Latest / truthunedited / Joe Rogan Experience _2392 - John Kiriakou

Transcript

Joe Rogan Experience _2392 - John Kiriakou · truthunedited

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: Joe Roman Podcast.
• 0:03
  Speaker 2: Check it out The Joe Logan Experience, Shoin by Day Joe.
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: Rogan Podcast, by Night all day. You were saying you
• 0:13
  replaced Mike Baker.
• 0:14
  Speaker 2: Yeah, Mike's a great guy. He was a good officer.
• 0:18
  He was. He doesn't really talk about his work a lot.
• 0:23
  Maybe it's because a lot of years have passed, but
• 0:25
  he was the real deal. I replaced him in Athens,
• 0:27
  and he had done a lot of preliminary leg work
• 0:31
  in Athens. Athens was a tough place at the time.
• 0:35
  The American government spent more money on security in Athens
• 0:39
  than they spent anywhere else in the world, including Beirut.
• 0:42
  Why there It was a combination of two things. There
• 0:45
  were two indigenous Greek groups that were exceedingly dangerous. One
• 0:49
  was called Revolutionary Organization. Seventeen November, they had killed the
• 0:53
  c I station chief, two US defense attaches, just bad
• 0:58
  guys all around. The other was called Popular Revolutionary Struggle.
• 1:03
  And then on top of that you had Abu Nidal,
• 1:05
  the Libyans, the PFLP, the PFLPGC, the DFLP. Everybody was
• 1:12
  there because there was this informal agreement between the Greek
• 1:17
  government of Andreas Papandreu at the time, and these terrorist
• 1:22
  groups that if you don't kill Greeks will leave you alone.
• 1:27
  Oh boy, Yeah, but killing Americans wasn't part of the deal,
• 1:32
  so it was every man for himself.
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: Wow, your story is pretty nuts, man, and your story
• 1:39
  of getting in trouble and eventually going to prison for
• 1:43
  something that was what they were doing. What you reported
• 1:48
  on was completely illegal and you were completely honest about it,
• 1:54
  and it was essentially about the US torture program, right.
• 1:57
  Tell us how this all started. Long had you been
• 2:01
  involved in the CIA? Oh?
• 2:03
  Speaker 2: By then I had been in the CIA.
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: Well.
• 2:08
  Speaker 2: By the time I got to Pakistan as the head
• 2:11
  of counterterrorism operations after nine to eleven, I'd been in
• 2:14
  the CIA almost thirteen years and I was responsible for
• 2:19
  all counter terrorism operations in the country. Al Qaida was
• 2:25
  running out of Afghanistan into Pakistan because we were bombing
• 2:29
  the daylights out of them, and so my job was
• 2:32
  to find them and grab them and then just hold
• 2:37
  them or send them to trial. Was the original idea.
• 2:40
  And we were planning at the time for our first
• 2:44
  big name capture, right Bin Laden, I'm in Aszawari. We
• 2:49
  had killed Mohammed atf He was the head of what
• 2:53
  they called military affairs for al Qaida. We killed him
• 2:55
  at Torbora. But then there was Abu Zubeta, and then
• 2:58
  there was this unknown person that we later learned was
• 3:02
  highly shake Muhammad. So we were looking for any of
• 3:04
  these four or five people. And then there were others,
• 3:08
  those responsible for the embassy bombings in Africa, the USS
• 3:13
  coal bombing. So it just so happened that in February
• 3:17
  of two thousand and two we got a lead on
• 3:20
  Abuzubeta and we captured him. It took us six weeks
• 3:25
  to track him down, and we were close a couple
• 3:28
  of times, close where we would bust down the door
• 3:30
  and there's like an uneaten, like half eaten sandwich on
• 3:34
  the counter, a cigarette still burning. Sometimes we were a
• 3:37
  day or two behind him, but he knew we were looking,
• 3:39
  and he knew we were close. So we finally got him,
• 3:44
  and then the question is what do you want to
• 3:46
  do with him? And they told me hang on to him.
• 3:49
  We're going to send out a plane and we'll take
• 3:52
  it from there. So they did, and I wasn't cleared
• 3:57
  to know what they were going to do with him,
• 3:59
  Just like the guys on the plane weren't clear to
• 4:02
  know who it was we had captured and why they
• 4:05
  were taking this guy where they were taking him.
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: But is that all just need to know?
• 4:11
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's all need to know. In fact, when I
• 4:13
  got onto the plane, we three FBI agents. I picked
• 4:16
  him up on this gurney and carried him onto the plane.
• 4:18
  We had to stand him up and maneuver him onto
• 4:20
  the plane, and we laid him across the luggage rack
• 4:23
  at the back and tied him down. And one of
• 4:27
  the guys on the plane, he was dressed completely in
• 4:29
  black with a black hood on, and he says John,
• 4:32
  And I said who are you? And he lifts up
• 4:34
  his mask and he's an old boss of mine and
• 4:38
  I said, hey, what are you doing here? He said, oh,
• 4:39
  I came to take your prisoner. I said where are
• 4:42
  you taking him? And he said I can't tell you.
• 4:45
  You don't have a need to know. And I said,
• 4:46
  now that's cool. He said who is he? Anyway? I said, oh, dude,
• 4:49
  I'm sorry, you don't have a need to know. He says, yeah,
• 4:52
  fair enough, fair enough, okay, safe travels. And then you
• 4:55
  know your job is to take him from point A
• 4:57
  to point B not to become his friend and you know,
• 5:00
  get his family story, just like my job is to
• 5:02
  catch him and hand him over the next guy. And
• 5:04
  it's none of my business where he's going. And so
• 5:07
  when I got back to headquarters in May of that year,
• 5:11
  I was just standing in the sandwich line at the
• 5:13
  CIA cafeteria and one of the senior guys from the
• 5:16
  counter Terrorism Center came up to me very casually, and
• 5:20
  he said, oh, hey, I'm glad I ran into you.
• 5:23
  I meant to ask you, do you want to be
• 5:25
  certified in the use of enhanced interrogation techniques? And I
• 5:28
  had never heard that term before. This is May of
• 5:31
  two thousand and two. I said, enhanced interrogation techniques? What's
• 5:35
  that mean? And he goes, we're gonna start getting rough
• 5:38
  with these guys like that. I said, what's that mean?
• 5:42
  So he describes these ten techniques and I said, I
• 5:46
  don't know, man, that sounds like a torture program. And
• 5:49
  he said, it's not a torture program. We got it
• 5:52
  cleared by the Justice Department and the President signed it.
• 5:55
  He says, think about it. I said, yeah, give me
• 5:57
  an hour. I need an hour to think about it.
• 6:00
  I walked out of the cafeteria. I went up to
• 6:02
  the seventh floor, which is the executive floor, and there
• 6:07
  was a very very senior officer up there for whom
• 6:09
  I had worked ten years earlier in the Middle East.
• 6:12
  Knocked on his door, no appointment or anything, and I said, hey,
• 6:15
  I need some advice. I was just asked if I
• 6:18
  wanted to be trained in these enhanced interrogation techniques, what
• 6:22
  do you think of that? And he said, first of all,
• 6:26
  let's call a spade a spade. He said, this is
• 6:28
  a torture program. They can use whatever euphemism they want,
• 6:31
  but this is a torture program, and torture's a slippery slope.
• 6:35
  He said, you know how these guys are. Somebody's going
• 6:37
  to be a cowboy. They're going to go overboard and
• 6:39
  they're going to kill a prisoner. And when that happens,
• 6:42
  there's going to be a congressional investigation. Then there's going
• 6:45
  to be a Justice Department investigation, and somebody's going to
• 6:47
  go to prison. Do you want to go to prison?
• 6:50
  I said, no, I don't want to go to prison.
• 6:52
  As it turned out, I was the only person who
• 6:54
  went to prison, but I said no, I don't want
• 6:55
  to go to prison. I went back downstairs. I said, listen,
• 6:58
  I have a moral and ethical problem with this. I
• 7:01
  think it's illegal, and I don't want any part of it.
• 7:04
  The funny thing is I had just captured a z
• 7:07
  A Beta, who we believed was the number three in
• 7:09
  al Qaeda, and I got passed over for promotion. And
• 7:13
  the reason I got passed over, they said, was because
• 7:15
  I turned down the training. The head of the counter
• 7:18
  Terrorism Center said in my promotion panel that I had
• 7:21
  displayed a shocking lack of commitment to counter terrorism. And
• 7:26
  then the guy who had given me the advice saw
• 7:29
  that my name wasn't on the promotion list and he
• 7:32
  promoted me out of psychle So I realized then I
• 7:36
  was up against something that was going to be tough.
• 7:38
  And then there was a psychiatrist at the agency whom
• 7:42
  I had known for years. We earned the same men's group,
• 7:45
  we went to the same church, and he happens to
• 7:47
  be both a brigadier general in the Army and a
• 7:50
  CIA psychiatrist. And he said to me one day, buddy,
• 7:55
  you know they call you the human rights guy behind
• 7:57
  your back. And I said, yeah, I don't care, and
• 8:01
  he said, you know that's not a compliment, right, And
• 8:05
  I said, Steve, they're wrong about this, and I'm right
• 8:09
  about it. I said, I'm comfortable with the decision that
• 8:13
  I made, and I just left it at that. I
• 8:16
  didn't realize, though, how much I had pissed them off
• 8:20
  until later on.
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: So all you had done, essentially was stand up for
• 8:26
  your beliefs, your morals, your ethics, and the law. And
• 8:30
  you said I don't want to participate in anything that
• 8:32
  I know to be illegal.
• 8:33
  Speaker 2: That was the start.
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: Listen, you're standing out against the group, and I.
• 8:38
  Speaker 2: Was the only one. I'm almost ashamed to tell you that.
• 8:41
  They asked fourteen of us if they wanted if we
• 8:44
  wanted to be trained in the enhanced interrogation techniques. I
• 8:47
  was the only one who said no.
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: Now, this doesn't necessarily mean that you would have to
• 8:53
  use them. You were just going to be trained.
• 8:55
  Speaker 2: Oh no, they were to use and then.
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: But you would be required to use these techniques. So
• 9:01
  if you were not trained in them, then what would happen?
• 9:05
  Would that preclude you from ever being involved in any
• 9:09
  sort of a questioning interrogation?
• 9:12
  Speaker 2: Yes, which is funny for a couple of reasons. Number one.
• 9:16
  There was no such thing at the time as an
• 9:19
  interrogation class. Right, the FBI has deep, years long interrogation classes.
• 9:28
  We never had to interrogate anybody. And in fact, when
• 9:31
  we started capturing prisoners in Pakistan in January of two
• 9:36
  thousand and two, I'm like, well, what do you want
• 9:38
  me to ask him? I cabled headquarters. We caught this guy.
• 9:41
  What do you want me to ask him? Oh, you'll
• 9:43
  figure it out, just go with it. I'm like, okay.
• 9:46
  So I was working with the Pakistani Intelligence Service and
• 9:49
  I said, listen, I'm usually the good cop. You want
• 9:52
  to be the bad cop. And he's like, yeah, I'll
• 9:54
  be the bad cop. So we bring the prisoner out.
• 9:56
  We're sitting there looking at him. I said, what's your name?
• 9:58
  He's like, screw you Pakistani wax him across the face.
• 10:02
  So I say again, what's your name? Listen, buddy, just
• 10:04
  give me your name. My friend here, he's not in
• 10:07
  a very good mood, he's not a very nice guy.
• 10:09
  Just tell me what your name is. Come on, and
• 10:12
  then they tell you their name standard.
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: Yeah, So what exactly did you know what enhanced interrogation
• 10:22
  techniques they were going to implement?
• 10:24
  Speaker 2: Oh, yeah, that day in the cafeteria. My colleague explained
• 10:29
  it in great detail. And a lot of these techniques
• 10:31
  are not torture. Right if I grab you by the
• 10:34
  lapels and say dog on, you answer my questions, that's
• 10:38
  not torture. Or the first one was called the belly slap,
• 10:43
  or the intention slap was another way they called it.
• 10:46
  Where I smack you in the belly, makes a cracking sound,
• 10:48
  maybe it leaves a handprint, it's a little bit embarrassing.
• 10:52
  That's not torture. But then it graduated quickly to things
• 10:57
  like waterboarding, which everybody knows about. But there were techn
• 11:00
  that were that were in my view, that were worse
• 11:03
  than waterboarding, like, for example, there was the cold cell.
• 11:06
  So they strip you naked, they chain you to an
• 11:09
  eyebolt in the ceiling, so you can't you can't lay
• 11:12
  or kneel or sit or anything. You can't get comfortable
• 11:15
  in any way, and they they chill the cell to
• 11:19
  fifty degrees fahrenheit and then every hour somebody comes in
• 11:23
  and throws a bucket of ice water on you. Oh,
• 11:26
  but we killed people with that technique. The Justice Department
• 11:30
  never said we could kill people, and when we would
• 11:34
  kill people with that, at least two with that technique
• 11:37
  that admititude from hypothermia, and.
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: There wasn't a protocol in place to stop them from dying.
• 11:43
  Speaker 2: No, there was later, but in those early days, no, later,
• 11:47
  we always had a doctor on scene. Like for example,
• 11:50
  that was a beta his heart actually stopped during a
• 11:53
  waterboarding session and the doctor revived him just so he
• 11:56
  could be tortured more. It's like, you know, it didn't
• 11:59
  the Germans do that? Come on, now, now we're doing it.
• 12:03
  That's not cool.
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: Is there any other way? Like I know that mk
• 12:07
  Ultra experimented with a lot of drugs and a lot
• 12:09
  of different techniques involved in whether it was trying to
• 12:14
  find the truth out of people or getting people to
• 12:15
  commit acts. Was did they ever implement something where they
• 12:19
  would give someone something.
• 12:21
  Speaker 2: That's a good question. The short answer is yes, not
• 12:25
  in the very beginning. But they were working with things
• 12:28
  like truth serum and different drugs like relaxation drugs, GABA, penton,
• 12:34
  you know, stuff like that to sort of get you
• 12:37
  to open up. But remember too that the agency got
• 12:42
  in such trouble in seventy five and seventy six before
• 12:45
  the Church Committee and the Pike Committee about mk Ultra
• 12:50
  that as soon as Senator Church said, don't destroy the documents,
• 12:56
  the director went right back to headquarters and ordered them
• 12:58
  to destroy everything. And so only about twenty percent of
• 13:02
  the mk Ultra documents still exist. So we don't really
• 13:06
  know exactly exactly what it was that was learned in
• 13:11
  that program, like what worked and what didn't work. We
• 13:14
  hear these stories about, you know, dosing the fog laden
• 13:19
  air of San Francisco just to see if everybody gets sick.
• 13:23
  We've all read the stories about this bakery in France
• 13:26
  where apparently we dosed the bread and everybody in the
• 13:28
  village went nuts. But we don't really have fullsome documentation
• 13:35
  that we could have used operationally while interrogating prisoners.
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: So just to avoid prosecution, they figured out a way. Yeah,
• 13:44
  that's crazy, and so then whatever they did learn is lost.
• 13:48
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's lost.
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: If there was something, whether it's MDMA or right LSD
• 13:53
  or whatever they give people.
• 13:54
  Speaker 2: They worked with LSD for twenty years, at least at
• 13:59
  least twenty years. They there was an operation, it was
• 14:02
  a sub operation of them k Ultra, where they runted
• 14:06
  a safe house in San Francisco. They recruited a bunch
• 14:10
  of hookers and had them go out and pick up John's,
• 14:14
  bring them back to the to the safe house where
• 14:17
  they thought they were going to get laid, doze them
• 14:20
  with LSD, and then interrogate them and try to get
• 14:23
  them to give up their deepest secrets. Yeah, in that climax, exactly,
• 14:30
  nobody's agreed to do this. You haven't informed them properly.
• 14:35
  These are American citizens. You can't just take people off
• 14:37
  the streets and and force LSD down there.
• 14:41
  Speaker 3: Throw.
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: They were running the Hate Ashbury Free Clinic until right
• 14:44
  after a month after Chaos by Tom and came out.
• 14:47
  Speaker 2: You're exactly right.
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: My wife's mom went there, She used to she was
• 14:54
  a hippie in San Francisco. She went to the Hate
• 14:57
  Ashbury frea clinic. It was by the CIA, which is
• 15:02
  so crazy, and it's totally connected to Manson in the MASSA.
• 15:04
  Speaker 2: Oh yeah, Manson exactly, Yeah, exactly, Yeah, Manson was a
• 15:08
  part of it as well.
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: It's so nuts and they wouldn't have even known about
• 15:12
  that until they found the stash of documents that connected
• 15:15
  it all together.
• 15:16
  Speaker 2: And just think of what's been destroyed, right, what we could.
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: Have looked exactly. We only know a small fraction of
• 15:22
  what was done. So is it a case of just
• 15:25
  they're not elected, they're put into power. Presidents come and go,
• 15:30
  and over the course of their career twenty years plus,
• 15:34
  they just have so much power and so much ability
• 15:37
  to get things done that they just bypassed the law.
• 15:40
  Speaker 2: I think that is That's the whole story right there
• 15:43
  in a nutshell. When I was there, I remember being
• 15:46
  shocked by some of the old timers who had been
• 15:48
  there for as long as forty or forty two years.
• 15:51
  There was one in particular. He was the National intelligence
• 15:54
  Officer for Warning, so he was the one that was
• 15:56
  supposed to say, you know, I'm worried about what Libya
• 15:59
  is going to look like ten years from now, and
• 16:01
  then somebody writes a paper about it. He had been
• 16:03
  there for forty two years. He had to get a
• 16:07
  waiver from the director because he had aged out. Well,
• 16:10
  these guys make no secret of their belief that they
• 16:15
  can outwait pretty much any president. Presidents come and go,
• 16:19
  and these guys are there forever, and so if the
• 16:22
  president wants him to do something that they don't want
• 16:24
  to do, they just slow roll it. Just wait until
• 16:27
  he leaves, and that's the end of it.
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: You know.
• 16:31
  Speaker 2: That's why I say, I've said this in interviews a lot.
• 16:34
  There is a deep state. You don't have to call
• 16:37
  it the deep state if you don't want to. You
• 16:38
  can call it the state, you can call it the
• 16:41
  federal bureaucracy, you can call it whatever you want. The
• 16:43
  fact is it exists, and it's unelected, and it's generally
• 16:48
  unaccountable to anybody, and they just wait for the president
• 16:52
  to leave if they don't want to do what he wants.
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: So you find out about this torture program if you
• 17:00
  won't participate, so that puts you on the outs. And
• 17:04
  when do you know that this is going to be
• 17:06
  like a significant problem in your career?
• 17:10
  Speaker 2: You know, honestly, I didn't know until well after I
• 17:13
  left the agency. You know, once I turned this down
• 17:20
  and I got this out of cycle promotion for the
• 17:22
  Azubeta operation, I was named executive assistant to the CIA's
• 17:27
  Deputy director for Operations, and in that position you have
• 17:30
  access to literally everything that the CIA is doing around
• 17:34
  the world. And so I'm reading these cables coming back
• 17:39
  from the secret site and people are saying, like, WHOA
• 17:43
  I didn't sign up for this. Nobody said we're going
• 17:46
  to torture people. I quit and then they come home.
• 17:50
  Or there was a secretary who fainted once when she
• 17:53
  happened to be in the room while Abzebeta was being tortured,
• 17:57
  and she curtailed her assign. That means she sends a
• 18:01
  cab at headquarters saying I'm coming home. I'm not doing
• 18:04
  this anymore. That is a career ending decision to curtail
• 18:08
  an assignment. And I remember thinking, so, I'm not the
• 18:12
  only one who thinks this is this is illegal. Certainly
• 18:16
  somebody's gonna come out and say something, and nobody did.
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: This episode is brought to you by Happy Dad Hard Seltzer.
• 18:24
  Most hard beverages overcomplicate everything. Happy Dad keeps it simple,
• 18:29
  low carbonation, gluten free and only one hundred calories in
• 18:33
  every can. Barbecues, golf rounds, hanging by the pool, chilling
• 18:37
  after work. Happy Dad is perfect for whatever you're up to.
• 18:41
  Everyone is drinking all these skinny cans loaded with sugar,
• 18:45
  but Happy Dad only has one gram of sugar in
• 18:48
  a normal can. You can grab a variety pack featuring lemon, lime, watermelon, pineapple,
• 18:55
  and wild Cherry and Don't Sleep on the Grape collab
• 18:59
  with death Row Records. It's a fan favorite for a reason.
