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Feb. 2, 2017 - InfoWars Special Reports
49:39
The Spy Who Beat The CIA Torture Regime
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When we began beating down the door of Abu Zubaydah's safe house, he and two colleagues, a Syrian bomb maker and a Syrian bodyguard, ran to the roof of the house and then began a Syrian bomb maker and a Syrian bodyguard, ran to the roof of the house and then began trying to leap to the roof There was a Pakistani policeman on the ground.
Who shot each of them as he tried to jump.
Abu Zubaydah was shot in the thigh, the groin, and the stomach with an AK-47 and was nearly killed.
We picked him up and threw him into the back of a filthy Toyota pickup truck that we had commandeered and rushed him to the local hospital, one of the worst places on earth that I've ever seen.
They patched him up.
Just enough so that he didn't bleed to death.
And we asked the Pakistani Air Force to send us a helicopter.
They landed the copter in the hospital parking lot.
We loaded Abu Zubaydah onto the helicopter and took him to a nearby military base.
I spent the first 56 hours of his captivity with him.
I tore up a sheet and tied him to the bed.
And he was in a coma the first 24 hours, so all I did was just sort of sit there and stare at him.
Finally, he came out of the coma and the first thing he asked was for me to kill him, to smother him with a pillow because he was afraid of what was going to happen.
Joining us now is John Kiryakou.
He is somebody who exposed the Bush-era torture program.
He paid a very heavy personal price.
He's a CIA, former CIA agent, 14 years experience.
He had, and let me just tell you, some of the awards that he had there.
That's his website there, johnkiriakou.com.
He got 10 exceptional performance awards, a sustained superior performance award, a counterterrorism service medal, State Department meritorious honor, many other awards.
I'm not going to go through all of them.
He won in 2016 the Sam Adams Award.
He's won a lot of awards for standing for liberty since he exposed this, since he paid the price.
He is the only person who was jailed for these torture activities, not the torturers who violated the law, and it was against the law.
We're going to talk to him about that.
Back in 2007, he was the first CIA official to confirm waterboarding.
He was jailed ostensibly for revealing the identity of a CIA official.
We're going to talk about that, though, because it's really, that comes to the persecution, the double standards that we see.
We're going to cover all that.
He is also a speaker, author, and, of course, a whistleblower.
His books in 2012, he wrote Reluctant Spy, My Secret Life and the CIA's War on Terror.
And he's got a new book that's coming up based on his...
His time in prison.
Doing time like a spy.
How the CIA taught me to survive and thrive in prison.
So we're going to talk to him about that.
But first up, we want to talk about waterboarding.
Welcome, John.
Thank you for joining us.
And you have our gratitude, all those who uphold liberty, who believe that we ought to be a nation of high ethical and legal moral standards.
We all applaud what you did for exposing what happened in that dark period that we had of waterboarding.
And we hope that's not going to be repeated.
Thank you so much.
I can't tell you how thrilled I am to be with you today.
I really appreciate you having me.
Well, thank you.
You know, one of the things that you said in the many interviews that you've done, you said you think, and this is going back to 2007, when this first broke with Brian Ross 10 years ago, you said, I think as a country this is something that we have to decide we want to do, whether we want to do this as a matter of policy.
It should not be a secret.
It should be part of a national conversation.
And so that's why we're talking to you here.
We've got a president now.
President Trump, he says he supports waterboarding, but he also says at the same time he's going to defer to James Madison.
He's picked as Secretary of Defense, who says he does not think that it is effective or a policy that we should pursue.
So I think this is something that, as Piers Morgan has talked about, he's a person who knows Donald Trump personally.
He says you can have disagreements with him, and he will listen to those disagreements.
We see that in the appointment that he made with General Mattis.
He says he'll listen to you as long as you don't just stand there and shout at him, you're a monster.
So we want to have this kind of conversation, not just for President Trump, but for President Trump supporters who listen to what he has to say and say, these guys play really dirty.
Maybe we need to get down at their level and fight with them.
What do you say to that?
I say that reasonable people can agree to disagree about this.
And if you want to get down and dirty, if you want to reinstate a torture program, then change the law because torture is illegal in this country.
And furthermore, with this exception that we saw during the George W. Bush administration, torture has always been illegal in this country.
In 1946, we executed Japanese soldiers.
Who waterboarded American prisoners of war.
Now imagine that.
In 1946, waterboarding was an executable offense.
In 1968, the Washington Post ran a front page photograph of an American soldier waterboarding a North Vietnamese prisoner.
And on the day that that photo was published, the Defense Department initiated an investigation of the soldier.
The soldier was arrested.
He was charged with torture.
He was convicted and sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Well, the law hasn't changed since 1946 or 1968. We've changed.
So if we want to have this debate, I think a debate is a great thing for our democracy.
