Turning The Tide With Dennis Kucinich And John Kiriakou
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And as many of you know, I was in D.C. last week hosting the Turning the Tide 9-11 event.
It is my pleasure to share with you two of the most powerful speeches from that event, former Congressman Dennis Kucinich and CIA whistleblower John Keriaku.
Buckle up and get ready to make sense of the madness.
Because this is the first time since 9-11 that I've actually kind of created a synthesis that I wanted to share with what I think is a group that's emerging as one of the most formidable groups for truth in this country.
But I just have something that I want to share with you before I begin, and that's about what happened yesterday in Utah with Charlie Kirk.
I didn't know Charlie, but I will say this, that mass violence, which we're talking about here tonight, mass violence impels and creates personal violence, which in turn creates mass violence.
So whatever your politics, please understand that the assassination of Charlie Kirk is a grave assault on our nation.
It diminishes all of us.
It challenges us to recognize that we have to escape this endless rotation of the wheel of violence.
We are dedicated to turning the tide.
So thank you for being here this evening.
It's actually exhausting just to listen and to remember and hear the testimony of everyone who's been here, who's in the last yesterday, today, and I can anticipate tomorrow.
For those of us who have been through it in the last 20-some years, it's hard to listen to.
It stirs up some deep emotions.
And I just have to say, Kurt and to Richard Gage, you know, how much I appreciate being here.
But it's not without a lot of emotion hearing this.
It all comes back, Burt, Dana.
It all comes back.
And so this is the first time that I've really spoken about it and put it together since then.
And I hope that as I make this presentation, you'll see that the point of view that I'm offering fits neatly with the work of turning the tide, Richard, the work that you've been doing since that day.
So it's been well established that Israel and the U.S. are partners.
What is not understood is the square dance-like sequence, the deadly doe-see-doh back and forth of that partnership involving 9-11.
The U.S. and Israel aligned in prevarication, determinedly, wrongly associating the motive, the intent, and the execution of the attacks, wrongly associating it with Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
Immediately after 9-11, Netanyahu, who was in America on that day, was asked by the BBC what the attack meant for U.S.-Israeli relations.
It's very good, he said.
It's very good.
Then he caught himself.
Well, not very good.
It will generate immediate sympathy.
On September 12th, in a CNN interview, Mr. Netanyahu said, quote, it's not just bin Laden, it's not just the networks, it's also the states that harbor and support them, Iraq, Iran, the Taliban, and Afghanistan.
A few days later, on September 16th, 2001, Vice President Cheney appeared on NBC News Meet the Press, and he claimed, We also have evidence that Saddam Hussein's been harboring terrorists, including al-Qaeda.
On the first anniversary of 9-11, on the evening of September 11, 2002, President Bush, with New York's Ellis Island as a backdrop, gave a speech which set the stage for conflating Iraq with 9-11.
The next day, September 12, 2002, in Washington, D.C., Benjamin Netanyahu appeared before the Congressional Committee of which I was a member, and with the unmistakable intent of influencing Congress to vote to go to war against Iraq because of 9-11, he said, do you believe that action can be taken against Saddam only after he builds nuclear bombs and using them?
And do various critics, especially overseas, believe a clear connection between Saddam and 9-11 must be established before we have a right to prevent the next 9-11?
He was making the connection.
False between Iraq and 9-11.
He continued, the most compelling case for preemption against Saddam's regime, I believe, was not the president's powerful words, but the savage action of the terrorists themselves on September 11th.
He went on to say, there's no question whatsoever that Saddam is seeking, is working, is advancing towards the development of nuclear weapons.
No question whatsoever.
If you take out Saddam, I guarantee you, he told Congress, I guarantee it, that we'll have enormous positive reverberations on the region.
After 9-11, the United States must act preemptively against terrorist regimes, said Netanyahu.
Now, in this congressional hearing, I had a chance to ask Mr. Netanyahu some questions.
And one question I asked was this, Mr. Netanyahu, what other countries would you have us bomb?
He answered, Iran, Libya.
A few weeks later, on October 2nd, 2002, as the leader of the effort against the war, I began personally distributing on the floor of the House of Representatives a detailed memo.
I gave it, I put it in the hands of hundreds of members.
The memo was frank and clear, and it stated that based on all credible and available information, Iraq had nothing to do with 9-11, with al-Qaeda's role, that Iraq had neither the intention nor the capability of attacking the U.S., that there was no credible evidence that Iraq was either possessing or was about to use weapons of mass destruction, and that America was about to enter a bloody abyss based on misinformation, disinformation, and outright lies.
