Latest / truthunedited / Joe Rogan Experience #2392 - John Kiriakou - PowerfulJRE

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Joe Rogan Experience #2392 - John Kiriakou - PowerfulJRE · truthunedited

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: Jo podcast.
• 0:03
  Speaker 2: Check it out The.
• 0:04
  Speaker 1: Joe Wilgan Experience, Train by Day, Joe Rogan Podcast, by
• 0:08
  Night all day. Because you were saying you replaced Mike Baker, Yeah,
• 0:15
  Mike's a great guy. He was a good officer. He was.
• 0:20
  He doesn't really talk about his work a lot. Maybe
• 0:23
  it's because a lot of years have passed, but he
• 0:25
  was the real deal. I replaced him in Athens, and
• 0:27
  he had done a lot of preliminary leg work in Athens.
• 0:31
  Athens was a tough place at the time. The American
• 0:35
  government spent more money on security in Athens than they
• 0:39
  spent anywhere else in the world, including Beirut. Why well,
• 0:43
  there it was a combination of two things. There were
• 0:45
  two indigenous Greek groups that were exceedingly dangerous. One was
• 0:49
  called Revolutionary Organization. Seventeen November, they had killed the CI
• 0:53
  station chief, two US defense attaches, just bad guys all around.
• 0:59
  The other was called Popular Revolutionary Struggle. And then on
• 1:03
  top of that you had Abu Nidal, the Libyans, the PFLP,
• 1:08
  the PFLPGC, the DFLP. Everybody was there because there was
• 1:14
  this informal agreement between the Greek government of Andreas Papandreau
• 1:20
  at the time, and these terrorist groups that if you
• 1:23
  don't kill Greeks, we'll leave you alone. Oh boy, Yeah,
• 1:29
  but killing Americans wasn't part of the deal, so it
• 1:32
  was every man for himself.
• 1:34
  Speaker 2: 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?
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: Oh? By then I had been in the CIA.
• 2:07
  Speaker 2: Well.
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: By the time I got to Pakistan as the head
• 2:11
  of counter terrorism operations after nine to eleven, I'd been
• 2:14
  in the CIA almost thirteen years and I was responsible
• 2:19
  for all counter terrorism operations in the country. Al Qaeda
• 2:24
  was running out of Afghanistan into Pakistan because we were
• 2:28
  bombing the daylights out of them, and so my job
• 2:32
  was to find them and grab them and then just
• 2:37
  hold 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 Azawai. We
• 2:49
  had killed Mohammed Atef. 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 per 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
  Amuzubeta 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.
• 4:00
  It's 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 2: But is that all just need to know?
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's all need to know. In fact, when I
• 4:13
  got onto the plane, we three FBI agents and I
• 4:16
  picked him up on this gurney and carried him onto
• 4:18
  the plane. We had to stand him up and maneuver
• 4:20
  him onto the plane, and that we laid him across the
• 4:22
  luggage rack at the back and tied him down. And
• 4:27
  one of the guys on the plane, he was dressed
• 4:29
  completely in black with a black hood on, and he
• 4:32
  says John, And I said who are you? And he
• 4:33
  lifts up his mask and he's an old boss on
• 4:37
  mine And I said, hey, what are you doing here?
• 4:39
  He said, oh, I came to take your prisoner. I
• 4:42
  said where are you taking him? And he said I
• 4:44
  can't tell you. You don't have a need to know.
• 4:46
  And I said, now that's cool. He said who is he? Anyway?
• 4:49
  I said, oh, dude, I'm sorry, you don't have a
• 4:51
  need to know. He says, yeah, fair enough, fair enough, okay,
• 4:53
  safe travels. And then you know your job is to
• 4:56
  take him from point A to point B, not to
• 4:58
  become his friend and you know, get his family story,
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  just like my job is to catch him and hand
• 5:03
  him over the next guy. And it's none of my
• 5:05
  business where he's going. And so when I got back
• 5:08
  to headquarters in May of that year, I was just
• 5:12
  standing in the sandwich line at the CIA cafeteria and
• 5:15
  one of the senior guys from the counter Terrorism Center
• 5:17
  came up to me very casually, and he said, oh, hey,
• 5:22
  I'm glad I ran into you. I meant to ask you,
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  do you want to be certified in the use of
• 5:26
  enhanced interrogation techniques? And I had never heard that term before.
• 5:30
  This is May of two thousand and two. I said,
• 5:33
  enhanced interrogation techniques? What's that mean? And he goes, we're
• 5:37
  gonna start getting rough with these guys like that. I said,
• 5:41
  what's that mean? So he describes these ten techniques and
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  I said, I don't know, man, that sounds like a
• 5:48
  torture program. And he said, it's not a torture program.
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  We got it cleared by the Justice Department and the
• 5:53
  President signed it. He says, think about it. I said, yeah,
• 5:57
  give me an hour. I need an hour to think
• 5:59
  about it. I walked out of the cafeteria. I went
• 6:02
  up to the seventh floor, which is the executive floor,
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  and there was a very very senior officer up there
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  for whom I had worked ten years earlier in the
• 6:11
  Middle East. Knocked on his door, no appointment or anything,
• 6:15
  and I said, hey, I need some advice. I was
• 6:17
  just asked if I wanted to be trained in these
• 6:20
  enhanced interrogation techniques, what do you think of that? And
• 6:24
  he said, first of all, let's call a spade a spade.
• 6:27
  He said, this is a torture program. They can use
• 6:30
  whatever euphemism they want, but this is a torture program,
• 6:33
  and torture's a slippery slope. He said, you know how
• 6:35
  these guys are. Somebody's going to be a cowboy. They're
• 6:38
  going to go overboard and they're going to kill a prisoner.
• 6:41
  And when that happens, there's going to be a congressional investigation.
• 6:44
  Then there's going to be a Justice Department investigation, and
• 6:47
  somebody's going to go to prison. Do you want to
• 6:49
  go to prison? I said no, I don't want to
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  go to prison. As it turned out, I was the
• 6:53
  only person who went to prison, but I said no,
• 6:55
  I don't want to go to prison. I went back downstairs.
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  I said, listen, I have a moral and ethical problem
• 7:01
  with this. I think it's illegal, and I don't want
• 7:03
  any part of it. The funny thing is I had
• 7:05
  just captured a z a Beta, who we believed was
• 7:08
  the number three in al Qaeda, and I got passed
• 7:11
  over for promotion. And the reason I got passed over,
• 7:14
  they said, was because I turned down the training. The
• 7:17
  head of the counter Terrorism Center said in my promotion
• 7:20
  panel that I had displayed a shocking lack of commitment
• 7:23
  to counter terrorism. And then the guy who had given
• 7:27
  me the advice saw that my name wasn't on the
• 7:30
  promotion list and he promoted me out of psychle So
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  I realized then I was up against something that was
• 7:38
  going to be tough. And then there was a psychiatrist
• 7:40
  at the agency whom I had known for years. We
• 7:44
  earned the same men's group, we went to the same church,
• 7:46
  and he happens to be both a brigadier general in
• 7:49
  the Army and a CIA psychiatrist. And he said to
• 7:53
  me one day, buddy, you know they call you the
• 7:56
  human rights guy behind your back. And I said, yeah,
• 8:00
  I don't care, and he said, you know that's not
• 8:03
  a compliment, right, And I said, Steve, they're wrong about this,
• 8:08
  and I'm right about it. I said, I'm comfortable with
• 8:12
  the decision that I made and I just left it
• 8:15
  at that. I didn't realize, though, how much I had
• 8:19
  pissed them off until later on.
• 8:21
  Speaker 2: 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.
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  Speaker 1: That was the start.
• 8:35
  Speaker 2: Listen, you're standing out against the group, and I was.
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: The only one. I'm almost ashamed to tell you that.
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  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.
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  Speaker 2: Now, this doesn't necessarily mean that you would have to
• 8:53
  use them. You were just going to be trained. Oh no,
• 8:56
  they were to use and then but you would be
• 8:59
  required to use these techniques. So if you were not
• 9:02
  trained in them, then what would happen? Would that preclude
• 9:06
  you from ever being involved in any sort of a
• 9:10
  questioning interrogation?
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  Speaker 1: 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. The 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.
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  Speaker 2: Standard. Yeah, So what exactly did you know what enhanced
• 10:22
  interrogation techniques they were going to implement.