We should have this debate because, like I said, reasonable people can agree to disagree.
But as things stand now...
Torture is illegal and it shouldn't be done.
Well, you know, the interesting thing is, and we saw the CIA do this, intelligence services do this, they always change the language, don't they?
So they don't call it torture, they call it an enhanced interrogation technique.
So when you change the language and you come up with this bureaucratic doublespeak, then they can say, well, we're not violating the law.
So we have to understand what is involved here.
And I want you to break this down for us because you were...
You led a team that captured the first significant al-Qaeda individual, suspect at the time, and he was waterboarded 83 times.
Tell us about that.
Tell us about the capture and tell us about the interrogation.
Yes, this was Abu Zubaydah, who was a Palestinian born in Saudi Arabia and who the CIA believed at the time, this was 2002, We believed that he was the number three ranking person inside al-Qaeda.
That turned out to not be correct, but he was a bad guy nonetheless.
So we knew that Abu Zubaydah was somewhere in Pakistan, and we were able to narrow down his possible location to 14 separate sites.
So a lot of planning goes into something like this.
We had never done more than...
Two raids simultaneously before, since the September 11th attacks.
So we flew in a big team from Washington, half CIA, half FBI. We had the Pakistani military there with us.
And let's just say this was in 2002, so this is very soon after September 11th.
That's right, very soon after September 11th.
This was March the 28th, 2002. We hit 14 simultaneous sites.
And caught, I'm not allowed to say the exact number of al-Qaeda fighters we caught, but it was many dozens of al-Qaeda fighters, including Abu Zubaydah and including a man who was the commander of the Darunta training camp, al-Qaeda's training camp in Kandahar, Afghanistan.
So this was a major counterterrorism success that we had.
So tell us about his condition.
I understand he was shot.
Yeah, he, when we began beating down the door, of Abu Zubaydah's safe house.
He and two colleagues, a Syrian bomb maker and a Syrian bodyguard, ran to the roof of the house and then began trying to leap to the roof of the neighboring house to try to escape.
There was a Pakistani policeman on the ground.
Who shot each of them as he tried to jump.
Abu Zubaydah was shot in the thigh, the groin, and the stomach with an AK-47 and was nearly killed.
We picked him up and threw him into the back of a filthy Toyota pickup truck that we had commandeered and rushed him to the local hospital, one of the worst places on earth that I've ever seen.
They patched him up.
Just enough so that he didn't bleed to death.
And we asked the Pakistani Air Force to send us a helicopter.
They landed the copter in the hospital parking lot.
We loaded Abu Zubaydah onto the helicopter and took him to a nearby military base.
I spent the first 56 hours of his captivity with him.
I tore up a sheet and tied him to the bed.
And he was in a coma the first 24 hours, so all I did was just sort of sit there and stare at him.
Finally, he came out of the coma, and the first thing he asked was for me to kill him, to smother him with a pillow, because he was afraid of what was going to happen.
He calmed down eventually, and we had a couple of conversations about Islam versus Christianity.
He asked if I was a Christian.
I said that I was.
He told me that he did not want to attack the United States on September 11th.
He wanted to attack Israel, but that bin Laden had overruled him.
And he was really concerned about what was going to happen.
And I said, listen, I'm going to give you one piece of advice.
I said, I am the nicest guy that you are going to meet in this experience.
My colleagues are not as nice as I am.
So if you do one thing, it's that you have to cooperate.
And he said, You seem like a nice man, but you're the enemy, and I'll never cooperate.
I said, suit yourself.
Finally, at around 3 o'clock in the morning, a CIA private jet landed at the Air Force Base.
Three FBI agents and I carried him on a gurney and put him on the plane, and he took off.
He went to a secret location, a secret prison, where he was allowed to recover until...
The summer.
It took him about six weeks before he was healthy enough to be interviewed.
And at first, an FBI agent by the name of Ali Soufan began to interrogate him.
Now, Ali was a terrific FBI agent and a seasoned and practiced interrogator.
He actually was making inroads with Abu Zubaydah, inroads that allowed him to collect actionable intelligence to disrupt attacks and save American lives.
But it's a slow process.
What you do, the only way you can succeed, really, is to establish a rapport or to establish a relationship with a prisoner.
Get the prisoner comfortable, maybe offer him a cigarette or a piece of fruit or something, and eventually he'll open up to you.
That's succeeded since the end of the Second World War, when the FBI was interrogating Nazi war criminals.
But that was too slow for the CIA. And so George Tenet, who at the time was the CIA director, went to President Bush and asked President Bush to give primacy over the case to the CIA rather than to the FBI. President Bush did that.
The FBI withdrew from this secret location.
And on August 1, 2002, the torture of Abu Zubaydah began.