On October 7, 2002, President Bush spoke in Cincinnati, proclaiming, we've learned that Iraq has trained al-Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and deadly gases.
On October 10th, 2002, the House of Representatives, swept up in an endless stream of government chest-snumping, patriotic retribution parroting media war talk, voted 296 to 133 to wage war against Iraq.
The Senate followed the next day.
On January 28, 2003, at his State of the Union address, President Bush told Congress, Evidence from intelligence sources indicates Saddam Hussein had links to terrorist organizations, including al-Qaeda.
On February 5th, 2003, General Colin Powell, the U.S. Secretary of State, in an appearance before the United Nations Security Council, we all remember it.
He asserted, Iraq today harbors a deadly terrorist network headed by Abu Mossad al-Zarqawi, an associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda lieutenants.
On February 18, 2003, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Benjamin Netanyahu said, if we do not prevent the marriage of militant Islam with weapons of mass destruction, 9-11 will be a mere prelude.
The month later, on March 15th, Mr. Netanyahu, in an interview with the Jerusalem Post, said, the removal of Saddam Hussein is essential in the global war on terror.
It's the lesson of 9-11.
On March 16, 2003, Vice President Cheney said on Meet the Press, we believe Iraq has had a relationship with al-Qaeda that's gone on for a number of years.
On March 18th, a few days later, President Bush provided a presidential determination, which is a legal justification for attacking Iraq, in a letter to Congress.
I've determined that Iraq's continuing threat and links to terrorist organizations, including al-Qaeda, require action, the letter said.
And then on March 19th to 20th, 2003, the U.S. instituted a so-called shock and awe, a massive military attack on Iraq.
On March 21st, 2003, the President formally notified Congress under the War Powers Resolution that combat operations had begun.
He said, I've also determined that the use of armed force against Iraq is consistent with actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those who aided in the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.
They kept going, conflating Iraq with 9-11.
Now, Benjamin Netanyahu, the once and future leader of Israel, and President George Bush each conflated Iraq with 9-11 synchronously at key moments, each with the same purpose.
A deadly orchestration towards a premeditated war against Iraq, which 9-11 was used to falsely justify.
We know now that Iraq had nothing to do with 9-11, but at least a million innocent, 1 million innocent Iraqis died because of that war.
5,000 of our brave servicemen and women lost their lives in that war.
Our economy suffered greatly.
At least $5 trillion in cost.
Our national honor was tarnished.
And as Colonel Schaefer mentioned a moment ago, no one, no one has ever been held to account.
However, several presidential candidates were even based upon proudly voting for the war with Iraq against Iraq.
So the United States was misled into a war based on lies about 9-11.
And despite, or Richard, perhaps because of the report of the 9-11 Commission, many questions remain unanswered.
After 9-11 for the next, after we went to war for the next eight years, I gave over 300 presentations in Congress pointing out over and over and over the lies.
the loss of life, the cost, calling not just for the end of the war, but for a new direction in U.S. policy in the region.
I introduced legislation for the creation of a cabinet-level Department of Peace to begin a new effort to shift the consciousness of the nation away from violence as a way of settling conflicts, to avert deadly violence at home and war abroad.
Now, Prime Minister Netanyahu, notwithstanding his twisting of facts, conflation of Iraq with 9-11, is cheerleading for the U.S. to go to war with Iraq at such a horrible cost of blood and treasure, has nevertheless ascended in the estimation of Washington.
Bereft of any credibility on what constitutes U.S. national security, in the ensuing years, the Israeli prime minister has been successful in gaining U.S. weapons to bomb Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Gaza, the West Bank, and most recently, Qatar.
The U.S. pursued Israel's interest in bombing Libya, murdering Gaddafi, and then murdering Iran's General Suleimani.
Now, Netanyahu gave a speech to Congress last year during which he received an astonishing 55 standing ovations as he called for America to stand together, this time against Iran.
When we stand together, we win and they lose, he said, urging a U.S. attack on Iran, which occurred less than a year later with the U.S. bombing three of Iran's nuclear sites.
We stood with Netanyahu and his country in Iraq, and we lost.
We lost our national honor.
We lost our men and women who put their lives in the line.
A second attack on Iraq looms, which could well precipitate World War III.
When we stand together in illegal aggression, we all lose.
