The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #2392 - John Kiriakou

00:00:01.000 Joe Rogan Wadcast, check it out.

00:00:03.000 The Joe Logan Experience.

00:00:06.000 Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.

00:00:13.000 Replaced Mike Baker.

00:00:14.000 Yeah, Mike's a great guy.

00:00:16.000 He was a good officer.

00:00:18.000 He was uh he doesn't really talk about his work a lot.

00:00:23.000 Maybe it's because a lot of years have passed, but he was the real deal.

00:00:26.000 I replaced him in Athens, and he had done a lot of preliminary legwork in Athens.

00:00:31.000 Athens was a tough place.

00:00:33.000 At the time, uh the American government spent more money on security in Athens than they spent anywhere else in the world, including Beirut.

00:00:42.000 Why?

00:00:43.000 There it was a combination of two things.

00:00:45.000 There were two indigenous Greek groups that were exceedingly dangerous. 1.00

00:00:49.000 One was called Revolutionary Organization 17 November.

00:00:52.000 They had killed the CIA station chief, two US defense attaches, just bad guys all around.

00:00:59.000 The other was called um Popular Revolutionary Struggle.

00:01:02.000 And then on top of that, you had Abu Nidal, the Libyans, the PFLP, the PFLPGC, the DFLP. 0.59

00:01:12.000 Everybody was there.

00:01:13.000 Because there was this informal agreement between the Greek government of uh Andreas Papandreou at the time and these terrorist groups that if you don't kill Greeks, we'll leave you alone.

00:01:27.000 Oh boy.

00:01:28.000 Yeah.

00:01:29.000 But killing Americans wasn't part of the deal, so it was every man for himself. 0.60

00:01:34.000 Wow.

00:01:35.000 Your story is pretty nuts, man.

00:01:38.000 And your story of getting in trouble and eventually going to prison for something that was what they were doing, what you reported on was completely illegal.

00:01:50.000 And you were completely honest about it.

00:01:53.000 Um it was essentially about the U.S. torture program.

00:01:56.000 Right.

00:01:57.000 Tell us how this all started.

00:01:59.000 Like how long had you been involved in the CIA?

00:02:03.000 Oh, by then I had been in the CIA.

00:02:07.000 Well, by the time I got to Pakistan as the head of uh counterterrorism operations after 9-11, I'd been in the CIA almost 13 years.

00:02:16.000 And um, and I was responsible for all counterterrorism operations in the country.

00:02:23.000 Al Qaeda was was running out of Afghanistan into Pakistan because we were bombing the daylights out of them. 0.99

00:02:30.000 And so my job was to find them and grab them and then just hold them or send them to trial was the original idea.

00:02:40.000 And um we we were planning at the time for our first big name capture, right?

00:02:47.000 Bin Laden, I'm in a zawahiri.

00:02:49.000 We had killed uh Mohammed Um Atef. 1.00

00:02:52.000 He was the head of what they called military affairs for Al Qaeda.

00:02:55.000 We killed him at Torabora.

00:02:56.000 But then there was Abu Zubeda, and then there was this unknown person that we later learned was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

00:03:03.000 So we were looking for any of these four or five people, and then there were there were others, those responsible for the embassy bombings in Africa, uh the USS coal bombing.

00:03:15.000 So it just so happened that in February of 2002, we got a lead on Abu Zubeda, and um, and we captured him.

00:03:24.000 It took us six weeks to track him down, and we were close a couple of times.

00:03:28.000 Close where we would bust down the door, and there's like an uneaten, like half-eaten sandwich on the counter, a cigarette still burning.

00:03:36.000 Sometimes we were a day or two behind him, but he knew we were looking, and he knew we were close.

00:03:41.000 So we finally got him, and then the question is, what do you want to do with him?

00:03:47.000 And they uh they told me uh hang on to him, we're gonna send out a plane, and uh we'll take it from there.

00:03:53.000 So they did, and I wasn't cleared to know what they were gonna do with him, just like the guys on the plane weren't cleared to know who it was we had captured and and who why they were taking this guy, where they were taking him.

00:04:08.000 But um that is that all just need to know?

00:04:11.000 Yeah, it's all need to know.

00:04:12.000 In fact, when I got onto the plane, we we uh three FBI agents and I picked him up on this gurney and carried him onto the plane.

00:04:18.000 We had to stand him up and maneuver him onto the plane, then we laid him across to the luggage rack at the back and tied him down.

00:04:25.000 And um, one of the guys on the plane, he was dressed completely in black with a black hood on.

00:04:31.000 And he says, John, and I said, Who are you?

00:04:33.000 And he lifts up his mask and he's uh an old boss of mine.

00:04:37.000 And I said, Hey, what are you doing here?

00:04:39.000 He said, Oh, I came to uh take your prisoner.

00:04:41.000 I said, uh where are you taking him?

00:04:43.000 And he said, I can't tell you, you don't have a need to know.

00:04:46.000 And I said, No, that's cool.

00:04:47.000 He said, Who is he anyway?

00:04:49.000 I said, Oh, dude, I'm sorry, you don't have a need to know.

00:04:51.000 And he says, Yeah, fair enough, fair enough.

00:04:53.000 Okay, safe travels.

00:04:55.000 And then, you know, your job is to take him from point A to point B, not to become his friend and you know, get his family story.

00:05:01.000 Just like my job is to catch him and hand him over to the next guy, and it's none of my business where he's going.