• 19:02
  Happy Dad is now available nationwide in the USA and Canada.
• 19:07
  Go to your local liquor store or visit happy dad
• 19:11
  dot com. For a limited time, use the code Rogan
• 19:14
  to buy one Happy Dad trucker hat and get one free.
• 19:18
  Enjoy a cold Happy Dad must be twenty one plus.
• 19:22
  Please drink responsibly. Happy Dad hard seltzer and tea malt alcohol,
• 19:27
  Orange County, California. Like, what are the techniques that they
• 19:31
  were using that were like causing her to fame?
• 19:34
  Speaker 2: The big ones were waterboarding, the cold cell, and sleep deprivation.
• 19:39
  Sleep deprivation doesn't sound like any big deal. And when
• 19:41
  that finally leaked, Don Rumsfeld, was the Secretary of Defense
• 19:45
  at the time, made a statement that still kind of
• 19:48
  sticks in my mind. He said, there is no such
• 19:52
  thing as sleep deprivation. He said, I have a stand
• 19:56
  up desk in my office. I don't even have a
• 19:58
  chair in my office, and sometimes I'll work twenty four
• 20:02
  hours and then into the next day thirty six hours.
• 20:05
  But that's not what we're talking about here. We know
• 20:08
  from the American psychological association that people begin to lose
• 20:12
  their minds at day seven with no sleep, and they
• 20:16
  begin to die. Their organs begin to shut down at
• 20:19
  day nine. But the CIA was authorized to keep people
• 20:22
  awake for twelve days, and that was another thing that
• 20:26
  caused prisoners to just die. They would have heart failure,
• 20:30
  you know. Or they keep them awake, you chain them
• 20:34
  to that eyebolt in the ceiling. Again, you have these
• 20:37
  industrial strength lights on them twenty four hours a day
• 20:40
  and like death Metal twenty four hours on volume eleven.
• 20:45
  And they just can't sleep because if they if they collapse,
• 20:51
  they'll pull their arms out of their sockets. They're chained
• 20:54
  that to that eyebolt. Jeez, it was bad. And then
• 20:58
  when people would die, they would just dig a hole
• 21:02
  next to the interrogation building, put him in the hole,
• 21:05
  cover it up, and then bring the next guy in.
• 21:08
  Speaker 1: No report, no, nothing, nothing.
• 21:10
  Speaker 2: There was one guy they reported on and headquarters wrote
• 21:13
  back and said, just put him on ice until we
• 21:15
  can figure out what to do. And they let literally
• 21:17
  just put him in a bathtub and filled it with ice,
• 21:20
  and then just decided a couple days later he started
• 21:22
  to turn. We should probably bury this guy. Yeah, it
• 21:28
  was ugly, and the Justice Department never said anything about that.
• 21:31
  They're like, oh, listen, Nah, you know you can do
• 21:34
  these techniques and if you kill him, just bury him
• 21:36
  out back. Nah. That wasn't the That wasn't the approved operation.
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: Was any of it effective? Like, was there any actionable information?
• 21:44
  Speaker 2: That's that's the worst part of this. It No, none
• 21:47
  of it was effective. You know. I say this all
• 21:50
  the time, Joe. It's like a kick in my gut
• 21:53
  to have to compliment the FBI. But if there's one
• 21:56
  thing that the FBI is really good at its entire
• 21:59
  gay they've been doing interrogations effectively since the Nuremberg Trials
• 22:04
  in forty five and forty six. These guys know what
• 22:06
  they're doing. And so with Abu Zubata as an example,
• 22:11
  we captured Abu Zubeta, and normally overseas, the CIA has
• 22:16
  primacy domestically, the FBI has primacy, but nine to eleven
• 22:20
  was still an open criminal investigation, and so we sent
• 22:23
  Abu Zubeda out to the secret site and the FBI
• 22:26
  took over. The CIA was furious about this, but there
• 22:30
  was an FBI agent by the name of Ali Sufan
• 22:33
  who did exactly as he was trained to do, and
• 22:36
  he began to engage Abu Zubeta in a conversation, and
• 22:39
  abzer Beta just gave him the silent treatment for weeks.
• 22:43
  This went on for weeks. But you go in, you
• 22:46
  offer him a cup of coffee, you offer him an orange.
• 22:50
  If he's cooperative, you'll let him write a letter to
• 22:52
  his mother, you know whatever. And finally he opened up
• 22:55
  and he gave us actionable intelligence that saved American lives.
• 23:00
  And give you two examples. Number one, we had no
• 23:02
  idea what the Al Qaeda wiring diagram looked like. We
• 23:06
  knew it was bin Laden and Zowari, and then we
• 23:09
  just didn't know what the organization was like, how it
• 23:14
  was built. So he explained to us how each one
• 23:18
  of these cells all around the world was stovepiped, compartmentalized.
• 23:22
  So cel A had no idea what cel B was doing.
• 23:25
  And Ali said, as an example, if you want to
• 23:31
  do an operation in let's say Dusseldorf, how would you
• 23:35
  do that? And Abuzu Beta said, well, there's this guy
• 23:39
  Mohammed and here's his phone number. Muhammed lives in Dusseldorf
• 23:44
  and he has a cousin Abdullah, and Abdullah has access
• 23:46
  to weapons, and here's Abdullah's email. And then Abdullah's got
• 23:50
  a friend Russia. They meet at the coffee shop, and
• 23:53
  Russia has has access to explosives. And then we're able
• 23:57
  to call the Germans and say, hey, listen, you have
• 23:59
  a serious problem in Dusseldorf, and here's what you need
• 24:02
  to do. And then they kicked down the door and
• 24:04
  they grabbed these guys that saved lives. The other thing
• 24:08
  that he told us, and he laughed actually because Ali
• 24:12
  didn't know what the heck he was talking about. He
• 24:15
  was talking about Muhdor, a guy using the nom deger Muchdar.
• 24:20
  We knew from our own files that there was this
• 24:23
  guy out there who called himself Muchdad, who was a
• 24:27
  very bad guy. In nineteen ninety six, he had initiated
• 24:32
  something called the Bojinka Operation. It was supposed to be
• 24:36
  carried out in the Philippines, and the idea was to
• 24:40
  hijack as many as fourteen seven forty sevens and then
• 24:45
  fly them into buildings all up and down the West
• 24:47
  coast of the United States. It just so happened that
• 24:50
  one day Muhdad, working on his plan, his diabolical terrorism plan.
• 24:56
  He went out to have lunch, and when he went
• 24:59
  out to have lunch, the cleaning lady came in to
• 25:01
  clean the apartment and she sees all this stuff laid
• 25:04
  out and she said, that looks like a terrorist attack
• 25:07
  being planned. She calls the cops. The cops come and say, ooh,
• 25:11
  this looks like a terrorist attack. We better call the
• 25:14
  Philippine Intelligence Service. They come and look at it, and
• 25:17
  somebody says we should probably call the CIA on this,
• 25:21
  and so we confiscated everything and Bojinka was disrupted.
• 25:27
  Speaker 1: Well crazy, it's crazy a cleaning lady.
• 25:30
  Speaker 2: You never know, you just never know.
• 25:33
  Speaker 1: It's just crazy that he would leave the plans.
• 25:35
  Speaker 2: Just thinking nobody's gonna come, nobody's going to see it.
• 25:40
  And then he ran off. So we knew there was
• 25:42
  this guy out there planning this big thing, and his
• 25:45
  name was Mukdad. Alz A Beta laughed at us and said,
• 25:48
  you don't know who Mukda is and Ali said no,
• 25:52
  and iz Abta said, his name is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
• 25:57
  That's the first time we ever heard that name. We
• 25:59
  didn't have documents in any files that were about any
• 26:02
  guy named Khali Sheik Muhammad. But that was the very
• 26:05
  first time we were able to piece it all together,
• 26:08
  and it was thanks to Abzubeta in turn thanks to
• 26:11
  Ali Sufan's treating Abu Zubta with respect. But on August
• 26:16
  the first George Tenant to two thousand and two, George
• 26:20
  Tenant went to the White House and he asked the President,
• 26:22
  for reasons that have never been made clear, he asked
• 26:25
  the President to turn over primacy to the CIA. He
• 26:30
  did that, and the CIA Director, Robert Muller, to his credit,
• 26:34
  he knew exactly what was going to come. Not only
• 26:37
  withdrew FBI personnel from the secret site, he withdrew FBI
• 26:42
  personnel from the country that the secret site was in.
• 26:47
  And within twelve hours, the CIA began to torture Vezbeeda.
• 26:50
  He went completely silent and remained silent, and then the
• 26:55
  FBI went back to the President and said, look, the
• 26:57
  CIA screwing this up. We were getting all us intelligence
• 27:01
  from this guy. Now he won't say anything, and we're
• 27:03
  putting him in a coffin. And we heard that he
• 27:07
  had this irrational fear of bugs, so we pour a
• 27:10
  box of cockroaches on him in the coffin, and close
• 27:13
  up the coffin, and we would open it up every
• 27:15
  couple days to change his diaper and give him food,
• 27:18
  and he went nuts. And so finally the White House
• 27:22
  turns everything back over to the FBI. It takes Ali
• 27:26
  months to get him to talk again, and then he
• 27:29
  starts talking again, and he's given us more and more
• 27:32
  information about al kite operations in Malaysia and anti Australia operations,
• 27:39
  and what's going on in Canada, and how a kite
• 27:42
  is able to move across borders between Europe and Asia.
• 27:47
  And then the CIA comes back in again and starts
• 27:49
  torturing him again and screwed it all up.
• 27:53
  Speaker 1: Why would they do that? I don't understand. If you're
• 27:56
  getting information, why would they decide to ramp it up
• 28:01
  in torture.
• 28:02
  Speaker 2: I think for a couple of reasons. I think we
• 28:04
  should never underestimate the motivating factor of a desire for revenge. Right,
• 28:11
  this was the worst intelligence failure in the history of
• 28:15
  the country. Three thousand people died because we hadn't done
• 28:19
  our jobs. So that was one thing. The other thing
• 28:24
  is the CIA had entered into an agreement with these
• 28:27
  two contract psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jesson in October
• 28:32
  of two thousand and one, and they said, hey, we've
• 28:35
  reverse engineered the military's seer program, and we think this
• 28:40
  would be an effective but harsh interrogation technique. And so
• 28:45
  we were chomping at the bit at the agency to
• 28:48
  try this thing out without using the word torture. We
• 28:52
  paid those guys one hundred and eight million dollars to say, oh,
• 28:57
  we think you should torture people. Here's here are the
• 28:59
  torture techniques. Just let us know when you want us
• 29:01
  to start. One hundred and eight million dollars for that.
• 29:05
  And so we thought, well, we've already spent the money,
• 29:09
  and we really do want revenge on these guys, so
• 29:12
  what the hell, let's just let's just go for it.
• 29:15
  I think that's what it was.
• 29:17
  Speaker 1: Wow, So how did you get in trouble?
• 29:23
  Speaker 2: I waited for somebody to say something about torture and
• 29:28
  nobody did. And then I got divorced. My kids moved
• 29:33
  with my ex wife to Ohio, and they were little
• 29:36
  they needed their dad. So I decided I'm going to
• 29:38
  leave the agency go into the private sector so I
• 29:40
  can see my boys on the weekends. And still I
• 29:44
  waited for somebody to say something, and nobody did. Now
• 29:47
  I wish that I could tell you that I stood
• 29:52
  up and I took us stand and that wasn't it
• 29:55
  at all. I got a call in December of two
• 29:59
  thousand and six, so now I'm out of the agency
• 30:02
  three and a half years. I got a call from
• 30:04
  Brian Ross at ABC News and he said that he
• 30:08
  had a source who said I had tortured Abu Zabeta.
• 30:12
  I said that was absolutely false. I was the only
• 30:16
  person who was kind to Abu Zabeta. I said, I've
• 30:20
  never laid a hand on Abu z A Beta or
• 30:22
  any other prisoner. And he said, well, you're welcome to
• 30:26
  come on the show and defend yourself. Well, I had
• 30:29
  never spoken to a reporter before. I didn't know that
• 30:34
  was a reporter's trick. So I said, I'll think about it.
• 30:38
  In the meantime, President Bush. I remember it being a Monday.
• 30:44
  President Bush gives a press conference and the International Committee
• 30:50
  the Red Cross had said in a paper that the
• 30:53
  CIA was torturing prisoners. Human Rights Watch said CI's torturing prisoners,
• 30:57
  and Amnesty International said prisoners. So a reporter says, look
• 31:01
  all these international human rights organizations are saying that the
• 31:05
  CIA is torturing its prisoners. What's your response to that?
• 31:08
  And the President looks right in the camera and he goes,
• 31:11
  we do not torture like that. And I said to
• 31:16
  my wife, who was a senior CIA officer, I said,
• 31:19
  he is a bald faced liar. He's looking the American
• 31:23
  people right in the eye and he's lying to us.
• 31:28
  And she said, are you surprised. Well, then on Wednesday,
• 31:32
  two days later, he gets another a similar question and
• 31:40
  he said that there is no torture. I knew he
• 31:43
  was lying. And then another two days later, it's Friday
• 31:47
  and he's walking from the south portico of the White
• 31:49
  House to the helicopter to go to Camp David for
• 31:52
  the weekend, and a torture shout a torture. A reporter
• 31:56
  shouts another question about torture. At this time he stops
• 32:00
  and he turns and he says, well, if there is torture,
• 32:04
  it's because of a rogue CIA officer. And I said
• 32:07
  to my wife, Brian Ross's sources at the White House,
• 32:11
  and they're going to pin this on me. So I
• 32:15
  called Brian Ross and I said, I'll give you your
• 32:17
  interview and I decided in the whatever I was.
• 32:19
  Speaker 1: Why did you think they're going to put on you?
• 32:21
  Because they were said human rights guy, so that you
• 32:24
  were going to be a patsy And I was not
• 32:27
  willing assumed that. I assumed, yeah, because that's just your
• 32:30
  experience with the organization.
• 32:32
  Speaker 2: Oh yeah, they're going to leave somebody out to dry
• 32:34
  to protect themselves. So I called Brian Ross. I said,
• 32:37
  I'll give your interview. And I decided that whatever he
• 32:41
  was going to ask me, and he never told me
• 32:42
  in advance what he was going to ask me, I
• 32:45
  was just going to tell the truth. And so he
• 32:48
  met me at the ABC News studios onto Sales Street
• 32:53
  in Washington, and and I said three things in that
• 32:56
  interview that changed the course of the rest of my
• 32:59
  life life. I said that the CIA was torturing its prisoners.
• 33:04
  I said that torture was official US government policy, it
• 33:07
  was not the result of any rogue officer. And I
• 33:10
  said that the policy had been personally approved by the
• 33:13
  President himself. And then, as you can imagine, within twenty
• 33:18
  four hours, the CIA files what's called a crime's report
• 33:22
  against me with the FBI, saying that I had revealed
• 33:25
  classified information. The FBI then investigates me from December of
• 33:31
  seven to December of eight, and then they sent my
• 33:35
  attorney a letter called the declination Letter, declining to prosecute.
• 33:39
  They said that they had completed their investigation, that the
• 33:44
  information was already out there because of Amnesty International, Human
• 33:49
  Rights Watch, and the Red Cross. But most importantly, torture
• 33:53
  is a crime, and it is illegal to classify a
• 33:58
  crime for the purpose of keeping it from the American people,
• 34:02
  So no charges. My wife and I went out to
• 34:04
  celebrate that night. We went to dinner. Three four weeks later,
• 34:10
  Barack Obama becomes president and he names John Brennan at
• 34:15
  first CIA director. But the liberals went crazy because Brennan
• 34:20
  was one of the fathers of the torture program. Everybody
• 34:22
  seems to forget that now, and we can get into
• 34:25
  that if you want. But but he then names Brennan
• 34:29
  the Deputy National Security Advisor for counter terrorism. Brennan immediately
• 34:35
  sends a memo to Eric Holder, the new Attorney General,
• 34:41
  and says talking about me, charge him with espionage, and
• 34:47
  Holder writes back, we got these memos in discovery when
• 34:51
  I went to trial. Holder writes back and says, my
• 34:55
  people don't think he committed espionage. And then Brennan writes
• 34:59
  back and says, charge him anyway and make him defend himself.
• 35:03
  So they charged me with five felonies, three counts of espionage.
• 35:08
  They waited until I went bankrupt, and then they dropped
• 35:12
  the espionage charges.
• 35:17
  Speaker 1: Yeah, oh god, that's so gross.
• 35:20
  Speaker 2: That's Washington.
• 35:22
  Speaker 1: It's just so hard to believe that the United States
• 35:26
  of America government works like that. I believe it. I
• 35:29
  believe it. Oh yes, it's hard to swallow.
• 35:32
  Speaker 2: There's a book by Harvey Silverglate, who's a professor of
• 35:36
  law at Harvard University. The book is called Three Felonies
• 35:38
  a Day, and he says that we are so overregulated,
• 35:43
  so over criminalized in this country that the average American,
• 35:48
  on the average day, going about his or her normal
• 35:53
  daily business, commits three felonies every single day. So if
• 35:59
  they want to, they're going to get you, and there's
• 36:02
  nothing you can do to protect yourself.
• 36:07
  Speaker 1: So what was Brennan's beef with you? Was it just
• 36:11
  because of the fact that you did that interview, or
• 36:14
  was their underlying tension?
• 36:17
  Speaker 2: We were never pals. I've known John Brennan for thirty
• 36:20
  five years. We never really cared for each other. To
• 36:25
  tell you the truth, I thought the guy was in
• 36:29
  over his head intellectually. When I first started there, he
• 36:34
  was a deputy group chief. He was a GS fifteen
• 36:37
  nobody journeyman, you know, first line, second line manager, no
• 36:41
  big deal, there are hundreds of them. And he worked
• 36:44
  for this really wonderful woman, a great intellect named Martha Kessler.
• 36:50
  And Martha was so highly respected. She had written this
• 36:53
  book I still remember the title, called Syria Fragile Mosaic
• 36:56
  of Power. And when you got hired, you got her
• 37:00
  book and you had to read the book, because like,
• 37:02
  this is what we do. This is the perfect example
• 37:04
  of what we do. So he was her deputy. One
• 37:07
  day he went to her and he said, Martha, you know,
• 37:10
  I've been your deputy for X number of years. I
• 37:12
  think I'm ready for promotion into the Senior Intelligence Service.
• 37:16
  And Martha said, and I just talked to her daughter
• 37:18
  a couple of weeks ago about this. Martha said, not
• 37:23
  only will you never be a member of the Senior
• 37:26
  Intelligence Service, I don't even want you working for me anymore.
• 37:29
  You're fired, Well you're not really fired at the CIA.
• 37:34
  If you're fired, that means you have six weeks to
• 37:38
  walk the halls and find another job. If you can't
• 37:40
  find another job in six weeks, then they escort you
• 37:44
  to your car, they take your badge, and you know,
• 37:47
  so long, good luck. Well, it's the normal job turnover
• 37:51
  is in the summertime. This is the week before Christmas
• 37:56
  nineteen ninety three or four, I can't recall now, and
• 38:05
  there are no jobs open at Christmas. So he finally
• 38:08
  finds one job. It is in the PDB staff the
• 38:12
  President's Daily brief and it is as a morning briefer,
• 38:18
  giving the President's Daily Brief briefing to the lowest ranking
• 38:23
  person entitled to a PDB briefing. So that's the National
• 38:27
  Security Council's director for Intelligence Programs, who happened to be
• 38:32
  this guy named George Tennant, And so they immediately hit
• 38:37
  it off. Two alpha dogs, cigars, smoking hard drink, and
• 38:42
  there used to be a kiosk right at the corner
• 38:44
  of seventeenth and Pennsylvania Avenue adjacent to the White House
• 38:47
  that sold cigars. Tenant had had a heart attack and
• 38:51
  he wasn't supposed to smoke, and his wife would yell
• 38:53
  at him. So they would after the briefing. They'd walk
• 38:55
  out to the kiosk and buy cigars and just stand
• 38:57
  there and laugh and you know, talk about chasing women
• 39:01
  or whatever. Totally hit it off. Then Tenant becomes the
• 39:05
  deputy director of the CIA, so he brings he brings
• 39:10
  Brennan back with him and makes him Martha Kessler's boss,
• 39:15
  deputy director of the office that Martha's working in. He
• 39:19
  calls Martha Kesler and says, now you're fired, and so
• 39:23
  she just elected to retire. Well, he ended up being
• 39:29
  identified by Tenant as the guy like, this is my guy.
