[00:00] John Kiriaku is a former senior CIA counterintelligence operations analyst, known for being the most relevant and impactful deep state whistleblower of recent years. Kiriaku exposed the use of torture by the United States government, specifically the CIA's so-called enhanced interrogation techniques. In reality, they are simply torture techniques, such as waterboarding, which consists of simulating the drowning of the detained person. Iriaku has also denounced numerous other abuses and openly illegal actions by the
[00:31] US Intelligence Agency, which has had dramatic consequences for him, because the deep state has relentlessly pursued him to the point of putting him in jail and destroying his personal life. John Kiriaku began his career at the CCA in the early 1990s, specializing in middle-entity and counterterrorism issues. After 9/11 he became head of counter-terrorism operations in Pakistan and led the capture of Abueda, an alleged senior member of Al-Qaeda. Kiriaku, while part of the CIA,
[01:01] refused to be trained in torture techniques and to participate in them. Later, after leaving the agency, he publicly confirmed in 2007 that waterboarding was used, directly contradicting official denials from the government and even the President of the United States. Despite not having personally participated in these criminal techniques, Kiriaku was the only one prosecuted and sentenced to prison, supposedly for leaking classified CIA information, revealing the mafia-like style of behavior of US intelligence agencies.
[01:32] Far from accepting scrutiny of its activities, as is supposed to happen in a system that protects individual freedoms, CA lashed out like a rabid dog against the only one who had the courage to denounce such blatantly illegal and abject behavior as the use of torture, which even led to the death of numerous interrogators. The existence of whistleblowers like John Kiriaku, Edward Snowden, Daniel Elsberg, and Juliana Sanch is fundamental to exposing the true nature of the American deep state. A hidden power system that perpetrates
[02:03] vile acts and radically contradicts the values that American democracy pompously proclaims to defend. These brave people risk everything to show the enormous gap that exists between the facade of freedom and justice that the United States pretends to exhibit, and the clandestine practices of torture. Mass surveillance, illegal wars, and cover-ups are actually taking place. But let's get on with a summary of the most relevant information provided by John Kiryaku himself in this interview
[02:34] from a few weeks ago on Joe Rogan's podcast. Wow, your story is pretty crazy, dude. And you getting into trouble and eventually going to prison for something that was what they were doing, what you reported, was completely legal. Uh-huh. And you were completely honest about it. One was essentially about the US torture program. Correct. Tell us how it all started. How
[03:05] long had you been involved with the CIA? Oh, so I had been in the CIA. Well, by the time I arrived in Pakistan as head of counterterrorism operations, after 9/11, I had been with the CIA for almost 13 years and was responsible for all counterterrorism operations in the country. Alqaira was leaving Afghanistan for Pakistan because we were
[03:35] bombing them nonstop, so my job was to find them and capture them and then just detain them or send them to trial. That was the original idea, and we were planning at that time our first big- name capture, right? Bin Laden Aiman Zawahiri. We had killed Ah Mohamed AF. He was the head of what they called military affairs in Alcaida. We killed him in Torabora, but then there was Abu
[04:06] Zubaida and then there was this unknown person who we later learned was Khalid Sheikh Mohamed. So we were looking for any of these four or five people. Then there were others, those responsible for the attacks on the embassies in Africa, the attack on the USS Call. So it turned out that in February 2002 we got a lead on Abuida and we captured him. It took us six weeks to track him down and we came close a couple of
[04:37] times to where we'd break down the door and there was like a half-eaten sandwich on the counter, a cigarette still lit. Sometimes we were after him for a day or two, but he knew we were looking for him and he knew we were close. So we finally caught it, and then the question is, what do you want to do with it? And they, uh, told me, keep it. We're going to send a plane and, uh, we'll take care of that. So they did it, and I wasn't allowed to know what they were going to
