[00:01] [Music] welcome to slow news day i'm steve poykinan and i'm sarah hall we are here highlighting artists activists organizers and agitators who are pushing back against late stage capitalism here
[00:31] in the heart of the empire joining us today we are beyond grateful and stoked uh is uh john kiriakou who has literally put himself at the forefront of the fight for truth about the cia's torture program he was the first person to go on tv and expose it in 2007 and for that had his life torn apart by the government ultimately
[01:02] spending 30 months in prison and he is now one of the most reliable sources for information about what our our cia is is up to and how it operates in a world of orwellian [ __ ] and lies uh so joining please give us a a a lot of uh a lot of love for john kirk how are you this morning i'm doing all right um let's uh let's
[01:34] jump right in i i talked a little bit uh about kind of what your uh a little bit of your backstory but if there's if there's anything that you feel like is pertinent to that will help people understand the the situation uh what what is happening now if there's anything relatable in in what happened to you that that would give people a a little bit more insight into how our our military and our intelligence community uh is operating in the middle east uh
[02:06] and fbi the intelligence community uh does on a daily basis i think we should just automatically assume that they're lying to us and i don't say that lightly i'm not saying that because i'm trying to be funny or to go over anything look at it this way the cia told us that they were not
[02:38] torturing prisoners there was no torture program that was a lie the cia said that there was no program of extraordinary renditions where they were kidnapping people and taking them from around the world that was a lie they said that there was no system of super prison around the world that was the lie it said for example that they had not broken into the senate intelligence committee's computer system that was a lot i could go on and on and on with the
[03:09] bottom line being everything that they tell the american people has been alive and the one should we believe you know when they come out and tell us for example that uh uh juan guido using using venezuela when juan white doe is the legitimately recognized president of uh of venezuela because they want him why should we believe that when they tell us that the iranians are the greatest
[03:40] threat based in the united states why should we believe that or when they that that the russians are the bravest threat or the chinese or the greatest threat or isis is the greatest threat why should we believe them when everything else they've told us is built so i would recommend i would urge your viewers to do your own research don't believe anything unless you've checked it out you know it's worth spending five ten fifteen minutes
[04:12] try to confirm it to repeat whatever it is the government that that is that is absolutely correct uh in in my opinion my opinion and i think it's a shared one um uh at least by a small percentage of people in america who who aren't persuaded by the propaganda um venezuela's new president says cia asset to me says part of the team
[04:43] he's uh didn't go to georgetown yeah he went to georgetown yeah uh a bit given our history in latin america and the way that we have put cia assets or employees in in uh high-level government positions after we orchestrated a coup i i i don't understand how the playbook can be the exact same every single always and people don't go hey wait a minute
[05:14] i've seen this before and it turned out to be [ __ ] what i you look at this way look at it this way this guy is what 35 years old 81 according to a recent call 81 of venezuela he's never heard of this guy he's he's not a major political state nobody knew who the heck he was um
[05:59] nobody from georgetown wakes up one morning and declares himself the president of venezuela i would say yeah he's probably a cia he's probably working with cia money i have no inside information whatsoever to to indicate that that's the case but like you where you said this cruiser and again i just don't see how how when the pattern is so repetitive and so specifically
[06:31] repetitive why why more people aren't you know aren't just really asses in the streets about this and and asses in the streets is kind of a central theme to the show we we don't think that voting inside a rigged system in a duopoly is an effective avenue for change especially if we have 11 years left before we hit an unsustainable point in the the way that our planet is going to treat us um
[07:03] so so we you know we thoroughly encourage people to get out and and make a noise and shut [ __ ] down if we can because that's the only way we're going to get any kind of of representation in the the political sphere um is the problem the propaganda effort seems to be especially when it comes to venezuela more successful than even in the middle east and and people
[07:34] on the people in the center people on the right venezuela's just been a punching bag historically uh can you shed any light onto why that may be [Music] invented relations with right-wing or federal right government in
[08:05] central and south america have been so much easier so much smoother than our relationships have been with various royal or or quasi-fascist regimes how many times in the last what six years in the death of of um president chavez has the united states done something to isolate the venezuelan government and it saw immediate success
[08:37] you know when people uh regional countries immediately fall into the line the fix is in so we wouldn't see that in the middle east because with which we have good relations are are um untrustworthy of us because of our history in that region that's not necessarily the case in latin america and i think we're the big boys on the block it might be because you
[09:09] know the military has been there are probably a hundred reason but um but it shows you how powerful we are that we can just decide one day we're going to unleash chaos and nobody complains about it while simultaneously telling people that meddling in elections is wrong yeah right i mean out of the one side of our mouth we said oh my god the russians gave us donald trump