• 39:34
  This guy's going places. He needs operational experience because he's
• 39:38
  been an analyst and an analytic manager all these years.
• 39:40
  I'm going to make him the station chief in Riad,
• 39:43
  Saudi Arabia. He's an analyst. He's never served overseas before,
• 39:47
  never recruited a spy. Ever, it wasn't his job. Now
• 39:51
  all of a sudden, he's the station chief and one
• 39:54
  of the most important stations in the world. So he
• 39:57
  does that for a long time, by the way, during
• 40:00
  which he approves the visas for the nine to eleven hijackers.
• 40:05
  And then he comes back as the deputy executive director
• 40:11
  of the whole CIA, right, So it's director, deputy director,
• 40:16
  executive director, and then the deputy directors for operations, Intelligence, Science,
• 40:21
  Technology Administration, and they're dotted lines. So he's now one
• 40:26
  of the five most senior people in the entire CIA.
• 40:30
  He does that for a couple of years and then
• 40:31
  becomes the executive director. By the time I get promoted
• 40:34
  to be the morning briefer for the director and executive assistant,
• 40:39
  I'm throwing all these stupid terms out executive assistant to
• 40:42
  the deputy director for operations. I'm meeting with Brennan every
• 40:46
  single day. So we're doing the Iraq War, We're doing
• 40:50
  terrorism and al Qaeda and all this stuff. He didn't
• 40:55
  like me, and I didn't like him. And then when
• 40:57
  I became the quote unquo quote human rights guy, that
• 41:02
  just kind of sealed it for me. But I didn't
• 41:04
  care because I didn't respect him anyhow. I will say
• 41:07
  that that Jim Patt, the deputy deputy director for operations,
• 41:12
  legendary officer and a really great guy. He hated Brennan
• 41:17
  more than I did, and he used to mock Brennan
• 41:20
  because Brennan at the time was telling everybody I want
• 41:24
  to head my own agency. I want to head my
• 41:26
  own agency. And they finally put him in charge of
• 41:28
  this thing that was temporarily called the t TICK, the
• 41:31
  Transnational Terrorism Information Center, it later became the National counter
• 41:35
  Terrorism Center, and they sort of sort of shunted at
• 41:40
  him off there and it was a nothing analytic organization,
• 41:44
  not even in the in the headquarters building. It was
• 41:46
  out one of the outlying buildings. And then he kind
• 41:49
  of went away. But where he really did right for
• 41:53
  himself is in two thousand and seven, there was this
• 41:58
  there was this wave of retirement. Right, we're enough now
• 42:02
  beyond nine to eleven that people can begin to retire,
• 42:05
  So this huge wave of senior level retirements in seven.
• 42:10
  And then once these guys retired, half of them went
• 42:12
  to the McCain campaign and half of them went to
• 42:15
  the Hillary Clinton campaign. And John Brennan was literally the
• 42:19
  only one who went to the Obama campaign and he
• 42:24
  saved himself.
• 42:27
  Speaker 1: Wow, So how did you wind up going to prisident?
• 42:33
  Speaker 2: Well, as soon as Barack Obama became president, John Brennan
• 42:37
  decided he was going to have my head, and so
• 42:42
  he asked a holder to have the FBI grab me
• 42:48
  and I'll tell you what they knew. They didn't have
• 42:50
  a case. So there's a little bit of background. From
• 42:55
  two thousand and nine to the end of twenty eleven,
• 42:58
  I was the senior investigator in this Senate Foreign Relations Committee,
• 43:01
  working for John Kerry. It was a terrible job. Carrie said, oh,
• 43:05
  I want you to do this and do that, and
• 43:07
  we're going to investigate this, investigate that, and then he
• 43:09
  would kill all the investigations because you wanted to be
• 43:12
  Secretary of State and you didn't want to piss anybody
• 43:14
  at the White House off. So I can't talk about
• 43:18
  how Afghanistan produces ninety three percent of the world's heroin
• 43:21
  and all of it is because the CIA said they could.
• 43:24
  I can't talk about the Dashi Lay massacre where two
• 43:27
  thousand Taliban soldiers were suffocated to death in container trucks
• 43:31
  because the CIA didn't punch holes for them to breathe
• 43:34
  in the in the containers. Can't talk about any of
• 43:37
  that stuff because you want to be the Secretary of State.
• 43:40
  So I left in twenty eleven, and right before I left,
• 43:46
  I got a call from a Japanese diplomat, and this
• 43:50
  is one of the things that I loved about that job,
• 43:53
  is this constant engagement with foreign diplomats. Who's doing what?
• 43:58
  And what do you think about Israel? What do you
• 43:59
  think about China? What do you think about what's going
• 44:02
  on in you know, Mexico or Cube or whatever. And
• 44:05
  I get a call from this Japanese diplomat and he
• 44:07
  invites me to lunch, and I said, great, we needed
• 44:10
  a place on Capitol Hill. And I remember that lunch
• 44:15
  very well. I remember we talked about Israeli elections, we
• 44:18
  talked about Turkish elections, and we talked about the Arab
• 44:21
  Israeli peace process. And at the end of the lunch,
• 44:24
  he says to me, and I should add his English
• 44:27
  was so bad that we had to do the lunch
• 44:31
  in Arabic. So he said, what's next for you? And
• 44:35
  I said, well, I think I'm going to resign soon.
• 44:38
  I promised Senator Kerry I'd give him two years. It's
• 44:41
  been two and a half. I have five kids and
• 44:43
  I really need to make some money and put my
• 44:45
  kids through college. And he goes, oh, no, don't do that.
• 44:51
  If you give me information, I can give you money.
• 44:56
  And I said, what the fuck is wrong with you?
• 44:59
  You have any idea how many times I've made that pitch.
• 45:02
  Shame on you cold pitching me like that. And I
• 45:05
  got up indignantly and I walked out. And I walked,
• 45:08
  and I mean directly, without stopping, to the office of
• 45:11
  the Senate Security Officer and I knocked on the door.
• 45:15
  I went in. I said, hey, I was just pitched
• 45:18
  by a foreign intelligence officer. And he goes, was it
• 45:21
  that damn Russian again? And I said no, it was Japanese.
• 45:24
  He goes, Japanese. I said, I know, right. He goes, well, no,
• 45:28
  sometimes they poke around looking for trade information. I said,
• 45:32
  this didn't have anything to do with trade information. I
• 45:34
  don't think. I don't know. We didn't even get that far.
• 45:38
  He said, okay, do me a favor. He said, I've
• 45:39
  got a standalone computer here that's not connected to the internet.
• 45:43
  Write it up as a memo, and I'm going to
• 45:45
  courier it over to the FBI. So I sat there
• 45:47
  and I wrote the whole thing, blow by blow. The
• 45:50
  next day calls me and he says, two FBI agents
• 45:53
  are going to come up and talk to you. And
• 45:55
  I said okay. So they come up. I recount the
• 45:57
  whole the whole lunch, and they said, all right, here's
• 46:00
  what we want you to do. We want you to
• 46:02
  call him back, invite him to lunch, and then try
• 46:06
  to get him to tell you exactly what information he
• 46:08
  wants and how much he's willing to pay for it.
• 46:11
  And I said, because I'm a patriot, I said, you
• 46:15
  want me to wear a wire and they said no,
• 46:18
  we're going to be at the next table. We're going
• 46:20
  to listen to everything. I said, but he only speaks Arabic.
• 46:22
  That's okay. We got a guy who speaks Arabic. Don't worry,
• 46:25
  I said, all right, So I call him, I invite
• 46:27
  him to lunch. We go to lunch, do the whole thing.
• 46:30
  But before the lunch, right before the lunch, they called
• 46:32
  and they said operation came up. Just write us another memo.
• 46:38
  Do the lunch and write us another memo. I said, fine,
• 46:40
  So I write another memo. They asked me to do
• 46:42
  it a third time, a fourth time, and a fifth time.
• 46:45
  The fifth time, he says to me, I have great news.
• 46:49
  He said, I got my dream job. I've been promoted
• 46:53
  and I'm going to be the deputy ambassador in Cairo.
• 46:57
  And I said, congratulations. I shook his hand. Never saw
• 47:00
  him again. So I've written all this to the FBI.
• 47:05
  One day in January of twenty twelve, so I've been
• 47:09
  out of the Senate for about nine months. The FBI
• 47:14
  calls and I look at myself and it says Federal
• 47:16
  Bureau of Investigation. I was like, I wonder what that's
• 47:18
  all about. So I answer and they said, hey, you
• 47:20
  remember that thing you helped us out with a year ago.
• 47:24
  And I said yeah, And they said we've got a
• 47:27
  similar situation and we need your help. And again, because
• 47:30
  I'm a patriot, I said anything for the FBI. I
• 47:35
  kick myself now for saying it. I said anything for
• 47:38
  the FBI. What do you want me to do? They said,
• 47:40
  come down to the Washington Field office Thursday morning at ten.
• 47:43
  I said done. I go down there the next Thursday
• 47:48
  and they're waiting for me at the entrance, which I
• 47:50
  thought was odd. And we go up to a conference
• 47:53
  room and they said, we're both cleared sitk gamma and
• 47:57
  then there were two compartments above top secret that I
• 48:02
  was cleared for. That they said they were cleared for,
• 48:05
  and so if the conversation necessitated it, we could go
• 48:10
  into that area. So they said, well before before we start.
• 48:16
  I just wanted to ask you. Just read your book.
• 48:18
  It was great. I loved it. Hey, what about this
• 48:21
  that you said in your book? And I was like, yeah, okay, yeah,
• 48:24
  it was a cool story. What about this other thing?
• 48:26
  Speaker 1: Yeah?
• 48:27
  Speaker 2: I had fun. I said, it was kind of hard.
• 48:30
  It took me nine months to write the book, twenty
• 48:32
  two months to get it cleared. Oh yeah, you got
• 48:34
  it cleared. Yeah, of course I got it cleared. Twenty
• 48:36
  two months. It took me to get it cleared. And
• 48:38
  I'm thinking, what an odd question. Then they start asking
• 48:42
  me about something called the Sam Adams Project and I said,
• 48:46
  I'm sorry, I don't know what that means. And then
• 48:50
  the bad cop of the two says, we know you've
• 48:53
  been giving information to the Guantanamo defense attorneys. I said,
• 48:57
  what are you talking about? And then I said, wait
• 49:01
  a minute, are you investigating me? And they said yeah,
• 49:07
  and we're raiding your house right now as we speak.
• 49:11
  And I said, thank god, I said, I want to
• 49:14
  speak to my attorney right now. That was the only
• 49:17
  reason that they didn't arrest me. And one of the
• 49:19
  things that I learned, and this became painfully evident when
• 49:22
  they started arresting January sixth. People was the FBI in
• 49:26
  Washington likes to make its arrests on Thursdays because there
• 49:31
  are no federal arraignments on Friday. So you're in the
• 49:34
  DC jail Thursday night, Friday night, Saturday night, Sunday night,
• 49:38
  getting this shit beaten out of you, and then they
• 49:41
  arrange you on Monday, and then you want to make
• 49:44
  a deal just so you don't ever have to go
• 49:46
  inside that prison again. But because I asked to see
• 49:50
  my attorney, they let me go. So I called the
• 49:52
  attorney as soon as I got out of the office. Actually,
• 49:55
  when I was walking out, one of them went over
• 49:59
  to I didn't know it at the time, but it
• 50:01
  was Peter Strock, and Peter Strock says, tell me. He
• 50:06
  implicated himself, and the guy said, not really, No, we
• 50:11
  have to let him go. And so I grabbed my
• 50:14
  cell phone and I left went to the attorney's office.
• 50:17
  They had already called my attorney and said they were
• 50:20
  charging me with espionage. I hadn't committed espionage. They knew
• 50:24
  I hadn't committed espionage, And in fact, since then, I'm
• 50:28
  fast forwarding a lot. Three FBI agents have reached out
• 50:32
  to me well, two to my attorneys. One reached out
• 50:35
  to me directly to apologize, saying that this came from
• 50:39
  the top. They thought it was a BS case. They
• 50:42
  were sorry they were involved, but there was nothing they
• 50:44
  could do. One guy reached out to me through eBay
• 50:47
  of all things, like to try to cover up the trail.
• 50:52
  He's like, listen, I've been losing sleep over this for
• 50:55
  the excuse me, for the last thirteen years. I just
• 50:57
  wanted to tell you how sorry I am. Blah blah blah.
• 51:01
  It's like, well, I hope you feel better. My whole
• 51:03
  life fell apart, but I'm glad you got that off
• 51:06
  your chest. So it became a matter of just survival
• 51:13
  after that, you know, you have to take it seriously.
• 51:15
  I was facing forty five years in prison, and then
• 51:18
  when the Justice Department made a request for a profer meeting.
• 51:24
  The profer meeting is they'll give you a little idea
• 51:27
  of what they have against you, and then they make
• 51:29
  an offer. You can take it or leave it. And
• 51:31
  they offered me forty five years and I said, I'm
• 51:36
  not doing forty five minutes. I didn't do anything wrong.
• 51:43
  And this woman, she became deputy attorney general for the
• 51:47
  Criminal Division under Biden. She said, take this deal, mister Kuriaku,
• 51:53
  and you may live to meet your grandchildren. Oh my god,
• 51:57
  oh it was. I went home that night and I
• 52:02
  went home. I'm ashamed to even say it. That night
• 52:05
  we put the kids to bed, and my wife and
• 52:08
  I were watching TV and she said, come on, let's
• 52:10
  go to bed. I said, I can't sleep. There's no
• 52:13
  way I'm going to be able to sleep. And she said, now,
• 52:15
  come on, let's go to bed. She knew I was
• 52:19
  going to go down into the garage, turn the car
• 52:22
  on it and just lay across the back seat, and
• 52:24
  she said, now, come on, you need to try to
• 52:26
  get some sleep. She saved me that night. But forty
• 52:31
  five years. And so they waited ten months before they
• 52:37
  were even willing to engage in a conversation, and then
• 52:41
  they offered ten years on a Monday. On Wednesday they
• 52:45
  offered eight, and on Friday they offered five. My lead
• 52:49
  attorney was this legendary guy named Plato Cacherras, and Plato said,
• 52:56
  you know, I've been a criminal defense attorney in this
• 52:58
  city for fifteen two years, and this is the first
• 53:02
  time I've ever seen them come down in time. He said,
• 53:06
  usually they offer you ten, you say no, the next
• 53:08
  offer is fifteen, then the next offer's twenty. I said,
• 53:12
  why are they coming down in time? He said, because
• 53:15
  they have a shit case and they know it's shit,
• 53:17
  and that's why we're going to go to trial and
• 53:18
  we're going to win this thing. I said, great. Well,
• 53:24
  they stayed at five and then they came back and
• 53:29
  they said three and a half. And I said, I'm
• 53:33
  going to trial. I'm going to win this thing turned out.
• 53:36
  At the time, my best friend, his wife had an
• 53:40
  uncle who was OJ Simpson's jury consultant, and she called
• 53:44
  him for me and she said, hey, my friend John,
• 53:46
  he's in this situation. He's like, yeah, I read about
• 53:48
  this in the papers. He could use your help. He
• 53:50
  came up, didn't charge me a cent. He came up
• 53:53
  to Washington. We got him a security clearance, and which
• 53:57
  was another thing. We asked for a security clearance, and
• 54:00
  then the Justice Department called and said the White House
• 54:05
  said Kurioku's attorneys have enough security clearances. And I said,
• 54:09
  who at the White House said we have enough security clearances? Well,
• 54:13
  they had to tell us that it was John Brennan.
• 54:16
  No more attorneys for Kuriocu fish or cut bait. Well, like,
• 54:19
  it's not up to John Brennan to decide if I
• 54:22
  have enough attorneys. They have an unlimited number of attorneys,
• 54:27
  an unlimited budget. As it turned out, they spent six
• 54:31
  million dollars to put me in prison. Was society really
• 54:35
  better off spending six million dollars to put me in
• 54:38
  a low security prison for twenty three months? So in
• 54:45
  the end they said best and final offer, thirty months,
• 54:51
  you do twenty three. Well, I was only the second
• 54:55
  American who had ever been charged with this crime of
• 54:58
  violating the intelligen Identities Protection Act of nineteen eighty two.
• 55:05
  The only other person that was charged with it was
• 55:07
  a woman named Sharon Scranach. She was a CIA secretary
• 55:10
  in Ghana in the eighties, and she was having an
• 55:14
  affair with a member of Ghana's intelligence service, and in
• 55:18
  the course of pillow talk, she revealed the names of
• 55:21
  all of the CIA officers in the station and the
• 55:25
  names of the sources they were running. And so the
• 55:27
  Ghanaians executed these guys.
• 55:30
  Speaker 1: Oh my god.
• 55:32
  Speaker 2: She got nine months in prison, nine months, and they
• 55:37
  offered me forty five years for blowing the whistle on
• 55:41
  the torture program. So my wife and I stayed up
• 55:45
  all night, literally all night, and because Sharon's Graanwage had
• 55:48
  taken a plea, there was literally no case law. So
• 55:51
  what we found we found several things. We found several
• 55:55
  articles from the Harvard Law Review saying this law is unconstitutional,
• 56:00
  it violates the First Amendment, and it is prior restraint
• 56:06
  right like it tells you in advance, you can't say X,
• 56:09
  Y and Z. But because there was no case law,
• 56:12
  you couldn't challenge it in court. And I said, well,
• 56:15
  can't we just appeal appeal to charge and maybe, you know,
• 56:21
  all the way up to the Supreme Court. And they said, yeah,
• 56:23
  we can do that post conviction, and then you're going
• 56:26
  to be forty five years waiting and hoping that the
• 56:29
  Supreme Court does the right thing. We can't do that.
• 56:33
  So so I decided by six am, I'm going to
• 56:39
  turn it down. I believed in my heart I hadn't
• 56:42
  done anything right. This was political. It was a vendetta
• 56:45
  by John Brennan and Obama. By all accounts. I had friends,
• 56:49
  of course who were still working at the Agency and
• 56:51
  working at the CIA or at the White House, and
• 56:54
  they said that Obama had this Nixonian obsession with national
• 57:00
  security leaks, and it's because that came from Brennan. Obama
• 57:04
  was a senator for two years. He didn't have any
• 57:07
  experience doing anything, so he did what John Brennan told
• 57:11
  him to do. And Brennan said, you gotta crack down
• 57:13
  on these leaks. They do nothing but embarrass us. So
• 57:18
  I decided I'm gonna turn it down. Six am, I
• 57:20
  send an email to my attorneys. I had eleven attorneys.
• 57:24
  I was paying half of them, five of them. And
• 57:29
  then one of them writes back and says, put on
• 57:30
  a pot of coffee. We'll be at the house by seven.
• 57:33
  So they come to my house. The four main ones
• 57:36
  came to the house. Plato was the first one in.
• 57:39
  I imagine this eighty year old six foot to two
• 57:43
  hundred and eighty pound, mean old man. He comes in
• 57:47
  and I said, good morning, Plato, and he said, you
• 57:50
  stupid son of a bitch, take the deal. Like that,
• 57:54
  I said, take the deal. You're the one that told
• 57:56
  me not to take the deal. You're the one who
• 57:58
  told me we're going to go to trial and you're
• 58:00
  in this thing. And he says, I only told you
• 58:03
  that to keep your spirits up.
• 58:05
  Speaker 1: Oh God.
• 58:06
  Speaker 2: And then the second one is partner Bob Trout, a
• 58:09
  sweet gentleman, a Southern gentleman. He says, if you were
• 58:16
  my own brother, I would beg you to take this deal.
• 58:21
  And I'm like, now what do I do? And then
• 58:24
  the third who is the guy Mark McDougall, one of
• 58:29
  the best attorneys I've ever encountered in my life and
• 58:33
  the one that I liked and respected the most out
• 58:36
  of all of them. I liked all of them and
• 58:38
  respected all of them, but I felt a connection to
• 58:40
  this guy. He pulls me aside. He was a little
• 58:42
  bit angry, and he said, you know what your problem is.
• 58:46
  Your problem is you think this is about justice, and
• 58:49
  it's not about justice. It's about mitigating damage. Take the deal.
• 58:55
  And I looked at my wife. She's just like, what
• 58:59
  do we going to do? So I took the deal
• 59:04
  and I got two and a half years in prison,
• 59:07
  and they made me do every single day of it.