00:05:07.000 And so when I got back to headquarters in May of that year, I was just standing in the sandwich line at the CIA cafeteria, and one of the senior guys from the counterterrorism center came up to me very casually, and he said, Oh, hey, I'm glad I ran into you.

00:05:23.000 I meant to ask you, do you want to be certified in the use of enhanced interrogation techniques?

00:05:28.000 And I had never heard that term before.

00:05:30.000 This is May of 2002.

00:05:32.000 I said, enhanced interrogation techniques, what's that mean?

00:05:36.000 And he goes, We're gonna start getting rough with these guys like that.

00:05:40.000 And I said, What's that mean?

00:05:42.000 So he describes these ten techniques.

00:05:45.000 And I said, I don't know, man.

00:05:47.000 That sounds like a torture program.

00:05:49.000 And he said, It's not a torture program.

00:05:51.000 We got it cleared by the Justice Department, and the president signed it.

00:05:54.000 He says, think about it.

00:05:56.000 I said, Yeah, give me an hour.

00:05:58.000 I need an hour to think about it.

00:05:59.000 I walked out of the cafeteria, I went up to the seventh floor, which is the executive floor, and um there was a very, very senior officer up there for whom I had worked ten years earlier in the Middle East, knocked on his door, no appointment or anything.

00:06:14.000 And I said, Hey, I need some advice.

00:06:17.000 I was just asked if I wanted to be trained in these enhanced interrogation techniques.

00:06:22.000 What do you think of that?

00:06:24.000 And he said, First of all, let's call a spade a spade.

00:06:27.000 He said, This is a torture program.

00:06:29.000 They can use whatever euphemism they want, but this is a torture program and torture's a slippery slope.

00:06:35.000 He said, You know how these guys are.

00:06:36.000 Somebody's gonna be a cowboy, they're gonna go overboard and they're gonna kill a prisoner.

00:06:41.000 And when that happens, there's gonna be a congressional investigation, then there's gonna be a Justice Department investigation, and somebody's gonna go to prison.

00:06:48.000 Do you want to go to prison?

00:06:49.000 I said, No, I don't want to go to prison.

00:06:51.000 As it turned out, I was the only person who went to prison, but I said, No, I don't want to go to prison.

00:06:56.000 I went back downstairs, I said, Listen, I have a moral and ethical problem with this.

00:07:01.000 I think it's illegal, and I don't want any part of it.

00:07:04.000 The funny thing is, I had just captured Abu Zabeda, who we believed was the number three in Al Qaeda, and I got passed over for promotion.

00:07:12.000 And the reason I got passed over, they said, was because I turned down the training.

00:07:17.000 The head of the counterterrorism center said in my promotion panel that I had displayed a shocking lack of commitment to counterterrorism.

00:07:25.000 And then the guy who had given me the advice saw that my name wasn't on the promotion list, and he promoted me out of cycle.

00:07:34.000 So I I realized then I was up against something that was gonna be tough.

00:07:38.000 And then there was a psychiatrist at the agency whom I had known for years.

00:07:43.000 We we are in the same men's group, we went to the same church, and he happens to be both a brigadier general in the army and a CIA psychiatrist.

00:07:52.000 And he said to me one day, buddy, you know they call you the human rights guy behind your back.

00:07:59.000 And I said, Yeah, I don't care.

00:08:01.000 And he said, You know that's not a compliment, right?

00:08:04.000 And I said, Steve, they're wrong about this.

00:08:08.000 And I'm right about it.

00:08:10.000 I said, I'm I'm comfortable with the decision that I made.

00:08:14.000 And I just left it at that.

00:08:15.000 I didn't realize though how much I had pissed them off until later on.

00:08:21.000 So all you had done essentially was stand up for your beliefs, your morals, your ethics, and the law.

00:08:29.000 And you said, I don't want to participate in anything that I know to be illegal.

00:08:33.000 That was the start.

00:08:35.000 Listen, I'm but you're standing out against the group.

00:08:38.000 And I was the only one.

00:08:39.000 I'm I'm I'm almost ashamed to tell you that they asked 14 of us if they wanted if we wanted to be trained in the enhanced interrogation techniques.

00:08:47.000 I was the only one who said no.

00:08:49.000 Now, this doesn't necessarily mean that you would have to use them.

00:08:54.000 You were just gonna be trained in that.

00:08:55.000 Oh no, no, you they were they were to use.

00:08:57.000 And then but you would be required to use These techniques.

00:09:01.000 So if you were not trained in them, then what would happen?

00:09:05.000 Would would that preclude you from ever being involved in any sort of a questioning, interrogation?

00:09:12.000 Yes, which is funny for a couple of reasons.

00:09:15.000 Number one, there was no such thing at the time as an interrogation class.

00:09:21.000 Right?

00:09:22.000 The FBI has deep years long interrogation classes.

00:09:28.000 We never had to interrogate anybody.

00:09:30.000 And in fact, when we started capturing prisoners in in uh Pakistan in January of 2002, I'm like, well, what do you want me to ask him?

00:09:39.000 I I cabled headquarters.

00:09:40.000 Well we caught this guy.

00:09:41.000 What do you want me to ask him?

00:09:43.000 Oh, you you'll figure it out.

00:09:44.000 Just go with it.

00:09:45.000 I'm like, okay.

