[00:02] [Music] all right y'all welcome to scott horton's show i am the director of the libertarian institute editorial director of antiwar.com author of the book fool's errand time to end the war in afghanistan and i've recorded more than 5 000 interviews going back to 2003 all of which are available at scotthorton.org you can also sign up for the podcast fee
[00:34] the full archive is also available at youtube.com scotthorton show you guys on the line i've got john kiriyaku uh he fought the terror wars for the cia and then they put him in prison for confirming the identity of some cia torturers the only person to be punished for george w bush's torture program um you know above officer level anyway um and uh certainly the only cia
[01:04] uh officer who was punished and uh now he's an anti-war guy uh i think pretty much fair to say and uh writes created articles about lots of important things welcome back to the show john how are you thanks doing well thanks good to talk to you again yeah man so uh boy there's a lot going on right now and you got this piece here a terrible take on the capital storming and that is in reference to a former associate of yours former cia officer robert grineer whose
[01:35] uh readers of fool's errand will remember was the station chief in islamabad at the dawn of the terror war and he gave an interview to npr news saying this and that about al-qaeda and the taliban and the capital mob and the american right and some things and i wonder if you could explain a little bit here uh maybe even read the quote if you've got it about what it is he was getting at there you know what i'm gonna pull up the quote what what he talked about in in a an op-ed in
[02:08] the new york times two weeks ago today as a matter of fact was uh the fact that we need to treat events insurrections like we saw in january the 6th here in washington uh as insurgencies and with insurgencies come counter insurgencies and i said in my piece that you know i've known grenier at all for a very long time and what he means is we need to be
[02:40] killing people well killing people for what reason i i say in my own piece that i was as sickened as everybody else was on january 6th i was as angry as everybody else was but we had a demonstration of some 15 or 20 000 people and we had what 500 800 that actually went inside the capitol and were violent and most of them were unarmed i think that there are accounts of
[03:10] of three people who we know definitively were armed and you're in the new york times saying that we need to treat this as a counter insurgency now what happens in counter insurgencies is you go door to door and you bust down the door sometimes you breach the door with explosives you grab everybody inside you zip tie them or cuff them you take them to some sort of an interrogation center and then you just sort it all out later
[03:42] well we've got this thing called the constitution and you can't do stuff like that so you know in whatever little way that i could scott i wanted to lay down a marker and say this is wrong this is anti-american this is a violation of our constitutional rights and we've got to put a stop to it i was disgusted that the new york times gave him a platform to even spout this nonsense yeah you know and i'm so sorry i've been
[04:13] so buried i got the new book out and everything i'm gonna send you a copy i got enough now um you're on the list what um thank you but um alicia i really oh thank you i appreciate that um i hope you like it i'm pretty sure you will um but uh oh i know so uh my apology was i didn't even read the new york times article and i forgot there even was one i read in your piece that there was one but i never got around to reading it i only read the npr interview after the fact and then i just got stuck on this paragraph i
[04:43] just don't know what to do about it and here's what's so funny john and man i can't wait to hear what you have to say about the giant mess of a question i'm about to unload on you here okay first of all here it is uh she says oh so you were station chief in islamabad on 9 11. so what are the lessons from the war against al qaeda there and you know me i wrote the book about afghanistan and i'm all hung up on this point there's a part in the book where i talk about how grineer had uh grenier whatever had organized with
[05:14] the pakistanis to prevent friendly fire in case in the event that bush allowed delta force to chase after bin laden when they crossed the border into pakistan which never happened um that's kind of part of the role he played there but anyway um and that's according to his book 88 days to kandahar where he writes about all that but then it's so funny the way he says this john he goes and and yes and uh you know even at the seeming height of the crisis immediately after 9 11 there really
[05:45] weren't that many members of al qaeda in afghanistan and the thrust of our campaign there was yes to hunt down al qaeda but primarily to remove the supportive environment in which they were able to live and to flourish and that meant fighting the taliban and and i think that is the heart of what we need to deal with here hunting down people who are criminals
[06:16] that is something which the u.s law enforcement is very well capable of doing and doing while preserving fundamental civil rights and in some ways that's the easiest part of the problem the difficult part of the problem is affecting the environment within which violent elements otherwise would be able to thrive so now please allow me to unzip a couple of things here first of all i'm stuck on what happened at tora bora and this son of a is saying that everything that i said was right that first of all there were only 400 al
[06:47] qaeda guys in the country at the time as cynthia store or his former cia officer maybe an old friend of yours i don't know confirmed to me on this show and that and then he says even then even he says it even at the seeming height of the crisis immediately after 9 11 al qaeda was a side project we decided to go after the taliban instead okay so there's that and i want to let you talk about that for 20 minutes if you
