[00:01] You got your notebook, let's go. Welcome to CN Live episode 7. I'm Joe Lauria, editor-in-chief of Consortium News. And I'm Elizabeth Goss. On today's program, we'll be discussing the coming 9/11 trial announced today
[00:31] with John Kiriakou. More than 19 years after the September 11th, 2001, five men will stand in a military court in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba for the terrorist attacks, a US military judge said today. The trial will begin on January 11th, 2021 and will be before a military jury. The government has until October 1st to turn over discovery materials to the defense. Defense attorneys want confessions thrown out for their clients that they say were elicited under torture. Joining us to discuss this is someone who was personally involved in events related to this coming trial, former CIA
[01:03] agent John Kiriakou. John led the capture of Abu Zubaydah, Osama bin Laden's chief lieutenant, and he blew the whistle on the CIA torture program, which figures significantly in this case. Hey John, welcome to CN Live. Thank you. Thanks so much for having me, Joe. I've been looking forward to this. Well, thank you, John. I've got really four burning questions and I'm not sure which order to begin asking you, but I'll start right away. Is there any way these guys could get a fair trial in a military court if it's a US military jury? How could that hardly
[01:33] be considered a jury of of their peers? Yeah, this is it's just not possible to get a fair trial. It's literally not possible. And let me tell you something, too. When when we first started capturing al-Qaeda prisoners in Pakistan in January of 2002, I was the chief of CIA counterterrorism operations there. And we hadn't caught any prisoners in Pakistan. They were all in Afghanistan. And those prisoners had been held in Afghanistan. Well, we started capturing
[02:04] them in Pakistan and I simply didn't know what to do with them. So, I called CIA headquarters and I said, "What do you want me to do with these guys? They're starting to accumulate." And I was told to put them on a military transport plane and send them to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. And I said, "Cuba? Why would I send them to Cuba?" And I was told that they had come up with a plan at headquarters that we put them all in Cuba, they'll sit there for two or three weeks until the appropriate federal district court can be identified
[02:35] where they would be tried, and then they would be sent from Guantanamo to either Washington, New York, or Boston to face trial in federal civilian court. And I thought, "Well, that's a great idea. If we have evidence that they've committed these terrible crimes of September 11th, they need to get in front of a jury as quickly as possible and be punished for their crimes." And we began sending everybody to Guantanamo. Everybody except, that is, the highest profile prisoners. In the beginning, it was Abu Zubaydah, who I captured on March 22nd,
[03:07] 2002. But then we began adding high-profile prisoners. Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who allegedly masterminded the USS Cole bombing, uh the various um attackers of the American Embassies in Africa. Finally, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in uh August of 2002. He was allegedly the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. But instead of sending them to Guantanamo and then on to federal district court, they were sent to secret prisons. I can't say where, even though it's been reported widely in the press. Uh the CIA
[03:38] has never declassified the information. But at those prisons, crimes against humanity took place. Their human rights, their civil rights, their civil were all violated. And not surprisingly, they confessed to everything from the 9/11 attacks to kidnapping the Lindbergh baby. And so, what do you do with that information? You can't do anything because we have a constitution in this country. You know, Joe, it's no accident that these trials didn't take place in 2003 or four or five or any year between
[04:10] then and today. Twice before, military judges said that they were going to hold trials, especially of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi Binalshibh, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's nephew, Ammar al-Baluchi. Those trials never took place, and the reason they never took place is because even the military judges recognized that because the CIA had tortured every one of these men, literally nothing that they said to implicate themselves could be used against them.