And so before we get into the details of that, you know, going back again to the ethics issue, you know, one of the things that concerns me about this.
Is that we don't want to become what we fight.
And this is why we had people that we executed, as you pointed out, in World War II, who did waterboard torturing.
This is why we imprisoned American soldiers who did this.
This is something that goes before Donald Trump.
It goes before Barack Obama.
It goes before George Bush.
We had made that decision for ethical reasons that we want to take the high ground.
We do not want to become the same as the terrorists.
So that's a very important point.
You also pointed out the legal issues.
You also pointed out that there is a pragmatic issue that, again, you and the FBI agent and General Mattis have all said that it is much more effective to use other interrogation techniques because once you start torturing people, they will tell you anything to get it to stop, won't they?
They will tell you literally anything.
You know, I hear something that's called...
I'm having a mental blank right now.
The ticking time bomb scenario.
Oh yeah, yeah, 24. They dramatized that on a weekly basis.
We saw that every week.
You had to beat somebody, you had to torture somebody in order to get the information at the last second.
Exactly.
And the truth of the matter is, there is no such thing as the ticking time bomb.
This is just right out of the movies.
It doesn't happen in real life.
It's a red herring that people throw out there into this debate.
When they are pro-torture and can't really articulate why they're pro-torture.
So this idea that there's a bomb getting ready to go off in an American city and you have to torture the person to get the information to prevent the bomb from going off.
But the person you're torturing will tell you literally anything that he thinks will cause you to stop the torture.
Let's say there is a bomb getting ready to go off in New York.
He's going to tell you that it's in Chicago or Los Angeles or Atlanta.
All he's going to do is buy some time and get you to stop torturing him.
That's it.
And in the meantime, you have to vet this information.
You have to analyze the information.
You can't just run to—he's not going to give you an address where you can go dismantle the bomb.
This is only in the movies.
So to me, that argument is just a non-starter.
Let's talk about— The actual process.
Can you describe this?
You've seen it, presumably, right?
Yes.
Can you describe this for the audience so they understand what we're talking about here?
Why we made this a heinous crime?
Why we executed Japanese soldiers for doing this?
Why Americans should not be doing this as a matter of policy?
Talk about the actual process.
And I'll give you Abu Zubayr as the example.
Abu Zubayr was waterboarded 83 times.
What that means is...
The prisoner is strapped to a board or to a gurney with his feet slightly elevated so there's more pressure on the upper part of the body, on the face and head, on the torso.
And his face is then wrapped in material.
It can be cloth or burlap or even cellophane, something like that.
And then water is forced on the face, like from a hose, for example.
The prisoner takes in water.
There's going to be water escaping into the nose or into the mouth, and it creates a sense of drowning.
The prisoner begins to panic, and with that water going into the mouth or the nose, it ends up collecting in the lungs.
So you really do believe that you're drowning.
Now, in the case of Abu Zubaydah, we now know from the Senate torture report, which I would remind our viewers and listeners, It was written based on primary source CIA documents.
We know that Abu Zubaydah was so severely waterboarded that he went into convulsions and finally his heart stopped and he had to be revived.
So this is a technique that can result in death and actually sometimes does result in death.
One thing I want to point out too, not all of the So-called enhanced interrogation techniques that were approved by the Bush White House are torture techniques, right?
If I grab you by the lapels and I say, answer my question, darn you, that's not torture.
Do they call that enhanced interrogation?
Yeah, that was actually one of the enhanced interrogations.
That's another part of it.
It's not just playing with the language, but it's including things that are innocuous into things that are really severe like this and just grouping them all together into this bureaucratic turn.
Precisely.
And there were techniques that I always believed were far worse than waterboarding.
There was a technique called the cold cell, for example, where a prisoner is stripped naked.
He's chained to an eye bolt in the ceiling like this so that he can't get comfortable in any way.
His cell is chilled to 50 degrees Fahrenheit.
And then every hour, a CIA officer...
We'll go into the cell and throw a bucket of ice water on it.
This technique actually killed two prisoners.
We had two prisoners die of hypothermia.
Now, the point is not to kill the prisoners.
The point is to soften them up, so to say, so that they will give you that actionable intelligence that you need to save American lives.
But when the result is death, that's not a workable technique.
Another one was sleep deprivation.
Now, you may remember in the early 2000s, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld famously said that he didn't believe sleep deprivation was torture because he used to stay up 24 hours, 48 hours, and he had a stand-up desk.
He had a stand-up desk, so he wasn't even sitting and resting during the course of the day.
Well, there's things we know, and there's things that we don't know, and there's things that we don't know that we don't know.
That's right.
The master of doublespeak, yeah.
We know also from both the Senate Torch Report, which you just had on the screen, and from the American Psychological Association, that people begin to lose their minds around day seven of sleep deprivation.
They begin to shut down.