[09:40] well on the other side well we'll give you one white though and you're gonna thank us for it uh are we gonna see boots on the ground in a legitimate military conflict in venezuela before the year's up i don't think so but i think we will see something in the illegitimate i think what will probably special forces or corporate groups working closely with collaborative federal purposes and i think they'll do
[10:11] more to harass venezuelans and undermine the government and if the party to outright possibly move their property don't forget that this entire application is a violation of international law there are only three ways in which we can commit truth to another three ways that are that are legal under international law and that is with the implication of the host government which clearly is not what happened here number two is if that government
[10:43] militarily attacks us clearly and the third is with the um official approval of the united nations but not secretary clinton but the united nations and that also happened yeah it's it's uh it's insane to me and what's more insane to me is is the uh
[11:16] the reaction by just regular people like regular working people who have no stake in the end result of us invading venezuela for their oil they're just regular [ __ ] people that are like oh hey no it's venezuela they deserve to be kicked and and i think that the god i think that the efforts that that our media put into delegitimizing
[11:49] any nation that hasn't fully endorsed our style of of not necessarily democracy but uh uh have not been absorbed into the empire uh how they do it with no introspection whatsoever with no no and these people are [ __ ] road scholars some of them you know they know history they know better they just disseminate the propaganda because they're getting paid thirty thousand
[12:19] dollars a day and i don't you had a crisis of conscience you sat on some [ __ ] for a couple of years you know what that's like you know it it's for um do the same thing you know i participated in a pound especially that
[12:50] maybe two weeks ago and it's been a long time since i had smoked i've spoken and he said something that it just made it all worthwhile he said that he had followed my face very closely and that when i was um that's what made him decide to go with his revelations and he said that without john kiriakou there would not have been an ed snowden i hope that more people in cia or nsa
[13:22] or wherever dwight wherever to go public with evidence of government illegality because if we keep letting the government get away with it nothing will ever change and people like you and and i will be you know in the in the fringe pattern frequently and that's just not right no i i in a sane world we would treat our whistleblowers the way that we treat our athletes and we would treat our
[13:54] athletes like athletes um i um i wanted to talk to you a little bit about iran uh because i i remember who john bolton is and i have noticed a pattern over the last year year and a half of donald trump's cabinet being absorbed by george w bush's friends and his father's
[14:26] friends and all of those same for lack of better word deep state or permanent intelligence state unelected state has taken root in donald trump's administration and we are illegally in venezuela we're still bombing all of the same countries we've been bombing and iran has been it would be the the feather and john bolton's gigantic mustache
[15:06] and he couldn't even get himself confirmed as ambassador to the united nations and push not to name him in a recess appointment so why is john bolton the national security adviser why isn't john bolton secretary of state because even in the republican senate he's still so impossible that he couldn't get a confirmation uh in the us senate so you name the national security adviser and here you put this well-known neocon
[15:38] uh in charge of u.s foreign and military policy that's exactly what's happening so first of all i want to say that your observations are correct we have seen in a very short period of time less than two years a group of george bush and a group of what are called um republican never trumpers people who said that they're republicans they're conservatives and they never vote for or support donald trump
[16:09] take you over the trump administration and it's born an intelligence policy my john bolton john the last person like literally the last person except for maybe elliot abrams that's a great point already predicted yes uh elliott who's who's a proven um uh war criminal you
[16:45] very quickly and very quietly and here we are where we find ourselves with a with a neocon foreign policy that's identical to the george w bush and yet people are people are saying trust the plan and people think that he drained the swamp and people think that that uh donald trump walking out and saying we shouldn't be in syria or afghanistan is the same thing as we are getting out of syria in afghanistan and then you see
[17:16] the report that he spends 67 percent of his time doing [ __ ] all and people are like well great because he's not working but no john bolton is working during that time elliot abrams is working during that time jared kushner is going around and making deals that are ultimately just going to blow up right in his smug little face um but those people are working when he's not
[17:48] and that that to me is more dangerous than an incurious narcissist trying to decide whether or not he can i don't know uh jail people based on tweets you know so true this is not what i expected um because he was surrounded with the likes of jared kushner and stephen miller um
[18:19] but i didn't expect the neocon i i really didn't i really believed that that on foreign policy they were so far apart that they were going to have to just sit out this administration and that's not at all no it's absolutely it it it's such a part of the overall pattern that that i shouldn't be surprised but i when when they first started coming in and even brett kavanaugh being nominated