Now, Israel has often complained that it has no one to negotiate with to bring an end to conflicts or fend off future wars.
They make sure of it.
For those interested in peaceful negotiations, meetings arranged by the U.S., supposedly to reach an agreement with Iran or with Hamas and Qatar, end up being traps, opportunities for Israel to kill the negotiators.
Venezuela recently was more likely the target of an attack on its boat in international waters, killing 11 people, not because of a new U.S. interest in anti-illegal drug efforts, but most likely because Venezuela does not support the genocide happening in Gaza under the Netanyahu government.
It's noteworthy that the U.S. imposed sanctions on the International Criminal Court and Francesca Albanese, special U.N. rapporteur on the rights of the Palestinian territory, just for calling out Israel and its inhumanity.
America has forgotten the lessons of 9-11 as to who we can and can't trust with respect to international policy, and it is affecting us here at home.
Domestically, our constitutionally guaranteed rights under the First Amendment, freedom of speech, under attack.
Academia has been published for dissent about genocide, universities dealt heavy fines, students expelled, all in the name of enforcing a narrowly defined, redefined anti-Semitism as a way to deflect protests against the Israeli government's policies of theft of Palestinian land, ethnic cleansing, starvation, genocide, all with a tacit approval and funding of the United States of America, and it's wrong.
The United States, our social reality has been reconstructed to support genocide and to support the policies of a nation and its leaders who lead us from one bloody conflict to another.
The U.S. may protect Israel with its veto in the Security Council, but it cannot protect it from the hundreds of millions of people worldwide who are not misled, who know wrong when they see it, and condemn murder for what it is.
If truth equals anti-Semitism, it's time to perhaps to examine what anti-Semitism really is.
The facts are that countless Gazans have died.
Gazans are being starved.
The reality is that a large-scale program of ethnic cleansing is ongoing.
If we allow this bleak reality to be dismissed as merely politically motivated anti-Semitism, we allow that to happen.
We're all being reduced to moral ignorance.
Now, 6 million Jews perished in the Holocaust.
Never again means never again.
It means it for Jews.
It means it for Gazans.
means for people everywhere.
Israel cannot survive the contradiction of having a history of such immense suffering and inhumanity inflicted upon Jews by the Nazis only to see its own country stand accused before the world of murderous crimes.
which recall the Nazi era.
We are all warned in the book of Matthew: quote: Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation, and every city or house divided against itself will not stand.
We should all want all the hostages brought home.
We should mourn the deaths of every innocent Israeli.
If we mourned the deaths of every innocent Palestinian in Gaza, we might well drown in our own tears.
The death of truth, however, is beyond mourning.
It is the final knell for the American Republic.
And that is why, Richard, what you're doing and what Turn the Tide is about is a chance to help protect and save our country.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
As I conclude, I wanna ask this question.
Why is it that we in America who pride ourselves on freedom of thought, freedom of speech, freedom of inquiry, why are we not permitted to ask questions about the apparent destructive symbiotic relationship between the U.S. and Israel, about the constant strategic deception, about the billions that go for mass murders, about the undue influence that Israeli interests have on our own government?
Why can't we probe further into the advisability of having the leaders of a nation of 10 million influence the most important national security decisions of our nation of 350 million?
It is time for the U.S. to assert our own hard-won sovereignty, not through escalatory rhetoric and illusions of world dominance, but by thoroughly examining the premise not only of U.S.-Israeli relations, but of all of our foreign entanglements.
Let's start taking care of things here at home.
I do not believe that the people of the United States support stealing people's homes.
I do not believe that today's Americans support the theft of people's lands.
I do not believe Americans want to starve people or want to murder children or want to see their tax dollars support genocide.
We do have serious political differences in America, which outside elements exploit.
We know that.
The polarization and the partisanship, which is evident, cause us to lose sight of what unites us.
At such a time, we must remember things that help hold us together.
What binds us together as American people is a sense of common decency, a desire to do the right thing, a desire to see our families flourish and our communities thrive, a belief in goodness and God and our communities, and a hope for something that we used to call the American dream.
A home, hearth, health, education, jobs, decent wages, retirement security.
We cannot hope to attain this unless we're truly free and independent with no permanent friends or foes, just the permanent social and economic interests of the American people as our first commitment and as our highest fiduciary responsibility.
As we strive, we must remember who misled us into war against Iraq over 9-11 and be thoroughly cautious.