• 59:10
  In fact, we went to sentencing, and this was in
• 59:14
  the Eastern District of Virginia, the Espionage Court, And the
• 59:18
  reason why we didn't go to trial in the end
• 59:20
  was that the the oj Simpson jury consultants said, if
• 59:24
  we were if we were in any other district in America,
• 59:29
  I would say, let's go for it. We're gonna win
• 59:31
  this thing. But the Eastern District of Virginia, your entire
• 59:35
  jury is going to be people from the CIA, from
• 59:37
  the FBI, from DoD, from intelligence community contractors. He said, buddy,
• 59:43
  you don't have a prayer. Take the deal. Yeah it
• 59:49
  was bad. Wow, So it's sentencing. My attorney said, your honor,
• 59:53
  we request that mister Kiak would be sent to a
• 59:55
  minimum security work camp. She says, any objection from the
• 59:59
  Justice Department. They said, no objection. She goes, Okay, minimum
• 1:00:02
  security work camp. No bars on the windows, no locks
• 1:00:05
  on the doors. You're free to come and go as
• 1:00:07
  you please. You're just on your honor not to abscond.
• 1:00:11
  And most of the guys work. There's a little college
• 1:00:13
  in town. You go sweep the floors or whatever. So
• 1:00:17
  I got to the prison three months later, and it's
• 1:00:23
  weird the system that we have.
• 1:00:24
  Speaker 1: Joe.
• 1:00:25
  Speaker 2: You just you walk up and you knock on the
• 1:00:26
  door and you say, Hi, I'm John Kiriak. I'm here
• 1:00:28
  to turn myself in. That's all you do, and your
• 1:00:31
  friends and family just drive away. And so they said, yeah,
• 1:00:36
  you got to go across the street to the actual prison.
• 1:00:38
  They'll process you and then they just bring you back
• 1:00:40
  over here. And I said, okay. So I go across
• 1:00:42
  the street and I said, I'm John Kiriako, I'm here
• 1:00:46
  to turn myself in. And the guy takes me by
• 1:00:50
  the arm. We go outside and we start walking around
• 1:00:53
  to the back of the prison and I said, no, no,
• 1:00:56
  I'm supposed to be at the minimum security camp across
• 1:00:59
  the street. And the guy laughs at me and he goes, not,
• 1:01:02
  according to my paperwork, you're not. And I was like,
• 1:01:06
  oh my god, take it easy. We later learned Brennan
• 1:01:11
  was so angry at the shortness of my sentence that
• 1:01:15
  he told them make it as difficult as possible. So
• 1:01:21
  I told myself, take it easy. If you make any ruckus,
• 1:01:25
  they're going to put you in solitary. You don't say
• 1:01:27
  a word. So I didn't say a word. It took
• 1:01:29
  him about forty minutes to process me. Then they walked
• 1:01:33
  me to my cell. The only thing the cop said
• 1:01:36
  to me, he says, a word of advice, buddy, if
• 1:01:39
  anybody comes into your cell, uninvited. That's an act of aggression.
• 1:01:44
  And I said, great, thanks, I'm here forty minutes and
• 1:01:47
  now I'm going to get my ass kicked. I appreciate it.
• 1:01:51
  And then I started that whole odyssey.
• 1:01:54
  Speaker 1: And so what kind of prison were you in?
• 1:01:57
  Speaker 2: I was in FCI, the Federal Correctional Institution at Loretto, Pennsylvania,
• 1:02:03
  which is a low security prison, but it's called a
• 1:02:06
  low medium and then there's a high medium. So this
• 1:02:09
  was a low medium. It took me five days to
• 1:02:11
  get access to a phone, and I called Mark McDougall,
• 1:02:15
  the attorney that I liked so much, and I said, Mark,
• 1:02:19
  they put me in the actual prison with the pedophiles
• 1:02:23
  and the mafia dons and the drug kingpins. I said,
• 1:02:26
  what do I do? He says, oh my god. Well,
• 1:02:30
  he said, we could file emotion, but it'll be two
• 1:02:33
  years before we get hearing, and you'll be home by then.
• 1:02:36
  He said, buddy, I'm sorry, You're going to have to
• 1:02:37
  tough it out. And so that's what I did.
• 1:02:42
  Speaker 1: Wow, So you have this long career working for the government,
• 1:02:50
  they put you away, and what is it like for
• 1:02:54
  you to feel so betrayed and to get out and
• 1:03:02
  what do you do when you get out.
• 1:03:05
  Speaker 2: I was frankly very angry when I got out. I
• 1:03:07
  didn't realize how angry I was. Like people would mention
• 1:03:11
  it to me, like maybe you should talk to somebody,
• 1:03:14
  maybe you should, you know, think about a pharmaceutical option.
• 1:03:18
  And I was like, why, there's nothing wrong with me. Yeah,
• 1:03:21
  I'm ready to fight and march and you know, raise
• 1:03:24
  my fist against the Obama administration. And so I was wrong,
• 1:03:30
  of course I was. I was so angry that that
• 1:03:36
  it wasn't even healthy for the people around me. But
• 1:03:39
  I'll tell you, Joe, the hardest thing is you think
• 1:03:43
  you can just step back into your life again, and
• 1:03:47
  you'll never be able to step back into your life.
• 1:03:51
  So I thought, okay, well, I'm highly educated. I have
• 1:03:55
  a bachelor's degree in Middle Eastern Studies. I have a
• 1:03:58
  master's degree in legislative policy analysis. I finished my PhD
• 1:04:03
  case class work in international affairs. I got rejected by McDonald's,
• 1:04:11
  by Safeway, by Target, by Uber. We don't hire felons.
• 1:04:17
  I mean, I couldn't get a job anywhere. And you broke,
• 1:04:21
  and I was broke, bankrupt.
• 1:04:24
  Speaker 1: So you couldn't even get a job driving for uber.
• 1:04:27
  Speaker 2: Uber turned me down. Yeah, it's crazy, it's crazy, But
• 1:04:31
  you know what, though, what did you do well? I
• 1:04:35
  was confident that I was right and they were wrong.
• 1:04:40
  And my wife, unfortunately she's now my ex wife, but
• 1:04:45
  she gave me some of the best advice anybody ever
• 1:04:48
  gave me. She said, you have to keep telling your
• 1:04:52
  side of the story because eventually they're going to move
• 1:04:55
  on to their next victim. And if you keep talking,
• 1:04:59
  your side of the story is going to be the
• 1:05:01
  side of record, and eventually the truth is going to
• 1:05:04
  come out. And sure enough, six weeks before before I
• 1:05:09
  was released from prison, I called her. I was allowed
• 1:05:13
  to call her every other day for fifteen minutes. So
• 1:05:16
  I called her and I said, how is your day?
• 1:05:18
  And she said it was great? And I said, really great.
• 1:05:21
  Why was it so great? And she said because the
• 1:05:24
  Senate Torture Report was released today and it proved that
• 1:05:27
  everything you said was true. And I said, that is great,
• 1:05:31
  and she said. John McCain stood up on the floor
• 1:05:33
  of the Senate and said, if it weren't for John Kyriaku,
• 1:05:36
  the American people would never have had any idea what
• 1:05:39
  the CIA was doing in their name. And so when
• 1:05:42
  I got home, God bless him. One of the first
• 1:05:45
  calls I received was from John McCain's chief of staff,
• 1:05:48
  and he said, Senator McCain says, welcome home, and he
• 1:05:51
  wants to know what he can do to be helpful.
• 1:05:54
  And I said, oh my God, I said tell him.
• 1:05:56
  I said, thank you. I liked McCain very much from
• 1:05:59
  one I was working on Carrie's staff. Carrie was a
• 1:06:01
  little jealous of McCain, and McCain would go out of
• 1:06:05
  his way to shake my hand and say hi. Carrie
• 1:06:07
  said to me one time, why don't you to get
• 1:06:09
  a room or something? And I said, now, I said,
• 1:06:11
  it's we have this connection over torture. I said, McCain
• 1:06:14
  takes me seriously, and I take him seriously. And so
• 1:06:19
  when I spoke to McCain, I said, these damn Obama
• 1:06:22
  people they confiscated my pension and I'm going to have
• 1:06:26
  to work until the day I die. They drove me
• 1:06:28
  into bankruptcy and took my pension. So he came up
• 1:06:36
  with this idea. It was a great idea to write
• 1:06:39
  an amendment. My attorney wrote this amendment to the National
• 1:06:43
  Defense Authorization Act of twenty sixteen, and it said that
• 1:06:48
  every American convicted of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act
• 1:06:55
  between October first and October thirty first, twenty twelve, shall
• 1:07:00
  hereby have his pension reinstated. So, of course I'm the
• 1:07:04
  only person in the world that that refers to. So
• 1:07:07
  he said, nobody reads these fifteen hundred page bills. We're
• 1:07:11
  gonna slip it in there. And he said, I'm going
• 1:07:12
  to be on the conference committee. We'll get it taken
• 1:07:14
  care of. And then he got sick. He got a
• 1:07:17
  brain tumor, and he wasn't named to the Conference committee,
• 1:07:21
  and so they pulled it back out again, and then
• 1:07:24
  he died. And so here I am ten years later.
• 1:07:30
  The only way that this can be made right is
• 1:07:36
  with a presidential pardon. And that's what I've been working
• 1:07:39
  on for years now.
• 1:07:42
  Speaker 1: So what did you do for money?
• 1:07:45
  Speaker 2: I was offered a job at a small think tank
• 1:07:47
  in Washington called the Institute for Policy Studies, and they said,
• 1:07:53
  we'll give you an office, but you're gonna have to
• 1:07:55
  raise your own salary. And so it was just like
• 1:07:58
  constant gofund me. So I did that for a year.
• 1:08:01
  I made twenty thousand dollars for the year, and I said,
• 1:08:04
  I can't do this. It's untenable. And so I just decided, look,
• 1:08:09
  no company is going to hire me, right, I can't
• 1:08:12
  go back into government again, and so I'm going to
• 1:08:15
  have to work for myself. So I had already written.
• 1:08:20
  My first book made number five on the New York
• 1:08:22
  Times Bestsellers list. My second book, I wrote, Longhand from Prison.
• 1:08:27
  I ended up winning two literary awards for that book.
• 1:08:29
  I won the Pen First Amendment Award, which, along with
• 1:08:32
  the Pen Faulkner, the Pulitzer, and the Edgar Allan Poe
• 1:08:36
  is one of the Big Four. And then I won
• 1:08:37
  the Forward Reviews Memoir of the Year. That year, I
• 1:08:40
  thought I'm going to keep writing books. I started writing
• 1:08:43
  a column that ended up being syndicated through the Consortium
• 1:08:48
  for Independent Journalism. So it's like two hundred small town
• 1:08:51
  papers around the country, and you know, a little bit here,
• 1:08:56
  a little bit there, consulting. And then the Greek government.
• 1:09:01
  I happen to be Greek American. My grandparents all came
• 1:09:03
  from the island of Rhodes. As soon as I was arrested,
• 1:09:08
  like within a day, the Greek ambassador called me and
• 1:09:11
  he said, what can we do to be helpful, and
• 1:09:13
  I said, you can give me citizenship, and man like that,
• 1:09:18
  I got Greek citizenship, and so as soon as I
• 1:09:22
  got out of prison, the Greek government hired me to
• 1:09:24
  help them write a new whistleblower protection law, and then
• 1:09:28
  they passed it quickly. The Parliament passed it into law,
• 1:09:31
  and then the European Union adopted it. So I went
• 1:09:34
  to Brussels and I testified there, and then they repackaged it.
• 1:09:39
  Now it's the law of the land and all of
• 1:09:40
  the European Union. And then people in the States began
• 1:09:44
  taking me more seriously. I started doing some paid speaking gigs.
• 1:09:48
  I got hired as an adjunct professor at a couple
• 1:09:50
  of different universities, and then you know, after a while
• 1:09:55
  you could make an okay living. I'm still going to
• 1:09:58
  have to work until the day I die, because I
• 1:10:00
  have literally nothing saved. It all went to the attorneys,
• 1:10:06
  and you know, hope for the best. I will say
• 1:10:09
  that I was a third generation Democrat. I left the
• 1:10:14
  Democratic Party ages ago. John Brennan and Barack Obama's actions
• 1:10:22
  convinced me that I had done the right thing, and
• 1:10:26
  now I have found common cause with populist Republicans. You know,
• 1:10:34
  you don't have to agree on every issue, right, you
• 1:10:36
  don't have to like everybody and everything that they believe
• 1:10:40
  in and everything they stand for. But I've struck up
• 1:10:44
  a great friendship, for example, with Tucker Carlson, sweetest guy
• 1:10:49
  in the world and a great supporter of mine. And
• 1:10:54
  Judge Napolitano. It's a love fest every time that the
• 1:10:58
  two of us get together. And I realized that, you know,
• 1:11:03
  this thing, this this political system we have, it's antiquated,
• 1:11:08
  It doesn't work. You have to you have to engage
• 1:11:11
  with the individual like I never thought that I would
• 1:11:14
  be agreeing with Marjorie Taylor Green on some of these
• 1:11:17
  these civil liberties issues, right, or Thomas Massey or Bernie
• 1:11:22
  Sanders for that matter. But I've realized that now I've
• 1:11:26
  I've got to I've got to stand up for what's right,
• 1:11:29
  not what the DNC happens to think what's right, or
• 1:11:33
  some politician that I used to, you know, think I
• 1:11:36
  had respect for thinks is right. A couple of nights
• 1:11:41
  before I left for prison, the director the former director
• 1:11:46
  of the CI's Counter Terrorism Center, who later became the
• 1:11:48
  Deputy director for Operations and was very close to Brennan.
• 1:11:52
  He was the d d O when Brennan was the
• 1:11:54
  director of the CIA. He tweeted at me and he said,
• 1:11:58
  don't drop the soap with a a laughing emoji. I
• 1:12:02
  gave myself a couple hours to cool off, and then
• 1:12:06
  I texted back and I said, Jose, I'm on the
• 1:12:09
  right side of history and you are not. And that
• 1:12:14
  gave me such peace. I knew I could go to prison,
• 1:12:19
  survive this just fine, and come out and still make
• 1:12:23
  an impact. And you know, knock on wood, that's how
• 1:12:26
  it's worked out. True. It's ugly, you know, and you
• 1:12:34
  get to prison. One of my attorneys said, hey, I've
• 1:12:39
  had I've collected a list of six hundred emails email
• 1:12:43
  addresses from people who want to know how you're doing.
• 1:12:47
  Once you get there, once you get comfortable, just send
• 1:12:51
  me a letter and I'll send it around to these people.
• 1:12:54
  I said, okay, great. It took me. You don't realize it,
• 1:12:57
  but you're in shock for the first week or two.
• 1:13:00
  And then I started settling into the routine and it
• 1:13:05
  was kind of I mean, it was pretty screwed up
• 1:13:08
  that first day. Twenty minutes after the cop warned me
• 1:13:12
  about people coming into my room unannounced. These two guys
• 1:13:16
  just walk in, boldly, just walk in. I jump up.
• 1:13:18
  I put my fist up, I go, what do you want?
• 1:13:21
  One of them has a swastika on his neck. It
• 1:13:24
  took up his entire neck, it came up onto his face.
• 1:13:27
  The other one had fuck you tattooed on his eyelids.
• 1:13:31
  So I go, what do you want? And the swastika
• 1:13:35
  guy says you the new guy. I said, yeah, so,
• 1:13:38
  and he says you a fag. I said, no, I'm
• 1:13:41
  not a fag. He said you are rat. I said no,
• 1:13:45
  I didn't have anybody else in my case. I'm not
• 1:13:46
  a rat. And he says, you a chomo. I go,
• 1:13:50
  I don't know what that word means. He goes, chomo
• 1:13:53
  child molester. I said, now, I'm not a child molester.
• 1:13:57
  And he goes, okay, you could sit with the Arians
• 1:13:59
  in the cafeteria. And I was like, oh, I guess
• 1:14:04
  I'm with the Arians now. Grand yeah. And then the
• 1:14:09
  guy across the hall from me was the boss of
• 1:14:11
  the Banano family, and one day he said to me,
• 1:14:14
  I would get the New York Times and he would
• 1:14:17
  get the New York Post and we would trade at
• 1:14:19
  the end of each day, he asked me, let me
• 1:14:23
  ask you something. He says, why you sit with those
• 1:14:26
  Nazi retards in the cafeteria. I said, I don't know, Pete.
• 1:14:30
  My first day here, they told me to sit with them.
• 1:14:33
  He goes, from today, you're with the Italians, and I said, awesome.
• 1:14:39
  And they became my closest friends. I mean, I got
• 1:14:43
  a book out of it. They were absolutely wonderful, honorable, honest,
• 1:14:51
  fun the smallest so called gang in the prison, but
• 1:14:55
  the one that commanded the most respect. And once word
• 1:14:59
  was out that I was with the Italians, it was
• 1:15:01
  hands off. And it was thanks to one guy shout
• 1:15:05
  out to Mark Lanzelotti. Mark was from Philly and he
• 1:15:08
  saw in the New York Times I was going to
• 1:15:10
  be assigned to that prison on a Sunday. I was
• 1:15:13
  assigned on Thursday. And he took it upon himself to
• 1:15:19
  go to every one of the Italians to say, there's
• 1:15:22
  a CIA guy coming here. He's not an FBI agent.
• 1:15:27
  The FBI are cops and rats. The CIA protected us
• 1:15:31
  from the Muslims, and they're like, oh okay, And so
• 1:15:35
  it was, you know, welcome, no problems.
• 1:15:41
  Speaker 1: God, it has to be insanely stressful.
• 1:15:43
  Speaker 2: It was like it was like living in the Twilight Zone.
• 1:15:45
  The stress, the stress will kill you. It's incredible. You
• 1:15:49
  see people break down all the time. They just lose it.
• 1:15:52
  And it's not like you're gonna, you know, be taken
• 1:15:53
  out to some medical units someplace. You go to solitary
• 1:15:57
  and you can live or die down in there. Yeah. Oh,
• 1:16:01
  so I was telling you. So I waited about six
• 1:16:04
  weeks before I was comfortable enough to write a letter.
• 1:16:08
  So I very arrogantly called it Letter from Loretto because
• 1:16:12
  I had such respect for Martin Luther King's Letter from
• 1:16:15
  Birmingham Jail. And so I said two things in this.
• 1:16:19
  I mean, I talked about the food, and I talked
• 1:16:21
  about the Italians. But I said two things. I said,
• 1:16:25
  there was this one guard who was really abusive. She
• 1:16:27
  was absolutely horrible. You know that phrase rode hard and
• 1:16:30
  put away wet. That was this. That was this woman,
• 1:16:33
  all tatted out from you know, the neck down, and
• 1:16:36
  just a nasty, mean, old, awful, awful person. So I
• 1:16:42
  was walking through the hall one day and she said, hey,
• 1:16:45
  are you that motherfucker whose name I can't pronounce it?
• 1:16:48
  Mail call and I go kiriaku, just like it's spelled.
• 1:16:54
  She goes, how about if I call you fuck face
• 1:16:57
  like that? So I said classy and I walked away.
• 1:17:03
  Somebody later told me they're not allowed to talk to
• 1:17:06
  us that way. That's a violation of you know, Code
• 1:17:08
  eleven point eight sub section you know, b whatever. So
• 1:17:13
  I wrote it in the in the letter, and I
• 1:17:16
  was just like, you know, life in prison. What am
• 1:17:17
  I going to do this? This woman swears at me,
• 1:17:19
  there's nothing I can do. The other thing was more important.
• 1:17:23
  I had been there three days and one of my
• 1:17:26
  cellmates was an Australian arsonist, and he said, let me
• 1:17:29
  walk you around and introduce you to the guys. I said, okay.
• 1:17:34
  We go to this other housing unit and there's a
• 1:17:37
  little tiny guy there who didn't speak any English. And
• 1:17:41
  he said, this is I forget what his name is,
• 1:17:43
  Imat or something. He's from Iraq. And I said, I
• 1:17:46
  should have been Metaftick. It's very nice to meet you.