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: 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 and answer my questions,
• 10:38
  that's not torture. Or the first one was called the
• 10:42
  belly slap, or the intention slap was another way they
• 10:46
  called it. Where I smack you in the belly, makes
• 10:47
  a cracking sound, maybe it leaves a handprint, it's a
• 10:50
  little bit embarrassing. That's not torture. But then it graduated
• 10:55
  quickly to things like waterboarding, which everybody knows about. But
• 10:59
  there were tech that were that were in my view
• 11:02
  that were worse than waterboarding, like, for example, there was
• 11:05
  the cold cell. So they strip you naked, they chain
• 11:09
  you to an eyebolt in the ceiling, so you can't
• 11:11
  you can't lay or kneel or sit or anything. You
• 11:14
  can't get comfortable in any way. And they they chill
• 11:19
  the cell to fifty degrees fahrenheit and then every hour
• 11:23
  somebody comes in and throws a bucket of ice water
• 11:25
  on you. Oh but we killed people with that technique.
• 11:29
  The Justice Department never said we could kill people and
• 11:33
  when we would kill people died with that at least
• 11:35
  two with that technique that admititude from hypothermia.
• 11:40
  Speaker 2: And there wasn't a protocol in place to stop them
• 11:42
  from dye.
• 11:43
  Speaker 1: 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 2: 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 1: 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
• 13:29
  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 2: 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 1: Yeah, it's lost.
• 13:49
  Speaker 2: If there was something, whether it's MDMA or right LSD
• 13:53
  or whatever they give people.
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: 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 mk ULTRA where they runted a
• 14:07
  safe house in San Francisco. They recruited a bunch of
• 14:10
  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.
• 14:27
  Speaker 2: Climax.
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: Yeah, in that climax, exactly. Nobody's agreed to do this.
• 14:33
  You haven't informed them properly. These are American citizens. You
• 14:36
  can't just take people off the streets and and force
• 14:40
  LSD down there.
• 14:41
  Speaker 2: Through They were running the Hate Ashbury Free Clinic until
• 14:44
  right after a month after Chaos by Tom and came out.
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: You're exactly right.
• 14:50
  Speaker 2: 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 and the
• 15:04
  mass Oh.
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: Yeah, Manson, exactly, Yeah, exactly, Yeah. Manson was a part
• 15:08
  of it as well.
• 15:09
  Speaker 2: It's so nuts and they wouldn't have even known about
• 15:12
  that until they found the stash of documents. They connected it.
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: All together, and just think of what's been destroyed right
• 15:18
  what we could.
• 15:19
  Speaker 2: 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 1: 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
• 15:49
  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 2: You know.
• 16:31
  Speaker 1: 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.
• 16:54
  Speaker 2: Ough, so you find out about this torture program, 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 1: You know, honestly, I didn't know until well after I
• 17:14
  left the agency. You know, once I turned this down
• 17:20
  and I got this out of cycle promotion for the
• 17:22
  Albuzubeta 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 Azebeta was being tortured,
• 17:57
  and she curtailed her assign. That means she sends a
• 18:01
  cable 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
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  Orange County, California. Like, what are the techniques that they
• 19:31
  were using that were like causing her of fame?
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: 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 2: No report, no, nothing, nothing.
• 21:10
  Speaker 1: 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 literally just
• 21:17
  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, n 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 2: Was any of it effective? Like, was there any actionable information?
• 21:44
  Speaker 1: 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
• 22:00
  they've been doing interrogations effectively since the Nuremberg Trials in
• 22:04
  forty five and forty six. These guys know what they're doing.
• 22:07
  And so with Abu Zubeta as an example, we captured
• 22:12
  Abu Zubeta, and normally overseas, the CIA has primacy domestically,
• 22:17
  the FBI has primacy, but nine to eleven was still
• 22:21
  an open criminal investigation, and so we sent Abu Zubeta
• 22:24
  out to the secret site and the FBI took over.
• 22:27
  The CIA was furious about this, but there was an
• 22:30
  FBI agent by the name of Ali Sufan who did
• 22:34
  exactly as he was trained to do, and he began
• 22:36
  to engage Abu Zubeta in a conversation, and Abozo Beta
• 22:40
  just gave him the silent treatment for weeks. This went
• 22:43
  on for weeks. But you go in, you offer him
• 22:46
  a cup of coffee, you offer him an orange. If
• 22:50
  he's cooperative, you'll let him write a letter to his mother,
• 22:53
  you know whatever. And finally he opened up and he
• 22:55
  gave us actionable intelligence that saved American lives. Give you
• 23:00
  two examples. Number one, we had no idea what the
• 23:03
  al Qaeda wiring diagram looked like. We knew it was
• 23:06
  bin Laden and Zawahi, and then we just didn't know
• 23:11
  what the organization was like, how it was built. So
• 23:15
  he explained to us how each one of these cells
• 23:18
  all around the world was stovepiped, compartmentalized. So cel A
• 23:23
  had no idea what cel B was doing. And Ali said,
• 23:28
  as an example, if you want to do an operation
• 23:32
  in let's say Dusseldorf, how would you do that? And
• 23:36
  Ibuz Abta said, well, there's this guy Mohammed and here's
• 23:42
  his phone number. Muhammed lives in Dusseldorf and he has
• 23:44
  a cousin, Abdullah, and Abdullah has access to weapons, and
• 23:47
  here's Abdullah's email. And then Abdullah's got a friend, Rashid.
• 23:51
  They meet at the coffee shop and Rashid has has
• 23:54
  access to explosives. And then we're able to call the
• 23:58
  Germans and say, hey, listen, you have a series problem
• 24:00
  in Dusseldorf, and here's what you need to do. And
• 24:03
  then they kicked down the door and they grabbed these
• 24:05
  guys that saved lives. The other thing that he told us,
• 24:09
  and he laughed actually because Ali didn't know what the
• 24:13
  heck he was talking about. He was talking about Muchdor,
• 24:17
  a guy using the nomdger Muchdar. We knew from our
• 24:21
  own files that there was this guy out there who
• 24:25
  called himself Muchdad, who was a very bad guy. In
• 24:29
  nineteen ninety six, he had initiated something called the Bojinka Operation.
• 24:35
  It was supposed to be carried out in the Philippines,
• 24:39
  and the idea was to hijack as many as fourteen
• 24:43
  seven forty sevens and then fly them into buildings all
• 24:46
  up and down the West coast of the United States.
• 24:49
  It just so happened that one day Muchdard, working on
• 24:52
  his plan his diabolical terrorism plan. He went out to
• 24:57
  have lunch, and when he went out to have lunch,
• 25:00
  the cleaning lady came in to clean the apartment and
• 25:03
  she sees all this stuff laid out and she said,
• 25:05
  that looks like a terrorist attack being planned. She calls
• 25:08
  the cops. The cops come and say, ooh, this looks
• 25:12
  like a terrorist attack. We better call the Philippine Intelligence Service.
• 25:16
  They come and look at it, and somebody says we
• 25:18
  should probably call the CIA on this, and so we
• 25:23
  confiscated everything and Bojinka was disrupted.
• 25:27
  Speaker 2: It was crazy. It's crazy a cleaning lady.
• 25:30
  Speaker 1: You never know, you just never know.
• 25:33
  Speaker 2: It's just crazy that he would leave the plans.
• 25:35
  Speaker 1: Just thinking nobody's going to 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. Alzebta laughed at us and said, you
• 25:48
  don't know who Mukda is and Ali said no, and
• 25:52
  abuz Abta said, his name is Khalid Sheik Mohammed. That's
• 25:57
  the first time we ever heard that name. We didn't
• 25:59
  have documents in any files that were about any guy
• 26:02
  named Khali Sheik Muhammad. But that was the very first
• 26:06
  time we were able to piece it all together, and it
• 26:08
  was thanks to Abo Zubeta, in turn thanks to Ali
• 26:12
  Sufan's treating Abu Zebeda with respect. But on August the
• 26:17
  first George Tenant to two thousand and two, George Tenant
• 26:20
  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 Arvezbeeda.
• 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 2: And why would they do that. I don't understand. If
• 27:56
  you're getting information, why would they decide to ramp it
• 28:01
  up in torture.
• 28:02
  Speaker 1: 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
• 29:02
  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 2: Wow, So how did you get in trouble?
• 29:23
  Speaker 1: 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 to prisoners. So a reporter says,
• 31:01
  look all these international human rights organizations are saying that
• 31:04
  the 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. This time he stops and
• 32:00
  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 interview,
• 32:17
  and I decided in the whatever.
• 32:19
  Speaker 2: I was, why did you think they're going to put
• 32:21
  it on you? Because they were calling said human rights guy,
• 32:24
  and that you were going to be a patsy.
• 32:26
  Speaker 1: And I was not willing to assume that. I assumed, yeah.
• 32:29
  Speaker 2: Because that's just your experience with the organization.
• 32:32
  Speaker 1: 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 life.
• 33:00
  I said that the CIA was torturing its prisoners. I
• 33:04
  said that torture was official US government policy, it was
• 33:07
  not the result of any rogue officer. And I said
• 33:10
  that the policy had been personally approved by the President himself.