Thanks again, Richard, Kurt, and all of you here to turning the tide and those who know that we do not fear asking the deeper questions that followed the events of 9-11, 2001, 24 years ago.
Everything that we're told about 9-11, which was instrumental in leading us to attack Iraq, has been proven to be a lie.
Accordingly, we have a clear right and an obligation to search for answers to the fundamental question about the planning of 9-11, its execution, the physical effects, the structural consequences when the planes hit the World Trade Center.
We have the capacity.
We have the capacity to learn the truth about 9-11, about the motivations, about whose interests were being served, about the phenomena like the collapse of Building 7 in New York City, about the lies that took us into war, about the lies that kept us in war, about the lies which even now build a war consciousness so ubiquitous that for the first time since the Civil War,
an American city has been threatened by our own government with war.
Serious.
Unanswered questions will not go away.
The conspiracy, if there was one, was against the truth and against the American people.
So let us continue with a limitless quest for answers.
Fear not drawing conclusions that shake the foundations of this country because truth is the path to national reconciliation.
Truth is the path to bind up our wounds.
Never has there been a time in the history of America where the quest for defining truth is of such importance.
Truth rescued from our deepest, darkest recesses.
Truth facing our deepest fears.
Truth liberating a nation tired of being told lies by people in high places with low motives.
The Bible says, you shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.
So my dear friends, let us fearlessly march through the fog of disinformation, misinformation, manufactured intelligence, and psyops.
We move forward dauntlessly towards an uplit path.
Thanks, everybody.
I actually had a prepared speech, which I normally don't do.
I just wing it.
I figured if I don't know these issues by now, I'm never going to know them.
But after listening to Congressman Kucinich, after watching Senator Johnson yesterday, I think I can't give that speech that I intended to.
What I'd like to do is just to stand here and say, yeah, I agree.
That's kind of the end of the story.
I agree.
But I'll agree by throwing in a couple of anecdotes.
For those of you who don't know me, my name is John Kiriaku.
I spent almost 15 years in the CIA and then found myself after 9-11 in a couple of leadership positions.
I was the chief of counterterrorism operations for the CIA in Pakistan after 9-11, led a series of raids that resulted in the capture of Abu Zubaydah, whom we wrongly believed was the number three in Al-Qaeda, and then went home to become the executive assistant to the CIA's Deputy Director for Operations, a position in which I got to see literally everything that the CIA was doing around the world.
And I can tell you, they are lying about everything.
Everything.
I mean, just on the surface of things, think about it.
They told us there was no torture program.
Of course, there was a torture program.
That was a lie.
They told us that there was no archipelago of secret prisons around the world.
That was a lie.
They told us that there was no program of international renditions or extraordinary renditions where we were kidnapping people who had never been charged with a crime and then sending them to countries that they had no ties to so that they could be tortured.
That was a lie.
And then they told us there's nothing happening at Guantanamo.
We're just holding people there to await trial in the appropriate federal district courts.
That was a lie.
Literally everything they said was a lie.
Now, listen, I will admit to you, I was a true believer for a long time.
Even though I was a third-generation Democrat, liberal Democrat, we don't use the word liberal anymore, but progressive Democrat, three generations.
We had a photograph of Franklin Roosevelt on our TV, which I still have.
I can't abide by what the Democratic Party does any more than I can abide by what the Republican Party does because they're all lying to us.
I want to take you back to the months after the 9-11 attacks.
We had captured Abu Zubaydah, and I was sitting at the foot of his bed.
My orders were to not leave his bedside.
I was tired, very tired.
And so I was afraid I was going to fall asleep.
So I tore up a sheet and I tied him to the bed.
He was in a coma, but I don't know.
I was thinking, maybe the doctor's al-Qaeda, maybe the nurse is Al-Qaeda.
I'm going to fall asleep in the chair and they're going to make him escape.
So I tied him up.
And then I woke up and I noticed that one of the FBI guys that was in and out had left Abu Zubaydah's diary next to the bed.
So when I woke up, I said, what's that?
Oh, that's the diary.
We confiscated it at the safe house.
But it's in Arabic.
He said, I can't read it.
I said, pass it over here.
I'll check it out.
So I'm looking through the diary, and much of it was innocuous.
The CIA and the FBI differ on this and have for 23 years.
But much of it was doodles.
He was a very talented artist.
Some of it was poetry.
He would write letters.
He was 27 at the time.
He would write letters to his 14-year-old self saying, treat our parents with respect.
Don't say terrible things to that girl down the block.