• 1:17:48
  And he says, ay, but I'm in Iraq. I said, yeah, great,
• 1:17:53
  you're from Iraq. I was in Iraq. It's very nice
• 1:17:56
  to meet you. Turns out he was there on a
• 1:17:58
  terrorism charge. He was the e mom of some mosque
• 1:18:02
  in New York and somebody was trying to sell a
• 1:18:04
  sting or missile to somebody, and he translated the document,
• 1:18:08
  the bill of sale, and he got wrapped up in
• 1:18:10
  this terrorism case. So I get called into the lieutenant's
• 1:18:15
  office the next day. And usually if you're being called
• 1:18:17
  into the lieutenant's office, you're going straight to solitary. So
• 1:18:21
  I hear my name Kuriaku lieutenant's office immediately, always with
• 1:18:26
  he immediately, and they know you can't do it immediately
• 1:18:28
  because all the doors are locked. So I wait for
• 1:18:31
  a ten minute move period. The bells ring and I
• 1:18:35
  go to the lieutenant's office. I said, you wanted to
• 1:18:37
  see me, and they have this guy's picture on a
• 1:18:42
  computer screen. You know this guy, I said, I don't
• 1:18:45
  know him. I met him yesterday. What'd you say to him?
• 1:18:49
  I said, I said, nice to meet you. What did
• 1:18:52
  he say to you? He said nice to meet you too.
• 1:18:55
  Oh yeah, Well after you walked out, he called a
• 1:18:59
  number in Pakistan and they told him to kill you.
• 1:19:02
  I said, get the fuck out of you. I could
• 1:19:04
  kill this guy with my thumb. Oh no, don't do that.
• 1:19:07
  We've been looking for a reason to transfer him out.
• 1:19:11
  I'm like, okay, So every time I see this guy,
• 1:19:15
  I give him the stink eye right, and then he
• 1:19:17
  gives me the stink eye back. But then the more
• 1:19:20
  I thought about it, the more I thought, that doesn't
• 1:19:21
  make any sense. He's Kurdish. He only speaks Arabic and Kurdish.
• 1:19:28
  Why would he call a number in Pakistan when they
• 1:19:30
  don't speak Arabic in Pakistan. That just didn't make sense.
• 1:19:34
  So I saw him in the yard and I went
• 1:19:36
  up to him, and he got kind of scared, like
• 1:19:38
  he was going to try to defend himself. And I had,
• 1:19:40
  you know, six inches and one hundred pounds on this guy.
• 1:19:43
  So I said, I said, wait a minute, I just
• 1:19:45
  want to ask a question. Did the cops say anything
• 1:19:49
  to you about me? And he said yeah. I said,
• 1:19:52
  what did they say to you? And he said they
• 1:19:55
  told me that after we met, you called a number
• 1:19:58
  in Washington and they told you to kill me. And
• 1:20:01
  I said, oh, they did, did they? So I went
• 1:20:04
  back to the law library and I looked this up
• 1:20:06
  and this was a Class D felony. It was conspiring
• 1:20:10
  to commit violence in a federal facility. It's punishable by
• 1:20:14
  up to five years in prison. So I wrote it
• 1:20:17
  in my letter and I sent it to my attorney,
• 1:20:20
  and I didn't give it a second thought. I didn't
• 1:20:22
  know my attorney was friends with Arianna Huffington, who then
• 1:20:25
  put it on. Huffington posted this banner headline millions of hits.
• 1:20:30
  The next thing I know, Jake Tapper drives to the
• 1:20:33
  prison to interview me. And it's in I mean, it's
• 1:20:36
  everywhere from from CNN to Playboy to the Economist and
• 1:20:41
  Time magazine when Time magazine was a thing. And NPR's
• 1:20:45
  calling the prison to interview me. And the next thing
• 1:20:48
  I know him called the warden's office. Well, that's in
• 1:20:50
  an off limits part of the facility. So the warden
• 1:20:55
  calls me in. He's like, I'm gonna send you to
• 1:20:58
  solitary right now. And I thought, you know, is now
• 1:21:01
  the time to be to be humble before the warden?
• 1:21:05
  Or should I stake my claim? And I said, Warden,
• 1:21:09
  with all due respect, I've gone nose to nose with
• 1:21:14
  al Qaeda, with Hasbala, with the Iranians, and you want
• 1:21:19
  me to be afraid of you? Give me some credit.
• 1:21:24
  He said, yeah, we'll see what you say when you've
• 1:21:27
  spent some time in solitary. I said, I've lived in Yemen,
• 1:21:32
  in Pakistan. I'm not afraid of your Loretto Pennsylvania solitary. Besides,
• 1:21:38
  I said, go ahead and send me to solitary. CNN's
• 1:21:42
  going to be waiting for you next to your car
• 1:21:44
  in the parking lot. And I just looked at him.
• 1:21:48
  I never went to solitary, not for a minute.
• 1:21:53
  Speaker 1: Wow, geez. So they're trying to set you guys up.
• 1:21:58
  Mm hmm, trying to get you guys at it, scho
• 1:22:00
  his throat hopefully, Yeah. Something.
• 1:22:03
  Speaker 2: They did it one other time. My one of my attorneys.
• 1:22:06
  Speaker 1: Didn't know who orchestrated that.
• 1:22:09
  Speaker 2: No, that No, I don't think he was smart enough.
• 1:22:14
  I don't think he cared enough. It had to come
• 1:22:17
  from the agency.
• 1:22:18
  Speaker 1: Oh my god.
• 1:22:19
  Speaker 2: There was one other incident too. I lived in the
• 1:22:23
  same block of cells with a with an Afghan American
• 1:22:28
  pharmacist who had an oxy problem. Nice guy, and he
• 1:22:33
  came up to me one day and he said, Hey,
• 1:22:35
  the spokesman for the Taliban is here now and he
• 1:22:38
  wants to meet you. I said, the spokesman for the Taliban.
• 1:22:41
  I said, are you talking about that case in New Jersey?
• 1:22:44
  And he said yeah. I said, I don't have anything
• 1:22:47
  to say to the spokesman with Taliban. I don't want
• 1:22:49
  to meet him. And he said, oh, okay, I'll tell him.
• 1:22:53
  So I'm out in the yard one day, and my
• 1:22:57
  attorney had warned me they're they're upset at the shortness
• 1:23:01
  of your sentence, so be very careful. They're going to
• 1:23:05
  try to set you up and add years on. So
• 1:23:08
  I'm ount in the yard and here comes this guy
• 1:23:11
  with a beard down to his waist and he's got
• 1:23:13
  his hand out to shake my hand, and I put
• 1:23:16
  my hands up so as not to touch him. And
• 1:23:19
  I looked just past him, and there's a guard in
• 1:23:22
  the woods outside the thing with a long distance camera lens,
• 1:23:27
  and he's going click click, click, click click. And I said,
• 1:23:30
  don't you even think about touching me. And he said, oh,
• 1:23:34
  come on, man, come on, we have a lot in common.
• 1:23:37
  I said, we have nothing in common. I spent half
• 1:23:39
  my career trying to kill people like you. I said,
• 1:23:42
  get away from me, don't touch me, or you're going
• 1:23:45
  to end up unconscious on the ground. And he walked away,
• 1:23:49
  and then he got transferred out, and I said, isn't
• 1:23:52
  it interesting that the spokesman for the Taliban was sent
• 1:23:56
  to our prison and was only here for four days.
• 1:24:00
  Isn't that interesting? And then they just gave up.
• 1:24:03
  Speaker 1: Wow, this kind of stuff is so hard to believe.
• 1:24:10
  Speaker 2: It's America, and you don't want to believe this about America.
• 1:24:13
  Speaker 1: You want to believe we're the good guys. Yeah, and
• 1:24:16
  you want to believe that we'd never turn on our
• 1:24:17
  own like that over something that's.
• 1:24:20
  Speaker 2: Just yeah, but they do.
• 1:24:23
  Speaker 1: But the crazy thing is, it's like the CIA torture
• 1:24:26
  program wasn't even effective.
• 1:24:28
  Speaker 2: No, that's the thing. It wasn't even But you know what, though, Joe,
• 1:24:34
  when these guys die and they've started to die, in
• 1:24:37
  their obituaries, it's going to say that they were among
• 1:24:42
  the creators of the CIA's torture program, and so they
• 1:24:47
  have a vested interest in repeating this lie over and
• 1:24:51
  over and over again that it was the right thing
• 1:24:53
  to do.
• 1:24:54
  Speaker 1: But what I don't understand is wouldn't they want to
• 1:24:57
  be effective?
• 1:25:00
  Speaker 2: Think if they were clear headed.
• 1:25:02
  Speaker 1: Yes, that's the only thing that makes the least sense
• 1:25:04
  to me. Like I idealistically, I like to think of
• 1:25:09
  the people that are in charge of the CIA of
• 1:25:12
  having a very important role in national security. And if
• 1:25:16
  you're in a position where you have a very important
• 1:25:18
  role in national security, it's it's imperative to do what
• 1:25:23
  is most effective. And if torture is not most effective,
• 1:25:29
  then don't do it. Then you would abandon torture and
• 1:25:32
  use those coercion tactics that the other guy was using.
• 1:25:35
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right, And in fact, they ended up abandoning
• 1:25:40
  the torture program. Yeah. Mitchell and Jessin took their one
• 1:25:44
  hundred and eight million dollars and they retired to Florida.
• 1:25:48
  And then subsequent CIA directors following George Tennant said yeah,
• 1:25:53
  you know, this didn't work. We're not going to do
• 1:25:55
  it anymore.
• 1:25:55
  Speaker 1: Sure, God, I mean.
• 1:26:03
  Speaker 2: I have to laugh just because it's so nuts. What
• 1:26:06
  else can you do?
• 1:26:07
  Speaker 1: It's beyond nuts. It's disgusting, and it's just amazing that
• 1:26:14
  they could get away with them. Yeah, and they have.
• 1:26:18
  Speaker 2: Nobody's been prosecuted, nobody.
• 1:26:21
  Speaker 1: Does Trump know about all the stuff.
• 1:26:24
  Speaker 2: About my stuff?
• 1:26:25
  Speaker 1: Yeah, like if you ever, I don't try to get
• 1:26:28
  a pardon out him.
• 1:26:29
  Speaker 2: I've tried. I let me rephrase, I am trying. So
• 1:26:34
  I have a letter that that Ronald Reagan's former Deputy
• 1:26:39
  Attorney General generously wrote asking the President to pardon me.
• 1:26:44
  Tucker Carlson signed it. Judge Napolitano signed it, Doug Deeson,
• 1:26:49
  who's a friend of the president, signed it. Sid Miller,
• 1:26:51
  who's here in Texas, has signed it. And the president's
• 1:26:56
  former US attorney in Utah has signed it. And then
• 1:27:00
  and I sent it to Ed Martin, the US Parton Attorney,
• 1:27:04
  and then other people have said, oh, I would have
• 1:27:08
  signed that. So we have a second letter. Doctor Phil
• 1:27:13
  has agreed to sign it. There are a couple of
• 1:27:18
  other people, high level people. Ken Higgy and who is
• 1:27:20
  the head of the President's transition team, has signed it.
• 1:27:25
  And there are a couple of others. We had really
• 1:27:27
  good news yesterday from the CIA director John Ratcliffe, and
• 1:27:32
  he said that the CIA has no objection if the
• 1:27:37
  President were to pardon me. That's a big deal. We
• 1:27:41
  have also a nice one sentence statement from Tulca Gabbard
• 1:27:44
  saying that she has no objection to a pardon. So
• 1:27:49
  I don't know, man, I'm hoping for the best. You
• 1:27:51
  know what they say in business school, hope is not
• 1:27:53
  a strategy. But I genuinely don't know what else to do.
• 1:28:01
  Speaker 1: Now you're doing all these conversations. She did the conversation
• 1:28:05
  with Tucker, he did his show, You're now doing my show.
• 1:28:09
  You've done a bunch of other shows. Do you have
• 1:28:11
  any concern that in exposing more of what has been
• 1:28:15
  done due that it somehow limits your possibility of being
• 1:28:18
  pardoned because you're exposing so many people that may still
• 1:28:23
  be working there.
• 1:28:25
  Speaker 2: I'm told that all of my detractors are either dead
• 1:28:29
  or retired. A friend of mine from the CIA called
• 1:28:32
  me the other day to say something very funny. That
• 1:28:35
  she was sitting in a mandatory security briefing and she
• 1:28:39
  said one of the slides was just a picture of me,
• 1:28:42
  and it said the insider threat underneath. And she said,
• 1:28:47
  everybody started to boo, and the instructor said, why, why
• 1:28:52
  are you booing? And one of the guys said, he's
• 1:28:55
  not an insider threat, he's a whistleblower. And she said,
• 1:29:00
  in the next running of the class, my picture was removed,
• 1:29:04
  so I won. I won, and John Brennan lost. That's
• 1:29:08
  really what it's come down tough.
• 1:29:15
  Speaker 1: It's so hard to hear these stories.
• 1:29:17
  Speaker 2: It's terrible.
• 1:29:17
  Speaker 1: It's so hard to imagine that government could be so
• 1:29:21
  discussed Oh.
• 1:29:22
  Speaker 2: My god, I wouldn't wish this on my worst enemy. Truly,
• 1:29:25
  I wouldn't wish it on anybody. And you know, think
• 1:29:27
  of it this way. Also at the working level, these
• 1:29:31
  FBI agents don't get promoted by not arresting you. The
• 1:29:36
  assistant US attorneys don't get promoted by not prosecuting you
• 1:29:40
  or by giving you a short sentence.
• 1:29:43
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 1:29:43
  Speaker 2: They all see themselves, as you know, having the corner
• 1:29:47
  office at the law firm someday or running for Congress
• 1:29:50
  or for the governor, and they're going to make that
• 1:29:53
  career on your back.
• 1:29:55
  Speaker 1: That's the problem, right, because there's a lot of cases
• 1:29:58
  where people are setting people up. And you know, I
• 1:30:01
  was talking to a friend of mine about this one
• 1:30:03
  case where there was a I'm sure you remember it.
• 1:30:05
  There was a nineteen year old I think he's probably
• 1:30:10
  at the very least intellectually challenged guy, and they tricked
• 1:30:13
  him into they radicalized him, gave him a fake bomb,
• 1:30:18
  gave him a cell phone.
• 1:30:19
  Speaker 2: Do you know this exactly what you're talking about.
• 1:30:21
  Speaker 1: And then swept in and got him. And he wasn't
• 1:30:26
  planning on doing anything. It was they talked him into
• 1:30:29
  doing the whole thing. He wasn't a bright person and
• 1:30:33
  they got an arrest because of that. So it adds
• 1:30:36
  to their career. It's it like when I was having
• 1:30:38
  a conversation about this, we brought up the governor that
• 1:30:42
  they were planning on kidnapping the governor Whittner, Yeah, Michigan. Yeah,
• 1:30:48
  and that twelve of the fourteen people were working with
• 1:30:51
  the FBI.
• 1:30:52
  Speaker 2: Yeah, which is just Listen, there are well documented cases
• 1:30:56
  where the FBI infiltrates a group and they go to
• 1:31:00
  a meeting and literally everybody in the meeting is an
• 1:31:04
  FBI agent, Like what is that? Is this a joke?
• 1:31:09
  This is what the American taxpayer's money goes for. You
• 1:31:11
  remember have you heard of the rude eighty two bridge
• 1:31:14
  plot in Cleveland? No, there are three morons sitting in
• 1:31:18
  a bar getting drunk.
• 1:31:20
  Speaker 1: Oh I did hear about this.
• 1:31:21
  Speaker 2: The other guy comes in, Hey, you know what we
• 1:31:23
  should do? It would be so much fun blow up
• 1:31:25
  the rute eighty two bridge. I have some explosives and
• 1:31:28
  these guys are drunk, They're like, yeah, let's do rude
• 1:31:30
  ady two bridge. Well, the guy with the explosives is
• 1:31:32
  an FBI and for me, and he set them all up.
• 1:31:34
  And they got like twenty eighteen and fifteen years in prison.
• 1:31:38
  It was the FBI's idea, not their idea. They're just
• 1:31:42
  sitting in a bar drinking.
• 1:31:43
  Speaker 1: Well, how about January six how about January sixth? This
• 1:31:46
  is there you go. I was trying to explain to
• 1:31:48
  Jim gaff again. One day, Jim Gaffkin was talking about
• 1:31:52
  what they did in January sixth. I go, do you
• 1:31:54
  understand that there were paid people that were working for
• 1:31:58
  the federal government. They were in employees of the federal
• 1:32:01
  government that were on that lawn trying to convince people
• 1:32:05
  to go in. And he was very incredulous. He did,
• 1:32:09
  He did not believe it. And I said, there are
• 1:32:12
  agent provocateurs, Yes, that are That is their job to
• 1:32:16
  try to get you to do something illegal.
• 1:32:18
  Speaker 2: Exactly so they can build their careers by making these arrests.
• 1:32:22
  Speaker 1: Not just that, but demonize the president the present percent
• 1:32:26
  to a much larger extent, to charge him with insurrection,
• 1:32:30
  to say that he was plotting to overthrow the government.
• 1:32:34
  Speaker 2: Yeah, And as it turns out, the only one who
• 1:32:36
  was actually plotting to overthrow the government was John Brennan.
• 1:32:41
  Speaker 1: How was he plotting to overthrow the government?
• 1:32:42
  Speaker 2: In twenty fifteen and twenty sixteen with Russia Gate. Oh right, right,
• 1:32:47
  you know I remember talking to CIA friends of mine saying,
• 1:32:51
  you know, they taught us in training that you've got
• 1:32:54
  to follow the evidence, and there's no evidence that any
• 1:32:58
  of this happened. I work with Christopher Steele on an
• 1:33:01
  operation in London twenty five years ago. Twenty six years ago.
• 1:33:09
  There was this fundamental misunderstanding of what an operations officer
• 1:33:15
  was supposed to do. An operations officer goes out and
• 1:33:18
  collects intelligence and then sends it back and that's it.
• 1:33:23
  Then it's up to the analyst to decide this is great,
• 1:33:26
  this is crap, this is not true, this is partially true. Whatever.
• 1:33:31
  So he goes out there, talks to whatever low level,
• 1:33:34
  terrible sources he happened to have, writes all this nonsense down,
• 1:33:39
  sends it back and they were like, oh, look what
• 1:33:42
  Donald Trump did. He hired prostitutes to pee on Barack
• 1:33:47
  Obama's bed. No he didn't. One guy made this up
• 1:33:53
  and Christopher Steele wrote it and sent it back. That
• 1:33:55
  doesn't make it fact.
• 1:33:57
  Speaker 1: It wasn't it funded by the Hillary Clint It sure was. Yes,
• 1:34:02
  it was h which is equally wild.
• 1:34:06
  Speaker 2: You made it another point. I wanted to address these
• 1:34:09
  January sixth people. Let's say that some of them did
• 1:34:15
  do whatever, broke the window or went into the building unauthorized. Okay,
• 1:34:23
  then that's deserving of a smack on the hand and
• 1:34:26
  a strongly worded letter and maybe a thousand dollars. Fine,
• 1:34:30
  don't do that again, thirty years in prison again. Is
• 1:34:35
  society really better off by locking all these people up
• 1:34:41
  and spending millions and millions of dollars of the taxpayer's
• 1:34:44
  money to do it? Of course not.
• 1:34:47
  Speaker 1: No, of course not. But it also just divides us
• 1:34:49
  even it does, And it also very much distorted the
• 1:34:53
  narrative with people like Jim Gaffigan, who's a friend of mine,
• 1:34:57
  who's a very left leaning comedian, and he had it
• 1:35:02
  in his mind that these people win it. And they
• 1:35:05
  also have this thing where they say a cop.
• 1:35:06
  Speaker 2: Was murdered, right, that's not true.
• 1:35:09
  Speaker 1: They say it over and over again. That's not true.
• 1:35:11
  One cop died after the fact of a heart attack.
• 1:35:16
  You could say, maybe it was because of the stress
• 1:35:19
  of January sixth, perhaps.
• 1:35:22
  Speaker 2: Maybe maybe not, maybe not, Maybe he shouldn't have been
• 1:35:25
  a cop.
• 1:35:25
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, if you can die off health problems, right, Like,
• 1:35:29
  that's not normal to just die of a heart attack
• 1:35:32
  because of a very stressful days. But that's it. This
• 1:35:35
  idea that they killed cops, that that narrative keeps coming out.
• 1:35:41
  It was an insurrection. They murdered cops, they broke into
• 1:35:44
  the White House, they were looking for Nancy Pelosi, they
• 1:35:47
  were going to kill her. Like, Okay, are you sure,
• 1:35:50
  because there's a lot of the story that's bullshit. Now
• 1:35:52
  it turns out at one point in time they were
• 1:35:54
  saying it was twenty FBI agents. Now the latest number
• 1:35:58
  is two hundred and seventy. Right, Yeah, that's huge. That's
• 1:36:02
  a lot of people. That's a lot of people that
• 1:36:05
  are encouraging people to break in. And there's many instances
• 1:36:09
  of these suspected people that are on camera, a lot
• 1:36:12
  of them wearing face masks. There's one of them, more
• 1:36:15
  guys removing the broken glass from the window and encouraging
• 1:36:19
  people to go in, and another guy gets into spaces
• 1:36:22
  he goes, do not do that, and then he pushes
• 1:36:24
  that guy, fuck you, and the other guy backs off.