Their bodies physically begin to shut down around day 10.
And people begin to die at day 12.
But the CIA was authorized to keep people awake for as long as 14 days.
So now there are prisoners who have undergone sleep deprivation who are unable to participate in their own defenses because they've lost their minds thanks to this technique.
Wow, that's amazing.
Now, while we're talking about the torture report, let's talk about the accidental destruction of that 6,700-page report.
And one of the things that gives me hope about all this is that Dianne Feinstein, you said, used to be a real cheerleader for the CIA until they turned on her when her committee was investigating this torture report.
And I'm hoping...
That what we've seen at the beginning of the Trump administration in terms of the intelligence agency coming out and attacking him in a way we've never seen heads of intelligence agencies come after a president before.
I'm hoping that as he sees some of this, it's going to pull him back just like Dianne Feinstein was pulled back with some of this.
I hope that's going to create a healthy skepticism from the president on that.
But talk about how a 6,700-page report can just disappear.
This is unique to the United States, isn't it?
Yeah, the Senate torture report was based, as I said a moment ago, on primary source CIA documents.
And so the CIA makes a case that it owns the Senate torture report, right?
Because CIA documents, they still belong to the CIA. They are what the CIA calls currently and properly classified.
So they were loaned, if you will, to the Senate investigators to do their report, but the ownership of the report is the CIA's.
So the CIA argues then that the Senate does not have the right to keep or to maintain a copy of the full report in its spaces.
Ludicrous.
I mean, that's what congressional oversight is all about.
That's why the Senate and House Intelligence Committees were created in the first place.
At the same time, the CIA maintains that other executive branch organizations, the Department of Defense, the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, the Attorney General's Office, also do not have a right to keep a copy of the report because,
being currently improperly classified, It's the property of the CIA. So what we really need or needed is either A, the president to come out and say, the report will be maintained as a government document and will not be destroyed, or for the legislative branch to finally step up and say, we're going to exercise real oversight here.
We are going to keep a copy of this report, and it's not going anywhere.
It's going to stay in the safe.
And that's the key thing, too.
We've seen in so many different areas, and those who listen to the radio program and the nightly news here understand that Congress has abdicated its authority to the bureaucracies in so many different ways.
They allow them to essentially write the laws.
They're allowing the CIA to run roughshod over this.
Let's talk about some of the things that did come out in the only 500 pages that surfaced of that.
Some of the things like rectal hydration with hummus, sexual assault with broomsticks.
No, this was not authorized by the CIA, and this has been my position all along.
And again, this really points to the weakness of Barack Obama and his utter inability to stand up to the CIA. Also, John Brennan was a monster of Barack Obama's creation.
This is another thing I've maintained over the last four years.
Things like rectal rehydration using hummus, things like sexual assault using broomsticks, or repeatedly slamming a prisoner's head against the wall, which we did to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's nephew, to the point where it causes permanent traumatic brain injury.
Those actions are not authorized by anybody.
Not by the CIA, not by the Justice Department, not by anybody.
Except that they're not punished.
You could say that there's a tacit authorization, isn't there?
Once somebody does that, they're not punished for it, then it's kind of understood with a wink and a nod that that's authorized.
You're exactly right.
You're exactly right, and that's really the core issue.
The core issue is we're supposed to be a country of laws.
We're supposed to be a country that has what is perhaps a divinely inspired constitution.
So we're either going to live by those laws and to respect that constitution, or we're not.
And if we're not, we should not profess to other countries to be this shining beacon of civil liberties and civil rights.
Exactly.
As we started out, you said we need to have this conversation.
That's what you said 10 years ago when you broke this information out there.
If we don't have this conversation, if we don't decide as a nation what the rules are going to be, then we don't have any rules.
And we are a lawless country, and they do whatever they wish, and that is precisely why they do this.
They don't want any rules that restrict them to anything.
If they get caught, they allow these people to go with it, but that gives them plausible deniability to say, well, you know, we didn't authorize that, but of course they didn't punish it either.
No, they don't punish it, and oftentimes when senior CIA officers are put into a box, when they get caught doing something like this, they'll say, well, we briefed the committees.
And the committees didn't tell us to stop.
And in fact, some of the time they did brief the committees, most of the time they actually didn't.
They may send a memo to the chairman or the vice chairman, but then that's it.
They consider that to be informative.
And when there was no objection, they just took that as the green light or as carte blanche to go ahead and do what they want.
That's not congressional oversight.
Let me ask you about John Rizzo.
Of course, he was a lawyer who defended enhanced interrogation techniques, his book.
And of course, you're talking about how the CIA maintained that they owned the report.
I guess they look at it like a book that you have a copyright on because they call themselves The Company.
His book was called The Company Man.
