John Kiriakou, a former CIA counterterrorism officer (1990–2007) and Senate investigator who exposed the agency’s torture program in 2007, warns that Netanyahu is pushing Trump into a reckless "war of choice" with Iran—despite its lack of direct threat to America—risking global energy chaos and regional fragmentation. Kiriakou argues Israel’s demands (no uranium enrichment or ballistic missiles) would dismantle Iran’s sovereignty, while its strategy of dividing Iran into five puppet states (Balochistan, Arabistan, Kurdistan) via proxies like the MEK could trigger catastrophic instability. Sanctions over 47 years have forced Iran to develop hypersonic missiles and drones, with 600 launched in a recent 12-day conflict, exposing U.S. overreliance on costly, China-dependent interceptors like Iron Dome. America’s $1.5T defense budget fails to match China’s battery tech or Russia/South Korea’s efficiency, proving military spending alone won’t secure peace—only diplomacy can. [Automatically generated summary]
How could it possibly be in the United States national interest to initiate another war of choice?
It can't be.
It's not in our interests.
It's not.
No.
It's not.
It's not.
It actually contradicts our interests of trying to keep energy prices low.
100% correct.
The Iranians are no threat to us.
And if the Israelis really believe that the Iranians are an existential threat to them, then maybe they should engage with the Omanis or the Algerians or the Saudis or the Emiratis or even the Qataris to try to come to some sort of a diplomatic solution.
But Nenyahu flying to the United States every two months and begging whoever happens to be president to destroy Iran for him.
That's just not in the U.S.'s national interest.
Welcome to today's interview here on Brighteon.com.
I'm Mike Adams, the founder of Brighteon.
And today we're joined by a very special person, a first-time guest here on the show, but someone who I must have seen a hundred of his interviews.
And his name is John Kiriaku.
And he's a former CIA counterterrorism case officer, earlier an analyst.
And he's got some wildly popular, successful podcasts on Spotify and Apple.
We'll get to some of that.
He joins us today to talk about what's happening in the Middle East and around the world.
Welcome, Mr. Kiriaku.
It's a pleasure to have you on today.
Thank you.
Thank you.
The pleasure is all mine.
It's good to see you.
Well, look, it's just, I'm honored that you're here because as I've even said on my own podcast, I said, I like this guy.
I like your message.
I like your humanity.
I like the fact that you are a critical thinker, that you're not, you don't have party loyalty or person loyalty, but rather principles loyalty.
And that's all that counts right now.
You want to give us a little background for our audience?
Sure.
I joined the CIA just out of graduate school in January of 1990.
I spent the first seven and a half years of my career as an analyst working exclusively on Iraq.
And then I made kind of an unusual change to counterterrorist operations.
I ended up being the chief of CIA counterterrorism operations in Pakistan after the 9-11 attacks.
Wow.
And yeah, it was quite the job.
I would imagine.
And then I went into the private sector for a few years, then to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee as the senior investigator there, working on counterterrorism, counter-narcotics, things like that, piracy, international piracy.
I blew the whistle on the CIA's torture program in 2007.
And the Obama administration in 2012 arrested me, charged me with five felonies, including three counts of espionage.
I ended up taking a plea to a lesser charge just to make the thing go away.
I had five kids at home.
But I said that the CIA was torturing its prisoners.
I said that torture was official U.S. government policy and the policy had been approved by the president himself.
I would do it again today if I had the opportunity.
I have zero regrets.
And got out of prison 11 years ago.
And since then, I've written, wow, nine books.
And I've got my podcasts.
And yeah, you know, so a little bit here and a little bit there getting together a living.
Well, you're doing an extraordinary job.
And I think people are really resonating with your message.
And it seems like it's time.
You know, we've all lived through the, you know, the Bush era and the Obama era that you saw and then the first Trump era, et cetera.
I mean, we've lived through this and not that much has changed, except it's all seemingly gotten worse.
So how would you characterize today's Trump administration?
Just in the context of being humanitarian or following the rule of law or respecting the Constitution, where are we in history with this Trump administration compared to where we were when you were blowing the whistle?