[07:17] want but then there's the other whole thing where he's not even talking about that he's just making a stupid metaphor and he's saying that the guys that bum rush the capital are al qaeda and the american right are the taliban yes yes what the hell so talk about the first part first though man please yeah um you know when i was on the senate foreign relations committee uh staff we had
[07:50] we had grenier testify and we had the chairman of joint chiefs of staff and i forget who the third person was but senator jeanne shaheen a democrat from new hampshire asked a question and it was very direct and very pointed she said and this this was in the spring of 2009 how many members of al qaeda are in pakistan easy question direct question the answer was 25. so by 2009 there were 25 members of al qaeda in pakistan we set
[08:23] out to destroy al-qaeda in october of 2001 and man they were destroyed so what were we still doing there what we've reached that was at the dawn of the pakistani terror war that was when obama and the cia were just starting the drone war there starting we hadn't even had yet debates over refueling the drones for example in balochistan that became so controversial you're exactly right so we decided
[08:53] that we were going to to pick a fight essentially with the taliban with which we had never had a beef right well we didn't have we didn't have diplomatic relations with them but we don't have diplomatic relations with a lot of countries well bill clinton's government i mean you were in the cia at the time right isn't it not the case that bill clinton supported the rise of the taliban absolutely absolutely because the taliban were anti-communist they were anti-russian and uh yeah i mean
[09:26] they it was good for our sphere of influence and so this is just five years later right bill clinton and the saudis and the pakistanis helped them take kabul in 1996. this is five years later we're pretending like i don't know these guys in fact let's pretend that the taliban knocked the towers down while we're letting bin laden go i mean he even used the word primarily immediately after 9 11 our primary objective was to go after the guys that didn't do it and let the guys who did do it get away john yep that is exactly what happened that
[09:58] is exactly what happened grenier writes in this new york times piece and and this is exactly what you said a moment ago over represented among the ranks of angry but ordinary citizens who stormed the capitol um on january 6th were others hardly ordinary committed to violent extremism the proud boys the three percenters the oath keepers christian nationals chauvinists white supremacists and q anon fantasists among others okay
[10:29] listen all those groups are nuts i agree all those groups are nuts they're they're all extremists but who says that they were that they were committed to violent extremism i'd like to see what his sources are for that right or that many oppose a threat to the american legal order at all right i mean is there a three percenter caucus in one state house out of 50 in this country no come on ridiculous ridiculous and like i say what i said in
[11:01] my own piece is i've known grenier for many many years decades and this is cia code words for using violence extrajudicial violence against americans hey y'all scott here if you want a real education in history and economics you should check out tom woods's liberty classroom tom and a really great group of professors and experts have put together an entire education of everything they didn't teach you in school but should have
[11:32] follow through from the link in the margin at scotthorton.org for tom woods's liberty classroom look here you and i both know that what you need is some libertarian institute things like shirts and sweatshirts and mugs and stickers to put on the back of your truck and to give to your friends too that say libertarian institute on them so that everyone will know the origins of your oppositional defiant disorder and where they can listen to all the best podcasts so here's what you do go to libertasbella.com and look at all the great libertarian institute stuff
[12:02] they've got going there find the ad in the right hand margin at libertarian institute dot org libertas bella.com okay so what are they really thinking because okay so here's another part of this thing that they talk about in this in the interview is he says and again this is just crazy i don't you know this guy for decades you explain this to me then translate this for me kiriakou he says here's an important element we haven't talked about is what i refer to as insurgent leadership the fact of the matter is
[12:34] that the most violent elements that we are concerned about right now see former president trump as a broadly popular and charismatic symbol he is their charismatic leader whether he chooses to acknowledge it or not and you know just as i saw in the middle east that the air went out of violent demonstrations when iraqi leader saddam hussein was defeated and seen to be defeated i think the same situation applies here the fact that matter is that mr trump
[13:05] has lost it's very important that people see that he is lost is a private citizen but i think it's extremely important that his potency as a symbol for the most violent among us is somehow addressed in other words we're to somehow perceive donald trump as sitting at mar-a-lago leading a continuing insurgency against the biden government and an attempt to overthrow it but we haven't heard a peep from him and he hasn't said a word after you know he hasn't put up any kind of