00:09:46.000 So I I was working with the Pakistani Intelligence Service, and I said, Listen, I'm I'm usually the good cop.

00:09:52.000 Do you want to be the bad cop?

00:09:53.000 And he's like, Yeah, I'll be the bad cop.

00:09:55.000 So we bring the prisoner out, we're sitting there looking at him.

00:09:57.000 I said, What's your name?

00:09:58.000 He's like, screw you.

00:09:59.000 The Pakistani whacks him across the face. 1.00

00:10:01.000 So I say again, what's your name?

00:10:03.000 Listen, buddy, just give me your name.

00:10:06.000 My friend here, he's not in a very good mood, he's not a very nice guy.

00:10:09.000 Just tell me what your name is.

00:10:11.000 Come on.

00:10:12.000 And then they tell you their name.

00:10:14.000 Standard.

00:10:15.000 Yeah.

00:10:16.000 So what exactly did you know what enhanced interrogation techniques they were gonna implement?

00:10:24.000 Oh yeah.

00:10:25.000 That day in the cafeteria, uh my colleague explained it in great detail.

00:10:30.000 And a lot of these techniques are not torture.

00:10:32.000 Right?

00:10:33.000 If I grab you by the lapels and say, dog on you, answer my questions.

00:10:38.000 That's not torture.

00:10:39.000 Or the the first one was called the belly slap.

00:10:43.000 Uh or the intention slap was another way they called it, where I smack you in the belly, it makes a cracking sound, maybe it leaves a handprint.

00:10:50.000 It's a little bit embarrassing.

00:10:52.000 That's not torture.

00:10:53.000 But then it graduated quickly to things like waterboarding, which everybody knows about, but there were techniques that were that were, in my view, that were worse than waterboarding.

00:11:04.000 Like for example, there was the cold cell.

00:11:06.000 So they strip you naked, they chain you to an eye bolt in the ceiling, so you can't you can't lay or kneel or sit or anything.

00:11:14.000 You can't get comfortable in any way.

00:11:16.000 And um they they chill the cell to fifty degrees Fahrenheit, and then every hour somebody comes in and throws a bucket of ice water on you.

00:11:26.000 Oh but we killed people with that technique.

00:11:29.000 The Justice Department never said we could kill people.

00:11:32.000 And when we would kill people done with that.

00:11:35.000 At least two with that technique that hypothermia committed to from hypothermia.

00:11:40.000 And there wasn't a protocol in place to stop them from dying?

00:11:43.000 No.

00:11:44.000 There was later, but in those early days, no.

00:11:47.000 Later, we always had a doctor on scene.

00:11:49.000 Like for example, with Abu Zubeda, his heart actually stopped during a waterboarding session, and the doctor revived him just so he could be tortured more. 0.81

00:11:58.000 It's like, you know, didn't the Germans do that? 1.00

00:12:00.000 Come on now.

00:12:01.000 Now we're doing it?

00:12:03.000 That's not cool.

00:12:04.000 Is there any other way that like I know that MKUltra experimented with a lot of drugs and a lot of different techniques involved in whether it was trying to find the truth out of people or getting people to commit acts?

00:12:17.000 Was did they ever implement something where they would give someone something?

00:12:21.000 That's a good question.

00:12:22.000 The short answer is yes.

00:12:24.000 Not in the very beginning, but they were working with things like truth serum and and different drugs like relaxation drugs, uh gabapentin, you know, stuff like that to sort of get get you to open up.

00:12:39.000 But remember too that the agency got in such trouble in 75 and 76 before the the church committee and the pike committee about MK Ultra, that as soon as Senator Church said, don't destroy the documents, the director went right back to headquarters and ordered them to destroy everything.

00:13:00.000 And so only about 20% of the MK Ultra documents still exist.

00:13:05.000 So we don't really know exactly exactly what it was that was learned in that program, like what worked and what didn't work.

00:13:14.000 We hear these stories about, you know, dosing the the fog laden um air of San Francisco just to see if everybody gets sick.

00:13:23.000 We've all read the stories about this bakery in France where apparently we dosed the bread and everybody in the village went nuts.

00:13:30.000 Uh but we don't really have fulsome documentation that we could have used operationally while interrogating prisoners.

00:13:39.000 Aaron Powell So just to avoid prosecution, they figured out a way.

00:13:43.000 Yeah.

00:13:44.000 That's crazy.

00:13:45.000 And so then whatever they did learn is lost.

00:13:48.000 Yeah, it's lost.

00:13:49.000 If there was something, whether it's MDMA or LSD or whatever they give people.

00:13:54.000 They worked with L with LSD for 20 years, at least.

00:13:58.000 At least 20 years.

00:13:59.000 You know, they they there was an operation, it was a sub-operation of MKUltra where they rented a safe house in San Francisco, they recruited a bunch of hookers, and had them go out and pick up John's, bring them back to the to the safe house where they thought they were going to get laid, dose them with LSD, and then interrogate them and try to get them to give up their deepest secrets.

00:14:26.000 It's like midnight climax.

00:14:27.000 Yeah, midnight climax, exactly.

00:14:29.000 It's like what nobody's agreed to do this.

00:14:33.000 You haven't informed them properly.

00:14:35.000 These are American citizens.

00:14:36.000 You can't just take people off the streets and and force LSD down their throat.

00:14:41.000 Well, they were running the hate Ashbury Free Clinic.