[04:41] So, how in the world there's going to be a fair trial in January of 2021 when it was impossible every year before that is a mystery to me. Well, next month, according to The New York Times, there'll be a hearing in this case on whether or not those confessions should be thrown out, a motion by the defense, because in fact, as you said, the confessions were yielded under torture. What you've just said is the military judges all realized that, but uh well, I wouldn't be surprised, would you, if the defense loses that motion and and the confessions are
[05:13] not thrown out? I wouldn't be surprised if the defense loses and the and and they're not thrown out. But, there's another issue here, too. Um and that is how are the defendants and their attorneys going to be able to interview or cross-examine or interrogate those human sources who identified the locations of these men that allowed the CIA to capture them? Or, if it wasn't human intelligence that led to their locations, if it was
[05:45] signals intelligence or some other kind of clandestine method, those sources and methods are going to have to be revealed to the defense team so that the defendants can defend themselves, and the CIA would never ever allow such a thing to happen. So, that's not going to happen, man. Now, now when you said the judges already knew that there was torture involved, was that before you public when public with the torture program or after? No. Um no, it was it was after. The judges
[06:15] knew that there was torture involved in the military interrogation program before I went public uh because of Abu Ghraib and because of a courageous uh Navy civilian whistleblower in 2005. But, what the CIA was doing was still a mystery. There was one Army um enlisted man at Guantanamo, Joe Hickman. Uh Joe just happened to be the guard on duty uh when Abu Zubaydah arrived on a secret flight to Guantanamo, and custody was turned over
[06:47] from the CIA to the Department of the Army. Uh Joe spoke with Abu Zubaydah. Abu Zubaydah told Joe that he had been tortured, and then Joe kept his eyes open and noticed a couple of times when Americans wearing civilian clothes not answering to the military would take prisoners out of their cells and into a room that Joe was told was off-limits to the military. And then those prisoners turned up dead the next morning, and their deaths were
[07:18] ruled suicides. Uh Joe blew the whistle. Not many people listened to him, but uh but he went public, and that was before I ever did. You led the arrest recently of Zubaydah. Why is he the chief lieutenant of Osama bin Laden himself? Well, that's that's the $64,000 isn't he being put on trial here? Yeah. That's the $64,000 question right there. Uh Joe Joe Hickman and I actually wrote a book about about this called The Convenient Terrorist. In February of 2002, February 6th, 2002,
[07:50] I was called into the uh US Embassy very early in the morning. Um I was met there by every senior intelligence officer in country as well as the FBI's legal attaché. And I was told that Abu Zubaydah was somewhere in Pakistan and that we had to catch him. And I'm embarrassed to tell you that I had to sit there with a very serious look on my face thinking to myself, Abu Zubaydah, that name kind of rings a bell to me, but I don't have any idea really who this guy is. And then I was told, Abu Zubaydah, he's
[08:21] the number three in Al-Qaeda. And I vaguely remembered reading something in Time magazine saying that he was the number three in Al-Qaeda. Okay, I'm happy to get with the program. Let's go look for the guy. We'll try and catch him. In fact, he was not the number three in in Al-Qaeda. He was never a member of Al-Qaeda. He never pledged fealty to Al-Qaeda or to Osama bin Laden. He was a bad guy. He had established both of Al-Qaeda's training camps in southern Afghanistan as
[08:51] something like a contractor. He created and maintained Al-Qaeda's safe house in Peshawar, Pakistan called the House of Martyrs. But he never actually joined Al-Qaeda and he certainly was not the number three. Besides that, and this is the real rub, and this is why Abu Zubaydah is not going on trial with the rest of these guys. There were two Abu Zubaydahs. There were two men, first cousins, who had the same name. Now, when you have one Abu Zubaydah file and the other Abu Zubaydah file, and you don't know that they're
[09:22] two different people, and you put them together, you have a file that looks like a terrorist Superman. He's in America. He's in Jordan. He's in Saudi Arabia. He's in Afghanistan. My god, this guy is everywhere all at the same time. And he's opening up safe houses and he's opening up training camps and he's the number three in Al-Qaeda and he's robbing a bank in Bozeman, Montana. Well, it it's frightening. But it was two guys. It wasn't the same guy. And so all these things that we accused Abu Zubaydah of doing,
[09:54] all these things that we tried to get him to admit to under torture, were false. They were done by his cousin. And as soon as his cousin smelled trouble, he ran from Montana to Florida to Jordan, disappeared in Jordan, and nobody's ever seen him again. Wow. Elizabeth. John, I was wondering why you think this has happened now and why is it also that the mainstream press has really kind of ignored this story today? That it doesn't seem to be really on the radar of most people. It's his own show.