That's actually a pretty tough question.
MAGA as an ideology is something that I think many, many Americans can agree with.
I've long maintained, and you may have seen me say this in other podcasts, but I've long maintained that the ideological spectrum is not a straight line from left to right.
It's a circle.
And at some point, it meets.
The left and the right meet.
In the case of MAGA and the progressive left, I think that that is on issues of war and peace.
There were celebrations when the president announced a mere six or seven months ago that he wanted to cut the Pentagon budget by 50%.
But then just a couple of months later, he said he wanted to increase the Pentagon budget by 50%.
You can't be both a neocon and a MAGA Republican at the same time.
My friends on the left would disagree with me if I said that I believed that the Trump administration would go down in history as one of the more humanitarian administrations.
I don't think that it will.
But that's not to say that that's necessarily a bad thing.
Because on the other side, on the flip side, open borders aren't humanitarian for anybody.
And so we have to make a decision.
The point that I think you were alluding to is the fact that we are an incredibly divided nation.
I'm 61 years old.
I vaguely remember 1968 and 1969.
I remember sitting on my dad's lap and asking him why so many buildings were burning on TV.
And he told me that some bad men had killed Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy and people were very upset.
I don't think we've been so divided since 1968 or 1969.
I mean, think, you know, the Kent State uprising and shootings, for example.
We don't have to be there.
I think that the political parties have put us there.
And I believe that we shouldn't be loyal to political parties.
We should be loyal to the Constitution.
We should be loyal to the country, loyal to the idea that this really is the greatest nation on earth.
And I think people get distracted by these political, you know, this political silliness.
Okay.
Thank you for that detailed and thoughtful answer.
Now, let's apply that to the situation in the Middle East where from my perspective, and feel free to correct me, you know, this is a conversation and you can tell me I'm wrong.
I mean, you actually, you know more about this than I do by far.
So my perception is that Trump is about to attack Iran because Netanyahu is twisting his arm and making him do it.
That's the story right there.
That's it.
Is that it?
That is it.
That is the truth.
I'm going to ask you a rhetorical question.
How could it possibly be in the United States national interest to initiate another war of choice?
It can't be.
It's not in our interest.
It's not.
It's not.
It actually contradicts our interests of trying to keep energy prices low.
100% correct.
100% correct.
I feel very strongly about this.
The Iranians are no threat to us.
And if the Israelis really believe that the Iranians are an existential threat to them, then maybe they should engage with the Omanis or the Algerians or the Saudis or the Emiratis or even the Qataris to try to come to some sort of a diplomatic solution.
But Nenyahu flying to the United States every two months and begging whoever happens to be president to destroy Iran for him, that's just not.
That's not in the U.S.'s national interest.
No.
I have five children.
I have four sons.
All of them are of military age.
Well, that's not true.
Three of the four are of military age.
I wouldn't want my sons fighting and dying in Iran to protect Israel's, you know, what the Israeli government believes is its long-term security goal.
Let the Israelis go fight that fight.
And another thing, too, is I believe when Donald Trump talks about the Nobel Peace Prize, he gets so much guff in the press.
But I think Donald Trump probably deserves the Nobel Peace Prize.
And if he were able to negotiate some sort of an agreement with the Iranians, it should be hands down a done deal.
And I'll add, people forget that he was the one who mandated negotiations between the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda, number one.
Same thing between Cambodia and Thailand, number two.
I mean, we can go all around the world.
There have been seven or eight of them all around the world.
They're not headline makers, but he's the one that ordered these negotiations, these diplomatic talks that have resulted in peace.
Well, we used to say in the 1970s, and I learned this in college in the 1980s, only Nixon could go to China, right?
Only the most virulently anti-Chinese president could make peace with China.
Maybe only Trump can go to Tehran.
But his, let me ask you a follow-up on that.
He keeps saying he wants Iran to do a deal, but really he wants Iran to surrender to his terms.
And his terms are absolutely unacceptable.
They're not even his.
They're Benjamin and Tanya's terms.