You know, have respect for your brothers and sisters, that kind of thing.
But then also in the diary were the personal cell phone numbers of three Saudi princes.
And I'm looking at this like, what in the world?
Are these cell phone numbers?
So I called Islamabad and I said, listen, I'm sitting here in the hospital and I'm looking at this diary that we confiscated.
And I think it's got the cell phone numbers of three Saudi princes.
And the analyst that I called said, you've got to be kidding me.
And I said, no.
So I read him the names and the, I violated all kinds of security issues.
But anyway, I read him the names and the phone numbers over the phone.
He cabled headquarters.
They just said, thank you.
Another couple of months pass.
I go back to CIA headquarters.
By then, this information had bubbled up to the director, George Tenet.
This was one of only two times I ever saw George lose his temper.
Prince Bandar bin Sultan, Al-Saud, who's the Saudi ambassador to the United States and the son of then, what was he, the minister of whatever, Prince Sultan, defense, I think it was.
George had called Prince Bandar into the office, and George said, We have this information that these three members of your family are in the personal diary of the number three men in al-Qaeda.
And he said, Bandar, I'm telling you, I'm telling you because we're allies, we're going to start killing people, a lot of people, and some of them are going to be named Al-Saouud.
So Bandar left the meeting, and then over the next couple of weeks, three things happened.
One of the princes had bariatric bypass surgery, and he died on the operating room table somehow.
Another prince was killed in a one-car accident on the Riyadh to Jeddah Highway.
And then the third prince went camping in the desert like he used to do all the time and died of thirst.
Of thirst.
Bandar didn't do us any favors by having his cousins killed.
He set us back.
But that was the plan.
Because those three princes would have had to answer questions as to why in the world their personal cell phone numbers were in Abu Zubaydah's diary.
And it wasn't just that.
Why was Omar al-Bayoumi at President Bush's Crawford Ranch before 9-11 with Crown Prince Abdullah?
And then he excuses himself from the meeting to go outside and call the hijackers.
Why was that never investigated?
It's because the CIA wouldn't let us investigate it.
The CIA wouldn't let the 9-11 Commission investigate it.
What kind of commission was the 9-11 Commission if it was not permitted to interview CIA officers?
Or if it was not permitted to interview prisoners at Guantanamo?
Or do they just fill in the blanks by making it up?
And it's not just the Saudis that were a problem for us.
The Israelis were at least as big a problem.
The Saudis aren't so heavy-handed about it as the Israelis are.
And I'll give you just one example.
When I got back from Pakistan, I was promoted, and I went up to the seventh floor to be the assistant to the deputy director, as I said.
On my first day on the job, I was so excited.
And I went into the deputy director's office, and I went like this.
I said, so, what are we doing now?
And he said, I actually can't tell you.
You have to go up to the sixth floor and sign some secrecy agreements and then we'll talk.
I said, okay.
They were waiting for me in security.
They had six secrecy agreements lined up on the table.
And I knew the security officer.
I said, I need to sign these secrecy agreements.
And so he had them all aid out.
I signed each and every one.
And the secrecy agreement is such that you promise to never, ever talk about this ever for the rest of your life.
You take it to the grave unless it's declassified.
And for the most part, it's been declassified.
So I signed the six agreements and I said, so what's up?
And he goes like this.
Next year, we're going to invade Iraq.
We're going to overthrow Saddam Hussein.
And we're going to open the biggest Air Force base in the world so we can move all of our air assets out of Saudi Arabia and deprive Osama bin Laden of the ability to say that we are polluting the land of the two holy mosques.
I was dumbstruck.
I've just gotten back from Pakistan where we've all dedicated our lives to finding Osama bin Laden.
And all I could think to say was, we haven't caught bin Laden yet.
What do you mean we're going to overthrow Saddam Hussein?
And he said, stop.
The decision's been made.
We don't have a say.
And the battle lines have been drawn.
I said, what are the battle lines?
He said, the pro-invasion forces are OVP, the office of the vice president, OSD, the office of the Secretary of Defense, and the National Security Council.
And he said, the anti-Iraq war factions, as crazy as this sounds, CIA, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the State Department.
And I said, so what do we do?
He said, we do as we're ordered to do.
We're going to go to war with Iraq.
So that's what we prepared for from March of 2002 to February of 2003.
It was all about getting ready to fight the Iraqis.
And for what reason?
There was no reason.
I never encountered a CIA officer who ever believed that there was a connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
Osama bin Laden hated Saddam Hussein as much as he hated us.