[05:08] do with him. Just like the guys on the plane weren't allowed to know who we had captured and who, why they were taking this guy, where they were taking him. But that's all, just need to know. Yes, it's all about needing to know. In fact, when I boarded the plane, we—uh, three FBI agents and I—picked him up in this little bed and took him to the plane. We had to lift him and maneuver him to get him onto the plane. Then we placed it on the luggage rack at the rear and tied it down. And
[05:39] one of the guys on the plane was dressed all in black with a black hoodie and said, "John." And I said, "Who are you?" And he lifts his mask and says, "Uh, an old boss of mine." And I said, "Hey, what are you doing here?" He said, "Oh, I came to take your prisoner." I said, "Uh, where are you taking it?" And he said, "I can't tell you. You don't need to know." I said, "No, it's fine." He said, "Who is it anyway?" I said, "Oh, friend, I'm sorry, you do n't need to know." And he says, "Yes, exactly, exactly. Well, have a good trip." And then, you know, your job is to
[06:11] get him from point A to point B, not to become his friend, and, you know, to learn about his family history. Just like my job is to catch him and hand him over to the next guy, and it's none of my business where he goes. So when I returned to headquarters in May of that year, I was just standing in line for a sandwich in the CIA cafeteria and one of the senior guys from the Anthropology Center approached me very casually and said, "Oh, hey, it's nice to find you. I wanted to ask, would you like to get certified in the use of
[06:42] enhanced interrogation techniques?" and I had never heard that term before. This is May 2002. I said, " Improved interrogation techniques, what does that mean?" And he says, "Let's start getting tough on these guys." So. And I said, "What does that mean?" "So describe these 10 techniques." And I said, "I don't know, man, that sounds like a torture show." And he said, "It's not a torture program. We have it approved by the Department of Justice and the president signed it." He says,
[07:13] "Think about it." I said, "Yes, give me an hour. I need an hour to think about it." I left the cafeteria and went up to the seventh floor, which is the Eer um executive floor. There was a very, very senior officer there for whom I had worked 10 years earlier in the Middle East. I knocked on his door unannounced and said, "Hey, I need some advice. I was just asked if I wanted to be trained in these enhanced interrogation techniques. What do you think about it?" And he said, first of all
[07:44] , let's call a spade a spade. He said, "This is a torture program." They can use whatever euphemism they want, but this is a torture program. And torture is a slippery slope. He said, "You know what these guys are like?" Someone's going to be a cowboy, they're going to cross the line and kill a prisoner. And when that happens, there will be a congressional investigation, then a Justice Department investigation, and someone will go to prison." Do you want to go to prison? I said, "No, I don't want to go to prison." It turned out I was the only person who went to
[08:15] prison, but I said, "No, I don't want to go to prison." I went back downstairs. I said, "Listen, I have a moral and ethical problem with this. I think it's illegal, and I don't want to be a part of it." The funny thing is, I had just captured Abu Zubaida, who we believed was number three at Al-Qaeda, and I was passed over for promotion. And the reason I was passed over, they said, was because I refused training. The head of the counterterrorism center said at my promotion panel that I had shown a shocking lack of commitment to
[08:46] counterterrorism. Oh. And then the guy who had given me the advice saw that my name wasn't on the promotion list and promoted me out of cycle. So I realized then that I was facing something that was going to be difficult. And then there was this psychiatrist at the agency whom I had known for years. We were from the same group of men. We went to the same church, and it turns out he's both a brigadier general in the army and a psychiatrist with the CIA. And he
[09:16] said to me one day, "Dude, you know they call you the human rights guy behind your back?" And I said, "Yeah, I don't care." And he He said, "You know that 's not a compliment, right?" And I said, "Steve, they're wrong about this and I'm right." I said, "I'm comfortable with the decision I made and I left it at that." However, I didn't realize how angry I had made them until later.