00:14:43.000 Yeah.

00:14:43.000 Until right after a month after chaos by Tolkien came out.

00:14:47.000 You're exactly right.

00:14:48.000 Oh.

00:14:49.000 Yeah, my mom craziness. 1.00

00:14:51.000 My uh wife's mom went there.

00:14:53.000 She used to she was a hippie in San Francisco.

00:14:57.000 She went to the hate Ashbury Free Clinic.

00:14:59.000 Oh, it was run by the CIA.

00:15:01.000 Which is so crazy.

00:15:02.000 And it's totally connected to Manson, the Manson.

00:15:05.000 Oh, yeah, Manson.

00:15:05.000 Exactly.

00:15:06.000 Yeah.

00:15:06.000 Exactly.

00:15:07.000 Yeah.

00:15:07.000 Manson was a part of it as well.

00:15:09.000 It's so nuts.

00:15:10.000 And they wouldn't have even known about that until they found a stash of documents that connected it all together.

00:15:16.000 Just think of what's been destroyed.

00:15:18.000 Right.

00:15:18.000 What we could have learned.

00:15:19.000 Exactly.

00:15:19.000 We only know a small fraction of what was done.

00:15:23.000 So is it a case of just they're they're not elected, they're put into power, presidents come and go, and over the course of their career, 20 years plus, they just have so much power and so much ability to get things done that they just bypass the law.

00:15:40.000 Yeah, I I think that is that's the whole story, right there in a nutshell.

00:15:44.000 When I was there, I remember being shocked by some of the old timers who had been there for as long as forty or forty-two years.

00:15:51.000 There was one in particular, he was the National Intelligence Officer for warning.

00:15:55.000 So he was the one that was supposed to say, you know, I'm worried about what Libya is going to look like ten years from now.

00:16:01.000 And then somebody writes a paper about it.

00:16:03.000 He had been there for forty two years.

00:16:05.000 He had to get a waiver from the director because he had aged out.

00:16:10.000 Well, these guys make no secret of their belief that they can outweigh pretty much any president.

00:16:17.000 Presidents come and go.

00:16:19.000 And these guys are there forever.

00:16:21.000 And so if the president wants them to do something that they don't want to do, they just slow roll it.

00:16:26.000 Just wait until he leaves.

00:16:28.000 And that's the end of it.

00:16:30.000 You know, that's why I say I I've said this in interviews a lot.

00:16:36.000 You don't have to call it the deep state if you don't want to.

00:16:38.000 You can call it the state.

00:16:40.000 You can call it the federal bureaucracy.

00:16:42.000 You can call it whatever you want.

00:16:43.000 The fact is it exists.

00:16:45.000 And it's unelected and it's generally unaccountable to anybody.

00:16:50.000 And they just wait for the president to leave if they don't want to do what he wants.

00:16:56.000 So you find out about this torture program, you won't participate, so that puts you on the outs.

00:17:04.000 And when do you know that this is going to be like a significant problem in your career?

00:17:10.000 You know, honestly, I didn't know until well after I left the agency.

00:17:15.000 You know, uh once I I turned this down, um, and I got this out of cycle promotion for the Abu Zuba operation, I was I was named executive assistant to the CIA's deputy director for operations.

00:17:28.000 And in that position, you have access to literally everything that the CIA is doing around the world.

00:17:35.000 And so I'm reading these cables coming back from the secret site, and people are saying, like, whoa, I didn't sign up for this.

00:17:44.000 Nobody said we're gonna torture people.

00:17:47.000 I quit, and then they come home.

00:17:50.000 Or there was a secretary who fainted once when she happened to be in the room while Abu Zabeda was being tortured, and she uh curtailed her her assignment.

00:18:00.000 That means she sends a cable to headquarters saying, I'm coming home, I'm not doing this anymore.

00:18:05.000 That is a career-ending decision to curtail an assignment.

00:18:09.000 And I remember thinking, so I'm not the only one who thinks this is this is illegal.

00:18:16.000 Certainly somebody's gonna come out and say something.

00:18:19.000 And nobody did.

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00:19:29.000 Like what are the techniques that they were using that were like causing her to faint?

00:19:34.000 The big ones were waterboarding, the cold cell, and sleep deprivation.

00:19:39.000 Sleep deprivation doesn't sound like any big deal.

00:19:41.000 And when that finally leaked, Don Rumsfeld, who was the Secretary of Defense at the time, made a statement that that still kind of sticks in my mind.

00:19:50.000 He said, There is no such thing as sleep deprivation.

00:19:54.000 He said, I have a stand up desk in my office.

00:19:58.000 I don't even have a chair in my office.

00:19:59.000 And sometimes I'll work 24 hours and then into the next day, 36 hours.

00:20:05.000 But that's not what we're talking about here.

00:20:07.000 We know from the American Psychological Association that people begin to lose their minds at day seven with no sleep.

00:20:15.000 And they begin to die, their organs begin to shut down at day nine.

00:20:20.000 But the CIA was authorized to keep people awake for twelve days.

00:20:24.000 And that was another thing that caused prisoners to just die.

00:20:28.000 They would have heart failure, you know?

00:20:31.000 How'd they keep them awake?

00:20:33.000 You chain him to that eye bolt in the ceiling again.

00:20:36.000 You have these industrial strength lights on them 24 hours a day and like death metal 24 hours on volume eleven.