[13:36] actual fight of any substance since january 7th he that was the end of that you know as far as that goes and and then again with the analogies here remember that time john kiriakou that they captured saddam hussein and then the next day america defeated the sunni base insurgency because they gave up is that how you remember the year two thousand four five six and seven and eight you know that is not how i remember it happening um and he knows better you know bob
[14:07] grenier is a very smart guy and he likes to bill himself as the consummate moderate but i want to re-read what you just said here mass demonstrations in pakistan in support of osama bin laden fell into dull quiescence when he was driven into hiding after september 11th to blunt the extremists mr trump's veneer of invincibility must similarly be crushed now to me scott that that means to take him out you know take him out
[14:40] however you want to politically uh legally judicially whatever but some people are going to read that as just taking him out if you know what i mean okay so now so what is going through these people's head that they're they must be just pretending to believe that donald trump is about to what raise up a brown shirt army to overthrow all the governors of america and take over the country or something give me a break with this
[15:10] stupidity this isn't even a comic book well it says a lot that as soon as this thing was published john brennan just jumped right into the fray on a uh in an interview on npr saying that bob grenier is you know a genius and brilliant and this was a brilliantly written piece and we need to stop donald trump and he's a danger to the republic and all the usual garbage that john brennan spouts this was the plan i mean grenier and brennan have been friends for
[15:41] 35 years so of course brennan was gonna come out and uh and take a cheap shot at trump that's what we saw happen but the the scary thing is you know a lot of people in the cia believe this kind of thing they believe that they're smarter than everybody else they're smarter than you are they're smarter than i are than i am and they are going to uh they're going to put this out there in the newspaper of record for all the world to see and uh they're going to show how the how the deep state's going to make this whole
[16:11] thing right i mean but at the same time they're tapping his phone and they know he ain't doing a damn thing so this is all just make-believe donald trump and look if don let's say donald trump was trying to get real brave right now all they have to do is send your replacement down there to have a meeting with him where hey now that you're a private citizen again you think we were hard on you when we were framing you for treason with russia we'll cut your throat shut up they'd say that right to his face and he would say okay i get it maybe
[16:41] that's already happened right i mean there's he's not doing anything i guess it's possible he could run again for the nomination in election under our laws in another four years but other than that he's completely ridiculous what's he gonna do he's gonna see south florida with one armed force you know what are we talking about donald trump is like david koresh is about to march on downtown waco and sees it no he's not he's sitting at home when
[17:12] you guys showed up he is more concerned right now about the palm beach city council asking him to leave than he is about any kind of insurrection or or raising a standing army to attack michigan or you know whatever else he's being he's being accused of doing right now okay but so here's the thing these guys know they're lying this isn't about trump this is about picking on the right it's about kicking the right wing off of the internet and as john brennan said even libertarians oh yeah who which libertarians ever
[17:42] insulted john brennan i don't know i'm sorry guys if i got us all in trouble uh i saw i chuckled when i read that yeah well it's not that funny really and you know antiwar.com has already been deranked by google they they rounded us up with the worst of the right and the left from their point of view back a few years ago and they've kicked some of our best allies completely off of facebook and twitter um and all kinds of things and it seems like it's really only just starting here but here let me go ahead and get kind of kooky on you a minute here for just a second this is the cia
[18:14] and you're they say former cia john i don't know that's the law they put you in prison i'm pretty sure if there's a former cia officer you're one of them you and ray okay but so aren't aren't you guys sick and evil and devious enough that this is all deliberate because in fact you're not just trying to kick not you they are not just trying to kick the right wing off the internet they're trying to turn them into a radicalized force they're trying to make things worse they're being provocative because they're trying to radicalize the
[18:45] right to have more and more of an excuse to crack down on them yes that's exactly what we're seeing here you know it's funny to me that that the democrats think that they're ascendant right now and so they're overreacting just like so many of us predicted that they would but the thing is this this is always cyclical and it's going to come back and bite them and then they're going to be delisted and then they're going to be thrown off of twitter and facebook and instagram and they're going to jump up and down and
[19:15] say how unfair it is and how un-american it it is and then we're back where we started again yeah i mean assuming someone can find their way around silicon valley and all their restrictions now i mean it sort of seems like no we're actually a few miles down the slippery slope from where we were before in fact someone interviewing me yesterday said doesn't it seem like yeah for those of us you're a little bit older than me but for those of us who grew up in the 70s 80s 90s and even 2000s that that america's over this is a whole