[18:49] karl rove plucked brett kavanaugh out of nowhere and gave him a federal appointment like he is part and parcel of that crew and people's unwillingness to to make that connection uh especially in conservative media uh especially like trump stalwart defenders they are not willing to go hey you know what all of these people that we just spent
[19:20] the last eight ten years trashing are running the show again and and that's dangerous uh it um it's a there's a hole in in reporting that that i find particularly curious oh i think i think they're right i think that's that's one building problem that could get worse because you know trump is a creature and he's not a washington insider so he doesn't really know who the substantive
[19:52] experts are in this in this city don't forget for example that 13 assistant secretaries of state positions are vacant right now 13 it's impossible to implement foreign policy when you have no assistance secretary today to implement it so he doesn't know who who the people are at that second or third tier were necessary to run the day-to-day operations of government what he knows are the people he knows you know the roy
[20:22] cohens of the world he's dead of course give you an example of the people that donald trump surrounds himself with right um those are the people and those are the ones were leading the likes of elliott i gotta tell you even with donald trump as president elliott abrams was literally the last person i thought would be rehabilitated and brought into international
[20:56] yeah that that to me was was more of a a nod to the uh cynthia mckinney calls them ziocons yeah and that was more of a nod to the ziocons than any other move that that this administration has made thus far and uh i'm i'm genuinely disconcerted over the fact that that guy
[21:28] is not in prison at the moment uh let alone being in charge of south american policy in venezuela um that's right that's right that's right well you know you got to look out for your friends um i know you don't have that much time left uh so if we uh
[22:00] you when you were employed by the cia you were in the middle east you were in afghanistan mostly right yeah um did we have a covert presence operating in iran at that point no not that i ever
[22:38] areas this is not true the cia is not good they are they're not as smart they're not as aggressive as people think they are and that's why there are so many many routine intelligence failures because you have literally nobody on the ground to report that to you you have no recruited access inside the country to report back to you that's why 911 happened he has literally zero sources inside of
[23:10] [Music] talk about an intelligence failure you know we talk about these major intelligence failures being 911 and pearl harbor and a handful of times in between i would venture to say that that we experience intelligence failures all the time i mean look at look at the major look at the major events foreign policy events of the last generation the cia missed every single one of them they missed the fall of the berlin wall
[23:42] they missed the iran hostage crisis they missed uh the transition of power in cuba they miss everything and it's because they're just not as good as they want people to believe they are i mean it's either that or they're helping it along i i think no because if they were helping in a bomb resulting in chaos that's just dragged the country down into well we spent 13 trillion dollars
[24:14] for example on foot yeah it seems like it would be really easy to control a population of say 80 percent of the country live paycheck to paycheck or gofundme was the national healthcare model or people needed three jobs to pay bills so the only news they got was on corporate media who was selling them the talking points of the
[24:46] intelligence community in the military industrial complex but i am a cynical bastard so it could just be it could just be me are you by by showing you the example of ken delaney pennsylvania is the nbc news national security course candidate formerly with us with the los angeles times kendallane was taught red-handed through freedom of information
[25:18] sending his article to the cia for for commons before he sent them even to his own editor and the cia was telling him well we want you to say this uh this way and we don't want you to say this other thing and here's some alternative language that we like better and that's what nbc news was publishing what the cia wanted pennsylvania to have to end it well that's not democracy
[25:49] that's not freedom of press that's the that's the the deep state dark state whatever corporate media complex telling americans what they what they want americans to do yeah it's state-run media passing is free market independent journalism and and yet you have your show uh is uh is on sputnik we're on youtube
[26:19] you know uh lee camp is on rt and gets treated like a russian asset you know uh they kicked ed schultz off at msnbc and he went to rt you know it uh chris hedges fire you know left the new york times because he wouldn't toe the line on selling the iraq war and on contact as an rt show you know it they won't uh they won't allow
[26:50] even the slightest bit of countering the narrative that is put out there by um you know the government and and the military industrial complex so it seems it seems like state-run media to me i think it is essentially i mean what's the difference bro they're just insane fun
[27:21] i i couldn't agree with you more i know you said we had 30 minutes and it's been 30 minutes so uh uh please guys go check out uh loud and clear with brian becker and john kiriyaku on sputnik radio there's a free app to download or i can listen right on my my laptop uh and then do you have any we're on um i heard radio itunes spotify and speaker
[27:52] it's free if you don't want to download this app yeah there's a bunch of other good shows on sputnik too um and do you have anything else coming up soon that you would like to plug or promote oh on the 21st of february if you happen to find yourself in salem massachusetts uh we're going to be at the salem um keeper series uh talking about exactly these issues awesome all right well john thank you so much we