[09:46] But as John Kiriaku explains, it's not just about the dreaded waterboarding, the simulation of drowning the detainee, a practice in which the prisoner is tied to an inclined bench with their feet raised and water is repeatedly poured over their face, mouth and nose, preventing them from breathing normally for periods of 20 to 40 seconds. This sensation of induced asphyxia causes vomiting, convulsions, extreme panic, and the real perception that one is going to die. The operation can be repeated many times, as happened with the prisoner Abueda,
[10:17] who was subjected to this technique up to 183 times, suffering serious physical and mental damage. Kiriaku also explains how other techniques, just as or even more terrifying, are used, which often end with the death of the detainee. So, what exactly did you know about what enhanced interrogation techniques they were going to implement? Oh, yes. That day in the cafeteria, a colleague of mine explained it in great detail, and
[10:47] many of these techniques aren't torture, right? If I grab you by the lapels and say, "Damn it, answer my questions, that's not torture." Or the first one was called the slap in the stomach. Uh. Or the attention slap was another way they called it, where I slap you on the belly. It makes a crackling sound, maybe it leaves a handprint. It's a little embarrassing, that's not torture. But then it quickly progressed to things like waterboarding, which everyone knows about, but
[11:18] there were techniques that were, in my opinion, worse than waterboarding, such as the cold cell. So they strip you naked, chain you to an eye bolt in the ceiling so you can't lie down or kneel or sit or anything, you can't get comfortable in any way. And they cool the cell to 50º Fahrenheit and then every hour someone comes in and throws a bucket of ice water at you. Oh. But we killed people with that technique. The
[11:49] Justice Department never said we could kill people, and when we did kill, people died from it, at least two with that technique that the agency admitted to causing hypothermia, and there was no protocol to prevent them from dying. There was n't one later, but there wasn't in those early days. Later we always had a doctor on site, for example with Abu Zubaida, his heart actually stopped during a simulated drowning session and the doctor revived him only so that he could be tortured further. It's like, "Didn't
[12:21] the Germans do that? Come on, now we 're doing it, that's not right." As? What techniques were they using that caused her to faint? The major ones were simulated drowning, the cold cell, and sleep deprivation. Sleep deprivation doesn't sound like a serious problem. And when it was finally leaked, Don Rumsfeld, who was the secretary of defense at the time, made a statement that still sticks in my mind. He said, "There is no such thing as sleep deprivation." He said, "I have a
[12:53] standing desk in my office. I don't even have a chair in my office, and sometimes I work 24 hours and then 36 hours the next day. But that's not what we 're talking about here. We know from the American Psychological Association that people start to lose their minds on the seventh day without sleep and they start to die. Their organs start to fail on the ninth day. But the CIA was authorized to keep people awake for 12
[13:23] days. And that was another thing that caused prisoners to just die. They suffered heart failure. You know how they kept them awake. You chained them up again to that eye bolt in the ceiling. You have these industrial lights on over them 24 hours a day, and like, extreme metal 24 hours at volume 11. And they just can't sleep because, yeah, if they collapse, their arms will dislocate.
[13:54] They're chained to that eye bolt. God was evil. And then when people died, they just dug a hole next to the building..." During interrogations, they'd put them in the hole and then bring in the next one. There was no report, nothing, nothing. There was one guy they reported on, and headquarters responded, "Just put him on ice until we can decide what to do." And they literally put him in a bathtub and filled it with ice and then decided a couple of days later. After that, he started to decompose.
[14:25] We should probably bury this guy. Oh yeah, it was horrible. And the Justice Department never said anything about it. They were like, "Oh, listen." Uh, you know, you can use these techniques, and if you kill him, just bury him in the backyard. Yeah, that wasn't the approved operation. Was any of it effective? Was there any useful information? That's the worst part of it. None of it was effective. You know, I say it all the time, Joe, it's like a kick in the gut having to
[14:57] congratulate the FBI. But if there's one thing the FBI is really good at, it's interrogations. They've been conducting interrogations effectively since the Nuremberg trials in '45 and '46. These guys know what they're doing, and so with Abu Zubaida as an example, we captured Abu Zubaida, and normally overseas the CIA has primacy, domestically the FBI has primacy, but on 9/11 it was still an open criminal investigation,