And I thought the most interesting thing in his book was the fact that he said that he wanted to join the CIA. When he was watching the Frank Church Committee hearings where they were talking about the lawless actions of the CIA, to me, that was amazing to see that that would inspire him to want to join that organization.
And evidently, it wasn't to bring law and rules to that organization, but to help them get away with it.
Yeah.
Rizzo obviously had the sound off when he was watching the Church Commission hearings.
I knew John Rizzo very well.
John Rizzo makes a very specific point of not talking about me and not mentioning me or my case, which I appreciate, frankly.
But John Rizzo was wrong about enhanced interrogation techniques.
He was wrong about waterboarding.
He was wrong about torture.
He did nothing to stop it.
And in his book, he sort of throws the reader a bone, saying, well, I probably should have stopped it.
I didn't.
I probably made a mistake.
We're the good guys.
They're the bad guys.
So we just need to move on.
It's not that we need to move on.
We need to clarify what we're going to do as a country.
We need to clarify what kind of intelligence policy we're going to have and whether or not we're going to follow the Constitution and follow the law of the land.
Plain and simple.
Well, of course, we had that discussion with the Pike and the Church Committee hearings, and it was all because the CIA and the NSA were spying on conversations, phone conversations at that time of American citizens.
We all focus on the assassination guns that were shown, you know, that they're passing around and everything.
But the core of it was that they were spying on American citizens, so they created the FISA Act, and then they used that.
To spy on American citizens as authorization to spy on American citizens.
So clearly they didn't learn anything from that or they used that as they typically do to move forward.
But before we get into the persecution, the way they prosecute you, the double standards that we see here, because that's another key thing that is happening to Americans all over the place is the double standard that we see for the people at the top.
I just want to ask you, when you were there, were you...
Kind of the outlier that was concerned about what was going on with the waterboarding excessive techniques here?
Or were there a lot of people that were concerned about it but were afraid to speak up?
I thought at the time that I was the only person who had a problem with this.
There were 14 of us who were approached by a senior officer in the CIA's Counterterrorism Center asking us if we wanted to be what he called trained in the use of enhanced interrogation techniques.
Of the 14, two of us said no, and one of the two changed his mind and went into the training.
So of the 14, I was the only one who said no.
I said, this sounds like a torture program.
Torture's wrong.
I don't want any part of it.
And in fact, I didn't even say that right away.
I said, give me an hour to think about it.
And I went up to the seventh floor, which is the CIA's executive floor.
There was a very, very senior CIA officer there for whom I had worked in the Middle East about a decade earlier.
And I went in and I said, hey, do you have a minute?
I said, they just approached me and asked me if I wanted to be trained in these enhanced interrogation techniques.
What do you think of this?
And he said, first, let's call it what it is.
It's a torture program.
They can use whatever euphemism they want, enhanced interrogation techniques, whatever they want.
It's a torture program.
Second, Torture is a slippery slope.
And you know how these guys are.
Somebody's going to go overboard.
They're going to torture a prisoner to death.
And then there's going to be a congressional investigation.
And after that, there's going to be a Justice Department investigation.
And then somebody's going to go to prison.
Do you want to go to prison?
And I said, no, I don't want to go to prison.
As it turned out, I was the only one who went to prison.
And none of the torturers ever went to prison.
But I went back down to the Counterterrorism Center and I said, this is a torture program and I don't want any part of it.
Well, you know, that's the amazing thing, too.
As Jessalyn Radick, your lawyer, pointed out, you said you're the only one who went to prison because he said that.
She said the people who ordered the torture, the lawyers who justified it, the people who carried it out, those who destroyed the videotapes of it, none of them are being held accountable.
The only person going to jail in this connection with this is the person who blew the whistle on it.
In fact, if John had actually tortured someone, I don't think he would be going to jail.
You would have gone along with the program.
You would have been a fine.
The thing is, and we hear this from People like Frank Serpico was talking about the police.
He said, look, any organization you've got, you're going to have good people, you're going to have bad people.
And the difference as to whether or not this organization is going to be a good or bad organization is, do you purge out the good people or do you purge out the bad people?
And clearly, in your case, what they're doing is they're purging out the good people.
You know, I joined the CIA because I'm a patriot.
I joined the CIA because I'm a second-generation American whose family always stressed the importance of public service.
This country has been so good to us, we needed to pay it back for all the riches that we've gotten over the years.
And for me, that was joining the CIA and serving my country overseas.
I just assumed when I joined the CIA that everybody felt the same way.
It wasn't about covering things up.
It was about serving the American people.
And I learned that that just wasn't the case at all.
It really wasn't the idealistic organization that I thought it was.
The sad thing is that in America...
We have, it's not just in law enforcement, it's not just in the CIA. It is in so many institutions, public and private.
There's a crisis of ethics, there's a crisis of morality, and that is what is eating this country like a cancer.