• 33:15
  And then, as you can imagine, within twenty four hours,
• 33:19
  the CIA files what's called a crime's report against me
• 33:23
  with the FBI, saying that I had revealed classified information.
• 33:28
  The FBI then investigates me from December of seven to
• 33:32
  December of eight, and then they sent my attorney a
• 33:36
  letter called the declination Letter, declining to prosecute. They said
• 33:40
  that they had completed their investigation, that the information was
• 33:46
  already out there because of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch,
• 33:49
  and the Red Cross. But most importantly, torture is a crime,
• 33:54
  and it is illegal to classify a crime for the
• 33:59
  purpose of key being it from the American people, So
• 34:02
  no charges. My wife and I went out to celebrate
• 34:05
  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 spionage, 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. Boom.
• 35:17
  Speaker 2: Yeah, oh god, that's so gross.
• 35:21
  Speaker 1: That's Washington.
• 35:22
  Speaker 2: It's just so hard to believe that the United States
• 35:26
  of America government works like that. I believe it. I believe.
• 35:30
  Oh yes, it's hard to swallow.
• 35:32
  Speaker 1: 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 2: 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 1: 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, nobody, journeyman,
• 36:39
  you know, first line, second line manager, no big deal.
• 36:42
  There are hundreds of them. And he worked for this
• 36:44
  really wonderful woman, a great intellect named Martha Kessler. And
• 36:50
  Martha was so highly respected. She had written this book
• 36:53
  I still remember the title, called Syria Fragile Mosaic of Power.
• 36:57
  And when you got hired, you got her book and
• 37:00
  you had to read the book because like, this is
• 37:02
  what we do. This is the perfect example of what
• 37:04
  we do. So he was her deputy. One day he
• 37:07
  went to her and he said, Martha, you know, I've
• 37:10
  been your deputy for X number of years. I think
• 37:13
  I'm ready for promotion into the Senior Intelligence Service. And
• 37:16
  Martha said, and I just talked to her daughter a
• 37:18
  couple of weeks ago about this. Martha said, not only
• 37:23
  will you never be a member of the Senior Intelligence Service,
• 37:27
  I don't even want you working for me anymore. You're fired, Well,
• 37:31
  you're not really fired at the CIA, if you're fired,
• 37:36
  that means you have six weeks to walk the halls
• 37:38
  and find another job. If you can't find another job
• 37:42
  in six weeks, then they escort you to your car,
• 37:45
  they take your badge, and you know, so long, good luck. Well,
• 37:49
  it's the normal job turnover is in the summertime. This
• 37:53
  is the week before Christmas nineteen ninety three or four,
• 38:01
  I can't recall now, and there are no jobs open
• 38:06
  at Christmas. So he finally finds one job. It is
• 38:11
  in the PDB staff the President's Daily brief and it
• 38:15
  is as a morning briefer, giving the President's Daily Brief
• 38:20
  briefing to the lowest ranking person entitled to a PDB briefing.
• 38:26
  So that's the National Security Council's director for Intelligence Programs,
• 38:31
  who happened to be this guy named George Tennant, And
• 38:35
  so they immediately hit it off. Two alpha dogs, cigars,
• 38:40
  smoking hard drink, and there used to be a kiosk
• 38:43
  right at the corner of seventeenth and Pennsylvania Avenue adjacent
• 38:46
  to the White House that sold cigars. Tenant had had
• 38:50
  a heart attack and he wasn't supposed to smoke, and
• 38:52
  his wife would yell at him so they would after
• 38:54
  the briefing, they'd walk out to the kiosk and buy
• 38:56
  cigars and just stand there and laugh and you know,
• 39:00
  talk about chasing women or whatever. Totally hit it off.
• 39:04
  Then Tenant becomes the deputy director of the CIA, so
• 39:07
  he brings he brings Brennan back with him and makes
• 39:12
  him Martha Kessler's boss, deputy director of the office that
• 39:17
  Martha's working in. He calls Martha Kessler and says, now
• 39:21
  you're fired, and so she just elected to retire. Well,
• 39:27
  he ended up being identified by Tenant as the guy like,
• 39:32
  this is my guy. This guy's going places. He needs
• 39:36
  operational experience because he's been an analyst and an analytic
• 39:39
  manager all these years. I'm gonna make him the station
• 39:42
  chief in Riad, Saudi Arabia. He's an analyst, he's never
• 39:46
  served overseas before, never recruited a spy. Ever, it wasn't
• 39:50
  his job. Now all of a sudden, he's the station
• 39:53
  chief and one of the most important stations in the world.
• 39:56
  So he does that for a long time, by the way,
• 40:00
  during which he approves the visas for the nine to
• 40:03
  eleven hijackers, and then he comes back as the deputy
• 40:10
  executive director of the whole CIA, right, so it's director,
• 40:15
  deputy director, 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 un quote human rights guy, ah,
• 41:02
  that just kind of sealed it for me. But I
• 41:03
  didn't care because I didn't respect him anyhow. I will
• 41:07
  say 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 shunted him off there
• 41:41
  and it was a nothing analytic organization, not even in
• 41:44
  the in the headquarters building. It was out one of
• 41:47
  the outlying buildings. And then he kind of went away.
• 41:50
  But where he really did right for himself is in
• 41:55
  two thousand and seven, there was this there was this
• 41:58
  wave of retirement. Right, we're enough now beyond nine to
• 42:03
  eleven that people can begin to retire. So this huge
• 42:06
  wave of senior level retirements in seven. And then once
• 42:10
  these guys retired, half of them went to the McCain
• 42:13
  campaign and half of them went to the Hillary Clinton campaign.
• 42:17
  And John Brennan was literally the only one who went
• 42:21
  to the Obama campaign. And he saved himself.
• 42:27
  Speaker 2: Wow, so how did you wind up going to prison?
• 42:33
  Speaker 1: 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 the 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 heroine
• 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
• 43:52
  job is this constant engagement with foreign diplomats, like who's
• 43:57
  doing what? And what do you think about Israel? What
• 43:59
  do you think about China? What do you think about
• 44:01
  what's going on in you know, Mexico or Cuba or whatever.
• 44:05
  And I get a call from this Japanese diplomat and
• 44:07
  he invites me to lunch, and I said, great, we
• 44:09
  needed a place on Capitol Hill. And I remember that
• 44:14
  lunch very well. I remember we talked about Israeli elections,
• 44:18
  we talked about Turkish elections, and we talked about the
• 44:20
  Arab Israeli peace process. And at the end of the lunch,
• 44:24
  he says to me, and I should add his English
• 44:28
  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
• 45:12
  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 2: Yeah?
• 48:27
  Speaker 1: 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
• 48:37
  two months. It took me to get it cleared. And
• 48:38
  I'm thinking, what an odd question. Then they started 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
• 50:58
  wanted to tell you how sorry I am. Lah 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.
• 51:56
  Speaker 2: Oh my god, oh it was.
• 51:58
  Speaker 1: I went home that night and I went home. I'm
• 52:03
  ashamed to even say it. That night we put the
• 52:05
  kids to bed, and my wife and I were watching
• 52:09
  TV and she said, come on, let's go to bed.
• 52:11
  I said, I can't sleep. There's no way I'm going
• 52:14
  to be able to sleep. And she said, now, come on,
• 52:16
  let's go to bed. She knew I was going to
• 52:19
  go down into the garage, turned the car on it
• 52:22
  and just lay across the back seat, and she said,
• 52:24
  now come on, you need to try to get some sleep.
• 52:28
  As she saved me that night. But forty five years.
• 52:32
  And so they waited ten months before they were even
• 52:38
  willing to engage in a conversation, and then they offered
• 52:42
  ten years on a Monday. On Wednesday, they offered eight,
• 52:46
  and on Friday they offered five. My lead attorney was
• 52:49
  this legendary guy named Plato Cacheris, and Plato said, you know,
• 52:57
  I've been a criminal defense attorney in this city for
• 52:59
  fifteen two years, and this is the first time I've
• 53:03
  ever seen them come down in time? He said, usually
• 53:06
  they offer you ten, you say no, the next offers fifteen,
• 53:10
  Then the next offer's twenty. I said, why are they
• 53:13
  coming down in time? He said, because they have a
• 53:15
  shit case and they know it's shit, and that's why
• 53:17
  we're going to go to trial and we're going to
• 53:19
  win this thing. I said, great. Well, they stayed at
• 53:26
  five and then they came back and they said three
• 53:31
  and a half. And I said, I'm going to trial.
• 53:34
  I'm going to win this thing turned out. At the time,
• 53:37
  my best friend, his wife had an uncle who was
• 53:41
  OJ Simpson's jury consultant, and she called him for me
• 53:44
  and she said, hey, my friend John's in this situation.