[19:45] different era now our internet what we thought the internet would be for example which this kind of wide open space of blogs and retweets and whatever you got is becoming much more like a chinese-style internet and they're going for it and in the name of this the danger of the white supremacists which is apparently the right half of all of american political culture yeah you know i don't know right and it's it's very dangerous
[20:17] it's very dangerous when and at the in the meantime we've got these people like bob grenier and like uh james clapper and john brennan and these other former intelligence people coming out and professing to be the moderates the right thinkers the ones who are going to protect us and save us and if anything they're causing damage to the constitution and you know what's hilarious about all this is this uh i don't know about the role of uh grenier here but i know that
[20:48] john brennan was the leading backer of jabba al-nusra in syria this guy's idea of you know right-wing radical terrorism is we ought to help these guys shoot some tow missiles at some tanks and see what kind of money and guns and breakfast and training and whatever else we can give them so they can fight better yes absolutely right we can't forget that it was john brennan who decided to ally
[21:19] the cia with al qaeda which just changed its name to japan anusura in syria we were actually fighting on the side of al-qaeda if you can imagine such a thing yep and this is the same guy talking about how you're a trader and i'm a trader right and and every and you know what this is exactly what happened after oklahoma city right the pac-con operation which one way or the other it's not definitive so i won't go out on
[21:50] a limb it may have been a deliberate provocation in fact i guess i should ask you what you know about that but there was andre strossmeier seems like he was not really a nazi he was a cop infiltrating this group and helping provoke them and then they did the oklahoma bombing they blamed it on one or two guys and let the rest get away and then they blame the entire right first of all it was actual nazis that did it but then they pretended that they ignored the actual nazis the literal individual men who were nazis who did it and instead
[22:22] they pretended that all militias are nazis and and smeared all militias that had grown up after waco in response to the waco massacre that you're not going to do that around here we'll show you kind of thing and they said no no these guys all worship hitler and hate jews and kill babies now uh after the uh oklahoma city bombing and they essentially accuse rush limbaugh who to me is the center right you know the absolute if he yeah you know not very far right
[22:52] at all and it was rush limbaugh and everybody to the right of him every white man in america owns a gun did the oklahoma bombing and slaughtered those babies and bill clinton bragged the oklahoma bombing saved my presidency as everybody rallied around and and support the flag and lay a wreath in memory of the people and yeah so you know you can see how dangerous this kind of thing goes where they want to you know try i mean
[23:22] it's just like with the muslim terrorist entrapments too right there's been as trevor aronson has documented there's been between 250 and 300 outright entrapment cases by the fbi of mostly harmless idiot muslims in america loners people with sick mothers in desperate need of money and whatever you know trapped into saying the wrong thing on tape and and locked in jail um and you know they can do that same kind of
[23:52] thing in fact the new law that they're proposing john the what i read of it the only thing that it did i don't think it created any new crimes that i saw at least the verse the version of the bill i saw um said what it does is it creates a new domestic terrorism agency inside the department of homeland security and inside the fbi permanent new agencies to focus on the radical right which is again the entire right that's been discussed since the early 1990s
[24:22] on my very first trip to london as a cia officer i'd been to london many times of course but as in my first trip as a cia officer we talked with mi5 about their duties as a domestic intelligence service mi6 is you know famously the foreign intelligence service mi5 does only domestic intelligence they don't have the power to arrest but they don't need to arrest anybody that's what scotland yard is for and the discussions way back then i mean this must have been 1992 or 1993
[24:56] we were talking about setting a similar thing up in the united states either parallel to the fbi or or as a part of the fbi that would just spy on american citizens and then provide that intelligence to the fbi to affect arrests and here we are all these years later 30 years later and it looks like it's going to come to pass and then but so yeah again it seems like
[25:26] a step back to cynthia storer um the former cia analyst who i interviewed on the show we were talking about radical islam and such and she said that you know she essentially confirmed that the what she called the cia's framework for terrorism for understanding terrorism what causes it and how to prevent it and how to short-circuit it and all these things it doesn't include religion at all religion says islam doesn't mohammed all that has nothing to do with it whatsoever it she said it's disenfranchised people
[25:58] who feel like they have tried everything and there's no accountability and no redress and their voice is silenced and they're really pissed and then they resort to if they're you know crafty about it not just violent revenge attacks but attacks designed to provoke political reactions and and move change forward one way or the other sometimes into deep chaos before we get where we're going or this kind of thing but that that's what it is and if you're and she was talking i think she was sort