• 1:36:30
  How is that not being investigated as a serious crime?
• 1:36:36
  And that is a serious it's a violation of what
• 1:36:42
  you're supposed to be doing in the first place. If
• 1:36:44
  the FBI was on that loan, on that lawn, I
• 1:36:47
  would hope what they would be doing is informing people
• 1:36:52
  entering into this building is a felony breaking these windows,
• 1:36:56
  getting into this building is you do not want to
• 1:36:59
  do that. If you want to peacefully protest, do that.
• 1:37:02
  But I'm telling you this will fuck with you for
• 1:37:04
  the rest of your life and most likely ruin it.
• 1:37:08
  Speaker 2: I think you're one hundred percent right.
• 1:37:10
  Speaker 1: That's what I would hope from law enforcement. I wouldn't
• 1:37:13
  hope that they would be trying to set people up.
• 1:37:15
  Speaker 2: And from a civil society, right, you know, do we
• 1:37:21
  we want to set people up to go to prison?
• 1:37:23
  We want to wreck families and wreck people's lives. Why
• 1:37:28
  would we want to do that?
• 1:37:29
  Speaker 1: Also, was there did they turn down the idea of
• 1:37:34
  bringing in the National Guard?
• 1:37:37
  Speaker 2: You know, I really don't understand. It appears, yes, it
• 1:37:42
  appears that that's which could have happened.
• 1:37:44
  Speaker 1: Also significantly deterred people from committing these crimes. That's right,
• 1:37:50
  that they were encouraged to do.
• 1:37:51
  Speaker 2: I'll tell you if I was at a demonstration and
• 1:37:53
  all of a sudden the National Guard shut up. I'd
• 1:37:56
  say this isn't for me.
• 1:37:57
  Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, and I think most people would do that
• 1:38:00
  as well. You're right, it's crazy. It's just so gross
• 1:38:07
  that there are legal system gets used against political opponents
• 1:38:12
  in that way, in such a devious and just a
• 1:38:15
  sinister way.
• 1:38:16
  Speaker 2: Harry Truman once famously said, if you want a friend
• 1:38:20
  in Washington, get a dog.
• 1:38:26
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, God, what a gross business. It's just sad
• 1:38:30
  because I also am a patriot and I want to
• 1:38:33
  think of us as better than that.
• 1:38:35
  Speaker 2: Yeah, we're the good guys.
• 1:38:36
  Speaker 1: And I don't think it's necessarily the fault of these individuals.
• 1:38:40
  I think the system really sucks, and I think you
• 1:38:45
  work for that system. And just like all these Congress
• 1:38:48
  people that wind up insider trading, everybody else is doing it.
• 1:38:51
  It's the culture. You get wrapped up in it, just
• 1:38:53
  like bad cops. You know, you get a signed to
• 1:38:57
  a precinct that's filled with corrupt cops, and you have
• 1:38:59
  to do things to stay with them. They're your blood brothers,
• 1:39:02
  and you're all in this together, and so you wind
• 1:39:04
  up doing some criminal activities that you think are just
• 1:39:07
  everybody does. It is what we do, yep. And your
• 1:39:10
  an FBI agent. While we got to set this guy up. Okay,
• 1:39:13
  let's set him up. This is what we do. Hey,
• 1:39:15
  if he doesn't do it, he's not committing a crime.
• 1:39:17
  We got nothing on him, Okay. And then you just
• 1:39:19
  convince him to do it. And he's a fucking idiot.
• 1:39:22
  And so he does it, and he hits that cell
• 1:39:24
  phone and now you're arresting him and he's like what Yeah,
• 1:39:27
  and he's so dumb he barely knows what happened mm hmm.
• 1:39:31
  Speaker 2: And the chances are he can't afford a decent attorney,
• 1:39:35
  or he's not notorious enough and newsworthy enough to get
• 1:39:42
  you know, a list attorneys volunteering pro bono. So he's
• 1:39:46
  stuck with a public defender that's going to spend eight
• 1:39:48
  hours on the case and he's going to get screwed
• 1:39:50
  in the end.
• 1:39:51
  Speaker 1: And there's also the narrative that's very difficult to shake.
• 1:39:55
  So if you get accused of some sort of a
• 1:39:57
  heinous crime, the narrative are most people that are casual
• 1:40:02
  viewers of that story is that you're a terrorist, or
• 1:40:05
  you're a guy who's gonna kidnap the governor, or you're
• 1:40:08
  a guy who is an insurrectionist who's trying to overthrow
• 1:40:11
  the government of January sixth, And then you watch the
• 1:40:14
  footage that they wouldn't release during the trials, and you
• 1:40:17
  see them getting a guided tour, the guided tour through
• 1:40:21
  like the the security guards are walking them into the Senate,
• 1:40:24
  Like what the fuck? What is this? And why is
• 1:40:28
  no one outraged? And why is it only one side
• 1:40:30
  that's outraged? God, if I was a if I was
• 1:40:35
  a Democrat congressman or a senator, or if I was
• 1:40:39
  any sort of a politician on the other side, I'd
• 1:40:41
  be like, do you know how disgusting this is? This
• 1:40:44
  is You're you're using this to go after Donald Trump,
• 1:40:47
  of all things, instead of just better political opposition exactly.
• 1:40:54
  Speaker 2: And the media or to blame in part as well.
• 1:40:56
  Speaker 1: Well, they're bought and paid for absolutely. I mean, the
• 1:41:00
  media in this country is a complete and total failure.
• 1:41:02
  The only thing that's real media in this country or
• 1:41:05
  independent journalists, that's right. And there's mostly people who worked
• 1:41:09
  for large media corporations and either were fired or had
• 1:41:13
  to leave because they're own ethics and morals, or and
• 1:41:16
  eventually branched down on their own and now they're in
• 1:41:19
  grave danger, you know, and they're worried about being prosecuted
• 1:41:23
  or set up.
• 1:41:23
  Speaker 2: I couldn't agree more killed.
• 1:41:26
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's super sketchy, because that's we like to think
• 1:41:30
  of ourselves as better. This is the shining example for
• 1:41:34
  the rest of the world. This is the experiment in
• 1:41:38
  self government that the whole world follows this lead. And
• 1:41:43
  when you see that not just tolerated but standard, and it.
• 1:41:48
  Speaker 2: Hurts, it really does. I was raised in a family
• 1:41:53
  like you were, where I was taught that this was
• 1:41:56
  the greatest country on earth. I still think it is
• 1:42:01
  and I do too, which and that's why we have
• 1:42:03
  to weed out the likes of John Brennan.
• 1:42:08
  Speaker 1: God, but it seems like there's a lot of people
• 1:42:12
  like that, Yeah, that are deeply rooted. This is what
• 1:42:15
  you were talking about too, that presidents come and go,
• 1:42:18
  but those people that's the real power. You know, this
• 1:42:22
  term the deep state. A lot of people that you know,
• 1:42:24
  there's a lot of people that don't like to entertain
• 1:42:26
  any kind of conspiracies because they think it's like a
• 1:42:28
  fool's journey. But you're really foolish if you don't believe
• 1:42:34
  in conspiracies. Yeah, because just how many of them have
• 1:42:37
  to be proven true before you go. Maybe I should
• 1:42:42
  reassess my position on these things.
• 1:42:45
  Speaker 2: Sixty two years after the JFK assassination, we're still learning
• 1:42:48
  new information. Yeah, information that's been kept from us.
• 1:42:52
  Speaker 1: And there's still a lot of it. I mean, they
• 1:42:54
  were supposed to. That was the one of the more
• 1:42:56
  disappointing things about this administration. Like immediately right off the
• 1:42:59
  j we're supposed to get all the CIA files, all
• 1:43:02
  the JFK files, We're supposed to know exactly what happened
• 1:43:05
  to him. We know very little. Very little new information
• 1:43:11
  has been released that illuminates any aspects of that case. Yeah,
• 1:43:16
  it's a shame. Well, it's terrible because most likely at
• 1:43:21
  least some part of our government was involved in assassinating
• 1:43:25
  the president and no one went to jail. No, nothing happened,
• 1:43:30
  and in fact, people succeeded and thrived after that.
• 1:43:35
  Speaker 2: Sad truth. Yeah, that's exactly what happened.
• 1:43:38
  Speaker 1: I mean, it goes back. There's so many cases, Like
• 1:43:41
  I've had conversations with people that like they you know,
• 1:43:44
  they don't want to be fools, right, So that's a
• 1:43:46
  lot of the people that don't want to believe in conspiracies. Like, OK,
• 1:43:49
  most of it can be explained away by incompetence or coincidence.
• 1:43:52
  And it's not like that's not even true. It's not
• 1:43:55
  even most of it. It's some things can be explained
• 1:43:59
  some things.
• 1:44:00
  Speaker 2: I had a friend at the agency. He was one
• 1:44:02
  of my first bosses, and he had started out in
• 1:44:07
  this like internship program that the agency had. The it
• 1:44:12
  was you had to be working on a master's degree.
• 1:44:14
  But anyway, his first assignment was in the counter Intelligence Center,
• 1:44:19
  which at the time was being run by James Angleton.
• 1:44:22
  And on his first day, the secretary walked him around
• 1:44:26
  and you know, this is what we do over here,
• 1:44:28
  and this is what we do over there, and there
• 1:44:30
  was this entire wall of file folders and she said,
• 1:44:35
  whatever you do, don't look in those folders. You're not
• 1:44:40
  cleared for that. Well he said, well, of course, the
• 1:44:43
  very first minute that he's left alone, he runs and
• 1:44:46
  looks in the folders and he said, every single one
• 1:44:49
  of those folders was on an American citizen. And the
• 1:44:53
  CIA is forbidden by law from spying on Americans.
• 1:44:58
  Speaker 1: Oh god. Yeah. The crazy thing too, in a lot
• 1:45:05
  of people's eyes is the difference between what they thought
• 1:45:10
  of what the narrative is of the Obama administration in
• 1:45:14
  terms of like whistleblowers and like what the hope was.
• 1:45:18
  You know, it was hope and change.
• 1:45:19
  Speaker 2: Oh, hope and change. And you know the statistic. The
• 1:45:23
  Espionage Act was written in nineteen seventeen to combat German
• 1:45:27
  saboteurs during the First World War. Between nineteen seventeen and
• 1:45:32
  two thousand and nine, three Americans were charged with espionage
• 1:45:37
  for speaking to the media. Under Barack Obama, eight people
• 1:45:42
  were charged with espionage for speaking to the media. So
• 1:45:45
  he was the enemy of whistleblowers.
• 1:45:48
  Speaker 1: Not only that. That was part of his campaign. Yeah,
• 1:45:51
  part of his campaign, right, was protection of whistleblowers. Absolutely.
• 1:45:54
  It was in the Hope and Change website.
• 1:45:57
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, look at the dash Deie Lanley masker that
• 1:45:59
  I mentioned earlier. It was part of his campaign to
• 1:46:03
  open an investigation of Dashti Laily. What happened was at
• 1:46:08
  Dashti Lailey, Afghanistan on November thirtieth and December the one,
• 1:46:13
  two thousand and one, two thousand Taliban soldiers gave up
• 1:46:17
  en maas right, and the Northern Alliance called us and said,
• 1:46:23
  what do we do with all these guys? We don't
• 1:46:24
  have room for them. So we told them put them
• 1:46:27
  in trucks, take them out to the desert, and just
• 1:46:29
  hold them there until we can divide them up and
• 1:46:32
  send them to smaller jails all around the country, and
• 1:46:34
  if we have to, we can send some to Pakistan.
• 1:46:38
  But there were no air holes in the containers, there
• 1:46:42
  was no food, there was no water. And of the
• 1:46:47
  two thousand fourteen survived, and one of the fourteen said
• 1:46:53
  that when they opened the trucks in the desert, the
• 1:46:56
  bodies fell out like sardines from a can. So Barack
• 1:47:00
  Obama said in two thousand and eight, if he's elected president,
• 1:47:04
  he's going to investigate this massacre and get to the
• 1:47:07
  bottom of it. And then there was nothing. So I
• 1:47:09
  said to John Kerry, I said, listen, this is part
• 1:47:11
  of the Obama campaign. Let me go to Afghanistan and
• 1:47:15
  investigate this thing. And so I went. And there are
• 1:47:19
  still bones just sticking out of the sand. There are
• 1:47:22
  clothes that have just been laying there in the desert
• 1:47:25
  all these years. All the bodies are still there. What's
• 1:47:27
  left of them? Really, Yeah, it's grizzly. So I come
• 1:47:32
  back and I get a call from a kind of
• 1:47:34
  a prominent human rights activist, and he said he wanted
• 1:47:37
  to see me, but it had to be private. So
• 1:47:39
  we went to Johns Hopkins University. There was a classroom
• 1:47:44
  that wasn't being used. We met there and he said, listen,
• 1:47:46
  I have a witness who was twelve years old at
• 1:47:49
  the time, and he was hiding behind a rock and
• 1:47:54
  he saw what happened when they opened the trucks and
• 1:47:58
  the bodies fell out. I said, okay, and he said,
• 1:48:01
  but what's new is He says that there were two
• 1:48:04
  men there wearing blue jeans and black t shirts and
• 1:48:08
  they were speaking English. I said, okay, that's all I need.
• 1:48:12
  So I wrote a letter to the agency and I asked,
• 1:48:15
  you know, for clarification, were any CIA personnel on site
• 1:48:20
  at the box up or at the at the location
• 1:48:23
  where the trucks were opened? And I had it auto
• 1:48:28
  penned John Kerry, Chairman. Six weeks later, a colleague comes
• 1:48:32
  into my office and he says, hey, you got a
• 1:48:35
  response from the agency to your letter. I said, I
• 1:48:37
  didn't see any response from the Agency. I just checked
• 1:48:39
  my mail an hour ago and he said, they classified
• 1:48:42
  at top secret. It's down in the vault. I said
• 1:48:45
  top secret. I said, well, what did it say? And
• 1:48:47
  he says, it says, go fuck yourself. I said, great,
• 1:48:52
  that's how they want to play it. So I went
• 1:48:54
  to carry and Carrie says, you know, we're stirring up
• 1:48:58
  a hornet's nest here, and I think we should just
• 1:49:02
  let this fade into history. I was like, again, because
• 1:49:06
  you want so badly to be Secretary of State again.
• 1:49:14
  Speaker 1: God, what a gross business.
• 1:49:17
  Speaker 2: It's awful, hideous.
• 1:49:20
  Speaker 1: What is it like for you on the outside now
• 1:49:23
  watching what's going on in the world.
• 1:49:28
  Speaker 2: There are some places that I'm optimistic about, and actually
• 1:49:33
  there are some developments that may look ugly on the
• 1:49:37
  surface that I'm optimistic about. First of all, this Seaspire.
• 1:49:40
  We're recording this on I guess today's Thursday. But the
• 1:49:43
  Seaspire that was announced this morning, this is huge, huge,
• 1:49:48
  And I think this is not a victory for these Raelis.
• 1:49:52
  I think that I think that it makes Donald Trump
• 1:49:55
  stronger and Benjamin Attaniell, who weaker netaw Who's decision to
• 1:49:59
  bomb gutter was too much, just too much, it served,
• 1:50:05
  it could have served to embarrass the president. What it
• 1:50:08
  ended up doing is it weakened Netanyahu's position. So that's
• 1:50:11
  a victory for for the White House as far as
• 1:50:13
  I'm concerned, real quick.
• 1:50:15
  Speaker 1: Yeah, the correct pronunciation, how did you say it? Gutter?
• 1:50:19
  You said gutter.
• 1:50:20
  Speaker 2: It's back here, it's called it cuff.
• 1:50:22
  Speaker 1: But so I've heard cutter. Yeah, it's got cutter. But
• 1:50:26
  they used saying.
• 1:50:27
  Speaker 2: They use a g sound. Other Arabs would call it
• 1:50:32
  kutta with a like a khu, but in the golf dialect,
• 1:50:36
  it's way down here.
• 1:50:38
  Speaker 1: Gotta gotta Okay.
• 1:50:41
  Speaker 2: The other thing is Iran. Man. I follow Iran more
• 1:50:46
  closely than anybody I know. You remember You're You're a
• 1:50:50
  little bit younger than I am, but not much. When
• 1:50:53
  we were kids, we had a terrible relationship with China,
• 1:50:57
  and Richard Nixon was the most China person that could
• 1:51:01
  possibly have been elected president. Yet it was Nixon that
• 1:51:04
  went to China and made peace with Chinese and open
• 1:51:07
  diplomatic relations. And I've call me crazy, but I think
• 1:51:13
  that if there's going to be peace with Iran, Donald
• 1:51:15
  Trump's going to make that peace with Iran. It may
• 1:51:17
  not be in the form of a trip to Tehran,
• 1:51:21
  but I could see a trip to Riyad and have
• 1:51:24
  a meeting brokered by Mohammed bin Salman and maybe we
• 1:51:29
  can come to some sort of an agreement on issue
• 1:51:31
  number one or issue number two.
• 1:51:33
  Speaker 1: Well, it seems to be a part of what he
• 1:51:36
  wants to accomplish in these four years is that he
• 1:51:39
  wants to go down as having made significant change in
• 1:51:42
  the world in a positive direction.
• 1:51:44
  Speaker 2: And we're seeing it. Whether whether people want to admit
• 1:51:47
  it or not.
• 1:51:48
  Speaker 1: That's part of the problem because of narratives.
• 1:51:50
  Speaker 2: That's it. You know, peace between India and Pakistan doesn't
• 1:51:54
  fit in the Democratic Party's narrative that Donald Trump is
• 1:51:57
  a warmonger. He's not a warmonger. Ask you know the
• 1:52:00
  Africans that he's weighed in for and we have peace
• 1:52:04
  in Sub Saharan Africa now, or this agreement today between
• 1:52:09
  Hamas and the Israelis. You know, I think this is
• 1:52:12
  the first of several new developments that's going to lead
• 1:52:15
  to the end of this conflict.
• 1:52:18
  Speaker 1: What is your take on netn Nyaho's position? Because if
• 1:52:24
  war is over, net Nyah, who will no longer be
• 1:52:29
  running Israel? Is that correct?
• 1:52:32
  Speaker 2: Eventually Nennyaho has a vested interest in making sure that
• 1:52:37
  this war lasts as long as possible, because remember he's
• 1:52:41
  still under indictment for corruption. Also, one thing that most
• 1:52:45
  Americans don't understand is the Israeli political system is such
• 1:52:48
  that it is literally impossible for any party to win
• 1:52:52
  a working majority in the kanesssan Right, there are just
• 1:52:54
  too many parties and too many individual interests. So you've got,
• 1:52:59
  you know, a dozen and parties represented Benjamin Etna, who
• 1:53:02
  has never won more than twenty seven percent of the vote. Wow,
• 1:53:07
  he's very unpopular. It's just that he's the least unpopular
• 1:53:12
  of the unpopular politicians. And it's a crazy way to
• 1:53:16
  run a country. One of the things that the Greeks
• 1:53:18
  did because the Greeks had the same problem. They are
• 1:53:20
  just too many parties, right, so you win twenty percent
• 1:53:24
  and you become the prime minister twenty percent, nobody wants you.
• 1:53:29
  So what they did is they raised the threshold to
• 1:53:32
  which you have to which you have to meet to
• 1:53:35
  win election to the parliament, from three percent to five percent,
• 1:53:39
  So that narrows it down to like six or seven parties.
• 1:53:42
  But then the party that comes in first, first past
• 1:53:44
  the poll gets an extra fifty seats. Then you don't
• 1:53:48
  have to go into any coalition governments with anybody, and
• 1:53:50
  you can run the country for four years or five years,
• 1:53:53
  whatever it happens to be. That's what the Israelis need
• 1:53:55
  to do. But Netnya, who longest serving prime minister in
• 1:53:59
  is reg the history, wildly unpopular. And it's funny because
• 1:54:04
  he used to be considered a right wing extremist and
• 1:54:07
  now he's the moderate of the government.
• 1:54:09
  Speaker 1: Really mm hmm.