00:20:45.000 And um and they just can't sleep because if they if they collapse, they'll pull their arms out of their sockets.

00:20:53.000 They're chained to that to that eye bolt.

00:20:56.000 Jeez.

00:20:57.000 It was bad.

00:20:58.000 And then when people would die, they would just dig a hole next to the interrogation building, put them in the hole, cover it up, and then bring the next guy in.

00:21:08.000 No report, no nothing.

00:21:10.000 Nothing.

00:21:10.000 There was one guy they reported on and headquarters wrote back and said, just put him on ice until we can figure out what to do.

00:21:16.000 And they let literally just put him in a bathtub and filled it with ice and then just decided a couple days later he started to turn, we should probably bury this guy.

00:21:27.000 Yeah, it was ugly.

00:21:28.000 And and the Justice Department never said anything about that.

00:21:31.000 They're like, oh, listen, uh, you know, you can do these techniques, and if you kill him, just bury him out back.

00:21:36.000 Yeah, and that wasn't the that wasn't the approved operation.

00:21:40.000 Was any of it effective?

00:21:42.000 Like was there any actionable information?

00:21:44.000 That's that's the worst part of this.

00:21:46.000 It no, none of it was effective.

00:21:49.000 You know, I say this all the time, Joe, it's like a kick in my gut to have to compliment the FBI.

00:21:55.000 But if there's one thing that the FBI is really good at, it's interrogations.

00:22:00.000 They've been doing interrogations effectively since the Nuremberg trials in 45 and 46.

00:22:05.000 These guys know what they're doing.

00:22:07.000 And so with Abu Zubeda as an example, we captured Abu Zubeda, and normally overseas the CIA has primacy.

00:22:16.000 Domestically, the FBI has primacy.

00:22:19.000 But 911 was still an open criminal investigation.

00:22:22.000 And so we sent Abu Zubeda out to the secret site and the FBI took over.

00:22:27.000 The CIA was furious about this.

00:22:29.000 But there was an FBI agent by the name of Ali Sufan who did exactly as he was trained to do, and he began to engage Abu Zubeda in a conversation.

00:22:39.000 And Abu Zubeda just gave him the silent treatment for weeks.

00:22:43.000 This went on for weeks.

00:22:44.000 But you go in, you offer him a cup of coffee, you offer him an orange.

00:22:50.000 If he's cooperative, you'll let him write a letter to his mother, you know, whatever.

00:22:54.000 And finally he opened up and he gave us actionable intelligence that saved American lives.

00:22:59.000 And I'll give you two examples.

00:23:01.000 Number one, we had no idea what the Al-Qaeda wiring diagram looked like.

00:23:06.000 We knew it was bin Laden and Zawahri, and then we just didn't know what what the organization was was like, how it was built.

00:23:15.000 So he explained to us how each one of these cells all around the world was stovepiped, compartmentalized.

00:23:22.000 So cell A had no idea what cell B was doing.

00:23:25.000 And um, and Ali said, as an example, if you want to do an operation in, let's say, Dusseldorf, how would you do that?

00:23:36.000 And Abu Zubeda said, Well, there's this guy, Muhammad, and here's his here's his phone number.

00:23:42.000 Mohammed lives in Dusseldorf, and he has a cousin, Abdallah, and Abdullah has access to weapons, and here's Abdullah's email.

00:23:49.000 And then Abdullah's got a friend, Rashid.

00:23:51.000 They meet at the coffee shop, and Rashad has access to explosives.

00:23:56.000 And then we're able to call the Germans and say, hey, listen, you have a serious problem in Dusseldorf, and here's what you need to do.

00:24:03.000 And then they kick down the door and they grab these guys.

00:24:05.000 That saved lives.

00:24:07.000 The other thing that he told us, and he he laughed actually, because Ali didn't know what the heck he was talking about.

00:24:15.000 He was talking about Muhtar, a guy using the Nom de Gera Mukhtar.

00:24:20.000 We knew from our own files that there was this guy out there who called himself Muchtar, who was a very bad guy.

00:24:29.000 In 1996, he had initiated something called the Bojinka operation.

00:24:35.000 It was supposed to be carried out uh in the Philippines, and the idea was to hijack as many as 14 747s and then fly them into buildings all up and down the west coast of the United States.

00:24:49.000 It just so happened that one day Muchtar, working on his plan, his diabolical terrorism plan, he went out to have lunch.

00:24:58.000 And when he went out to have lunch, the cleaning lady came in to clean the apartment, and she sees all this stuff laid out, and she said, That looks like a terrorist attack being planned.

00:25:08.000 She calls the cops. 0.95

00:25:09.000 The cops come and say, Ooh, this looks like a terrorist attack.

00:25:13.000 We better call the Philippine Intelligence Service.

00:25:16.000 They come and look at it, and somebody says, We should probably call the CIA on this.

00:25:21.000 And so we confiscated everything, and Bojinka was disrupted.

00:25:27.000 That's crazy.

00:25:28.000 It's crazy.

00:25:29.000 A cleaning lady. 1.00

00:25:30.000 You never know.

00:25:31.000 You just never know.

00:25:33.000 It's just crazy that he would leave the plants just laying around.

00:25:36.000 Well, thinking nobody's nobody's gonna come, nobody's gonna see it.

00:25:40.000 And then he ran off.

00:25:41.000 So we knew there was this guy out there planning this big thing, and his name was Muqtar.