[15:27] and so we sent Abu Zubaida to the secret site, and the FBI took over. I was furious about this, but there was an FBI agent named Ali Sufan who did exactly what he was trained to do, and he started to engage Abu Zubaida. Zubaida was in a conversation, and Abuida simply gave him the silent treatment for weeks. This continued for weeks, but you go in, offer him a cup of coffee, offer him an orange, if he cooperates, let him write
[15:58] a letter to his mother, you know, whatever, and finally he opened up and gave us useful intelligence that saved American lives. But on August 1, 2002, George Tenet went to the White House and asked the president, for reasons that have never been clarified, asked the president to hand over primacy to the CIA. He did, and the CIA director, Robert Müller, to his credit, knew
[16:28] exactly what was going to happen. Not only did he withdraw FBI personnel from the secret site, he withdrew FBI personnel from the country where the secret site was located, and in less than 12 hours the CIA began torturing Abuida. He went completely silent and remained silent. And then the FBI went back to the president and said, "Look, the CIA is messing this up." We were getting all this information from this guy, now he's not saying anything." And we were
[16:58] putting him in a coffin because he had an irrational fear of insects. So we poured a box of cockroaches over him in the coffin and opened it every couple of days to change his diaper and feed him, and he went crazy. And finally, the White House gives everything back to the FBI. It takes Ali months to get him talking again, and then he starts talking again and is giving us more and more information about Al-
[17:29] Qaeda's operations in Malaysia and the anti-Australian operations and what's going on in Canada and how Al-Qaeda is able to move across borders between Europe and Asia. And then the CIA intervenes again and starts torturing him again. Ugh! And they ruined everything. One of the things that should strike us is the moral compass of the average CIA officer. When they inform their colleagues that they're going to be trained in advanced interrogation techniques
[18:00] , a man—which is a ridiculous understatement—is called a "death torturer." To hide the fact that it was training in torture techniques, only he, only John Kiriaku, refused to participate. It does n't give us a good idea of the level of respect for the law and moral principles among the 22,000 CIA employees. So all you had essentially done was stand up for your beliefs, your morals, your ethics, and the law, and you said, "I don't want to participate in anything I know to be illegal."
[18:31] That was the beginning. Listen, I... But you're standing out... Yes. From the groupthink. And I was the only one. I'm almost embarrassed to say that 14 of us were asked if we wanted to be trained in the enhanced interrogation techniques. I was the only one who said no. Now, this doesn't necessarily mean you would have to use them. You were just going to be trained in them. Oh, oh, no, no. Eron, they were for use. And then, would you be required to use these techniques? You know, once I turned this down, um, and
[19:04] got this out-of-cycle promotion for the Abuida operation, I was appointed executive assistant from the CIA's deputy director of operations. And in that position, you have access to literally everything the CIA is doing all over the world. And so I'm reading these cables coming back from the secret site, and people are like, "Wow, I didn't sign up for this." Nobody said we were going to torture people. I quit, and then
[19:35] they go home. Or there was this secretary who fainted once when she was in the room while Abuida was being tortured, and she uh cut her assignment short. That means she sends a cable to headquarters saying, "I'm going home. I'm not doing this anymore." That's a career-ending decision to cut an assignment short. And I remember thinking, so I'm not the only one who thinks this is illegal. Surely someone is going to come out and say something, and nobody did.
[20:10] Another of the events Kiriaku denounces is the death of no less than 2,000 Taliban prisoners due to gross negligence by the CIA. It had absolutely no consequences, no repercussions whatsoever, and it was covered up under a cover-up. The silence from the government, which claimed it would shed light on the workings of the deep state, was a major factor. The Dash massacre I mentioned earlier was part of this campaign to open an investigation into Dash Lemon. What happened was that, in Dash Lemon, Afghanistan,
[20:41] on November 30th and December 1st, 2001, 2,000 Taliban soldiers surrendered en masse. And the Northern Alliance called us and said, "What do we do with all these guys?" "We don't have room for them." So we told them, "Put them in trucks, take them to the desert, and just keep them there until we can divide them up and send them to smaller prisons around the country." And if necessary, we can send some to Pakistan." But there were no
[21:11] air holes in the containers, no food, no water, and only 2,000 survived. And one of the 14 said that when they opened the trucks in the desert, the bodies fell out like sardines from a can. Then Barack Obama said in 2008 that if he was elected president, he was going to investigate this massacre and get to the bottom of it. And then nothing happened.