Let's take a look at the persecution and the double standards.
Now, you didn't go to jail for whistleblowing.
You went to jail because the identity of a CIA officer was exposed.
Tell us briefly about that, because I want to compare that to what happened to Scooter Libby and to General Petraeus.
Well, I'll start with the ABC News interview in 2007. This was where I initially blew the whistle on the CIA's torture program.
I said three things in that interview that really have changed the course of the rest of my life.
I said that the CIA was torturing its prisoners.
I said that torture was official US government policy.
It was not the result of a rogue.
And I said that the policy had been personally approved by the President of the United States.
The very next day, the CIA filed what's called a crimes report against me with the Justice Department, and the FBI began investigating me.
They investigated me for a full year, from December of 2007 to December 2008, and then they determined that I had not committed a crime.
I had not revealed classified information, and they closed the case.
What I did not know, though, was that the CIA was so angry that three weeks later, In January of 2009, when the most transparent president in American history was inaugurated, thank you, Barack Obama, the CIA asked him to reopen the case against me in secret.
And, you know, I've got to interject here because you're talking about the most transparent president.
And, yes, we now know that Barack Obama persecuted more whistleblowers and journalists under the...
100-year-old 1917 Espionage Act and all the other presidents combined under him.
And it's not just you.
He came after Thomas Drake.
The Bush administration did not come after any of the NSA whistleblowers like Drake and William Benny, who we've interviewed.
And I've interviewed Thomas Drake.
They didn't come after them until the Barack Obama administration.
That is the amazing thing that liberals need to take a look at that we all should be concerned about.
I hope we don't see a repeat of this with President Trump.
I hope not, and I think not, because President Trump has not expressed any particular, what's even the word, obsession with national security whistleblowing.
Not at all.
But I didn't know I was under investigation.
Not for four years.
And then four years later, in January of 2012, I was charged with five felonies, including three counts of espionage.
Espionage, in many cases, is a death penalty case.
So three counts of espionage, one count of making a false statement, which we were never actually clear on what the false statement was that I was supposed to have made.
And one count of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982.
I'm only the second American that's ever been charged with violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act.
And in fact, when I applied for a pardon recently, The author of that act, Dr. Morton Halperin, wrote a letter to the president saying that this is not why we wrote this law.
Please pardon John Kiriakou.
That didn't work out.
And it's not just me.
It's not just Drake and Benny and Weeby and me.
It's people like Jeffrey Sterling.
He's another CIA officer who's currently in prison for blowing the whistle on waste fraud and abuse in an Iran operation that went bad at the CIA. Yes, yes, absolutely.
And so the individual also, to give people some more background, the individual whose name eventually came out, and this was a journalist that you were talking to, he passed that information then along to some investigators, but his name was also already known with human rights activists, with blogs, and it was not leaked with any malice.
No, in fact, I'll tell you exactly how the leak took place.
This journalist, Matthew Cole, who at the time was with ABC News, Was writing a book about the CIA's rendition program, and he sent me a list of about a dozen names, and he said, can you introduce me to any of these people?
I'd like to interview them for my book.
And I looked at the list, and I said, I don't have any idea who any of these people were, which was true.
And he sent me a list of another dozen names.
And likewise, I said, I'm sorry, I don't know any of these people.
And I said, listen, you obviously know this issue so much better than I do.
I just can't help you.
Besides, kidnapping wasn't my thing at the CIA. I wasn't involved in kidnapping people.
So, finally, he says, well, what about this guy that you refer to in your book?
There was a guy on the tarmac in Pakistan when you turned over Abu Zubaydah.
He said, I think his name was John.
And I said, oh, you're talking about John Doe.
I don't know whatever happened to him.
He's probably retired and living in Virginia somewhere.
Well, that conversation was a felony.
Because I confirmed the surname of a former colleague.
Now, the reporter never met me in public.
And as it turned out, the name was already known to other reporters at the Washington Post and the New York Times, we learned during discovery.
But that's all the CIA needed to finally get their revenge on me.
And that's the thing.
It's like Stalin, you know, the famous quote, bring me the man, I'll find the crime.
They dug for four years and dug this thing up.
And again, as we pointed out, it was not really truly leaked.
And it certainly wasn't done with malice.
And yet if we compare this to the situation of Scooter Libby, and of course he's former chief of staff at Dick Cheney, who supported torture unreservably.
He said, yeah, let's just do it.
They leaked with malice the name of Valerie Plame that everybody talked about.
And Scooter Libby was convicted of that.
Of course, Dick Cheney wasn't.
None of the rest of his staff was.
But then George Bush pardoned him and commuted his sentence.
And then if you look at the case of Petraeus, Petraeus, we're talking about you going to jail for the identity of one person, as you just pointed out, that came out in a roundabout way.