00:25:46.000 Abu Zubeda laughed at us and said, You don't know who Muqtad is?

00:25:50.000 And Ali said no.

00:25:52.000 And Abu Zubeda said, his name is Khalid Sheikh Muhammad.

00:25:57.000 That's the first time we ever heard that name.

00:25:59.000 We didn't have any documents in any files that were about any guy named Khalid Sheikh Muhammad.

00:26:04.000 But that was the very first time we were able to piece it all together.

00:26:08.000 And it was thanks to Abu Zubedah, in turn, thanks to Ali Sufan's treating Abu Zubeda with respect.

00:26:15.000 But on August the first, George Tennant, 2002, George Tennant went to the White House and he asked the president for reasons that have never been made clear.

00:26:24.000 He asked the president to turn over primacy to the CIA.

00:26:30.000 He did that.

00:26:31.000 And the CIA director, Robert Muller, to his credit, he knew exactly what was going to come.

00:26:37.000 Not only withdrew FBI personnel from the secret site, he withdrew FBI personnel from the country that the secret site was in.

00:26:47.000 And within twelve hours, the CIA began to torture Abu Zbeda.

00:26:50.000 He went completely silent and remained silent.

00:26:55.000 And then the FBI went back to the president and said, look, the CIA's screwing this up.

00:26:59.000 We were getting all this Intelligence from this guy.

00:27:01.000 Now he won't say anything.

00:27:03.000 And we're putting him in a coffin.

00:27:05.000 And we we heard that he had this irrational fear of bugs, so we we pour a box of cockroaches on him in the coffin and close up the coffin.

00:27:14.000 And we would open it up every couple days to change his diaper and give him food and he went nuts.

00:27:20.000 And so finally the White House turns everything back over to the FBI.

00:27:24.000 It takes Ali months to get him to talk again.

00:27:29.000 And then he starts talking again.

00:27:30.000 And he's given us more and more information about Al-Qaeda operations in Malaysia and anti-Australia operations and what's going on in Canada and how Al Qaeda is able to move across borders between Europe and Asia.

00:27:46.000 And then the CIA comes back in again and starts torturing him again.

00:27:51.000 And screwed it all up.

00:27:53.000 Now why would they do that?

00:27:55.000 I don't understand.

00:27:56.000 If you're getting information, why would they decide to ramp it up and torture him?

00:28:02.000 I think for a couple of reasons.

00:28:03.000 I think we should never underestimate the motivating factor of a desire for revenge.

00:28:10.000 Right?

00:28:11.000 This was the worst intelligence failure in the history of the country.

00:28:16.000 3,000 people died because we hadn't done our jobs.

00:28:21.000 So that was one thing.

00:28:23.000 The other thing is the CIA had entered into an agreement with these two contract psychologists, uh, James Mitchell and Bruce Jesson in October of 2001.

00:28:33.000 And they said, hey, we've reverse engineered the military's SEER program, and we think this would be an effective but harsh uh interrogation technique.

00:28:45.000 And so we were chomping at the bit at the agency to try this thing out without using the word torture.

00:28:51.000 We paid those guys a hundred and eight million dollars to say, oh, we think you should torture people.

00:28:58.000 Here's here are the torture techniques.

00:29:00.000 Just let us know when you want us to start.

00:29:02.000 108 million dollars for that.

00:29:05.000 And so we thought, well, we've already spent the money, and we really do want revenge on these guys.

00:29:12.000 So what the hell?

00:29:13.000 Let's just let's just go for it.

00:29:15.000 I think that's what it was.

00:29:17.000 Wow.

00:29:19.000 So how did you get in trouble?

00:29:23.000 I waited for somebody to say something about torture, and nobody did.

00:29:29.000 And then I got divorced.

00:29:31.000 My kids moved with my ex-wife to Ohio, and they were little, they needed their dad, so I decided I'm gonna leave the agency, go into the private sector so I can see my boys on the weekends.

00:29:42.000 And um, and still I waited for somebody to say something, and nobody did.

00:29:46.000 Now, I wish that I could tell you that I stood up and I took a stand and that wasn't it at all.

00:29:56.000 I got a call in December of 2007.

00:30:00.000 So now I I'm out of the agency three and a half years.

00:30:03.000 I got a call from Brian Ross at ABC News, and he said that he had a source who said I had tortured Abu Zabeda.

00:30:12.000 I said, that was absolutely false.

00:30:15.000 I was the only person who was kind to Abu Zubeda. 0.76

00:30:19.000 I said, I've never laid a hand on Abu Zubeda or any other prisoner.

00:30:24.000 And he said, Well, you're welcome to come on the show and defend yourself.

00:30:28.000 Well, I had never spoken to an uh a reporter before.

00:30:33.000 I I didn't know that was a reporter's trick.

00:30:36.000 So I said, I'll think about it.

00:30:38.000 In the meantime, President Bush, I remember it being a Monday.

00:30:44.000 President Bush gives a press conference, and the International Committee of the Red Cross had said in a paper that the CIA was torturing prisoners.

00:30:54.000 Uh human rights watch said CI is torturing prisoners, and Amnesty International said CIs torturing prisoners.

00:31:00.000 So a reporter says, look, all these international human rights organizations are saying that the CIA is torturing its prisoners.

00:31:07.000 What's your response to that?

00:31:08.000 And the president looks right in the camera and he goes, We do not torture like that.