[21:42] So I said to John Carry, I said, "Listen, this is part of Obama's campaign, let me go to Afghanistan and investigate this." And so I went, and there were still bones sticking out of the sand. There's clothing that's been there in the desert all these years. All the bodies are still there. What's left of them, really. Yeah, it's gruesome. So I come back and I get a call from a pretty prominent human rights activist, and he said he wanted to see me, but it had to
[22:12] be private. So we went to, uh, Johns Hopkins University. There was a classroom that wasn't being used. We met there, and he said, "Listen, I have a witness who was 12 years old at the time and was hiding behind a rock and saw what happened when the trucks opened and the bodies fell out. I said, "Okay." And he said, "But the new thing is that he says there were two men there wearing jeans and black T-shirts and they were speaking
[22:43] English." I said, "Okay, that's all I need." So I wrote a letter to the agency and asked, you know, for clarification on whether there were CIA personnel at the packing site or, uh, at the location where the trucks were opened. And I had it automatically signed by John Carry, the president. Six weeks later, a colleague comes into my office and says, "Hey, have you got a response from the agency to your letter?" I
[23:14] said, "I didn't see any response from the agency. I just checked my email an hour ago." And he said, "It was classified as top secret. It's in the vault." I said, "Top secret." I said, "Well, what did it say?" And he says, he says, "Go to hell." I said, "Great, that's how they want to play." So I went to Carry and Carie says, "Ah, you know, we're stirring up a hornet's nest here and I think we should just let this fade into history." And I was like, "Why do you want to
[23:47] be Secretary of State again so badly?" God, what a disgusting business. It's horrible, dreadful. But one of the most striking aspects of the interview is the description of the mafia-like, perverse behavior of the American deep state, which reacts like a wounded animal against anyone who dares to shed a little light on its darkest activities. The situation is so brutal that Kriaku explains
[24:18] that he even openly considered suicide. Unfortunately, the witch hunt launched against him has led him to economic ruin, to jail, to being an outcast, an outcast in American society, unable even to access a normal job. I received a call in December 2007, so now I'm out of the agency. 3 and a half years. I received a call from Brian Ross of ABC News and he said he had
[24:49] a source who said that I had tortured Abu Zubaida. I said, "That's absolutely false. I was the only person who was kind to Abu Zubaid." I said, "I have never laid a hand on Abu Zubaida, nor on any other prisoner." And he said, "Well, you're welcome to come on the show and defend yourself." Well, I'd never spoken to a reporter before. I did n't know that was a reporter's trick, so I said, "I'll think about it."
[25:21] Meanwhile, President Bush— I remember it was a Monday—President Bush gave a press conference, and the International Committee of the Red Cross had said in a document that the CIA was torturing prisoners. Human Rights Watch said the CIA was torturing prisoners and Amnesty International said the CIA was torturing prisoners. So a reporter says, "Look, all these international human rights organizations are saying that the CIA is torturing its prisoners."
[25:51] What's your answer to that? And the president looks directly into the camera and says, "We don't torture like that." And I told my wife, who was a senior CIA officer, I said, "He's an outright liar. He's looking Americans straight in the eye and lying to us." And she said, "Are you surprised?" Well, then on Wednesday, two days later, um received another similar question
[26:25] and said there is no torture. I knew he was lying. And then, two days later, it's Friday and he's walking from the South Portico of the White House to the helicopter to go to C David for the weekend and a torture reporter, uh, shouts another question about torture and this time he stops and turns around and says, "Well, if there is torture it's by a rogue CIA officer." And I told my wife, "
[26:56] Brian Ross's source is in the White House and they're going to blame me." So I called Brian Ross and said, "I'll give you your interview." And I decided on whatever it was, why did you think they were going to blame you? Because I was the only one saying it was a human rights issue, so you were going to make a scapegoat. Yes. Mm. And it wasn't. You simply assumed that was it. You assume, yes. Because that's just your experience with the organization. Oh, yes. They're going to leave someone hanging to protect themselves. So I called Brian Ross and said, "I'll
[27:27] give you your interview." And I decided that whatever he was going to ask me—and he never told me beforehand what he was going to ask me—I was simply going to tell the truth. And that's how he found me at the ABC News studios, ah, on Siles Street in Washington. And I said three things in that interview that changed the course of the rest of my life. I said that the CIA was torturing its prisoners. I said that torture was an official policy of the United States government. It was not the result of
[27:59] any dishonest officer. And I said that the policy had been personally approved by the president himself. And then, as you can imagine, within 24 hours the CIA filed what is called a crimes report against me with the FBI, saying that I had disclosed classified information. The FBI then investigated me from December 2007 to December 2008 and then sent my lawyer a letter called a declination letter declining to
[28:31] prosecute. They said they had completed their investigation, that the information was already out there thanks to Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Red Cross. But most importantly, torture is a crime, and it is illegal to classify a crime for the purpose of hiding it from the American people. So no charges. My wife and I went out to celebrate that night; we went to dinner.