Including the missiles.
You can't give up the missiles if you're a sovereign nation, because then you would be destroyed.
So how does Trump expect anyone to agree to these terms?
This is literally the one thing about Donald Trump that I just simply don't understand.
I don't understand why he is so susceptible to pressure from Benjamin and Tanyahu.
You're exactly right.
The Israeli government demands are clear.
They've made them public.
And that is no uranium enrichment, period.
No ballistic missiles, period.
And you're right.
You cease to be a country if you can't defend yourself and can't have a missile system.
So what is that?
The Israelis have also talked increasingly less discreetly about the end goal being to divide Iran up into five small countries.
There would be Balochistan, Arabistan, Kurdistan, five little rump countries, because then they're much more easily controlled.
The Israelis have good relations with Azerbaijan, for example.
They have a base in Azerbaijan from which they can attack Iran.
They have good relations with Iran and Iraq's Kurds.
They're funding the Mujahideen Khalkh, the MEK terrorist group that we're now in bed with.
So I think that this end goal of the Israelis to carve up Iran into five different countries is what they're going to try to eventually get Donald Trump to do.
And this is nothing but catastrophe for all of us.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That makes sense to me, what you just said there.
So let me add this question into it.
Is it possible that Trump and the DOD are fantastically underestimating the increased weapons potential of Iran, even since last June, because of technology shipments from both China and technology?
And assistants from Russia.
Exactly.
Plus Iran's own domestic engineering capabilities, which are significant and very smart engineers and mathematicians, right?
Yes.
So it seems to me like I'm hearing from Trump and I'm hearing from the MA people like, yeah, America, we're the best.
We're undefeatable.
And I'm starting to think like, well, what about the laws of physics?
You know, hypersonic missiles, ballistic missiles, anti-ship missiles, et cetera.
Where do you even start?
Right.
Hypersonic missiles.
We don't have hypersonics yet.
We're experimenting with them, but we don't have hypersonics yet.
The Iranians do.
They've tested them, number one.
Number two, you remember prior to the 12-day war, the Israelis bombed Iran, and the Iranians responded with something like 600 drones.
These were slow-motion drones called suicide drones.
So they're not going to come back.
They just crash into whatever the target is.
They warned the Israelis in advance that the drones were coming.
And they did that just because they had to save face domestically.
Like, well, the Israelis attacked us, so now we're going to attack them with these drones.
They warned the Israelis through the Jordanians that the drones were coming.
All the drones were shot down, but seven out of, I think it was 600.
That's actually valuable intelligence that the Israeli Iron Dome is not perfect.
And seven slow-motion drones that you have watched for the past six hours try to make their way across Iraq and across Jordan, and you still couldn't shoot it down.
And shooting down the other drones costs a billion dollars or something.
And that was my second point.
The Israelis, the reason why that war only lasted 12 days was because the Israelis ran out of missiles.
They're just out.
They used them all.
And have they had a chance to replenish them?
We don't know, but a lot of observers say no.
In the meantime, you've made an important point that sanctions, which have gone on for 47 years now, have forced the Iranians to fend for themselves, right?
So if they have a need for something that they can't buy because of sanctions, they just make it themselves.
And they've become quite good at it.
Rare Earth Metals Threat00:12:53
Couple that with the technology that they are able to procure from China and Russia.
And the Iranians want for nothing.
They're prepared for the Israelis.
Also, Iran is a country of 92 million people.
And it's the size of Germany.
This is a major country we're talking about.
It's not just going to collapse because you fire a rocket at it.
That's right.
You're going to have to commit ground troops.
And I don't think that as a country, we have the stomach for something like that.
Well, let me go back to something you just said.
You're really talking about the economic asymmetry of how Iran can launch low-cost drones that require Israel to defend with extremely high-cost interceptors.
But I want to add another element to this and ask you about your knowledge on this.
The interceptors, which are mostly manufactured by U.S. weapons companies, they rely, of course, very heavily on these so-called rare earths that China has slapped major export restrictions on, including everything from gallium and dysprosium and neodymium and magnets and guidance and radar systems.