There was literally nothing Muslim about Saddam Hussein.
There was a famous story that Saddam and his vice president, Isat Ibrahim Aduri, went to Mecca to make the minor pilgrimage, the Umrah, in 1988 or 89.
Saddam didn't know the prayers because he had never learned the prayers.
Is that Ibrahim was very religious and was kneeling behind him and whispering the prayers quietly to Saddam so Saddam could say them more loudly to make it look like he knew what the hell he was doing.
There was nothing Muslim about Saddam Hussein.
But Dick Cheney said there's a connection between Al-Qaeda and Iraq, and that's the reason why we're going to attack.
It was just completely made up, just like the weapons of mass destruction.
Saddam had two sons-in-law, Hussein Kamal al-Majid and Saddam Kamal Al-Majid.
They were brothers married to Saddam's two daughters, Rana and Rugged.
Rugged and Rana.
Rugged was the older one.
They defected to Jordan, and they did it in the middle of the night because they were panicked that Saddam's eldest son, Uday, was going to kill them.
So we put a team together.
We flew out to Amman, where they had been given refuge.
And we had this plan that we were going to go in and say, all right, tell us where the weapons of mass destruction are.
Because we couldn't find them.
We figured maybe these guys, you know, are they geniuses or something?
They found this one patch of dirt that our overhead imagery can't find.
And maybe, you know, we just missed them or something because none of us ever saw any weapons of mass destruction.
So we go to the palace where King Hussein had them hold up.
And when we walked in, even before my boss could say anything, Hussein Kamal said, all right, I need overhead imagery of Saddam's palaces.
I need air cover.
I need secure communications.
I need weapons.
And my boss said, oh, wait a minute.
We didn't come here to make you president of Iraq.
We came here for you to tell us where the weapons of mass destruction are.
He said, there are no weapons of mass destruction.
The truth is, we had so scared the shit out of them in 1989 that they destroyed all the weapons of mass destruction and they buried the ruined missiles in the desert.
There were no weapons of mass destruction.
That's why the United Nations never found any.
That's why we never found any.
No country ever, even the Israelis, they have weapons of mass destruction.
Okay, show us whatever.
We'll go get them.
And then we'll punish them and bomb them or something.
We're just supposed to take the Israelis' words for it.
So there were none.
In the end, we gave Hussein Kamal and Saddam Kamal nothing.
They stayed in exile about six months, and then they sent word back to Iraq that they wanted to beg forgiveness and go back.
They were met at the Iraqi-Jordanian border by Saddam's two sons, who executed both of them.
So that was the end of it.
They never even made a foot inside Iraq.
Now, fast forward a little bit more to the week before we crossed the border into Iraq.
I want to tell you two things about that.
Number one, my primary role in the deputy director's office was to be the morning briefer for all of the deputy directors and the associate deputy directors, as well as the heads of counterterrorism, counter-narcotics, counter-proliferation, counterintelligence, and the chief of staff.
That was at 7.
And then at 7.30, I would brief the director.
So I went into the briefing this morning, and I said, before I get into the substantive reporting from overnight, we had a message from the Israelis, and they said that they want to be in on the attack in three days.
And the deputy director said, absolutely, positively not.
And I said, I already told them no.
Well, it just so happened that in the western Iraqi desert, when the Iraqis electrified that part of the country, they built electrical towers with three legs.
And two days before we attacked Iraq, somebody put explosives on one of the legs for like 100 miles, and every tower just started tipping over.
And I remember the deputy director saying, those fucking Israelis, they just don't know when to take no for an answer.
Excuse my language.
So they got a little piece of the action.
But it was the Israelis the whole time that were telling, well, they were telling the vice president's office, it was like an echo chamber, you got to overthrow Saddam.
And Cheney's office would say, yes, we have to overthrow Saddam.
And the Israelis would say, they're an existential threat.
And Cheney would say, yes, they are.
We're going to overthrow Saddam.
And at the CIA, we're like, is nobody paying any attention to Iran?
Saddam Hussein, whether you like his politics or not, he's the only thing protecting the Gulf Arab countries from Iran.
Once he's gone, that's it.
They're done if the Iranians decide to do anything about it.
The Israelis didn't care because the Israelis had a longer view than we did.
The Israeli view was, we're going to help you take out Iraq.
And then once it's taken out, we're going to help you take out Iran and Libya and Syria and, you know, everybody.