• 1:54:11
  Speaker 2: The likes of Iamar Ben Gvir and Smotrich and these
• 1:54:16
  other guys who have come in from the right, they
• 1:54:19
  were attacking him to the point where he had to
• 1:54:22
  bring their parties into this coalition government just to get
• 1:54:25
  him to shut up. I mean, these are people that
• 1:54:28
  have felony convictions for anti Arab hate crimes and now they're,
• 1:54:33
  you know, Minister of National Security, Minister of Finance with
• 1:54:37
  responsibility for the West Bank.
• 1:54:40
  Speaker 1: What's that?
• 1:54:41
  Speaker 2: Wow, it's a terrible untenable position.
• 1:54:47
  Speaker 1: Haven't they decided to go ahead and prosecute him even
• 1:54:50
  while he's in office.
• 1:54:51
  Speaker 2: Yeah, there's an ongoing dispute that the Israelis Supreme Court
• 1:54:55
  has weighed in on a number of times. So the
• 1:54:58
  Minister of Justice is appointed, of course by the Prime Minister,
• 1:55:03
  but the Supreme Court is independent of the Prime Minister
• 1:55:07
  and the Minister of Justice. So the Minister of Justice says,
• 1:55:10
  you can't prosecute him while he's Prime minister, and the
• 1:55:13
  Supreme Court says, oh, yes you can, and orders the
• 1:55:17
  court then to continue the case. So if the case
• 1:55:20
  is going to be continued, Netanyahuo's only viable strategy is
• 1:55:25
  delaying tactics. Appeal after appeal after appeal. You submit emotions
• 1:55:32
  on little technical issues. Maybe you get them to focus
• 1:55:36
  on missus Netagnahu, who's also under indictment, and you just
• 1:55:41
  delay it as long as you can. But the best
• 1:55:44
  argument that he has is I can't focus on my
• 1:55:47
  own defense because I have a word to prosecute. Well,
• 1:55:51
  if there's peace, then he's going to have to go
• 1:55:54
  on trial.
• 1:55:56
  Speaker 1: Wow, which incentivizes him to stay at war, which is
• 1:56:01
  so crazy.
• 1:56:02
  Speaker 2: Isn't it though. Strange situation.
• 1:56:05
  Speaker 1: Well, a lot of people aren't aware that there was
• 1:56:07
  hundreds of thousands of people protesting in the streets before
• 1:56:10
  October seventh.
• 1:56:11
  Speaker 2: Oh, you're exactly right. In fact, in August we saw
• 1:56:15
  the biggest protests in American history, sorry, in Israeli history,
• 1:56:19
  demanding that Netnahu resign and it was all because of corruption, And.
• 1:56:24
  Speaker 1: What is the specific corruption that he's been accused of.
• 1:56:27
  Speaker 2: You know, it's changed over the years. Some of it
• 1:56:30
  had to do with business, others had to do other
• 1:56:33
  accusations had to do with him trying to essentially sell
• 1:56:38
  positions in the government. But you know, I read the
• 1:56:43
  accusations when they first came out. They weren't strong. They're defensible,
• 1:56:49
  So I don't know why he doesn't just grab the
• 1:56:51
  bull by the horns and go for it.
• 1:56:54
  Speaker 1: Wow. So, out of all the issues that we face internationally,
• 1:57:03
  do you think that the Israel palaced on is the
• 1:57:07
  most significant one?
• 1:57:08
  Speaker 2: I don't Actually, I think the threat is greater from China.
• 1:57:13
  The Chinese are incredibly patient. There was a there was
• 1:57:18
  a joke in the Onion the other day. It was
• 1:57:21
  a bunch of Chinese guys just sitting around a table
• 1:57:24
  and it said, the Chinese government sits and waits for
• 1:57:28
  the United States to self destruct or continue its self
• 1:57:33
  destruction or something like that. It's because they know that
• 1:57:36
  they can outweigh us.
• 1:57:39
  Speaker 1: You know, we.
• 1:57:42
  Speaker 2: Have convinced ourselves over the decades that we have to
• 1:57:45
  be all around the world, protecting the week and those
• 1:57:50
  without a voice, and being the peacemaker. You know, we
• 1:57:54
  have we have one hundred and ninety bases and one
• 1:57:59
  hundred and forty four or countries. We have to do
• 1:58:02
  all that, And the Chinese say, yeah, yeah, you have
• 1:58:05
  to go ahead, spend all your money on that stuff.
• 1:58:08
  In the meantime, we're gonna have three hundred and fifty
• 1:58:11
  mile an hour trains and the best highways in the world,
• 1:58:14
  and the best schools and the best hospitals and the
• 1:58:17
  nicest airports, and then all of our extra money, we're
• 1:58:20
  gonna essentially bribe foreign countries to do things that we
• 1:58:25
  want them to do. So it's a lesson that I
• 1:58:28
  think we haven't learned as a country that there are
• 1:58:31
  other ways of winning hearts and minds.
• 1:58:37
  Speaker 1: What's also, they're actively engaged in making sure that people
• 1:58:42
  are arguing online, yeahinating.
• 1:58:44
  Speaker 2: You know, they're very good at these kinds of behind
• 1:58:48
  the scenes like quasi spy like surreptitious actions. They actively
• 1:58:58
  promote us arguing, fighting, disagreeing. They promote these societal disruptions
• 1:59:05
  that we're all so so worried about. And you know,
• 1:59:08
  we blame the Russians all the time, and certainly the
• 1:59:10
  Russians do this kind of thing too, but it's the
• 1:59:12
  Chinese that have really perfected it. And I think that
• 1:59:16
  most Americans don't realize how much we should be worried
• 1:59:19
  about that and trying to counter it.
• 1:59:22
  Speaker 1: Well, what could be done to counter it, because a
• 1:59:25
  lot of it is what's going on in social media
• 1:59:27
  is echo chambers. People exist in these echo chambers, are
• 1:59:31
  completely addicted to their smartphones. They're on the algorithm all
• 1:59:36
  day long. They're checking things and getting ramped up by things,
• 1:59:40
  and they're being told various narratives whatever it is. And
• 1:59:45
  there was a story recently about China getting caught using
• 1:59:49
  chat GPT for various different services where they were using
• 1:59:54
  bots and you know, so they had done it automated
• 1:59:57
  through chatchipt.
• 1:59:58
  Speaker 2: Brad parscalis in it right now on behalf of the Israelis.
• 2:00:01
  He recently won a six million dollar contract to train
• 2:00:05
  chat GPT to be more pro Israel. It was in
• 2:00:10
  Reason magazine a couple of days ago.
• 2:00:14
  Speaker 1: I also have the recent purchase of TikTok.
• 2:00:17
  Speaker 2: Absolutely a lot going on which I think could be
• 2:00:20
  very helpful for us. One of the things that we're
• 2:00:23
  bad at is identifying bots and controlling bots once they've
• 2:00:26
  been identified. I'll give you an example. I write columns
• 2:00:32
  all the time and have my own little podcast, and
• 2:00:36
  I said that I was optimistic that a deal seemed
• 2:00:40
  to be at hand, you know, between Israel and the
• 2:00:43
  guys of Palestinians. And then immediately I started getting attacked,
• 2:00:48
  and it was it was by obviously anonymous writers. I
• 2:00:53
  can't imagine that these writers are human beings. They had
• 2:00:56
  to be bots. One called me virulently anti Semitic because
• 2:01:02
  I said, this deal that appears the president has negotiated
• 2:01:06
  was a good idea, So I'm virulently anti Semitic. And
• 2:01:09
  then they built on that, and by the end of
• 2:01:13
  it and nobody else was commenting, But by the end
• 2:01:17
  of it they said that I was. I was morbidly
• 2:01:20
  obese and ugly and stupid too.
• 2:01:24
  Speaker 1: What the funds? Morbidly obese, ugly and stupid too. You
• 2:01:35
  don't even look a little fat.
• 2:01:36
  Speaker 2: No, no, I'm sixty. I feel like I'm okay.
• 2:01:42
  Speaker 1: You look great. That's so funny. It's kind of hilarious, though,
• 2:01:46
  But if you just say things enough, people are going
• 2:01:48
  to believe it that it's effective. It at least it
• 2:01:50
  moves a narrative into a certain direction.
• 2:01:52
  Speaker 2: You know, and chat GPT and these other chatbots are
• 2:01:55
  very easy to influence. When chat GPT first came out,
• 2:02:00
  just for fun, I said, who is John Kiriaku And
• 2:02:04
  it said John Kiriaku is a former CIA officer, blew
• 2:02:06
  the whistle on the Torch program, et cetera. John Kiriaku
• 2:02:09
  graduated from the University of Maryland and earned a master's
• 2:02:14
  degree in peace studies from the University of Bruges in Belgium.
• 2:02:18
  I don't even know where the University of Maryland is located, specifically,
• 2:02:22
  I know it's called College Park. I don't know how
• 2:02:24
  to get there. Never been to the University of Maryland.
• 2:02:27
  I didn't know there was a university in Bruges, let
• 2:02:30
  alone one that gave me a degree in peace studies.
• 2:02:32
  So I said, John Kiriaku graduated from George Washington University
• 2:02:36
  with degrees in this and that. And it says you
• 2:02:40
  are incorrect, and I said, no, you are incorrect, and
• 2:02:43
  then it says, no, you are incorrect, and then I
• 2:02:47
  just gave up.
• 2:02:49
  Speaker 1: Why didn't you say I'm actually John Kiriaku.
• 2:02:52
  Speaker 2: Afraid it was what it was going to do me.
• 2:02:56
  Speaker 1: But I mean, did you ask it where are you're
• 2:02:58
  getting your information from.
• 2:03:00
  Speaker 2: No, but it pulls from literally everywhere.
• 2:03:02
  Speaker 1: Right, So there's a narrative out there somehow or another
• 2:03:05
  that there's universities that you never attended.
• 2:03:09
  Speaker 2: Huh yeah, yeah, And then you know, if you make
• 2:03:14
  somebody angry, you can be just deleted from chat GPT.
• 2:03:19
  A friend of mine, there's pulled a surprise nominated political
• 2:03:24
  cartoonist Ted Rall. He did the same thing. Who is
• 2:03:27
  Ted Rall?
• 2:03:28
  Speaker 1: Well?
• 2:03:28
  Speaker 2: Ted Rall, we know is fifteen years at the Los
• 2:03:32
  Angeles Times as an award winning editorial cartoonist. It says
• 2:03:35
  there is no such person as Ted Roll. Hmmm, so
• 2:03:41
  I wonder who he pissed off.
• 2:03:43
  Speaker 1: Have you tried subsequently, No, let's see what perplexity says. Okay,
• 2:03:49
  pull up, that's what we use. That's one of our sponsors.
• 2:03:52
  Let's see who is John Kiriako. Let's see if they
• 2:03:56
  get it wrong too, because if that's the case, I mean,
• 2:03:59
  somebody probably planted this incorrect information out there into it,
• 2:04:04
  which is like how and why? Like what would be
• 2:04:07
  the purpose of doing that? What I mean, especially something
• 2:04:10
  that's not even derogatory.
• 2:04:11
  Speaker 2: It's just it's just factually incorrect.
• 2:04:13
  Speaker 1: Yeah, about your education. It gave you different places that
• 2:04:17
  you went to school, which is weird, Like that doesn't
• 2:04:20
  even make sense. No, Like what would what would be
• 2:04:23
  the benefit of that?
• 2:04:26
  Speaker 2: I have no idea, no answer, but just to ask it.
• 2:04:33
  Speaker 1: Who is John Kyriako? Let's see what it says. Who
• 2:04:37
  is John Kyriako? Okay, American whistleblower, author, journalist, former intelligence officer.
• 2:04:42
  All that stuff's true. Personal background CIA nineteen ninety All
• 2:04:47
  this is accurate.
• 2:04:48
  Speaker 2: Yeah, all of that is acts.
• 2:04:49
  Speaker 1: Whistle blowing and legal case recognition and advocacy, remain active
• 2:04:55
  and speaking out against torture and advocating for government transparency
• 2:04:58
  and ethical intelligence. All that's true. Yep, So.
• 2:05:03
  Speaker 2: All of that true.
• 2:05:04
  Speaker 1: That's it, absolutely correct.
• 2:05:06
  Speaker 2: Absolutely correct.
• 2:05:06
  Speaker 1: So ask a follow up. What is his education history? There?
• 2:05:10
  It is graduated from Newcastle High School, Washington University. All
• 2:05:14
  this is accurate.
• 2:05:15
  Speaker 2: That's all that's correct.
• 2:05:16
  Speaker 1: Okay, So it seems like whatever it was was just
• 2:05:19
  in chat GPT, Yes, which is really weird.
• 2:05:23
  Speaker 2: I'm using perplexity from now on.
• 2:05:25
  Speaker 1: What do you think it could have been? Like, what
• 2:05:27
  would be the benefit of giving incorrect information about your
• 2:05:31
  education in CHATCHPT?
• 2:05:33
  Speaker 3: I don't know.
• 2:05:34
  Speaker 2: I don't know, but I'll tell you. I used chat GPT.
• 2:05:37
  I teach a class in a graduate school class in
• 2:05:40
  the history of terrorism at the University of Salamanca in Spain,
• 2:05:45
  and so I was very proud of the course outline
• 2:05:49
  that I had written up, and I put the whole
• 2:05:51
  thing I just cut and pasted into chat GPT, and
• 2:05:54
  I asked it to recommend scholarly journal articles that I
• 2:06:00
  could use to supplement, you know, the books that I
• 2:06:03
  had recommended. So for the fourteen sessions of the pod,
• 2:06:09
  it gave me fourteen different links. Every single one of
• 2:06:13
  the links was fake. Whoa, every single one of them.
• 2:06:17
  There were no such links, there were no such articles.
• 2:06:21
  It just made it all up.
• 2:06:24
  Speaker 1: Is it possible that chat gpt is like has a
• 2:06:28
  mandate to fuck with you? You know what I mean?
• 2:06:33
  If you weren't doing your due diligence right and you
• 2:06:35
  just incorporated those links and they're like, oh my god,
• 2:06:38
  Karaoku is a fraud. These aren't even real articles.
• 2:06:40
  Speaker 2: Yeah, bullshit, right, that's crazy too.
• 2:06:44
  Speaker 1: Do you mean you must be paranoid? I mean you
• 2:06:46
  have to be, right, I'm paranoid, you have to be
• 2:06:48
  I mean, but you you must be because of what's
• 2:06:51
  happened to you. When you see something like that, you
• 2:06:53
  must be like, what the fuck. It's almost like they're
• 2:06:56
  just always trying to get you.
• 2:06:58
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I do feel that way sometimes. I'm
• 2:07:02
  sure that you do too, you know, the old saying
• 2:07:05
  just because your paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to
• 2:07:07
  get you.
• 2:07:07
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 2:07:08
  Speaker 2: There were times when I after I got out of prison,
• 2:07:10
  the first two years after I got out of prison,
• 2:07:12
  that every once in a while, And I'll preface this
• 2:07:15
  by saying I was a surveillance detection instructor at the CIA.
• 2:07:20
  Every once in a while I would see surveillance and
• 2:07:24
  and I would write down the license number and just
• 2:07:26
  call my lawyer, and then he'd call me, you know,
• 2:07:28
  a day later and say it's the FBI. They're just
• 2:07:31
  curious as to what you're up to. Oh God, And
• 2:07:33
  I'd say, all they have to do is ask, That's
• 2:07:36
  all they have to do. They don't have to follow
• 2:07:39
  me to get pizza with a buddy of mine and
• 2:07:41
  rest in, you know.
• 2:07:42
  Speaker 1: See them following.
• 2:07:43
  Speaker 2: They're really not good at surveillance.
• 2:07:50
  Speaker 1: Which is horrible because that's our job. Right. God, John,
• 2:07:56
  you've been through a quite an odyssey.
• 2:07:58
  Speaker 2: That's awful. It really is awful. I'm serious when I
• 2:08:02
  say I wouldn't wish it on anybody. It's a horrible thing.
• 2:08:05
  Speaker 1: But it's it's also awful because you've done so much
• 2:08:09
  good for your country.
• 2:08:12
  Speaker 2: I've tried.
• 2:08:13
  Speaker 1: That's what's crazy. And that's look I'm you know, I
• 2:08:16
  criticize intelligence agencies and everybody else who are doing wrong things,
• 2:08:20
  but I think they're important, very important too. When people
• 2:08:23
  say we need to dismantle the CIA and dismant like,
• 2:08:26
  what are you talking about? You know, like Mike Baker,
• 2:08:28
  I've had long conversations with him about threats overseas. Like
• 2:08:31
  if you talk to someone who's actually worked in the field,
• 2:08:34
  they will give you an understanding of all the bad
• 2:08:38
  things that are happening in the world that we have
• 2:08:39
  to keep tabs on. Like, don't say we should not
• 2:08:42
  pay attention. That is fucking crazy talk. You just don't
• 2:08:45
  want to corrupt CIA.
• 2:08:46
  Speaker 2: That's right, that's it. That's the bottom line right there.
• 2:08:49
  We don't want to corrupt CIA. We don't want to
• 2:08:51
  politicized CIA politicized. Yes, I'll give me another example. Yesterday,
• 2:08:56
  just yesterday, the deputy director of the CIA Ellis named
• 2:08:59
  himself the acting General Counsel, and people were like, oh
• 2:09:02
  my god. I woke up and I see these podcasts.
• 2:09:04
  Oh my god, the Elis has taken over the CIA.
• 2:09:07
  So I do a little bit of research, and by
• 2:09:11
  the end of it, I was like, Yeah, I would
• 2:09:14
  have done the same thing if I were Ellis. He's qualified, right,
• 2:09:18
  He's had all the relative jobs NSA, O, D, N I, CIA,
• 2:09:26
  House Intelligence Committee, He's done all these jobs. He wants
• 2:09:30
  the Office of the General Counsel to do what it's
• 2:09:32
  told to do to further the mission of the CIA,
• 2:09:36
  and they refuse to do it, and so he took over.
• 2:09:41
  Can't criticize that.
• 2:09:42
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that seems like a if he's a just man,
• 2:09:46
  that seems like a good response. But I don't know.
• 2:09:49
  I don't know enough about that world to comment on it, honestly.
• 2:09:52
  Speaker 2: But getting back to your point and Mike Baker's point,
• 2:09:56
  you know, and I'm out of the CIA, so I
• 2:09:59
  don't know as much as I used to know on
• 2:10:02
  a daily basis. But but Americans get only just a little,
• 2:10:07
  a little tidbit of what's happening in the world, Like
• 2:10:13
  we don't read about these emerging threats. For example, We'll
• 2:10:17
  never know about some kind of counter terrorism operation that succeeded,
• 2:10:23
  you know, and that saved Americans from a terrorist attack. Well,
• 2:10:27
  just never know, because that's the that's the nature of intelligence.
• 2:10:31
  You're not supposed to know, you know, the likes of
• 2:10:34
  Timothy Weiner will write a book about failures, but the
• 2:10:38
  successes have to remain secret.
• 2:10:43
  Speaker 1: Wow, Like, what is it like having been a public servant,
• 2:10:49
  having worked for the government, and having done all these
• 2:10:53
  things that are so critical and important for national security,
• 2:10:57
  and then to have that machine turn on, you do
• 2:11:00
  your time in prison and come out and now being
• 2:11:03
  someone who talks about it all.
• 2:11:05
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it was hard at first, Joe, I won't lie
• 2:11:09
  to you. I felt really alone in the world. And
• 2:11:12
  then a couple of days after my arrest, I got
• 2:11:16
  an email from a retired deputy director of the CIA,
• 2:11:19
  a guy that I had worked for at the very
• 2:11:22
  start of my career, and he said, I saved this
• 2:11:26
  as a kind of a souvenir. He said, You've chosen
• 2:11:29
  a difficult path. I only wish that I had had
• 2:11:33
  the guts to do it myself. WHOA And that made it.
• 2:11:36
  That changed my entire outlook on what I was facing
• 2:11:42
  that I actually wasn't alone. And most of my CIA friends,
• 2:11:47
  like the people who were truly friends of mine at
• 2:11:49
  the CIA, are still friends of mine today. They had
• 2:11:53
  to be discreet about it for a little while, but
• 2:11:56
  they never walked away from me.
• 2:11:57
  Speaker 1: Well that's great, John, You're a strong man. Yeah, yeah,
• 2:12:04
  I know how you've gone through all this come out
• 2:12:08
  on the other side as a person who comments on
• 2:12:11
  the state of the intelligence agencies. Yeah.