And all of these elements are extremely highly restricted.
Now, there's been a pass on some of those elements until the end of this year, but China could revoke that pass at any time, in addition to selling off U.S. treasuries and whatever else.
So China has a lot of cards to play.
If the U.S. attacks Iran, wouldn't China say, well, we can't let Iran fall because it's the gateway between the East and the Middle and Africa and Europe and everything.
So we're just going to use economic weapons and resource weapons of restrictions against the United States.
And then the U.S. won't be able to build the interceptors to give to Israel to defend itself against Iran.
Does that make sense?
You see, that makes perfect sense.
It's not just a question of, oh, should we hit them or should we not hit them?
There are an awful lot of moving parts in this.
One of the things that the Chinese saw early on was the value, the import of rare earth metals.
We were getting most of our rare earth metals from the Congo when that was a country.
They're just flush with rare earth metals.
But the problem with rare earths, they exist all over the place.
We even have them under the Salton Sea in the California desert.
They're very, very expensive to mine because most of what you mine with rare earths is just waste.
It's rock and sand and it's just wasted.
So it costs you more to mine it than the value of the finished ore.
Well, the Chinese are willing to take that economic loss because first their economy is very robust and they have the money.
They spend literally a fraction, less than 10% of what we spend on national defense or about 10% of what we spend on national defense.
And it allows them to control the entire world market for rare earth metals.
So what happens then, as you just posed, when we attack Iran on behalf of Israel?
We fight Israel's battle for it.
And then the Chinese cut us off from the sale of rare earth metals.
What are we going to use for missile guidance systems or cell phones or the computers that run our cars?
You made a second point that I think bears repeating.
The Chinese are, depending on what numbers you're looking at, the second or third largest holder of long-term government treasury bonds.
If the Chinese really want to put the pain to us, they can just dump those bonds.
Yes.
And our entire economy would crash.
So, you know, is it really worth it?
Do we really want to do this?
Besides the fact that you're probably not going to get your Nobel Peace Prize for waging a war of choice.
But see, these repercussions that you mentioned, these are costs to America, but not costs to Netanyahu.
So from Netanyahu's point of view, he doesn't care if he throws America under the bus or if America bleeds out economically, right?
As long as Israel gets what he wants, which is chaos in the Middle East.
See, but you can't say that out loud because then you're an anti-Semite.
You know, I said exactly the same thing a few weeks ago, and the Israeli foreign minister's political director wrote an article saying that I was a noted anti-Semite.
And I was like, what?
Well, but the word has lost all meaning now.
Yes, it has.
Just like sanctions, you know, sanctions sort of forced the Iranians to stand on their own or their own two feet.
Calling everybody who disagrees with one of your policies an anti-Semite has made the meeting worthless.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
And also, sanctions didn't work against Russia.
It just made Russia's domestic industry stronger.
Well, Foreign Minister Lavrov said two things.
He said, number one, the Russians were surprised at the swiftness with which the Americans implemented sanctions.
He said that just a week after the sanctions were announced.
And then a year or two later, he said he was surprised at the quickness with which the Russians were able to get around sanctions.
Let me add one other thing.
I went to China last year on a business trip.
It's the first time I had ever been to China.
And I had trouble finding places that would take a Visa or a MasterCard.
But everybody took this thing called the octopus card.
So finally, I asked one of the shopkeepers, what is this octopus card I keep seeing everywhere?
He said, oh, that's kind of our national credit card of China.
I said, why don't you just use MasterCard and Visa?
And he said, because MasterCard and Visa put every transaction through New York, which makes it susceptible to American sanctions.
He said, octopus card goes through Shanghai.
So we don't have to worry about American sanctions.
And that is what happens when you overuse and over-impose sanctions.
Yes, yes.
Okay, now, speaking of China, we've all seen China shipping many cargo planes of equipment to Iran.
And according to reports, I've done a lot of research on this.
It appears that those include both anti-stealth radar systems as well as ground-based interceptors that can independently track and take down stealth bombers and stealth fighters.