I mean, that was the plan all along.
I mean, look what they did.
Look what they did in Lebanon.
You don't have to like Hassan Nasrallah at all, or what he stands for, or his politics, or whatever, to acknowledge that what Israel did in Lebanon was a war crime.
But they don't care about that.
They'll kill.
This is one thing that they do that most other countries in the region don't do as a matter of policy.
If they have a target located in a block of apartments, let's say, they will blow up the entire city block and kill a thousand people if they think they can get that one guy.
That one.
Nobody else does that.
And then they bomb Gutter last week.
Did everybody in the world forget that it's gutter that's the home to the largest U.S. air base in the world?
And the Qataris finally today came to us and said, So, what are you guys going to do about this?
They bombed us in broad daylight, knowing we're a U.S. ally, knowing that we have the largest American air base in the world here.
And you guys just said, Oh, well, you know what?
They didn't inform us.
So, sorry.
With our own weapons, thank you.
With our own weapons, we put up with things from the Israelis that are incomprehensible to anybody who follows these issues.
It's just an utter mystery to me why we tolerate this kind of behavior from anybody.
We wouldn't tolerate this from an enemy, certainly.
Why would we tolerate it from a friend?
And, you know, I'm going to use friend in air quotes.
Forgive me if you've heard me tell these stories.
But I was on the job for, I don't know, three months, maybe.
This was in early 1990, like March of 1990.
And I was instructed to attend my very first liaison briefing.
This first briefing I ever did as a young 25-year-old, 20, whatever I was, 24-year-old CIA officer.
We're going to brief the Israelis.
And I said, okay, it's going to be the first foreign intelligence service that I'm declared to, where they say, this is John Kiriaku.
He's a CIA officer.
He's going to brief you today.
So the first thing I was told was, we're not going to brief them here at headquarters.
I said, oh, okay, why not?
The Israelis aren't allowed to come in headquarters.
I said, why not?
Because every time they come, they bring us gifts.
And the gifts always have listening devices embedded in them every time.
And they're packed with batteries.
Like they'll give, we have a seal of the CIA.
We want to give it to you as a gift.
Well, we have seals everywhere in every room.
And this one's packed with batteries that'll last for 18 months.
So no, we're not, we don't want your gift.
Thank you.
So we meet them in an off-campus place.
We call it the Israel safe house.
Okay.
So I'm the junior most analyst at this briefing, which meant that I went last.
So everybody else went first.
There were like 11 of us, the political analyst, the economic analyst, the military analyst, the oil analyst, the overhead imagery lady came over from the Navy yard and everybody did their thing.
I was the Iraq leadership analyst, which meant what I did all day was to do psychological profiles of the Iraqi leadership.
So it comes to me and I was given the script to follow and I said, hello, my name is John Kiriaku.
I'm the Iraq analyst in the Office of Leadership Analysis.
And there were two Israelis in the briefing, one Mossad and one Shinbet.
And the Shinbet guy writes down my name and he says, spell your name.
So I spell it for him.
And then he looks up at me over his glasses and he says, you are Jewish?
And I said, I am not recruitable.
Don't even think that you can recruit me.
I was so angry, I was shaking as I gave the briefing.
And I said, now I have to go to security and report that I was pitched.
And they laughed and they said, they've done that to all of us.
It's like they can't help themselves.
I was furious.
My boss, when I got back to the office, my boss said, how did it go?
I said, I want to strangle that Shinbet guy.
And he said, I knew it.
I knew he was going to pitch you.
He pitches all of us.
Well, the head of security at the CIA added a little something.
In a briefing in which we were being warned about counterintelligence threats, we were told to never, ever, ever go to this steakhouse on Route 123 that is closest.
It's the closest restaurant to the CIA.
And the reason why we were not allowed to go there is because the Russians thought that that's like the only place we went.
So anytime you go, it's all KGB agents sitting together waiting for the CIA people to go in, and they never went in.
We would always go another mile down the road and go to other restaurants.
So as part of that briefing, he said, you know, it's not just the Russians we have to worry about.
He said, Israel is ranked as critical threat, the highest threat level, critical threat for counterintelligence.
He said, many of you have met the Mossad and Shinbet representatives at the Israeli embassy here.
I had just met them.
And he said, well, there are 189 undeclared Israeli spies fanned out all across the United States to steal our defense secrets.
Now, why?
We give them everything.
So why would they be spying on us?
Actually, because we don't give them everything.