• 2:12:15
  Speaker 2: I'll add too that that the election of Donald Trump,
• 2:12:23
  in kind of an odd way, free me up to
• 2:12:27
  be more vocal because the Obama people and the Biden
• 2:12:37
  people were far far more willing to say that is
• 2:12:42
  speech that we don't like that needs to be prosecuted.
• 2:12:47
  And with Donald Trump, and I don't know if he
• 2:12:52
  even meant to do this or not, it's like so
• 2:12:56
  much more is out there and in the public realm,
• 2:13:01
  the public domain.
• 2:13:02
  Speaker 1: Why do you think that is?
• 2:13:04
  Speaker 2: You know, I think I think at the end of
• 2:13:06
  the day, that's populism. It's just a different way of
• 2:13:11
  looking at government. It's funny because under populism, the feeling
• 2:13:16
  is very strong that they work for us, and they
• 2:13:20
  answered to us. And with these mainstream administrations, whether it's Obama, Biden,
• 2:13:27
  George W. Bush, it's like, well, the wise men are
• 2:13:32
  running the government, so we need to stick by quietly
• 2:13:35
  and let them do their their important work.
• 2:13:39
  Speaker 1: And that's how things like the Patriotet.
• 2:13:40
  Speaker 2: Get snuck exactly. Right, that's a great point. Yes, and
• 2:13:47
  n the NDAA and right, we don't use that on.
• 2:13:52
  Speaker 1: Don't worry.
• 2:13:54
  Speaker 2: You know when I was, when I was in the
• 2:13:57
  on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff, the Obama administration
• 2:14:01
  passed the NDAA in twenty whatever it was fifteen, where
• 2:14:08
  they legalized propagandization of the American people. This came out
• 2:14:13
  of the most innocuous issue. We had this propaganda station
• 2:14:18
  radio and television called Radio TV Martis and it was
• 2:14:22
  beamed at Cuba. Right, the only thing that Cubans really
• 2:14:26
  care about watching from US is baseball, so we would
• 2:14:30
  broadcast a lot of baseball games. But the way it
• 2:14:33
  was being broadcast from Florida, there was this little strip
• 2:14:37
  of land on the Gulf coast in southern Florida where
• 2:14:42
  they could pick it up but only with like Dish
• 2:14:45
  network I think is what it was. Well, that's illegal
• 2:14:48
  because it's a propaganda station and Americans can't watch American propaganda.
• 2:14:52
  And so rather than like not broadcast it anymore or
• 2:14:57
  move the satellite or whatever they decided, we'll change the
• 2:15:01
  law to make it easier and more and legal to
• 2:15:05
  propagandaize the American people. So now the government can produce
• 2:15:10
  any propaganda that it wants and foist it on the
• 2:15:13
  American people. It's like, thank you, Barack Obama. Now I
• 2:15:17
  don't even know if the news that I'm reading is
• 2:15:19
  real or not. Thank you.
• 2:15:22
  Speaker 1: That is so insane, That is so insane that that's
• 2:15:26
  the origin of it. Wow.
• 2:15:29
  Speaker 2: Yeah, lazy bastards.
• 2:15:32
  Speaker 1: Well lazy and also just taking advantage of an opportunity,
• 2:15:35
  because this is an opportunity to push something through that
• 2:15:38
  could be beneficial if you want to push propaganda on
• 2:15:41
  the American people, and up until now it's been illegal,
• 2:15:44
  that's right. Has there ever been any talk of turning
• 2:15:47
  that back.
• 2:15:49
  Speaker 2: No, A lot of people believe that after Ed Snowden's
• 2:15:52
  revelations it would be turned back even if it were
• 2:15:55
  just you know, one part at a time, And that's
• 2:15:59
  just never happened. No, where's the outrage.
• 2:16:02
  Speaker 1: No, where is the outrage. And he's got to hide
• 2:16:04
  in Russia. Yep, crazy.
• 2:16:13
  Speaker 2: Depressing.
• 2:16:15
  Speaker 1: Do you think it could possibly push further in that direction? Oh?
• 2:16:19
  Speaker 2: I think that that first of all. Yes, I think
• 2:16:24
  that it's natural that it would push, it would push further.
• 2:16:28
  It's up to us to push back. And I don't
• 2:16:32
  think the American people have their act together enough.
• 2:16:36
  Speaker 1: Well we're too divided.
• 2:16:37
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's part we really are.
• 2:16:39
  Speaker 1: But something like the NBA should be a nonpartisan issue.
• 2:16:42
  Everyone should be looking at that and go, this is crazy,
• 2:16:45
  something like using propaganda against American citizens, Like, what's the
• 2:16:50
  pros and what's the cons right? I want two columns.
• 2:16:53
  I want you to write down all the things that
• 2:16:55
  are going to be negatively affected by propaganda and American citizens,
• 2:16:59
  all the ways they could be used corruptly, and then
• 2:17:02
  all the positives were going to get out of it. Oh,
• 2:17:04
  we can lie to Cuba. Fuck you, that's not enough.
• 2:17:08
  Speaker 2: No, it's not enough. I went to Cuba last year
• 2:17:11
  because they translated my first two books into Spanish and
• 2:17:15
  put them in the National Library of Cuba, and they
• 2:17:18
  had this ceremony during the International Book something or other
• 2:17:22
  for a bunch of American authors. So I went, and
• 2:17:25
  before I went, my editor at Consortium News said do
• 2:17:28
  me a favor, he said. Ever since I was a
• 2:17:29
  little kid, I've been an avid radio listener. He said,
• 2:17:33
  tune in after sunset, when the signals are stronger. Tune
• 2:17:37
  in to American radio stations and tell me if the
• 2:17:40
  Cubans are jamming them or if you can hear stations.
• 2:17:44
  I said, that's a great idea. So I had a
• 2:17:49
  radio there in my hotel room, and I got too
• 2:17:52
  many American stations, Miami and Fort Myers and anything you
• 2:17:59
  want to hear in Cuba from the United States, you
• 2:18:01
  can hear. They don't jam anything. And it's baseball, baseball, baseball.
• 2:18:06
  They want to hear every baseball game. We don't need
• 2:18:09
  radio TV. Martee. You know, I get a kick out
• 2:18:11
  of The Washington Post just clabbers Kerry Lake all the time.
• 2:18:16
  Every time, every time she testifies on Capitol Hill about
• 2:18:20
  the Voice of America. They're like, no, we need Voice
• 2:18:23
  of America. We need to spend another fifty million dollars
• 2:18:26
  to Why we don't need to propagandize them. First of all,
• 2:18:31
  have you ever heard of this thing called the internet?
• 2:18:34
  Speaker 1: Right?
• 2:18:34
  Speaker 2: Because that's where almost everybody gets their information. You want
• 2:18:37
  to propagandize people do it on the Internet, not on
• 2:18:41
  some AM radio station that you're beaming off into space
• 2:18:44
  in the middle of the night.
• 2:18:45
  Speaker 1: They must be doing that anyway. They must be.
• 2:18:47
  Speaker 2: I should hope, So I should hope.
• 2:18:49
  Speaker 1: So. I mean, these bots that we're worried about from China,
• 2:18:52
  a bunch of them have to also be from America.
• 2:18:54
  I would assume some agency, which is just like and
• 2:18:59
  then as AI gets more and more powerful, it's the race,
• 2:19:02
  Like who's in charge of that? Yeah? Like how does
• 2:19:05
  that go? And what happens when everything gets automated? And
• 2:19:09
  what happens when everyone gets on universal basic income and
• 2:19:12
  then they're relying entirely on the government? Right? Yeah, good point,
• 2:19:16
  And this is maybe a decade away, it's coming. Yeah.
• 2:19:21
  Is there anything else you're concerned about before we wrap
• 2:19:23
  this up that you want to talk about.
• 2:19:24
  Speaker 2: I'm less concerned about the Russians. I think the President
• 2:19:28
  has played this right. He tried to kind of force
• 2:19:33
  the two sides together, He got pushed back. He did
• 2:19:35
  what he could. We just have to wait until they
• 2:19:38
  slug it out, and then when it looks like one's
• 2:19:41
  going down, then we can step in and try to
• 2:19:43
  negotiate something. But what are you going to do?
• 2:19:45
  Speaker 1: Is that really the only solution at this point?
• 2:19:47
  Speaker 2: You know, I have a lot of friends who are
• 2:19:50
  professors of Russian studies, Soviet studies, all this stuff, and
• 2:19:55
  they all say the same thing, that the Russians are winning,
• 2:19:58
  the Ukrainians are losing. So the policy decision is, do
• 2:20:01
  we really want to jump in on the side of
• 2:20:03
  the Ukrainians or do we want to let diplomacy, Let
• 2:20:09
  diplomats do what they're paid to do. And I always
• 2:20:12
  say sure. We used to make fun of the Bush
• 2:20:15
  administration was that when I was at the agency because
• 2:20:17
  we had never seen an administration work so hard to
• 2:20:21
  not speak to our enemies. We weren't allowed to talk
• 2:20:24
  to the Russians or the Chinese, or the North Koreans,
• 2:20:27
  or the Iraqis, or the Iranians or the Cubans of Venezuelan.
• 2:20:31
  It's like, my god, who do we talk to? We're
• 2:20:34
  not going to accomplish anything diplomatically if we just talked
• 2:20:37
  to the British and the French and the Germans. So
• 2:20:41
  keeping the lines of communication open I think are very
• 2:20:44
  important to settling this. I think eventually what everybody predicted
• 2:20:48
  at the very beginning of the hostilities is going to
• 2:20:50
  be the final result, and that is that the Ukrainians
• 2:20:53
  are going to lose territory and the Russians are going
• 2:20:56
  to have to agree to probably fast tracked membership into
• 2:20:59
  the Union for Ukraine, and not NATO membership, but major
• 2:21:05
  non NATO ally status, the same status that we have
• 2:21:08
  for Australia and Japan and Bahrain and Saudi Arabia and
• 2:21:12
  the Emirates and Ukraine. I think that's how it's going
• 2:21:16
  to end up.
• 2:21:19
  Speaker 1: I just can't imagine why they would want to keep
• 2:21:22
  it going. I mean, at this point, they're.
• 2:21:25
  Speaker 2: What I'm told is that Putin is under great pressure
• 2:21:28
  from his military establishment, that the Russian people don't necessarily
• 2:21:33
  want this to continue as much as the Russian military
• 2:21:36
  leadership does. That's what these professors are telling me.
• 2:21:39
  Speaker 1: And why do they want to continue it?
• 2:21:41
  Speaker 2: Because they want to destroy Ukraine, they want to take Kiev.
• 2:21:45
  They wanted to collapse. You know, there are a lot
• 2:21:49
  of Russians who don't believe that Ukraine is a legitimate country.
• 2:21:54
  You know, even Crimea Crimea was Russian until nineteen fifty three.
• 2:21:58
  Krushyev gave it to the Ukrainians as a gift, and
• 2:22:01
  then the Russians took it back in fourteen, and.
• 2:22:05
  Speaker 1: So they feel the same way about Kiev. It's just
• 2:22:11
  so horrible to see like sixty year old men getting
• 2:22:13
  conscripted right off the street and yeah, kidnapped, just set
• 2:22:17
  right to the front of the line, right to the
• 2:22:19
  wood chipper.
• 2:22:20
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's just terrible.
• 2:22:22
  Speaker 1: And we don't even know the real numbers, no socialties, No,
• 2:22:24
  we don't.
• 2:22:25
  Speaker 2: It's got to be huge for the Ukrainians at least.
• 2:22:30
  Speaker 1: So you're not concerned about that. You think that's going
• 2:22:34
  to work itself out. As strategic as.
• 2:22:35
  Speaker 2: It is, I think it's going to burn itself out eventually.
• 2:22:39
  I'm very worried that the Israeli is going to attack
• 2:22:41
  Iran again. I'm worried that the Israelis aren't going to
• 2:22:45
  respect the deal that appears to be in process in
• 2:22:49
  Gaza or the West Bank. I mean, we're not talking
• 2:22:52
  about the West Bank where we're Just two weeks ago,
• 2:22:55
  a Christian village ceased to exist because settlers from New
• 2:22:59
  Jersey took all their houses. You know what happens next
• 2:23:04
  in the.
• 2:23:04
  Speaker 1: Word from New Jersey.
• 2:23:06
  Speaker 2: Yeah, there are a lot of synagogues in New York,
• 2:23:09
  New Jersey, Toronto that have these things called called real
• 2:23:14
  estate seminars where you can put your name on a
• 2:23:18
  list and then they call you and say, hey, house
• 2:23:22
  just opened up over here in this Arab village that's
• 2:23:24
  not Arab anymore, Come and take your house. And the
• 2:23:29
  two weeks ago the village that the Israelis cleared out
• 2:23:32
  was one of the last remaining Christian villages. Drives me crazy.
• 2:23:39
  Speaker 1: Wow, So what do you think they're overall strategies they
• 2:23:43
  eventually want to just take over all.
• 2:23:45
  Speaker 2: Oh, I think we should we should believe the Israelis
• 2:23:48
  when they tell us that they believe in greater Israel,
• 2:23:52
  which includes the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the southern
• 2:23:57
  quarter of Lebanon, a strip in south western Syria. And
• 2:24:03
  I mean the map that Natanyahu had at the UN
• 2:24:05
  the other day included the Sinai Peninsula. For heaven's sake,
• 2:24:09
  what's that all about. They took the Sinai in the
• 2:24:13
  sixty seven Warren gave it back after the Camp David Accords.
• 2:24:19
  So this, Yeah, I'm worried about about Israel.
• 2:24:26
  Speaker 1: Yeah, but are you worried about Israel's influence on American politics?
• 2:24:30
  Because that's one of the things that's coming to light
• 2:24:33
  over the last couple of years since the invasion, where
• 2:24:36
  people are paying more and more attention to Israel and
• 2:24:39
  then also seeing what happens when you criticize Israel.
• 2:24:44
  Speaker 2: They are very quick to primary elected officials who criticize Israel,
• 2:24:48
  and usually they'll win those primaries. APAK is very well funded,
• 2:24:53
  it is very very well organized. It's the gold standard
• 2:24:58
  of lobbying organisms. I've never understood why APAC doesn't have
• 2:25:03
  to register as a foreign agent with the Justice Department
• 2:25:08
  when everybody else does. Why is APAC special that it
• 2:25:12
  doesn't have to register? You know? Back in two thousand
• 2:25:15
  and eight, I guess it was I want a very
• 2:25:18
  small contract to write. It was like six op eds
• 2:25:22
  for the Abu Dhabi Chamber of Commerce, and it was
• 2:25:27
  because I was going to write op eds that supported
• 2:25:32
  American business in Abu Dhabi. Right, So I had to
• 2:25:38
  go on FARA dot gov. Fara dot gov. It's the
• 2:25:42
  Foreign Agents Registration Act and there's a form there, and
• 2:25:48
  I said, yeah, I took. You know, I won this contract.
• 2:25:50
  It was like thirty grand to write these six op
• 2:25:54
  eds and the source of the income is the Abu
• 2:25:57
  Dhabi Chamber of Commerce, and here's my name and my address,
• 2:25:59
  my fe number. Enter done. I registered. So if you're
• 2:26:04
  doing something anything on behalf of a foreign government, you
• 2:26:09
  have to register, except if you're APAX. And I just
• 2:26:15
  don't understand that.
• 2:26:20
  Speaker 1: That seems so insane. And whenever you see like just
• 2:26:24
  dozens of senators in Congress people going over to Israeli.
• 2:26:27
  Speaker 2: Like, oh, oh man, my very first week in the
• 2:26:32
  Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff, these lobbyists came in. We
• 2:26:35
  had it was a parade of lobbyists all the time.
• 2:26:37
  Every day they're coming in asking for something. So these
• 2:26:42
  two guys came in, could not have been any friendlier. Hi,
• 2:26:46
  welcome to the Capitol Hill. I said, oh, thanks, it's
• 2:26:50
  not my first go round. I've worked on Capitol before. Well,
• 2:26:54
  we wanted to welcome you with an all expenses paid
• 2:26:58
  trip to the Holy Land, and I said, thanks, No,
• 2:27:04
  I can pay for my own vacations, but I appreciate it.
• 2:27:07
  Oh nonsense, We'll take you to all the Christian holy sites.
• 2:27:11
  Thank you. I've been. I don't want to go. And
• 2:27:16
  some of my colleagues went for their all expenses paid
• 2:27:20
  trip to the Holy Land courtesy of Apak. I was like, yeah, no,
• 2:27:25
  thank you, not interested.
• 2:27:27
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and that's just the beginning of it. That's nothing
• 2:27:30
  compared to helping out your campaigns.
• 2:27:33
  Speaker 2: Well, i'll tell you, I tell this story a lot,
• 2:27:35
  but I think it's I think it's appropriate here. I
• 2:27:39
  had been at the agency for two and a half months,
• 2:27:43
  maybe too, about two and a half months, and I
• 2:27:47
  was told to give my very first liaison briefing. So
• 2:27:51
  this is going to be the Israeli Mosad and shin Bet,
• 2:27:56
  and I was going to be one of about eight
• 2:27:59
  analysts and I was the most junior, so I would
• 2:28:02
  go last, Well, we don't allow the Israelis into CIA headquarters.
• 2:28:06
  We used to, but every time they would come, they'd say, hey,
• 2:28:09
  we brought gifts. Here's a gift for you, and it's
• 2:28:12
  all packed full of listening devices and batteries, every one
• 2:28:15
  of them. And we'd say, you guys, you can't come
• 2:28:17
  back here every single time and try to bug our
• 2:28:20
  conference rooms. Oh sorry, well we're not sure how that happened.
• 2:28:26
  So we're like, yeah, you can't come in here anymore.
• 2:28:28
  So we rent an office where we meet the Israelis
• 2:28:33
  off campus.
• 2:28:34
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 2:28:34
  Speaker 2: Yeah, because you just can't.
• 2:28:35
  Speaker 1: Trust them, so that we so crazy.
• 2:28:38
  Speaker 2: We got this briefing and it's just two people. It's
• 2:28:41
  a woman who was the mossade officer and an older
• 2:28:45
  guy who was the shin Bet officer. So because we
• 2:28:49
  were all overt, we were giving our true names. And
• 2:28:53
  first the senior political officer gives her briefing, and then
• 2:28:56
  the econ guy, and the military guy and the oil guy,
• 2:29:00
  and finally comes around to me. So I said, my
• 2:29:03
  name is John Kiriaku, and I'm going to brief you
• 2:29:06
  on Saddam Hussein's current psychology. And the shin Bet guy
• 2:29:11
  goes like this, He goes, spell your name, So I
• 2:29:16
  spell it and he writes it down and he's looking
• 2:29:18
  at me over his glasses and he goes, you are Jewish,
• 2:29:24
  And I said, I am not recruitable. Don't even think
• 2:29:28
  about trying to recruit me. Afterwards, I was furious. I
• 2:29:33
  went back to the office. My boss said, how did
• 2:29:36
  it go? I said, that son of a gun shin
• 2:29:39
  Bet guy tried to recruit me. Everybody started laughing. I said,
• 2:29:42
  why is that so funny? And he said they've done
• 2:29:46
  that to every single one of us. It's like they
• 2:29:49
  can't help themselves.
• 2:29:52
  Speaker 1: It's crazy how effective it is though.
• 2:29:54
  Speaker 2: Oh yeah, look at Jonathan Pollard now he's running for
• 2:29:57
  the Kannesset Bastard.
• 2:30:00
  Speaker 1: It's just crazy how much influence one country has. Yeah,
• 2:30:04
  it really is not a much bigger country, much.
• 2:30:07
  Speaker 2: Bigger, and they have such a tiny population.
• 2:30:11
  Speaker 1: I know, what is it like, nine million people? Pretty gangster,
• 2:30:17
  it's pretty gangster. It's like Chicago taking over the world,
• 2:30:22
  that's right, right, and saying we're gonna do things our way.
• 2:30:25
  Not even Chicago, Chicago more people.
• 2:30:29
  Speaker 2: Fuck.
• 2:30:31
  Speaker 1: Wow. Well, listen, John, I really appreciate your time and
• 2:30:34
  thank you and and thank you for your story.
• 2:30:37
  Speaker 2: Thank you so much for having this and.
• 2:30:41
  Speaker 1: It's a horrible thing that they did to you, but
• 2:30:44
  it's I'm so glad you're out so we can't get
• 2:30:46
  your insight. Thank you very much, appreciate you very much.
• 2:30:49
  Speaker 3: Pleasure by everybody.
• 2:31:00
  Speaker 1: No