And yet Petraeus handed eight binders of information to his mistress.
He committed perjury on a signed statement saying that he didn't possess any classified documents.
And what did he get?
He got probation.
18 months of unsupervised probation.
And in fact, just to add insult to injury.
Oh, he was at the Bilderberg conference while he was on.
He wasn't even restricted to the United States.
He was there meeting with the wealthiest power brokers on earth, political industry.
Yeah, the day after his sentencing, he went to Iraq on a classified contract for the White House.
Well, that's even better.
Well, I don't know if that's even better than Bilderberg.
Bilderberg's put a lot of influence there.
But, you know, that's the amazing thing is this double standard that we see.
And we see this on and on and on, you know, it's not, and the quote, and let me read the quote, of course you're familiar with this, that he said about you.
This is what General Petraeus said about you just weeks before he was busted for doing orders of magnitude worse.
He said, and listen to the hypocrisy, oaths do not matter.
There are indeed consequences for those who believe they are above the laws and protect our fellow officers and enable American intelligence agencies to operate with a requisite degree of secrecy.
He said that about you.
Not about Hillary Clinton or about himself.
He said that about you.
That's the amazing thing to me.
The double standard that these people walk, they get nothing.
You get 30 months in jail.
You get three months house arrest, right?
Probation for three years.
He didn't even get probation for three years.
He got probation for two years.
And in fact, his probation is unsupervised, which means that he doesn't have to fill out any forms or no monthly financial report or nothing.
My attorneys and I complained after Petraeus was sentenced because when I was sentenced, I had something called an 11C1C plea.
And that means that we had negotiated a settlement.
Well, the judge in my case was a Clinton appointee who has a reputation as a hanging judge, and she reserves all national security cases for herself.
So my plea called for a sentence of 30 months, of which I knew I would serve about 23 months.
And at my sentencing, she said that This was the first 11C1C plea that she had ever had in her courtroom.
She didn't like it, but she was going to accept it.
She said to me, Mr. Kiriakou, if it were up to me, I would have given you 10 years.
I just had to stand there and take it.
When General Petraeus was sentenced, as soon as the judge finished sentencing him, the judge came down from the bench to shake his hand and thank him for his service to the country.
That kind of double standard just makes me sick.
That is so indicative of the corruption that we face.
All right, so let's talk real quickly about the NDAA, and then I want to get to your book, How Do We Survive and Thrive in Prison, that's coming up.
You can give us a little bit of a tease for that.
But of course, you know, the rest of us, you and I and the people who are watching this, we aren't General Petraeus.
We aren't Hillary Clinton.
We aren't Dick Cheney or his chief of staff.
So we are looking at this indefinite detention and rendition by the military that's been put in by Barack Obama and Republicans and Democrats and re-signed every year since I think it goes back, what, 2012 I think they put it in?
And of course Barack Obama said he wasn't going to do that.
Then he signed it on New Year's Eve and so forth and so on.
Great.
And then this year...
In the NDAA, where they like to put all this secret stuff, they've now put in what I like to call the Ministry of Truth provision, where they have now funded the State Department of all places as the arbiter of all news, fake news and propaganda, and the ability to counter it with $160 million funding over two years.
So, your comments on where we're headed with this in just a general sense?
I really don't think that this...
This can be overstated.
We are heading into an era of unprecedented propaganda, and it is government-sponsored propaganda.
We got a little taste of it under George W. Bush.
It became a part of who we are as a country under Barack Obama, and it's just getting worse because no one on Capitol Hill has the guts to stand up and say, this is wrong, and we shouldn't be doing it.
To me, this is really a failure of congressional oversight because presidents always want to be the strongest president they can be.
It's the nature of the presidency for the president to try to carve out as much executive power for himself as he can.
But it's the job of Congress to make sure that those three branches of government are balanced the way the Constitution has laid it out for us.
And Congress has not done that.
That's what's really most disturbing to me.
You know, when you've got an attorney general who says with a completely straight face in a congressional hearing that the U.S. Code gives the president the right to kill American citizens overseas, Americans who have never been charged with a crime, Americans who have not had the opportunity to face their accusers in a court of law, we have a problem.
And what that means then is that Congress has to stand up and rectify the problem.
And that has not happened.
Absolutely.
And I hope, my hope is that even though Donald Trump is a law and order president, that shouldn't preclude him.
Just as, you know, you joined the CIA, you wanted to do the right thing.
We have to have law.
We have to have order.
But we also have to have it in a framework that respects laws, respects rules, respects ethics and morality.
Donald Trump is experiencing the abuses of the press, the abuses of propaganda, the abuses of fake news firsthand to such a degree that it will really wake him up.
And he has the power and the independent thought to really do something about this.
Other than Rand Paul, we really haven't seen anybody else stand up and complain about this.