00:31:15.000 And I said to my wife, who was a senior CIA officer, I said, He is a bald-faced liar.

00:31:21.000 He's looking the American people right in the eye, and he's lying to us.

00:31:28.000 And she said, Are you surprised?

00:31:31.000 Well, then on Wednesday, two days later, um, he gets another, a similar question, and he said that there is no torture.

00:31:42.000 I knew he was lying.

00:31:44.000 And then another two days later, it's Friday, and he's walking from the South Portico of the White House to the helicopter to go to Camp David for the weekend.

00:31:53.000 And a torture shout uh torture, a reporter shouts another question about torture.

00:31:58.000 And this time he stops and he turns and he says, Well, if there is torture, it's because of a rogue CIA officer.

00:32:07.000 And I said to my wife, Brian Ross's sources at the White House, and they're gonna pin this on me.

00:32:14.000 So I called Brian Ross and I said, I'll give you your interview.

00:32:17.000 And I decided in the whatever it was.

00:32:20.000 Why did you think they're gonna pin it on you?

00:32:22.000 Because they were calling you the human rights guy so that you were gonna be a Patsy.

00:32:26.000 And I was not willing to.

00:32:28.000 I assumed because that's just your experience with the organization.

00:32:32.000 Oh, yeah.

00:32:32.000 They're gonna leave somebody out to dry to protect themselves.

00:32:36.000 So I called Brian Ross, I said, I'll give you your interview.

00:32:38.000 And I decided that whatever he was gonna ask me, and he never told me in advance what he was gonna ask me.

00:32:44.000 I was just gonna tell the truth.

00:32:46.000 And so he met me at uh the ABC News uh studios on DeSale Street in Washington, and um, and I said three things in that interview that changed the course of the rest of my life.

00:33:00.000 I said that the CIA was torturing its prisoners.

00:33:03.000 I said that torture was official U.S. government policy, it was not the result of any rogue officer, and I said that the policy had been personally approved by the president himself.

00:33:15.000 And then, as you can imagine, within 24 hours, the CIA files what's called a crimes report against me with the FBI saying that I had revealed classified information.

00:33:27.000 The FBI then investigates me from December of 07 to December of 08.

00:33:34.000 And then they send my attorney a letter called the declination letter, declining to prosecute.

00:33:39.000 They said that they had completed their investigation, that the information was already out there because of Amnesty International Human Rights Watch and the Red Cross.

00:33:50.000 But most importantly, torture is a crime, and it is illegal to classify a crime for the purpose of keeping it from the American people.

00:34:02.000 So no charges.

00:34:02.000 My wife and I went out to celebrate that night.

00:34:05.000 We went to dinner.

00:34:06.000 Three, four weeks later, Barack Obama becomes president.

00:34:12.000 And he names John Brennan at first, CIA director, but the liberals went crazy because Brennan was one of the fathers of the torture program.

00:34:22.000 Everybody seems to forget that now.

00:34:24.000 And we can get into that if you want.

00:34:26.000 But um, but he then names Brennan the deputy national security advisor for counterterrorism.

00:34:33.000 Brennan immediately sends a memo to Eric Holder, the new attorney general, and says, talking about me, charge him with espionage.

00:34:46.000 And Holder writes back, we we got these memos in Discovery when I went to trial.

00:34:52.000 Um Holder writes back and says, My people don't think he committed espionage.

00:34:58.000 And then Brennan writes back and says, charge him anyway and make him defend himself.

00:35:03.000 So they charged me with five felonies, three counts of espionage.

00:35:08.000 They waited until I went bankrupt, and then they dropped the espionage charges.

00:35:17.000 Yeah.

00:35:18.000 Oh God, that's so gross.

00:35:20.000 That's Washington.

00:35:22.000 It's just so hard to believe that the United States of America government works like that.

00:35:28.000 I believe it.

00:35:29.000 I believe it was it's hard to swallow.

00:35:32.000 There's a book by Harvey Silverglate, who's a professor of law at Harvard University.

00:35:37.000 The book is called Three Felonies a Day.

00:35:39.000 And he says that we are so over-regulated, so overcriminalized in this country that the average American on the average day going about his or her normal daily business commits three felonies every single day.

00:35:58.000 So if they want to Get you, they're gonna get you.

00:36:02.000 And there's nothing you can do to protect yourself.

00:36:06.000 So what was Brennan's beef with you?

00:36:10.000 Was it just because of the fact that you did that interview, or was there underlying tension?

00:36:17.000 We were never pals.

00:36:19.000 I've known John Brennan for 35 years.

00:36:22.000 We never really cared for each other.

00:36:25.000 To tell you the truth, I I thought the guy was in over his head intellectually.

00:36:32.000 He went when I first started there, he was a deputy group chief.

00:36:36.000 He was a GS-15, nobody, journeyman, you know, first line, second line manager, no big deal.

00:36:42.000 There are hundreds of them.

00:36:43.000 And he worked for this really wonderful woman, a great intellect named Martha Kessler.

00:36:50.000 And Martha was so highly respected.

00:36:52.000 She had written this book.

00:36:53.000 I still remember the title called Syria, Fragile Mosaic of Power. 1.00

00:36:57.000 And when you got hired, you got her book, and you had to read the book.

00:37:01.000 Because like this is what we do.

00:37:03.000 This is the perfect example of what we do.