[29:02] Three or four weeks later, Barack Obama becomes president and appoints John Brenon, initially director of the CIA. But the liberals went crazy because Brenon was one of the fathers of the torture program. It seems everyone has forgotten about it now, and we can get into that if you want, but then he names Brennon as deputy national security advisor for counterterrorism. Branon immediately sends a memo to
[29:33] Eric Holder, the new attorney general, and says, "Speaking of me, charge him with espionage." And Holder responds, "We obtained these memos in discovery when I went to trial." Holder responds, "My people don't believe I committed espionage." And then Brenon responds and says, "Accuse him anyway and make him defend himself." So they charged me with five felonies, three counts of
[30:04] espionage, waited until I went bankrupt, and then dropped the espionage charges. So, um, it became a matter of simple survival after that, you know? You have to take it seriously. I was facing 45 years in prison. And then when the UM Department of Justice made a request for an offer meeting, the offer meeting is, they give you a little bit of an idea of what they have against you and then they make an offer. You can accept it or leave it. And they
[30:38] offered me 45 years and I said, I'm not going to do even 45 minutes. I did nothing wrong and this woman became U assistant attorney general for the criminal division under Biden. She said, "Accept this deal, Mr. Kiriaku, and you may live to meet your grandchildren." Oh my God. Oh, I went home that night and
[31:08] went home. I'm even ashamed to say it. That night we put the children to bed and my wife and I were watching TV and she said, "Come on, let's go to bed." I said, "I can't sleep." "There's no way I can sleep." And she said, "No, come on, let's go to bed." She knew I was going to go down to the garage, start the car, and just lie down in the back seat. And she said, "No, come on. You need to try and get some sleep. Uh, she saved me that night.
[31:41] Wow. So at sentencing, my lawyer said, "Your Honor, we request that Mr. Kiraku be sent to a minimum-security labor camp." She says, "Any objections from the Department of Justice?" They said, "No objection." She says, "Okay, minimum-security labor camp, no bars on the windows, no locks on the doors." You are free to come and go as you please. " You're only honoring yourself by not escaping." And most of the guys work. There's a small school in town, you go sweep the floors or whatever. So
[32:12] I got to the prison three months later and, uh, it's a weird system we have. Joe, you go up and knock on the door and say, "Hi, I'm John Kiraku." I am here to surrender. That's all you do." And your friends and family just leave. And then they said, "Yeah, uh, you have to go across the street, to the real prison." They'll process you and then bring you back here. And I said, "Okay." So I crossed the street and uh said, "I am Jan Kiraku, I am here to turn myself in." And
[32:42] uh, and the guy grabs my arm. We went outside and started walking toward the back of the prison, and I said, "No, no. I'm supposed to be at the minimum-security camp across the street." And the guy laughs at me and says, "No, according to my papers you're not." And I was like, "Oh my God, calm down." Later we learned that Bran was so angry about the brevity of my sentence that he told them, "Make it as
[33:14] difficult as possible." So I told myself, "Calm down, if you make a scene, they'll put you in solitary confinement." "Don't say a word." So I didn't say a word. It took them about 40 minutes to process me, then they took me to my cell. The only thing the police officer said to me was, "Some advice, friend." If someone enters your cell uninvited, that's an act of aggression." And I said, "Great, thanks. I've been here for 40 minutes and now they're going to beat me up
[33:46] . I appreciate it. If you don't realize it before, but you're in shock for the first week or two, and then I started to adjust to the routine and it was a bit, I mean, it was quite messy. That first day, 20 minutes after the police officer warned me about people entering my room unannounced, these two guys just brazenly walk in, they just walk in. I jump up, raise my fists, and say, "What do you want?" One of them has a swastika on his neck. It
[34:17] covered her entire neck, going up to her face. The other one had "[ __ ] you" tattooed on his eyelids. So I say, "What do they want?" And the guy with the swastika says, "Are you the new guy?" I said, "Yes." "And?" And he says, "You're a [ __ ]." I said, "No, I'm not gay." He said, "You're a snitch." I said, "No, I didn't have anyone else on my case, I'm not a snitch." And he says, "You're a chomo." I say, "I don't know what that word means." He says, "Chomo,