[26:30] of i don't even think she explicitly talked maybe maybe she was referring to assad at the time that assad really could have nipped this thing in the butt a lot better if he'd been a lot nicer which i'm not sure i believe that because there was so much foreign intervention going on it was too late for his ass anyway and i think he knew that too but she was saying people were just coming out protesting and then they got met with real hard violence and then they really reacted badly to that and then it's a a cycle of violence but whether we're talking about syria where the cia's intervening
[27:00] or whether we're talking about anywhere else that's basically how it goes so then i'm saying if these guys have all read the same framework that she's read then this seems like early steps in trying to create a crisis trying to provoke some kind of massive violent conflict that'll lead us to what at the end i mean it's like they're going to be able to outlaw the right-wing party in america or something like that and suspend elections from now on and force us all to submit to
[27:32] kamala harris is under the new order or something so if that's right that they're reading that same framework the same way and we're on a on a john brennan plan for implementing this thing and making matters worse deliberately in the short or medium term to what end other than just oh good we get to have a new agency and exercise some more power which is fun and cash checks and not have to get real jobs i understand that but do they have something in mind for
[28:03] what america is supposed to look like after the end of four or eight years of this or worse you know i don't think they do i think that for them the end game is power and authority and all that matters to them is that they remain in charge when this is all over and what you do one of the things that they taught us scott at the cia and and from my first week on the job i i learned this little bit of uh of uh office politics is that
[28:34] in order to make yourself as important as you possibly can you have to constantly work at expanding your realm right you've got to be the king of as many people as possible and so so people managers at the cia were constantly trying to expand their authority but when you get up to that level that senior level of the john brennans and the bob grenier's and you want to expand your authority that expands then into other agencies i remember in um in 2002
[29:08] john brennan was in a feud with jim pavitt who was the deputy director for operations i worked for jim pavitt and um and brennan wanted to be more important than he was he had been the deputy executive director and so they created this new organization that at the time was called the ttic the transnational terrorism information center it became the national counter terrorism center and um and brennan was the first head well he wanted the t tick to break
[29:41] off from the cia and to become its own agency so he could be the first head of this new intelligence agency not for any other reason not because it would have streamlined the information the analysis would have been any better just because he wanted to be in charge of his own little fight them uh and and have it blocked that well as it turned out then brennan was the only person in 2008 from the cia to join the obama
[30:13] campaign everybody else either went to hillary or to mccain and uh when obama won the election brennan was able to call his own uh his own shot he became the deputy national security adviser and then the cia director and then until until the biden campaign i mean he was telling everybody in washington who would listen that he wanted to be the secretary of defense the only reason he didn't become secretary of defense was because biden was committed to uh to elevating uh women and minorities
[30:46] into these senior positions so it's all about power it's all about individual authority it's all about being as important as you can possibly be in washington and the american people be damned this whole time if that ain't the theme of the 21st century i don't know what is that never even enters the conversation yeah like that not even be damned but just not even brought up to be damned yep yep that's it by the way
[31:17] you're in the cia during the 90s tell me what you guys know tell me what you know about the oklahoma bombing from back then john anything no not a not a single thing not a single thing of course i was overseas at the time i was stationed in bahrain at the time but um but this was this was as great a fbi up as you know as there's ever been in american history uh you got that right got that right uh we got a book coming out i'm not writing
[31:48] it um i'll be proud to write the introduction to it uh a new uh fellow at the libertarian institute richard booth who's put together the ultimate oklahoma city bombing document archive uh at oakland at libertarianistic.org okc by the way um he's writing a book about it that i think is going to be the masterpiece uh and that's going to be we're going to be publishing that this year so that is great all right well listen thank you so much for your time i'm sorry i'm late i'm supposed to be talking with danny right now
[32:18] but uh thank you so much for coming back on the show i really appreciate it and listen uh please stay focused on this and and writing i know that you understand how important it is that you have former cia officer after your name and um that that means that you can get people to listen to you on a little bit higher level and it's it is important as you recognize and as you've already taken the lead in doing you get right out there and say uh uh i contradict my former friend here absolutely not it's so important to counter this narrative with people like yourself on on your
[32:49] level of credential in in media terms you know thank you man i appreciate that very much oh yeah thanks john appreciate it thanks you take care all right you guys that's john kiriakou he is at consortiumnews.com the scott horton show anti-war radio can be heard on kpfk 90.7 fm in la apsradio.com antiwar.com scotthorton.org and libertarianinstitute.org
[33:29] you