Now, what's interesting to me is that the anti-stealth radar claims to have a 500-kilometer detection range.
This is amazing.
Isn't it, though?
I mean, and that eliminates the ability of what Trump did last June bombing Fordo and others.
But there's one more thing that wraps all this together, John, which is that if we were to lose a stealth bomber, I don't think we could replace it now because it uses so many rare earths and also uses graphite.
And China has a near 100% global control over the graphite industry.
And the U.S. is 100% import-dependent on graphite and many of the rare metals.
So unless we have stockpiles sitting around somewhere, if we start losing stealth fighters or stealth bombers or even F-35s, I'm not sure how those can be replaced.
What do you think?
I have to agree with you.
If we were to lose a stealth fighter, it would be just devastating.
And if this is true, what we're hearing about the Chinese and Chinese military shipments to Iran, the Iranians are going to be far better prepared than we've given them credit for being.
You know, the Iranian policy, as we've seen it over the last several years, has been something called strategic patience.
That's what they've called it.
Strategic patience.
They've been willing to take blows from the Israelis.
They've been willing to just sit by as literally their entire top military leadership was taken out in a series of Israeli attacks.
All of their, not all, almost all of their top nuclear scientists have been assassinated one at a time.
Close-in assassinations in Tehran, as well as overseas when they're attending conferences or meetings, for example, and they don't retaliate.
Well, the Iranian government is far more patient than the Iranian people.
And the Iranian people have been demanding retaliation.
We keep getting attacked.
What are you going to do about it?
And so the government is in the position now where it's going to have to fight that fight if the Israelis and or the Americans launch something new.
And if they do launch something new and the Iranians really do put up a fight, that might include the use of Chinese technology, which believe me, the Chinese would love to see tested on the battlefield since they're not testing it on the battlefield now.
Because there is no Chinese battlefield.
Right.
Because they're not invading their neighbors.
Then what do we do?
We're screwed.
Exactly.
They're not invading their neighbors.
They're not invading their neighbors, right?
Like I say all the time that the American defense budget is bigger than the next eight largest countries combined, right?
Right.
And then we wonder why we have such hideous user-unfriendly airports.
Why are our roads and highways are afflicted with potholes everywhere?
Why our bridges are falling down into the rivers beneath them?
Why our hospitals are understaffed, overcrowded, and 20 years behind the times?
Because we spend everything on the Pentagon budget.
Because we've convinced ourselves that we have to be the policemen of the world, whether the world wants it or likes it or not.
And why don't we build bullet trains?
Those expenditures are not even efficient, right?
No, most of that's waste and fraud and grift.
So it is.
I mean, look at how Russia, with a fraction of the U.S. military budget, can come up with not only the Kinzal hypersonic missiles, but the Oreshnik system.
You're exactly right.
Revolutionary in using non-nuclear, high-energy kinetic impacts that do not violate any kind of nuclear treaties.
Not that any of those are even in force anymore since recently, but you see, you see what I'm saying?
I mean, with $1.5 trillion, we should have, you know, like Star Trek technology, photon torpedoes or something.
Exactly right.
Instead, exactly right.
You know, people say all the time, well, you don't know what DARPA is working on.
And I always say, but that's the point.
Whatever DARPA's working on, they should have developed it 20 years ago.
It should be out today.
And it should be Star Trek kind of stuff.
And it's not.
It's not.
You know, we've been told for decades they're working on this robot.
It's going to make soldiers obsolete.
They just need to figure out the battery.
Well, you know what?
The South Koreans figured out the battery.
And now South Korea, I should say, Hyundai is a subsidiary in South Korea that builds robots.
It was highlighted in the Wall Street Journal over the weekend.
They're ready to go to market with their robots with long-life batteries that can do things like get in a self-driving car and go do your grocery shopping.
Yeah.
How come we don't have that?
Why hasn't DARPA figured that out?
Two of China's top companies, BYD and Katel, C-A-T-L, right?
I mean, their battery technology is 20 years ahead of anything else.