And hopefully this will...
Activate Donald Trump.
Get him to see where this is a problem as it's happening to him.
Defend the rest of us as well.
One of my attorneys was President Reagan's assistant attorney general.
That's Bruce Fine, who's one of the preeminent libertarian thinkers on constitutional law in America.
We've had him multiple times.
He's very good, yes.
Oh, he's very, very good.
We have this conversation all the time.
We look to leadership toward people like Mike Lee, for example, from Utah, or Justin Amash, or Ron Paul before him, before he left Congress.
And we hang on to these guys.
And it's because nobody else really has the guts to come forward.
So all we can do is hope it changes, and in the meantime, we have to ride our elected officials, and we have to demand change.
Absolutely.
All right, since we're all looking at living in a prison state here, let's talk about your upcoming book, great title, Doing Time Like a Spy, How the CIA Taught Me to Survive and Thrive in Prison.
This is going to be coming out in May.
People can pre-book this now on Amazon.com.
Give us a little taste of what's going to be in that book.
Sure.
This is a tease.
Well, the CIA, in my CIA operational training, the CIA taught me what I call 20 life lessons.
And this was how to, well, this is going to sound terrible.
It's going to sound like I'm a monster, but how to manipulate people to get what you want.
And I only used it in CIA operations to tell you the truth.
But then when I went to prison, My judge had recommended that I go to a minimum security work camp.
When I got there, they put me in the actual prison with the murderers and the pedophiles and the drug kingpins.
Maybe that judge had something to do with that.
I suspect she did.
I called Bruce Fine and I said, Bruce, they put me in the actual prison.
And he said, oh my gosh, well, we can...
We can file a motion, but it'll be two years before we get a hearing and by then you'll be home.
You just have to tough it out.
And so I decided that very day that I was going to rely on my CIA training to make sure that I remained safe and to make sure that I stayed at the top of the social heap.
And so I used these 20 rules.
20 rules, things like admit nothing, deny everything, make counter accusations.
When stability is not to your benefit, chaos is your friend.
Recruit spies to steal secrets or anything else you might need.
John, this is also a dual-purpose book.
You could take this book and run for president or any elected office.
A CIA psychiatrist once told me that the CIA actively seeks to hire people who have What he called sociopathic tendencies, not sociopaths.
Sociopaths have no conscience, and they can very easily pass a polygraph, but they're impossible to control.
People who have sociopathic tendencies are comfortable working in moral or ethical gray areas.
And so in my CIA interviews, when they asked me, for example, What I would do if I needed a file and I couldn't recruit a guy to get me the file, what do you do then?
I said, you break into the office and you steal the file.
Just seemed like a logical answer to me.
And he said, that's exactly what you should do.
You're exactly right.
And I got hired.
So I used those same rules, those same life lessons.
That I learned at the CIA to protect myself in prison.
And one of the things that I did starting out was I made strategic alliances.
I've done this all through my life.
And this is what really did it for me.
I was sort of adopted by the Italians in prison.
And when I say Italians, it has quotation marks around it.
I mean Italians named Gambino and Bonanno and, you know...
Paisano.
Right.
You get the idea.
Right.
But I also did some free legal work for members of the MS-13 street gang or the Burachos or the Norteños and a member of the...
Of the Crips street gang from Los Angeles asked me if I would write a letter to his judge asking for a sentence reduction.
I did that.
And then these guys were indebted to me for the entire time that I was there.
I was friendly with the Nation of Islam.
I was friendly with the Aryan Brotherhood.
I mean, whatever I needed to do to make sure that I was respected and I was safe, I used those CIA rules and it all worked out just fine.
That should be a fascinating book.
And again, people can pre-order that.
That's coming up in May.
Is that right?
In May.
May 16th.
Okay, great.
And if people want to follow you, and you're our speaker as well, if they want to find out what you're doing, they can find you at johnkiriaku.com.
That's K-I-R. I-A-K-O-U. JohnKiriakou.com.
Thank you so much, John, for talking to us.
It's a fascinating story.
Thank you.
And I look forward to seeing that new book that you've got.
And thank you for standing up for freedom and for liberty and continuing to speak out in favor of that.
Thank you for everything you do.
This is a really important program, and I'm greatly indebted for the opportunity to speak with you today.
Thank you.
John Kiriakou, a true patriot.
Someone who has not just talked the talk, but he's actually walked the walk.
He's paid the price, a heavy price.
And as he said before, he would do it again.
What will you do?
Will you share this information?
Will you have this discussion with other people?
Will you educate your fellow citizens so that we can bring America to a higher level?
We need to reclaim the moral, ethical, legal high ground in America.
That's what John is telling us.
That's what we need so that we can live as free men with respect.
Thank you for joining us.
I'm David Knight.
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