• 53:47
  He's like, yeah, I read about this in the papers.
• 53:49
  He could use your help. He came up, didn't charge
• 53:51
  me a cent. He came up to Washington. We got
• 53:54
  him a security clearance, and which was another thing. We
• 53:58
  asked for a security clearance, and then the Justice Department
• 54:04
  called and said the White House said Kuriaku's attorneys have
• 54:06
  enough security clearances. And I said, who at the White
• 54:10
  House said we have enough security clearances? Well, they had
• 54:13
  to tell us that it was John Brennan, no more
• 54:17
  attorneys for Kuriacu, fish or cut bait. Well like, it's
• 54:20
  not up to John Brennan to decide if I have
• 54:22
  enough attorneys. They have an unlimited number of attorneys, an
• 54:27
  unlimited budget. As it turned out, they spent six million
• 54:31
  dollars to put me in prison. Was society really better
• 54:35
  off spending six million dollars to put me in a
• 54:39
  low security prison for twenty three months? So in the
• 54:45
  end they said best and final offer, thirty months, you
• 54:51
  do twenty three.
• 54:53
  Speaker 2: Well.
• 54:54
  Speaker 1: I was only the second American who had ever been
• 54:56
  charged with this crime of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection
• 55:01
  Act of nineteen eighty two. The only other person that
• 55:06
  was charged with it was a woman named Sharon Scranache.
• 55:09
  She was a CIAS secretary in Ghana in the eighties,
• 55:13
  and she was having an affair with a member of
• 55:16
  Ghana's intelligence service, and in the course of pillow talk,
• 55:20
  she revealed the names of all of the CIA officers
• 55:23
  in the station and the names of the sources they
• 55:26
  were running. And so the Ghanaians executed these guys.
• 55:30
  Speaker 2: Oh my god.
• 55:32
  Speaker 1: 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
• 55:52
  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,
• 56:13
  you couldn't challenge it in court. And I said, well,
• 56:16
  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 like eighty year old six foot to
• 57:43
  two hundred and eighty pound, mean old man. He comes
• 57:46
  in and I said good morning, Plato, and he said,
• 57:50
  you 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 2: Oh God.
• 58:06
  Speaker 1: 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, what now, what do I do? And
• 58:23
  then the third who is the guy Mark McDougall, one
• 58:29
  of the best attorneys I've ever encountered in my life
• 58:33
  and the one that I liked and respected the most
• 58:36
  out of all of them. I liked all of them
• 58:37
  and respected all of them, but I felt a connection
• 58:40
  to this guy. He pulls me aside. He was a
• 58:42
  little bit angry, and he said, you know what your
• 58:45
  problem is. Your problem is you think this is about justice,
• 58:48
  and it's not about justice. It's about mitigating damage. Take
• 58:53
  the deal. And I looked at my wife. She's just like,
• 58:59
  what do we going to do? So I took the
• 59:02
  deal 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 Kuriak would be sent to a
• 59:55
  minimum security work camp. She says, any objection from the
• 59:59
  justice to part They said, no objection. She goes, Okay,
• 1:00:02
  minimum security work camp. No bars on the windows, no
• 1:00:05
  locks on the doors. You're free to come and go
• 1:00:07
  as you please. You're just on your honor not to abscond. Andy.
• 1:00:11
  Most of the guys work. There's a little college in town.
• 1:00:14
  You go sweep the floors or whatever. So I got
• 1:00:18
  to the prison three months later, and it's weird the
• 1:00:23
  system that we have.
• 1:00:24
  Speaker 2: Joe.
• 1:00:25
  Speaker 1: 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 at the minimum security
• 1:00:58
  camp across the street. And the guy laughs at me
• 1:01:01
  and he goes, not, according to my paperwork, you're not.
• 1:01:05
  And I was like, oh my god, take it easy.
• 1:01:08
  We later learned Brennan was so angry at the shortness
• 1:01:13
  of my sentence that he told them make it as
• 1:01:17
  difficult as possible. So I told myself, take it easy.
• 1:01:24
  If you make any ruckus, they're going to put you
• 1:01:26
  in solitary. You don't say a word. So I didn't
• 1:01:27
  say a word. It took him about forty minutes to
• 1:01:31
  process me. Then they walked me to my cell. The
• 1:01:35
  only thing the cop said to me, he says a
• 1:01:37
  word of advice buddy, if anybody comes into your cell uninvited,
• 1:01:42
  that's an act of aggression. And I said, great, thanks,
• 1:01:46
  I'm here forty minutes and now I'm going to get
• 1:01:48
  my ass kicked. I appreciate it. And then I started
• 1:01:52
  that whole odyssey.
• 1:01:54
  Speaker 2: And so what kind of prison were you in?
• 1:01:57
  Speaker 1: 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 a hearing, and you'll be home
• 1:02:35
  by then. He said, buddy, I'm sorry, You're going to
• 1:02:37
  have to tough it out. And so that's what I did.
• 1:02:42
  Speaker 3: 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.
• 1:03:01
  Speaker 2: And what do you do when you get out?
• 1:03:05
  Speaker 1: 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
• 1:04:20
  broke and I was broke, bankrupt, HM so.
• 1:04:24
  Speaker 2: You couldn't even get a job driving for uber.
• 1:04:27
  Speaker 1: Uber turned me down. Wow, yeah, it's crazy, it's crazy.
• 1:04:31
  But you know what, though, what did you do well?
• 1:04:35
  I 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
  what 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 2: So what did you do for money?
• 1:07:45
  Speaker 1: 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 happened 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 laughing emoji. I gave
• 1:12:02
  myself a couple hours to cool off, and then I
• 1:12:06
  texted back and I said, Jose, I'm on the right
• 1:12:09
  side of history and you are not. And that gave
• 1:12:14
  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. Two 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 a 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, chom
• 1:13:53
  child molester. I said no, 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 2: God, it has to be insanely stressful.
• 1:15:43
  Speaker 1: 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
• 1:15:54
  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
  i'mat or something. He's from Iraq. And I said, and
• 1:17:46
  I should have been metaf Thick. It's very nice to
• 1:17:48
  meet you. And he says, and I'm in Iraq. I said, yeah, great,
• 1:17:54
  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 here. 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
• 1:19:22
  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 you a question. Did the cops say
• 1:19:49
  anything 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
• 1:20:51
  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
• 1:20:57
  a solitary right now. And I thought, you know, is
• 1:21:00
  now 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
• 1:21:45
  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 2: Wow, jeez. 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, you'll do something.
• 1:22:03
  Speaker 1: They did it one other time. One of my attorneys.
• 1:22:06
  Speaker 2: Didn't know who orchestrated that.
• 1:22:09
  Speaker 1: No, no, I don't think he was smart enough. I
• 1:22:14
  don't think he cared enough. It had to come from
• 1:22:17
  the agency.
• 1:22:18
  Speaker 2: Oh my god.
• 1:22:19
  Speaker 1: There was one other incident too. I lived in the
• 1:22:24
  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
• 1:22:43
  Jersey And he said yeah. I said, I don't have
• 1:22:47
  anything to say to the spokesman with Taliban. I don't
• 1:22:49
  want to meet him. And he said, oh, okay, I'll
• 1:22:51
  tell him. So I'm out in the yard one day
• 1:22:56
  and my attorney had warned me they're they're upset at
• 1:23:00
  the shortness of your sentence, so be very careful. They're
• 1:23:04
  going to try to set you up and add years on.
• 1:23:08
  So I'm out in the yard and here comes this
• 1:23:10
  guy with a beard down to his waist and he's
• 1:23:13
  got his hand out to shake my hand, and I
• 1:23:15
  put my hands up so as not to touch him.
• 1:23:19
  And I looked just past him, and there's a guard
• 1:23:22
  in the woods outside the thing with a long distance
• 1:23:26
  camera lens and he's going click click click, click, click
• 1:23:28
  click click. And I said, don't you even think about
• 1:23:32
  touching me? And he said, oh, come on, man, come on,
• 1:23:36
  we have a lot in common. I said, we have
• 1:23:38
  nothing in common. I spent half my career trying to
• 1:23:40
  kill people like you. I said, get away from me,
• 1:23:43
  don't touch me, or you're going to end up unconscious
• 1:23:46
  on the ground. And he walked away, and then he
• 1:23:49
  got transferred out, and I said, isn't it interesting that
• 1:23:53
  the spokesman for the Taliban was sent to our prison
• 1:23:57
  and was only here for four days? Isn't that interesting?
• 1:24:01
  And then they just gave up.
• 1:24:03
  Speaker 2: Wow, this kind of stuff is so hard to believe.
• 1:24:10
  Speaker 1: It's America, and you don't want to believe this about America.