[34:48] child abuser." I said, "No, I'm not a child abuser." And he says, "Okay, you can sit with the Aryans in the cafeteria." And I was like, "Oh, I guess I'm with the Aryans now." Oh wow, great. I was frankly very angry when I left. I didn't realize how angry I was, as people mentioned it to me, like maybe you should talk to someone, maybe you should, you know, think about a pharmaceutical option. And I was like, why is there nothing wrong
[35:21] with me, you know? I'm ready to fight and march and, you know, raise my fist against the Obama administration. And so, I was wrong, of course, I was so angry that it wasn't even healthy for the people around me. But I'll tell you, the hardest thing is that you think you can just go back to your life and you'll never be able to go back to your life. So
[35:51] I thought, "Okay, well, I'm highly educated. I have a bachelor's degree in Middle Eastern studies. I have a master's degree in legislative policy analysis. I finished my doctoral coursework in international affairs. I was rejected by McDonald's, by Safeway, by Target, by Uber. We hire criminals. I mean, I couldn't get a job
[36:22] anywhere. And you're broke? And I was broke, bankrupt. So you couldn't even get a job driving for Uber. Uber, my rich. Wow, yeah, it's crazy. It's crazy. But so I decided, look, no company is going to hire me, right? I can't go back to government again, so I'm going to have to work for myself." So I had already written my first book, which reached number five on the New York Times bestseller list. My second
[36:53] book I wrote by hand from prison. I ended up winning two literary awards for that book. I won the PEN First Amendment Award, along with the PEN Falkner, the Pulitzer, and the Edgar Allan Poe Award. Po is one of the Big Four. And then I won the Forward Reviews Memoir of the Year award. That year I thought, I'm going to keep writing books. I started writing a column that ended up being syndicated through the Consortium for Independent Journalism. So it's like 200 small-town newspapers across the country and a, you know, a little bit
[37:26] here, a little bit there. Consulting. The talk also mentions other cases that reveal how the deep state, how US intelligence agencies are out of control or organized, or initiate plots that drag people into jail who had no intention of committing crimes. What prevails is the personal interest of the employees of these agencies in promoting themselves, in gaining personal power or power for their inner circle.
[37:57] Under such base premises, any illegality, any vileness is possible, such as the detention, torture, and killing of innocents, even the start of armed conflicts for the most spurious interests. That is the reality of the Anglo-Saxon deep state. As the interviewer Joe Rogan himself says, this reality is difficult to... Swallow. Let's take note, Hispanic citizens, because if we're not aware of the true nature of our American neighbor's machinery, it will be very, very difficult for us to counteract it and
[38:28] overcome it. Another way I know that MK Ultra experimented with many different techniques involved in either trying to find the truth in people or making people commit acts. Did they ever implement something where they gave someone something? That's a good question. The short answer is yes. Not at first, but they were working with things like truth serum and different drugs like
[39:01] relaxation drugs or gabapentin, you know, things like that to make you open up. But remember also that the agency got into so much trouble in '75 and '76 before the Church Committee and the Pike Committee on MK Ultra, that as soon as Senator Church said, "Don't destroy the documents," the director went straight back to headquarters and ordered everything destroyed. And so only about 20% of the
[39:33] MK Ultra documents still exist. So we really don't know exactly what was going on. What they learned in that program, like what worked and what didn't. We hear these stories about, you know, dosing the fog-laden air of San Francisco, just to see if everyone would get sick. We 've all read the stories about this bakery in France, where apparently we dosed the bread and everyone in the village went crazy. Oh, but we don't really have
[40:05] complete documentation that we could have used operationally while interrogating prisoners. So just to avoid prosecution, they found a way. Yeah, it's crazy. And then whatever they learned was lost. Yeah, it was lost. If there was anything, whether it was MDMA, right, LSD, or whatever they were giving people. They worked with LSD, at least. Yeah, at least 20 years, you know? It was an operation, a sub-operation of Mecca
[40:38] Ultra where they rented a safe house in San Francisco. They recruited a bunch of prostitutes and had them go out and pick up clients, bring them back to the safe house where they thought they were going to have sex, dose them with LSD, and Then interrogate them and try to get them to reveal their deepest secrets. It's like, yeah, Climax. Yeah, Midnight Climax. Exactly. Yeah, it's like, nobody's agreed to do this. No, you haven't properly informed them.