We give them only 99% of everything.
And they want that last 1%.
I'll give you an example.
When we developed the F-35, we said to the Israelis, hey, we have this new thing, this new F-35.
It's supposed to be our best plane.
It's stealth and it's a bomber and it does all kinds of great tricks.
They said, we want it.
We said, yes, that's why we're offering it to you.
We're going to give you the first F-35.
We're going to call it the F-35I for Israel.
And they said, why are you going to make a difference between the F-35 and the F-35I?
And we said, because God forbid, if you're in a dogfight or there's a mechanical malfunction and it crashes, we don't want the Iranians to get it, the Russians, the Chinese, the Syrians.
So what we're going to do is we're going to very slightly degrade the avionics.
Well, they didn't like that one bit.
And so they decided to steal the avionics.
At the same time, the Emiratis came to us and they said, hey, we want this F-35.
We said, great, we're going to give it to you.
We're going to call it the F-35E for Emirates.
It's going to be exactly the same as the F-35I.
So we're going to slightly degrade the avionics.
They said, fine, we'll take it.
Not the Israelis.
They wanted the F-35 period with no letter afterwards.
A couple of years later, I decided I wanted to serve overseas.
And several of my colleagues in the office also wanted to serve overseas at the same time in what was called the analyst overseas program.
You do a rotation, an actual transfer to the State Department, and you serve as a Foreign Service officer.
And so I went to Bahrain.
My friends actually got married and went together to Jerusalem.
So when they arrived, the ambassador took them to Mossad and said, you already know my officers.
They've gotten married and they're here, declared to you, the wife is going to work on Palestinian political issues and the husband is going to go to the university and learn Arabic.
And they said, fine.
So the ambassador held a welcome party.
They call it a hail and farewell party.
You say, hello, welcome to the new people and farewell to the people who are transferring out.
And when they got back home from Tel Aviv later that night, they saw that all of their living room furniture had been rearranged while they were gone.
And they were like, okay, gonna be jerks about it.
So they reported it.
And the embassy said, yeah, they do that.
They'll break into the house and just so that you know that they can do whatever they want.
There's nothing you can do about it.
A year later, they go to another party at the ambassador's residence.
And when they get home, people had taken shits in all of the toilets in their house and left them unflushed.
So they're like, all right, Israelis again, they have to report it.
They broke into the house.
They took a dump in the house.
Every one of the toilets.
And they give us these giant houses, right?
Because you have to entertain.
So like for me, my wife and I had, our son was like 16 months old.
I had like a five-bedroom house.
You're talking about big houses with lots of toilets.
Another year later, it's time to leave and to come back to headquarters.
And so the ambassador throws a hail and farewell party for them.
And then they get back to the house and the dog is under the dining room table and he's whimpering because they had cut his tail off and they wrapped it in gauze and medical tape.
Why?
They're supposed to be our best friends in the world.
Why would they do something like this?
And it's because they're not our friends.
They care only about themselves, quite literally.
And if it means spying on us and stealing our secrets and harassing our employees and lying, maybe killing Americans, you know?
I was going to say, I apologize, I only have two minutes left, but I was going to say something in my original planned speech about the dancing Israelis.
Of course they were dancing.
You bet they were dancing because they knew exactly what 9-11 meant.
9-11 meant that we were going to feel compelled to go overseas and kill as many Muslims as we possibly could.
Of course they were dancing in the streets.
That's exactly what they wanted to happen.
Exactly what they wanted to happen.
And it's what happened.
But then when it wasn't good enough for us to go kill Afghans or a handful of al-Qaeda people, they engineered Iraq with Dick Cheney and David Addington and Scooter Libby and all of the other war criminals who were working either at the White House or at the Pentagon at the time.
And now here we are, all these years later.
We still don't know the truth about 9-11.
We don't know the role that the Israelis played.
We don't know the role that the Saudis played because we're not allowed to investigate it.
And we're supposed to just shake the Israelis' hands and forget about all the past and wish them the best.
Or else you're an anti-Semite.
Remember, if you're anti-Netanyahu, by God, that means you hate all Jews, and we can't have that.
And so here we are, 24 years after the fact.
You know, in my mind, 9-11 was like last Tuesday.
But 24 years have passed, and we're no better off than we were 24 years ago.
Not while we have, or worse, not while we have the Israelis hanging around our necks like an anvil.
And there you have it, folks.
Two extremely, extremely powerful speeches that let you know it is not about left or right.