[00:12] our first speaker today is john kiriakou john is an author and a brave whistleblower who confirmed that the cia was torturing people accused of being terrorists following the 9 11 attacks john take it away hi everybody thanks so much for inviting me um i want to talk just a little bit for a minute about the actual date of september 11th 2001. i was at cia
[00:42] headquarters like uh you know so many thousands of other people were and the one thing that sticks in my head from that day was thinking about al qaeda my god do you have any idea what you've done do you have any idea how many innocent people are going to be killed now because of this i mean certainly i knew what my government was capable of doing i just assumed that others knew what the
[01:13] american government was capable of doing too you know it's no accident that the washington dc area now has the highest concentration of anywhere in america and it's because those military contractors and intelligence community contractors saw their opportunity and they got rich they got rich because they knew that we would enter into what turned out to be a permanent wartime economy i think that something even worse than
[01:45] that that came out of september 11th was the number of precedents that we sent that made it okay to kill innocent people it was okay to develop a drone program it was okay for the military to cross borders and indiscriminately drop bombs or fire rockets and then when we kill entire families at weddings or funerals just say well there was a terrorist there we knew what we were doing take our word
[02:16] for it if you could see the intelligence that we have you would know that we did the right thing well i saw the intelligence that they had and it was all a lie it was all made up the problem with that besides the obvious is that many americans believe those lies and now 20 years later continue to believe those lies we've gone from the hunt for al qaeda the hunt for bin laden to the hunt for
[02:48] saddam hussein to the hunt for isis and now there's this group isis k in afghanistan and when we send drones to to blow up the leadership of isis k and then kill an entire family including seven children five of whom were under the age of five we're again told take our word for it we know what we're doing there were terrorists there we can't if the rest of the country
[03:19] didn't learn its lesson after 9 11 at least we've learned our lesson and it's up to us it's especially up [Music] john you're breaking up take the mantle of the begin the change of public
[03:51] opinion is that any better yes you might shut off your video to make sure it doesn't happen again okay i'm gonna do that i'm gonna try that right now so it's it's up to the young people of our country to make sure that it doesn't happen again it is it is the young people who can take these leadership positions for peace and
[04:21] justice and one of the things that's been so important to me in my posts yeah a career has been we must be relentless about a whole archipelago of of secret prisons that we're not rendering prisoners to third countries to face torture that they might not face here in the united states but we can't take their word for it because everything that they tell us is a lie you know they tell us that their weapons
[04:53] of mass destruction that was a lie they tell us that there are no secret prisons that was a lie they tell us that there was no torture program that was a lie so why should we believe anything they say we have to question everything it doesn't matter who's in the white house it doesn't matter if it's a democrat or a republican they're all guilty of the same thing so it's up to us to keep up the fight we can't let these last 20 years go for naught we have to make sure that people
[05:25] understand that there are americans like us who stand for peace and justice that we will fight against these unnecessary illegal wars we will stand up for human rights and civil rights and civil liberties and we will not give up i apologize for my for my audio and my my video thanks to everybody and enjoy the rest of the event bravo thank you very much john and um
[05:59] thanks for the shout out to the youth and i i put some information in the chat to corroborate um your feelings on it thank you very much