[41:09] These are American citizens. You can't just pull people off the streets and force SD on them. Well, they were running the Ashbury Free hate. Yeah, they were right up until after Tom O'Neil's Month After Chaos came out. That's it. You're absolutely right. Oh, that's the problem, isn't it? Because there are so many cases where people are setting traps for others. And you know, I was talking to a friend of mine about this case where there was—I'm sure you remember—there was a 19-year-old, I think he was probably
[41:40] at least intellectually mature, and they tricked him into being radicalized, gave him a fake bomb, gave him a cell phone. You know this story? I know exactly what you're talking about. Yeah. And they intervened, they caught him, and he wasn't planning on doing anything. It wasn't like he They convinced him to do everything. He wasn't a bright person, and they got him arrested for it. So that adds to his record. That's like when I was having a
[42:11] conversation about this, we mentioned the Uber they were planning to hijack. Yeah, Whmer. Yeah. Mm. Michigan. Yeah. And that 12 of the 14 people were working with the FBI. Yeah. Which is correct. Listen, there are well- documented cases where the FBI infiltrates a group, and they go to a meeting, and literally everyone at the meeting is an FBI agent. What is that? Are you kidding me? This is what
[42:43] American taxpayer money goes to. Remember, have you heard about the Route 82 bridge plot in Cleveland? No. There were three idiots sitting in a bar getting drunk. Oh, yeah. I've heard about this. Yeah. The other guy comes in. Hey, you know what we should do? It would be really fun to blow up the Route 82 bridge. I have some explosives, and these guys are drunk. They say, "Yeah, let's do the Route 82 bridge." 82." Well, the guy with the explosives is an FBI informant. They set them up and got like 20, 18, and 15 years in prison. It was the
[43:14] FBI's idea. It wasn't their idea; they were just sitting in a bar drinking. Look, we only know a tiny fraction of what went on. So it's a case of them simply not being elected; they're put in power. Presidents come and go, and over the course of their careers—more than 20 years—they just have so much power and so much ability to do things that they just bypass the law. I think that's the whole story. In short, when I
[43:45] was there, I remember being amazed by some of the veterans who had been there for as long as 40 or 42 years. There was one in particular; he was the national intelligence officer for warnings. So he was the one who was supposed to say, "You know?" "I'm worried about what Libya is going to be like in 10 years." And then someone writes a report about it. He'd been there for 42 years. He had to get a waiver from the director because he was over the age limit. Well, these guys make no secret of their belief that
[44:16] they can wait longer than practically any president. Presidents come and go, and these guys are there forever. And so if the president wants them to do something they don't want to do, they just slow it down, they just wait until he leaves, and that's the end of it. You know? That's why I say—I've said this in many interviews—there is a deep state. You don't have to call it the deep state if you don't want to. You can call it the state, you can call it the federal bureaucracy, you can call it whatever
[44:46] you want. The fact is, it exists, and it's unelected, and it's generally not accountable to anyone, and they just wait for the president to leave if they don't want to do what he wants. Yeah. Oh, God, that sucks. Washington. It's so hard to believe that the government of the United States of America operates like that. I believe it, I believe it. Oh, yeah, but it's hard to accept.
[45:26] Because We are delighted to announce that Pedro Baños is the well-deserved winner of the 2025 ISPA Unity Award, which honors those who have made outstanding contributions to fostering sisterhood within our community. We invite all our fellow Hispanic citizens to join us in celebrating this well-deserved award for Pedro Baños. The award ceremony will take place on November 22nd in Madrid. The day will include a free lecture by Mr. Baños himself, followed by a celebratory dinner. It will be a unique opportunity
[45:56] to honor the award recipient, celebrate our sisterhood, and hear from one of the most insightful voices of our time. See the links in the description for information on attending the lecture and the celebratory dinner.