• 1:24:13
  Speaker 2: 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 1: Just yeah, but they do.
• 1:24:23
  Speaker 2: But the crazy thing is, it's like the CIA torture
• 1:24:26
  program wasn't even effective.
• 1:24:28
  Speaker 1: No, that's the thing. It wasn't even eft. But you
• 1:24:32
  know what, though, Joe, when these guys die, and they've
• 1:24:35
  started to die, in their obituaries, it's going to say
• 1:24:40
  that they were among the creators of the CIA's torture program,
• 1:24:46
  and so they have a vested interest in repeating this
• 1:24:49
  lie over and over and over again that it was
• 1:24:53
  the right thing to do.
• 1:24:54
  Speaker 2: But what I don't understand is wouldn't they want to
• 1:24:58
  be effective?
• 1:25:00
  Speaker 1: Thinks if they were clear headed.
• 1:25:02
  Speaker 2: 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.
• 1:25:36
  Speaker 1: 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 gonna do it anymore. God,
• 1:26:01
  I mean, I have to laugh just because it's so nuts.
• 1:26:06
  What else can you do.
• 1:26:07
  Speaker 2: It's beyond nuts. It's disgusting, and it's just amazing that
• 1:26:14
  they could get away with them.
• 1:26:15
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and they have. Nobody's been prosecuted, nobody.
• 1:26:21
  Speaker 2: Does Trump know about all this stuff, about my stuff? Yeah, Like,
• 1:26:26
  if you ever, I don't try to get a pardon
• 1:26:28
  out of him.
• 1:26:29
  Speaker 1: 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 was
• 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
• 1:27:45
  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 2: Now. You're doing all these conversations. He 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 to you that it somehow limits your possibility of
• 1:28:18
  being pardoned because you're exposing so many people that may
• 1:28:23
  still be working there.
• 1:28:25
  Speaker 1: 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 2: It's so hard to hear these stories.
• 1:29:17
  Speaker 1: It's terrible.
• 1:29:17
  Speaker 2: It's so hard to imagine that government could be so discussed.
• 1:29:22
  Speaker 1: Oh 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. Right. They all
• 1:29:44
  see themselves, as you know, having the corner office at
• 1:29:48
  the law firm someday or running for Congress or for
• 1:29:51
  the governor, and they're going to make that career on
• 1:29:54
  your back.
• 1:29:55
  Speaker 2: 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. Do you know this story?
• 1:30:20
  Speaker 1: Exactly what you're talking about.
• 1:30:21
  Speaker 2: 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.
• 1:30:36
  Speaker 1: That's it.
• 1:30:37
  Speaker 2: Like when I was having a conversation about this, we
• 1:30:40
  brought up the governor that they were planning on kidnapping
• 1:30:44
  the governor Whittner, Yeah, Michigan. Yeah, and that twelve of
• 1:30:50
  the fourteen people were working with the FBI.
• 1:30:52
  Speaker 1: 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. Can
• 1:31:11
  you remember have you heard of the rude eighty two
• 1:31:13
  bridge plot in Cleveland? No, there are three morons sitting
• 1:31:18
  in a bar getting drunk.
• 1:31:20
  Speaker 2: Oh I did hear about this?
• 1:31:21
  Speaker 1: 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
• 1:31:34
  up and they got like twenty eighteen and fifteen years
• 1:31:37
  in prison. It was the FBI's idea, not their idea.
• 1:31:41
  They're just sitting in a bar drinking.
• 1:31:43
  Speaker 2: Well, how about January sixth?
• 1:31:44
  Speaker 1: How about January sixth?
• 1:31:45
  Speaker 2: This is there you go. I was trying to explain
• 1:31:48
  to Jim gaff again. One day, Jim Gaffkin was talking
• 1:31:52
  about what they did in January sixth? I go, do
• 1:31:53
  you understand that there were paid people that were working
• 1:31:58
  for the federal government. They were in employees of the
• 1:32:00
  federal government that were on that lawn trying to convince
• 1:32:05
  people 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.
• 1:32:17
  Speaker 1: Illegal, exactly so they can build their careers by making
• 1:32:21
  these arrests.
• 1:32:22
  Speaker 2: Not just that, but demonize the president the foreign 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 1: 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 2: How was he plotting to overthrow the government.
• 1:32:42
  Speaker 1: 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're like, oh, look what Donald
• 1:33:43
  Trump did. He hired prostitutes to pee on Barack Obama's bed. No,
• 1:33:48
  he didn't. One guy made this up and Christopher Steele
• 1:33:54
  wrote it and sent it back. That doesn't make it fact.
• 1:33:57
  Speaker 2: 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 1: 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?
• 1:34:46
  Speaker 2: Of course not, No, of course not. But it also
• 1:34:49
  just divides us.
• 1:34:49
  Speaker 1: Even if it does.
• 1:34:51
  Speaker 2: And it also very much distorted the narrative with people
• 1:34:54
  like Jim Gaffigan, who's a friend of mine, who's a
• 1:34:58
  very left leaning comedian, and he had it in his
• 1:35:02
  mind that these people win it. And they also have
• 1:35:05
  this thing where they say a cop.
• 1:35:06
  Speaker 1: Was murdered, right, that's not true.
• 1:35:09
  Speaker 2: 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.
• 1:35:21
  Speaker 1: Perhaps maybe maybe not, maybe not, Maybe he shouldn't have
• 1:35:25
  been a cop. Yeah, I mean, if you can die,
• 1:35:27
  get health problems, right.
• 1:35:29
  Speaker 2: Like, that's not normal to just die of a heart
• 1:35:31
  attack because of a very stressful days. But that's it.
• 1:35:35
  This idea that they killed cops, that that narrative keeps
• 1:35:40
  coming out. It was an insurrection. They murdered cops, They
• 1:35:44
  broke into the White House. They were looking for Nancy Pelosi,
• 1:35:47
  they 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 faces
• 1:36:22
  and 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 like that that is a serious It's a violation
• 1:36:41
  of what you're supposed to be doing in the first place.
• 1:36:44
  If the FBI was on that loan, on that lawn,
• 1:36:47
  I would hope what they would be doing is informing
• 1:36:51
  people 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 1: I think you're one hundred percent right.
• 1:37:10
  Speaker 2: 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.
• 1:37:16
  Speaker 1: 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 2: Also, was there did they turn down the idea of
• 1:37:34
  bringing in the National Guard?
• 1:37:37
  Speaker 1: 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 2: Also significantly deterred people from committing these crimes. That's right,
• 1:37:50
  That they were encouraged to do.
• 1:37:51
  Speaker 1: 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 say,
• 1:37:57
  this isn't for me.
• 1:37:57
  Speaker 2: 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 1: Harry Truman once famously said, if you want a friend
• 1:38:20
  in Washington, get a dog.
• 1:38:26
  Speaker 2: 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 1: Yeah, we're the good guys.
• 1:38:36
  Speaker 2: 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 1: 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 2: 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
  through like the the security guards are walking them into
• 1:40:23
  the Senate, Like what the fuck? What is this?
• 1:40:27
  Speaker 1: Like? What?
• 1:40:27
  Speaker 2: And why is no one outraged? And why is it
• 1:40:29
  only one side that's outraged? God, if I was a
• 1:40:33
  if I was a Democrat congressman or a senator, or
• 1:40:38
  if I was any sort of a politician on the
• 1:40:40
  other side, I'd be like, do you know how disgusting
• 1:40:43
  this is? This is You're you're using this to go
• 1:40:46
  after Donald Trump, of all things, and instead of just
• 1:40:50
  better political opposition.
• 1:40:52
  Speaker 1: Exactly, and the media or to blame in part as well.
• 1:40:56
  Speaker 2: Well, they're bought and paid for.
• 1:40:57
  Speaker 1: Absolutely.
• 1:40:58
  Speaker 2: I mean, the media in this country is a complete
• 1:41:01
  and total failure. The only thing that's real media in
• 1:41:04
  this country are independent journalists, that's right. And there's mostly
• 1:41:07
  people who worked for large media corporations and either were
• 1:41:12
  fired or had to leave because they're own ethics and morals,
• 1:41:16
  or eventually branched down on their own and now they're
• 1:41:19
  in grave danger, you know, and they're worried about being
• 1:41:22
  prosecuted or set up.
• 1:41:23
  Speaker 1: I couldn't agree more killed.
• 1:41:26
  Speaker 2: 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.
• 1:41:48
  Speaker 1: And it hurts, it really does. I was raised in
• 1:41:52
  a family like you were, where I was taught that
• 1:41:56
  this was the greatest country on earth. Not I still
• 1:42:00
  think it is and I do too, which and that's
• 1:42:03
  why we have to weed out the likes of John Brennan.