State of the art.
State of the art.
When I went to China last year, I said to a member of our group who was from Hong Kong.
She's an attorney.
I said, what is this car, this BYD?
She said, yeah, it stands for Beyond Your Dreams.
It's our electric car.
I said, this car is gorgeous.
They're amazing.
The design, it's just beautiful to look at.
And she said, yeah, they're really cheap.
They're going to be the number one car in a lot of different countries around the world.
And they're now number one in Canada, number one in Australia, number one in New Zealand.
Sales are booming in Europe.
I said, I've never heard of this car.
We don't have these in the United States.
And she said, because you guys banned them from the United States to protect Tesla.
Well, these cars are a third, a fourth of the cost of a Tesla, and they're better than Tesla.
And the design is certainly more attractive.
But we're not allowed to have them.
And critically, I'm glad you brought this up because the battery tech now that's just being announced, the sodium ion chemistry, as well as some, I think BYD's focus on sulfide chemistry.
But we're talking about a million miles of usage.
Not in one charge, obviously, but obviously thousands of chargers over time.
In other words, the car is going to last, I mean, the battery's going to last longer than the car.
Oh, yeah.
The seats will wear out before the car does.
Sodium Ion Chemistry Breakthrough00:03:17
100%.
But those batteries will go into military drones.
They will go into military robots.
They will go into all kinds of other equipment.
And the U.S. won't have that technology.
We are behind the curve.
And so many.
This is why you can hear frustration in my voice because I'm an American.
I love America.
I want America to do well.
And I'm frustrated that we seem to be, part of my language, just pissing away every opportunity to be a leader.
We're just sitting back with fraud and waste and cover-ups and not being the America that we were meant to be.
That's the way I see it.
I think you're 100% right.
I really do.
I think you're 100% right.
We're losing our leadership position.
We're behind the eight ball.
What happens when Bricks, which is going to continue to expand, decides to come up with a unified currency?
Oh, man.
Yeah.
And then, you know, they're buying oil in whatever the new Bricks currency is going to be.
We're done at that point.
We're done.
People will flee the dollar because we've weaponized it.
So let me give out your podcast information here first.
So one of your podcasts is called Deep Focus, and this is on Spotify.
I just want to encourage everybody to follow Deep Focus, and it's John Kiriaku.
That's K-I-R-I-A-K-O-U.
Such a cool name you have there, by the way.
Oh, thank you.
Yeah, very cool.
Thank you.
It means the son of Charles.
Does it?
Really?
Yeah.
Uh-huh.
Oh, wow.
I'll tell you a funny story.
My great friend.
Wait, wait, wait.
Let me tell your other podcast.
Oh, sure, sure.
Apple.
It's called John Kiriaku's Dead Drop.
Dead Drop.
So that's very popular on the Apple podcast there, too.
Be sure to check that out.
Sorry to interrupt.
Go ahead.
No, no, thank you.
Dead drop has gone crazy.
Last week we were number eight in the world.
That's amazing.
This week we're number 11.
I don't know how it happened.
But anyway, my great-great-grandfather in the third quarter of the 19th century was arrested for stealing a potato.
He was starving.
Really?
And he stole a potato.
And when he went to court, they said, what's your name?
And he said, Mark Marcos.
Mark what?
Marcos to Kiriaku.
Mark the son of Charles.
And so they wrote Mark Kiriaku, and we just never fixed it.
Really?
Wow.
Wow.
Okay, that's fascinating.
Well, I was wondering about your name.
I thought, I actually thought it might have been Greek, but only because of the ending of the name.
Right.
Right.
The beginning, I couldn't quite make out the Kiri part.
Right.
Yeah.
Right.
But that's a fascinating.
That's Charles.
That's fascinating.
Okay.
This is Mike jumping in here.
That's the first half of the interview with John Kiriaku.
And I thoroughly enjoyed this interview.
I'm going to play the second half for you in part two, which airs tomorrow.
So be sure to check that out.
And thank you for listening to today's interview.
I'm Mike Adams with Brighteon.com.
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