[28:24] will also meeting you thank you john we'll pick this up again here soon for uh part two yeah look forward to that thanks beautiful you have a wonderful rest of your day sir you too take care all right thank you thank you so much man [Music] do you want to uh freestyle for a little bit with this
[28:55] show kind of talk about what we just [ __ ] absorbed fill up another 15 minutes for the episode links [Music] we are on record still let's see here confirm stop cancel split screen
[29:25] and we are still recordings that was [ __ ] seamless dude that was awesome uh wow john kiriyaku um you imagine doing 30 months in federal prison because you told the truth about a torture program yeah you kind of just got like financially strangled into it though he wanted to like fight it with everything
[29:57] he had but that's absolutely at some point he said it became like strictly a consideration for his finances and his his family he was like one something million in i don't know if i i don't know if i agree with we're not going to have boots on the ground in venezuela like the reporting is starting to come out that we're already at the border with venezuela and colombia although
[30:27] he's right fighting a proxy war with the colombian army and u.s special forces seems a lot more out of the traditional playbook um i can't wait for part two he definitely backed up everything that you say about the media quite frequently and um what i've come to understand too i can't even stand watching it anymore so and i did watch a little bit of the
[30:58] rachel maddow talking about russia dropping the power while homeless people are freezing yeah [ __ ] rachel maddow what was on the deal with that anyways so okay she uh i'm i'm gonna try and find it here real quick uh but uh if you guys missed this um rachel maddow went on her show and tried to scare
[31:30] her listeners into thinking that at any moment russia could hack the power maybe she thought the fear would keep them warm russia can hack the power grid and make them freeze to death and i'm gonna go ahead oh good there it is they're the audio right in the dakotas now now what would happen
[32:00] if russia killed the power in fargo today what would happen if all the natural gas lines that that service sioux falls just poofed on the coldest day in recent memory and it wasn't in our power whether or not to turn them back on i mean what would you do if you lost heat indefinitely as the act of a foreign power on the same day the temperature in your front yard matched the temperature in antarctica what would you and your family do i would take the [ __ ] out of my ears
[32:32] oh my [ __ ] god what would you do if the russians hacked the power grid i would turn off the 1983 cinematic classic red dawn is what i would do i would stop watching red dawn on a [ __ ] loop the entire day while i was doing show prep red dawn red dog red dog [ __ ] that's why i would step away from that [ __ ] man that is
[33:04] absolutely what the [ __ ] are you talking about with the i'm gonna tell my who and her listeners are are not spring chickens man like the average age is like two years younger than the average age for a fox news viewer so it's like 63 65 something like that dude she is scaring old people for money scaring old people for money that is [ __ ] wrong rachel maddow it's wrong
[33:37] you should be ashamed of yourself but thirty thousand dollars a day to do your show will cover up a lot of [ __ ] shame how about it's a lot more likely that our infrastructure is just gonna collapse because it's so um taxed to the max or like pg e is just going to be like ah that was gnarly rebrand we're out of here and just leave that roach husk in the dusk i think that husk is more likely to blow over and crush us than
[34:08] the red jack in the power drift i don't know man vladimir putin is in the water in flint he is swear to god i [ __ ] heard it on msnbc it's [ __ ] vladimir putin so yeah he was like he was pretty that felt pretty good to have him say uh we're on to the media with the [ __ ] that they're [ __ ] blowing through the chodes at people you know they make it
[34:40] so glaringly obvious that you you have to willingly believe like it takes more effort to believe rachel maddow than it does to hear that [ __ ] and go are you [ __ ] kidding me are you you really you just [ __ ] you the russians are coming paid for that how many homeless people are in that region about 200 000
[35:11] i think it's like something like two that she showed on that map probably about a quarter million i don't know that's the entire [ __ ] like north part of the united states i i know that when they made a big deal out of 15 homeless people freezing to death in chicago i looked up the [ __ ] stats on how many empty houses there were and there are almost 2 400 empty homes it's not a an unfixable problem there's just
[35:43] no will for it i am happy to see that like the number one thing trending on twitter right now is the green new deal which uh nancy pelosi vehemently smackdown and called it the green new dream or whatever that those people are talking about nancy pelosi who said that her [ __ ] super weird clap at the state of the union was because she really agreed with
[36:15] what the president was saying and that she was actually kissing his ass and not introducing america to the [ __ ] you clap and i just want to go on record is saying that there are at least like a half a dozen [ __ ] schizophrenic homeless dudes in santa cruz that clap like that at the [ __ ] pigeons then the [ __ ] seagulls that they think are monitoring their thoughts and nobody is out there [ __ ] painting pictures of them with like [ __ ] you know halos and [ __ ] around them nobody's [ __ ] putting them on a meme celebrating their clap and i think it's
[36:45] [ __ ] [ __ ] man because a they might be right about the seagulls and b [Laughter] nancy pelosi's defense of herself was no i was agreeing vehemently with donald trump huh she's the most progressive person you guys could find for speakers huh
[37:17] remember that trump endorsed her too first speaker of the house yeah it's a big club wait a minute [ __ ] good luck to us all [Music] [Applause] [Music]
[37:50] [Applause] [Music] you