• 1:42:08
  Speaker 2: God. But it seems like there's a lot of people
• 1:42:12
  like that, Yeah, that are deeply rooted. Yes, and this
• 1:42:15
  is what you were talking about too, that presidents come
• 1:42:18
  and go, but those people that's the real power. You know,
• 1:42:21
  this term the deep state. A lot of people that
• 1:42:24
  you know, there's a lot of people that don't like
• 1:42:26
  to entertain any kind of conspiracies because they think it's
• 1:42:28
  like a fool's journey. But you're really foolish if you
• 1:42:32
  don't believe in conspiracies. Yeah, because just how many of
• 1:42:37
  them have to be proven true before you go? Maybe
• 1:42:41
  I should reassess my position on these things.
• 1:42:45
  Speaker 1: Sixty two years after the JFK assassination and we're still
• 1:42:48
  learning new information. Yeah, information that's been kept from us.
• 1:42:52
  Speaker 2: 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 JA,
• 1:43:00
  we're supposed to get all the CIA files, all the
• 1:43:02
  JFK files, We're supposed to know exactly what happened to him.
• 1:43:07
  We know very little. Very little new information has been
• 1:43:11
  released that illuminates any aspects of that case.
• 1:43:15
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a shame.
• 1:43:16
  Speaker 2: Well, it's terrible because most likely at least some part
• 1:43:22
  of our government was involved in assassinating the president and
• 1:43:28
  no one went to jail. No, nothing happened, and in fact,
• 1:43:31
  people succeeded and thrived after that.
• 1:43:35
  Speaker 1: Sad truth. Yeah, that's exactly what happened.
• 1:43:38
  Speaker 2: 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.
• 1:43:48
  Like most of it can be explained away by incompetence
• 1:43:52
  or coincidence and this and that, Like that's not even true.
• 1:43:55
  It's not even most of it. It's some things can
• 1:43:58
  be explained.
• 1:43:59
  Speaker 1: To some things. I had a friend at the agency.
• 1:44:01
  He was one of my first bosses, and he had
• 1:44:04
  started out in this like internship program that the agency had.
• 1:44:09
  The it was you had to be working on a
• 1:44:13
  master's degree. But anyway, his first assignment was in the
• 1:44:17
  counter Intelligence Center, which at the time was being run
• 1:44:20
  by James Angleton. And on his first day, the secretary
• 1:44:25
  walked him around and you know, this is what we
• 1:44:28
  do over here, and this is what we do over there,
• 1:44:30
  and there was this entire wall of file folders and
• 1:44:34
  she said, whatever you do, don't look in those folders.
• 1:44:39
  You're not cleared for that. Well he said, well, of course,
• 1:44:42
  the very first minute that he's left alone, he runs
• 1:44:46
  and looks in the folders and he said, every single
• 1:44:49
  one of those folders was on an American citizen. And
• 1:44:53
  the CIA is forbidden by law from spying on Americans.
• 1:44:58
  Speaker 2: 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 1: 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 2: 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 1: Yeah. Well, look at the Dashie Leiley mascer that I
• 1:45:59
  mentioned earlier. It was part of his campaign to open
• 1:46:03
  an investigation of Dashti Laiy. What happened was at Dashti Lailey,
• 1:46:09
  Afghanistan on November thirtieth and December the first two thousand
• 1:46:14
  and one, two thousand Taliban soldiers gave up en mass right,
• 1:46:19
  and the Northern Alliance called us and said, what do
• 1:46:23
  we do with all these guys. We don't have room
• 1:46:25
  for them. So we told them put them in trucks,
• 1:46:28
  take them out to the desert, and just hold them
• 1:46:30
  there until we can divide them up and send them
• 1:46:32
  to smaller jails all around the country, and if we
• 1:46:35
  have to, we can send some to Pakistan. But there
• 1:46:40
  were no air holes in the containers, there was no food,
• 1:46:43
  there was no water. And of the two thousand fourteen survived,
• 1:46:51
  and one of the fourteen said that when they opened
• 1:46:54
  the trucks in the desert, the bodies fell out like
• 1:46:57
  sardines from a can. So Barack Obama said in two
• 1:47:01
  thousand and eight, if he's elected president, he's going to
• 1:47:05
  investigate this massacre and get to the bottom of it.
• 1:47:07
  And then there was nothing. So I said to John Kerry,
• 1:47:10
  I said, listen, this is part of the Obama campaign.
• 1:47:13
  Let me go to Afghanistan and investigate this thing. And
• 1:47:17
  so I went, and there are still bones just sticking
• 1:47:21
  out of the sand. There are clothes that have just
• 1:47:23
  been laying there in the desert all these years. All
• 1:47:25
  the bodies are still there. What's left of them?
• 1:47:28
  Speaker 2: Really?
• 1:47:28
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's grizzly. So I come back and I get
• 1:47:33
  a call from a kind of a prominent human rights
• 1:47:36
  activist and he said he wanted to see me, but
• 1:47:37
  it had to be private. So we went to Johns
• 1:47:41
  Hopkins University. There was a classroom that wasn't being used.
• 1:47:45
  We met there and he said, listen, I have a
• 1:47:47
  witness who was twelve years old at the time, and
• 1:47:51
  he was hiding behind a rock and he saw what
• 1:47:56
  happened when they opened the trucks and the bodies fell out.
• 1:47:59
  I said, okay, and he said, but what's new is
• 1:48:03
  He says that there were two men there wearing blue
• 1:48:06
  jeans and black t shirts and they were speaking English.
• 1:48:10
  I said, okay, that's all I need. So I wrote
• 1:48:13
  a letter to the agency and I asked, you know,
• 1:48:16
  for clarification, were any CIA personnel on site at the
• 1:48:20
  box up or at the at the location where the
• 1:48:24
  trucks were opened? And I had it auto penned John Kerry, Chairman.
• 1:48:31
  Six weeks later, a colleague comes into my office and
• 1:48:33
  he says, hey, you got a response from the agency
• 1:48:36
  to your letter. I said, I didn't see any response
• 1:48:38
  from the agency. I just checked my mail an hour
• 1:48:40
  ago and he said they classified at top secret. It's
• 1:48:43
  down in the vault. I said top secret. I said, well,
• 1:48:46
  what did it say? And he says, it says, go
• 1:48:49
  fuck yourself. I said, great, that's how they want to
• 1:48:53
  play it. So I went to carry and Carrie says,
• 1:48:56
  you know, we're stirring up a hornet's nest here, and
• 1:49:00
  I think we should just let this fade into history.
• 1:49:04
  And I was like, again, because you want so badly
• 1:49:08
  to be Secretary of State again.
• 1:49:14
  Speaker 2: God, what a gross business.
• 1:49:17
  Speaker 1: It's awful, hideous.
• 1:49:20
  Speaker 2: 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 1: 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 stronger.
• 1:49:56
  And Benjamin Ettaniell, who weaker, Netta, who's decision to bomb
• 1:49:59
  gutter was too much, just too much. It served, It
• 1:50:05
  could have served to embarrass the president. What it ended
• 1:50:08
  up doing is it weakened Netanyahu's position. So that's a
• 1:50:12
  victory for the White House as far as I'm concerned.
• 1:50:15
  Speaker 2: You real quick, Yeah, the correct pronunciation, how did you
• 1:50:18
  say it?
• 1:50:18
  Speaker 1: Gutter?
• 1:50:19
  Speaker 2: You said gutter?
• 1:50:20
  Speaker 1: It's back here, It's called it cuf.
• 1:50:23
  Speaker 2: But I've heard cutter. Yah, it's got cutter.
• 1:50:25
  Speaker 1: But they used saying they use a g sound. Other
• 1:50:30
  Arabs would call it gutta with a like a k
• 1:50:33
  uh huh, But in the golf dialect, it's way down here,
• 1:50:39
  gotta okay. The other thing is Iran. Man, I follow
• 1:50:45
  Iran more closely than anybody I know. You remember you're
• 1:50:49
  you're a little bit younger than I am, but not much.
• 1:50:53
  When 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 opened
• 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 2: 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 1: And we're seeing it. Whether whether people want to admit
• 1:51:47
  it or not.
• 1:51:48
  Speaker 2: That's part of the problem because of narratives.
• 1:51:50
  Speaker 1: 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 2: What is your take on Netan Nyaho's position? Because if
• 1:52:24
  war is over, Netan Nyah, who will no longer be
• 1:52:29
  running israel Is that correct.
• 1:52:32
  Speaker 1: 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 Kanesssean. 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 Netnah, who
• 1:53:02
  has never won more than twenty seven percent.
• 1:53:06
  Speaker 2: Of the vote.