[10:25] Yeah. Yeah, right. Like my own show which totally ignored this news today. Um for a couple of reasons. Number one, I think that Donald Trump really really wants a scalp. I think Donald Trump secretly wishes that he had been a general or a war hero or something special that he could pin medals on his chest. He'll never have those medals on his chest. It doesn't matter what he does now. It doesn't matter that he's become president. But to be the guy that finally convicts the mastermind of the
[10:55] 9/11 attacks after what two previous presidents couldn't do it? Um that's that's quite a trophy. I think he's doing it for for his own very selfish purposes. But why is the mainstream media um ignoring it? I think for the same reason my own show ignored it today. I think people generally don't care anymore. You know, 18 years have passed and uh there's a whole generation, you know, just a couple of months ago we lost a soldier in Afghanistan. He was the first one that
[11:26] we've ever lost who was born after the 9/11 attacks. And I think that people just really don't care anymore. That is a really sad statement to, you know, about our society after after everything that 9/11 preceded. I think that's extremely depressing outlook, but seems to be accurate. I can't think of another reason why this would get so little press. I I agree with you. why this would petrol a war right now and yet nobody cares about convicting the individuals who involved. Of course, this should be in a civilian court. I I
[11:56] attended and I reported for the Boston Globe in 1999 trial in the Southern District of New York, United States versus Osama bin Laden. It was about the African Embassy bombings. It was in a civilian court. Mary Jo White was there in the in the courtroom. I saw her there. She was of course the she prosecuted on there the US the Southern District in New York. And it was a civilian trial and I saw her Al-Qaeda guys on the stand and there was a jury of civilians there and they convicted these guys. And I thought that's the way it was going to go until the Bush administration came along and decided on this entire
[12:29] black sites Guantanamo and military courts. And the whole thing's been a joke all along, hasn't it? All of these They had various types of proceedings over the years as well already in Guantanamo, haven't they? They tried to see whether people should stay there or not. In fact, they've already declassified 22,000 pages of documents from those hearings. Those hearings have been dragging on since since what, 2003? And and we're no closer to to justice for anybody than we were in 2003. You
[13:01] know, Joe, you go through some of these 22,000 pages of documents and all you see is this nonsensical back and forth and back and forth between the prosecution and the defense where the defense is winging it. And they're winging it because they're not permitted access to any of the statements that their own clients have made. It's all deemed to be classified and even though they have security clearances, those clearances aren't high enough Uh, allow them access to the information that they need to defend their clients. What could they possibly get in
[13:31] discovery by October 1st, which is only 2 months from now? They're they're supposed to Yeah. Uh, the the government's supposed to turn over materials to the defense in discovery. What can they possibly hope to get? Yeah. Uh, I saw that when the New York Times uh, broke the story this afternoon. Uh, my my guess is they can't hope to get much of anything because whatever it is that the prosecution still has that they deem to be important enough to use in a um, in a uh, trial you know they're going to fight tooth and nail to withhold from the defense.
[14:02] My guess is that this is going to get bogged down in litigation and that January 2021 date is just going to be pushed farther and farther back. And there'll be less and less interest in the event that spawned mass surveillance, illegal mass surveillance wars on several and several countries that continue to this moment. Yes. This is the genesis of it. If they if they actually try these men in a fair way, which we you established that most likely will not be uh, that could put some kind of a bow on this thing and
[14:33] that's normally what we do in the American system is to find someone who's guilty and try them fairly and then punish them. But instead we got wars and surveillance and now nobody cares about the damn trial. Yeah, that's that's right. We we really could achieve closure. We achieved closure with Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, with Omar Abdel-Rahman, the blind sheikh. We've achieved closure over and over and over. We've tried terrorists in civilian courts over and over and over again all across the country, all through our history. So what made these men so special, so
[15:04] terrible, so bad, so dangerous that they had to be kept in Cuba? Well, the only thing that did was the was the arrogance and the ego of Dick Cheney and the weakness of leadership of George Tenet. That's why we're still in this predicament as far as I'm concerned. Now, I'm going to let you go because you have to get a plane, John, but uh, you were saying before we came on the air that Sheikh Khalid Mohammed, who is named as one of the defendants in this trial, was you believe the mastermind. I do. I do believe he's the he was the mastermind. We didn't know his name. We didn't know that his name was Khalid
[15:35] Sheikh Mohammed. We knew only that there was a man known to his compatriots as Mukhtar, m u k h t a r, who had been the mastermind of the Bojinka operation, which was a plan in 1996 to hijack more than a dozen 747s from Manila and then fly them into buildings along the US West Coast. That That was foiled. But we we knew that there was this bad man out there. We didn't know his name. Abu Zubaydah finally gave us his name.
[16:06] Actually, let me clarify that. Abu Zubaydah gave the name Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to Ali Soufan over the course of a of a conversation over tea and dates, not to Mitchell Jessen as a result of the CIA's torture program. That was the actionable intelligence that Abu Zubaydah gave us and it did not come from torture. Which is valuable evidence, obviously. Indeed. So, John, Elizabeth, if you have a final question, we'll let John go. No, thank you, John, for joining us. I don't want to hold you up from your
[16:36] flight, but incredible insight. I'm glad at least a couple of people are asking questions about this and covering it today. to keep an eye on this story. That's for damn sure. And thank you that you have. Okay. Thank you for joining us. Thank you.