• 1:53:07
  Speaker 1: Wow, he's very unpopular. It's just that he's the least
• 1:53:11
  unpopular of the unpopular politicians. And it's a crazy way
• 1:53:16
  to run a country. One of the things that the
• 1:53:18
  Greeks did because the Greeks had the same problem. They're
• 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 Netna, who longest serving prime minister in
• 1:53:59
  is reg history, wildly unpopular. And it's funny because he
• 1:54:04
  used to be considered a right wing extremist and now
• 1:54:07
  he's the moderate of the government. Really mm hm, the
• 1:54:11
  likes of Iamar Ben Gvir and Smotrich and these other
• 1:54:16
  guys who have come in from the right, they were
• 1:54:20
  attacking him to the point where he had to bring
• 1:54:22
  their parties into this coalition government just to get him
• 1:54:25
  to shut up. I mean, these are people that have
• 1:54:28
  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. What's that? Wow, it's a
• 1:54:42
  terrible untenable position.
• 1:54:47
  Speaker 2: Haven't they decided to go ahead and prosecute him even
• 1:54:50
  while he's in office.
• 1:54:51
  Speaker 1: 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 2: Wow, which incentivizes him to stay at war, which is
• 1:56:01
  so crazy.
• 1:56:02
  Speaker 1: Isn't it though. Strange situation.
• 1:56:05
  Speaker 3: 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 1: 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 Netanyahu resign. And it was all because of corruption.
• 1:56:24
  Speaker 2: And what is the specific corruption that he's been accused of.
• 1:56:27
  Speaker 1: 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 2: 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 1: 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. You know, we have convinced ourselves
• 1:57:43
  over the decades that we have to be all around
• 1:57:46
  the world, protecting the week and those without a voice,
• 1:57:51
  and being the peacemaker. You know, we have. We have
• 1:57:57
  one hundred and ninety bases and one hundred and forty
• 1:57:59
  four or countries. We have to do all that, And
• 1:58:02
  the Chinese say, yeah, yeah, you have to go ahead,
• 1:58:06
  spend all your money on that stuff. In the meantime,
• 1:58:09
  we're going to have three hundred and fifty mile an
• 1:58:11
  hour trains and the best highways in the world, and
• 1:58:14
  the best schools and the best hospitals and the nicest airports,
• 1:58:18
  and then all of our extra money, we're gonna essentially
• 1:58:21
  bribe foreign countries to do things that we want them
• 1:58:25
  to do. So it's a lesson that I think we
• 1:58:29
  haven't learned as a country that there are other ways
• 1:58:32
  of winning hearts and minds.
• 1:58:37
  Speaker 2: What's also, they're actively engaged in making sure that people
• 1:58:42
  are arguing online. Yeah, fascinating.
• 1:58:44
  Speaker 1: You know, they're very good at these kinds of behind
• 1:58:49
  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.
• 1:59:23
  Speaker 2: 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 1: Brad Parscalus 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 2: Well, I also have the recent purchase of TikTok.
• 2:00:17
  Speaker 1: 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, who
• 2:01:01
  because I said, this deal that appears the president has
• 2:01:06
  negotiated was a good idea, so I'm virulently anti Semitic.
• 2:01:09
  And then they built on that and by the end
• 2:01:13
  of it, and nobody else was commenting, But by the
• 2:01:16
  end of it they said that I was I was
• 2:01:20
  morbidly obese and ugly and stupid too.
• 2:01:24
  Speaker 2: What the fun is.
• 2:01:31
  Speaker 1: Morbidly obese, ugly and stupid too.
• 2:01:34
  Speaker 2: You don't even look a little fat.
• 2:01:36
  Speaker 1: No, no, I'm sixty. I feel like I'm okay.
• 2:01:42
  Speaker 2: 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, then it's effective and at least it
• 2:01:50
  moves a narrative into a certain direction.
• 2:01:52
  Speaker 1: You know, and chat GPT and these other chatbots are
• 2:01:55
  very easy to influence. When chat gpt first came, now,
• 2:02:00
  just for fun, I said, who is John Kyriaku? 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. I've 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 2: Why didn't you just say I'm actually John Kiriaku.
• 2:02:52
  Speaker 1: Afraid it was what it was going to do me?
• 2:02:56
  Speaker 2: But I mean, did you ask it where you're getting
• 2:02:58
  your information from?
• 2:03:00
  Speaker 1: No? But it pulls from literally everywhere.
• 2:03:02
  Speaker 2: 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 1: 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 pulled a surprise nominated political cartoonist
• 2:03:24
  Ted Rall. He did the same thing. Who is Ted Rall? Well?
• 2:03:28
  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 2: 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 1: It's just it's just factually incorrect.
• 2:04:13
  Speaker 2: 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 now, like what would what would be
• 2:04:23
  the benefit of that?
• 2:04:26
  Speaker 1: I have no idea, no answer.
• 2:04:29
  Speaker 2: Well, but just to ask it. Who is John Kiriako?
• 2:04:34
  Let's see what it says. Who is John Kariako? Okay,
• 2:04:39
  American whistleblower, author, journalist, former intelligence officer. All that stuff's true.
• 2:04:43
  Personal background, CIA nineteen ninety All this is accurate.
• 2:04:48
  Speaker 1: Yeah, all of that is actually whistle.
• 2:04:49
  Speaker 2: Blowing and legal case recognition and advocacy, remain active and
• 2:04:55
  speaking out against torture and advocating for government transparency and
• 2:04:58
  ethical intelligence. All that's true.
• 2:05:01
  Speaker 1: Yep.
• 2:05:01
  Speaker 2: So all of that that's it absolutely correct.
• 2:05:06
  Speaker 1: Absolutely correct.
• 2:05:07
  Speaker 2: 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 1: That's all that's correct.
• 2:05:16
  Speaker 2: 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 1: I'm using perplexity from now on.
• 2:05:25
  Speaker 2: 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? I don't know.
• 2:05:34
  Speaker 1: 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 thing,
• 2:05:51
  I just cut and pasted into chat GPT, and I
• 2:05:55
  asked it to recommend scholarly journal articles that I could
• 2:06:01
  use to supplement, you know, the books that I had recommended.
• 2:06:05
  So for the fourteen sessions of the pod, it gave
• 2:06:10
  me fourteen different links. Every single one of the links
• 2:06:14
  was fake. Whoa, every single one of them. There were
• 2:06:18
  no such links, there were no such articles. It just
• 2:06:21
  made it all up.
• 2:06:24
  Speaker 2: 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. Yeah, bullshit. Right,
• 2:06:42
  that's crazy. Like, do you mean you must be paranoid?
• 2:06:46
  I mean, you have to be, right, I'm paranoid.
• 2:06:47
  Speaker 1: You have to be.
• 2:06:48
  Speaker 2: 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 1: 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 2: Yeah.
• 2:07:08
  Speaker 1: 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.
• 2:07:42
  Speaker 2: Know, see them following.
• 2:07:43
  Speaker 1: They're really not good at surveillance.
• 2:07:50
  Speaker 2: Which is horrible because that's our job.
• 2:07:52
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 2:07:53
  Speaker 2: God, John, you've been through a quite an odyssey.
• 2:07:58
  Speaker 1: 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 2: But it's it's also awful because you've done so much
• 2:08:09
  good for your country.
• 2:08:12
  Speaker 1: I've tried.
• 2:08:13
  Speaker 2: That's what's crazy, and that's I look, I'm you know,
• 2:08:16
  I criticize intelligence agencies and everybody else who are doing
• 2:08:19
  wrong things, but I think they're important, very important too.
• 2:08:22
  When people say we need to dismantle the CIA and
• 2:08:24
  dismant like, what are you talking about? You know, like
• 2:08:28
  Mike Baker, I've had long conversations with him about threats overseas.
• 2:08:31
  Like if you talk to someone who's actually worked in
• 2:08:33
  the field, they will give you an understanding of all
• 2:08:37
  the bad things that are happening in the world that
• 2:08:39
  we have to keep tabs on. Like don't say we
• 2:08:41
  should not pay attention. That is fucking crazy talk. You
• 2:08:44
  just don't want to corrupt CIA.
• 2:08:46
  Speaker 1: 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, give me another example. Yesterday, just yesterday,
• 2:08:56
  the Deputy Director of the CIA, Ellis, named himself the
• 2:09:00
  acting General Counsel, and people were like, oh my god.
• 2:09:03
  I woke up and I see these podcasts. Oh my god,
• 2:09:05
  the Elis has taken over the CIA. So I do
• 2:09:09
  a little bit of research, and by the end of it,
• 2:09:12
  I was like, Yeah, I would have done the same
• 2:09:15
  thing if I were Ellis. He's qualified, right, He's had
• 2:09:19
  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 2: 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 1: 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
• 2:10:06
  little tidbit of what's happening in the world, Like we
• 2:10:13
  don't read about these emerging threats. For example, We'll never
• 2:10:18
  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 nature of intelligence. You're
• 2:10:31
  not supposed to know, you know, the likes of Timothy
• 2:10:34
  Weiner will write a book about failures, but the successes
• 2:10:39
  have to remain secret.
• 2:10:43
  Speaker 2: 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 1: 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 2: 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 1: I'll add to that that the election of Donald Trump,
• 2:12:23
  in kind of an odd way, freed 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 2: Why do you think that is?
• 2:13:04
  Speaker 1: 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 2: And that's how things like the patriotet get.
• 2:13:40
  Speaker 1: Snuck exactly right. That's a great point. Yes, and n
• 2:13:47
  the NDAA and the right we don't use that on.
• 2:13:52
  Speaker 2: Don't worry.
• 2:13:54
  Speaker 1: 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
• 2:14:31
  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 network,
• 2:14:45
  I think is what it was. Well, that's illegal because
• 2:14:48
  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
  propagandize 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 2: That is so insane. That is so insane that that's
• 2:15:26
  the origin of it. Wow.
• 2:15:29
  Speaker 1: Yeah, lazy bastards.
• 2:15:32
  Speaker 2: 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 1: 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 2: Now, where is the outrage? And he's got to hide
• 2:16:04
  in Russia? Yep, crazy.
• 2:16:13
  Speaker 1: Depressing.
• 2:16:15
  Speaker 2: Do you think it could possibly push further in that direction?
• 2:16:18
  Speaker 1: Oh? I think that that first of all. Yes, I
• 2:16:24
  think that it's natural that it would push, it would
• 2:16:27
  push further. It's up to us to push back. And
• 2:16:32
  I don't think the American people have their act together enough.
• 2:16:36
  Speaker 2: Well we're too divided.
• 2:16:37
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's part, we really are.
• 2:16:39
  Speaker 2: But something like the NBA should be a nonpartisan issue. Sure,
• 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 1: 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 clabers 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 2: Right?
• 2:18:34
  Speaker 1: 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 2: They must be doing that anyway, They must be.
• 2:18:47
  Speaker 1: I should hope, So, I should hope.
• 2:18:49
  Speaker 2: 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. Yeah, which is just like
• 2:18:59
  and then as AI gets more and more powerful, and
• 2:19:02
  it's the race, Like who's in charge of that? Yeah?
• 2:19:04
  Like how does that go? And what happens when everything
• 2:19:07
  gets automated? And what happens when everyone gets on universal
• 2:19:11
  basic income and then they're relying entirely in the government. Right?
• 2:19:15
  Speaker 1: Yeah, good point.
• 2:19:16
  Speaker 2: 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 1: 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 2: Is that really the only solution at this point?
• 2:19:47
  Speaker 1: 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 2: I just can't imagine why they would want to keep
• 2:21:22
  it going. I mean, at this point, they're what.
• 2:21:25
  Speaker 1: I'm told is that Putin is under great pressure from
• 2:21:28
  his military establishment, that the Russian people don't necessarily want
• 2:21:33
  this to continue as much as the Russian military leadership does.
• 2:21:37
  That's what these professors are telling me.
• 2:21:39
  Speaker 2: And why do they want to continue it?
• 2:21:41
  Speaker 1: 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
  Krishtyev gave it to the Ukrainians a gift, and then
• 2:22:01
  the Russians took it back in fourteen, and.
• 2:22:05
  Speaker 2: So they feel the same way about Kiev. It's just
• 2:22:11
  so horrible to see like sixty year old.
• 2:22:13
  Speaker 1: Men getting conscripted right off the street.
• 2:22:15
  Speaker 2: And yeah, kidnapped, just set right to the front of
• 2:22:18
  the line, right to the wood chipper.
• 2:22:20
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's just terrible.
• 2:22:22
  Speaker 2: And we don't even know the real numbers nosualties.
• 2:22:24
  Speaker 1: No, we don't. It's got to be huge for the
• 2:22:27
  Ukrainians at least.
• 2:22:30
  Speaker 2: So you're not concerned about that. You think that's going
• 2:22:34
  to work itself out. As strategic as it is, I.
• 2:22:36
  Speaker 1: Think it's going to burn itself out eventually. I'm very
• 2:22:39
  worried that the Israeli is going to attack Iran again.
• 2:22:43
  I'm worried that the Israelis aren't going to respect the
• 2:22:46
  deal that appears to be in process in Gaza or
• 2:22:50
  the West Bank. I mean, we're not talking about the
• 2:22:52
  West Bank, where we're just two weeks ago. A Christian
• 2:22:55
  village ceased to exist because settlers from New Jersey took
• 2:23:00
  all their houses. You know what happens next in the
• 2:23:04
  wording from New Jersey. Yeah, there are a lot of
• 2:23:08
  synagogues in New York, New Jersey, Toronto that have these
• 2:23:13
  things called called real estate seminars where you can put
• 2:23:17
  your name on a list and then they call you
• 2:23:20
  and say, hey, house just opened up over here in
• 2:23:23
  this Arab village that's not Arab anymore, Come and take
• 2:23:27
  your house. And the two weeks ago the village that
• 2:23:31
  the Israelis cleared out was one of the last remaining
• 2:23:34
  Christian villages. Drives me crazy.
• 2:23:39
  Speaker 2: 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 1: 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 in south western Syria.
• 2:24:02
  And I mean the map that Ntya who had at
• 2:24:05
  the UN the other day, included the Sinai Peninsula. For
• 2:24:08
  Heaven's sake, what's that all about? They took the Sinai
• 2:24:12
  in the sixty seven Warren gave it back after the
• 2:24:15
  Camp David Accords. So this, yeah, we've I'm worried about
• 2:24:23
  about Israel.
• 2:24:26
  Speaker 2: 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 1: 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?
• 2:25:14
  Speaker 2: You know?
• 2:25:14
  Speaker 1: Back in two thousand and eight, I guess it was
• 2:25:17
  I want a very small contract to write. It was
• 2:25:21
  like six op eds for the Abu Dhabi Chamber of Commerce,
• 2:25:27
  And it was because I was going to write op
• 2:25:30
  eds that supported American business in Abu Dhabi. Right, So
• 2:25:38
  I had to go on Fara dot gov, far A
• 2:25:41
  dot gov. It's the Foreign Agents Registration Act, and there's
• 2:25:46
  a form there and I said, yeah, I took. You know,
• 2:25:50
  I won this contract. It was like thirty grand to
• 2:25:52
  write these six op eds. And the source of the
• 2:25:56
  income is the Abu Dhabi Chamber of Commerce. And here's
• 2:25:58
  my name and my address, my number. Enter done. I registered.
• 2:26:04
  So if you're doing something anything on behalf of a
• 2:26:08
  foreign government, you have to register, except if you're APACK.
• 2:26:14
  And I just don't understand that.
• 2:26:20
  Speaker 2: 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 1: 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 Hill 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 2: 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 1: 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 two 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 Mosade 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 and every
• 2:28:15
  one of them. And we'd say, you, guys, you can't
• 2:28:17
  come back here every single time and try to bug
• 2:28:20
  our conference rooms. Oh sorry, well we're not sure how
• 2:28:25
  that happened. So we're like, yeah, you can't come in
• 2:28:28
  here anymore. So we rent an office where we meet
• 2:28:32
  the Israelis off campus.
• 2:28:34
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 2:28:34
  Speaker 1: Yeah, because you just can't.
• 2:28:35
  Speaker 2: Trust them, so that we so crazy.
• 2:28:38
  Speaker 1: 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 Bete 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 2: It's crazy how effective it is though.
• 2:29:54
  Speaker 1: Oh yeah, look at Jonathan Pollard now he's running for
• 2:29:57
  the kanesset Bastard.
• 2:30:00
  Speaker 2: It's just crazy how much influence one country has. Yeah,
• 2:30:04
  it really is not a much bigger country.
• 2:30:06
  Speaker 1: Much bigger, and they have such a tiny population.
• 2:30:11
  Speaker 2: 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.
• 2:30:23
  Speaker 1: And saying we're gonna do things our way.
• 2:30:25
  Speaker 2: Not even Chicago. Chicago have more people.
• 2:30:29
  Speaker 1: Fuck.
• 2:30:31
  Speaker 2: Wow, Well listen, John, I really appreciate your time, and
• 2:30:34
  thank you and and thank you for your story.
• 2:30:38
  Speaker 1: Thank you so much for having me.
• 2:30:40
  Speaker 2: And it's a horrible thing that they did to you,
• 2:30:43
  but it's I'm so glad you're out so we didn't
• 2:30:46
  get your insight.
• 2:30:47
  Speaker 1: Thank you very much, appreciate you very much.
• 2:30:49
  Speaker 2: Pleasure by everybody.