00:37:05.000 So he was her deputy.

00:37:07.000 One day he went to her and he said, Martha, you know, I've been your deputy for X number of years.

00:37:12.000 I think I'm ready for promotion into the Senior Intelligence Service.

00:37:16.000 And Martha said, and I just talked to her daughter a couple of weeks ago about this.

00:37:20.000 Martha said, not only will you never be a member of the senior intelligence service, I don't even want you working for me anymore.

00:37:29.000 You're fired.

00:37:31.000 Well, you're not really fired at the CIA.

00:37:34.000 If you're fired, that means you have six weeks to walk the halls and find another job.

00:37:40.000 If you can't find another job in six weeks, then they escort you to your car, they take your badge, and you know, so long.

00:37:48.000 Good luck.

00:37:49.000 Well, it's the normal job turnover is in the summertime.

00:37:53.000 This is the week before Christmas, 193 or 4, I can't recall now.

00:38:03.000 And um, there are no jobs open at Christmas.

00:38:07.000 So he finally finds one job.

00:38:10.000 It is in the PDB staff, the president's daily brief, and it is as a morning briefer, giving the president's daily brief briefing to the lowest ranking person entitled to a PDB briefing.

00:38:26.000 So that's the National Security Council's director for intelligence programs, who happened to be this guy named George Tennant.

00:38:35.000 And so they immediately hit it off.

00:38:38.000 Two alpha dogs, cigar smoking, hard drinking.

00:38:42.000 There used to be a kiosk right at the corner of 17th and Pennsylvania Avenue, uh adjacent to the White House that sold cigars.

00:38:49.000 Tenant had had a heart attack and he wasn't supposed to smoke, and his wife would yell at him.

00:38:53.000 So they would, after the briefing, they'd walk out to the kiosk and buy cigars and just stand there and laugh and you know talk about chasing women or whatever.

00:39:02.000 Totally hit it off.

00:39:04.000 Then Tenet becomes the deputy director of the CIA.

00:39:07.000 So he brings, he brings Brennan back with him and makes him Martha Kessler's boss, deputy director of the office that Martha's working in.

00:39:18.000 He calls Martha Kessler in and says, now you're fired. 1.00

00:39:23.000 And so she just elected to retire. 0.90

00:39:26.000 Well, he ended up being identified by Tenant as the guy.

00:39:32.000 Like this is my guy.

00:39:34.000 This guy's going places.

00:39:36.000 He needs operational experience because he's been an analyst and an analytic manager all these years.

00:39:40.000 I'm going to make him the station chief in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

00:39:44.000 He's an analyst.

00:39:45.000 He's never served overseas before.

00:39:47.000 Never recruited a spy ever.

00:39:50.000 It wasn't his job.

00:39:51.000 Now all of a sudden he's the station chief in one of the most important stations in the world.

00:39:56.000 So he does that for a long time.

00:39:59.000 By the way, during which he approves the visas for the 9-11 hijackers.

00:40:05.000 And uh then he comes back as the deputy executive director of the whole CIA, right?

00:40:14.000 So it's director, deputy director, executive director, and then the deputy directors for operations intelligence science technology administration.

00:40:23.000 And they're they're dotted lines.

00:40:25.000 So he's now one of the five most senior people in the entire CIA.

00:40:30.000 He does that for a couple of years and then becomes the executive director.

00:40:33.000 By the time I get promoted to be the morning briefer for the director and executive assistant, I'm throwing all these stupid terms out, executive assistant to the deputy director for operations.

00:40:44.000 I'm meeting with Brennan every single day.

00:40:47.000 So we're we're doing the Iraq war, we're doing terrorism and Al Qaeda and all this stuff.

00:40:54.000 He didn't like me and I didn't like him.

00:40:56.000 And then when I became the quote, unquote human rights guy, that just kind of sealed it for me.

00:41:03.000 But I didn't care because I didn't respect him anyhow.

00:41:07.000 I will say that that Jim Pavitt, the deputy deputy director for operations, legendary officer, and a really great guy.

00:41:15.000 He hated Brennan more than I did.

00:41:18.000 And he used to mock Brennan because Brennan at the time was telling everybody, I want to head my own agency.

00:41:26.000 I want to head my own agency.

00:41:27.000 And they finally put him in charge of this thing that was temporarily called the TTIC, the Transnational Terrorism Information Center.

00:41:33.000 It later became the National Counterterrorism Center.

00:41:37.000 Um they sort of sort of shunted him off there.

00:41:41.000 And it was a nothing analytic organization, not even in the in the headquarters building.

00:41:46.000 It was out one of the outlying buildings.

00:41:48.000 And then he kind of went away.

00:41:50.000 But where he really did write for himself is in 2007, there was this, there was this wave of retirements, right?

00:42:01.000 We're enough now beyond 9-11 that people can begin to retire.

00:42:05.000 So this huge wave of senior level retirements in 07.

00:42:10.000 And then once these guys retired, half of them went to the McCain campaign, and half of them went to the Hillary Clinton campaign.

00:42:17.000 And John Brennan was literally the only one who went to the Obama campaign.

00:42:24.000 And he saved himself.

00:42:27.000 Wow.

00:42:28.000 So how did you wind up going to prison?

00:42:33.000 Well, as soon as Barack Obama became president, John Brennan decided he was going to have my head.

00:42:41.000 And so he asked Holder to have the FBI grab me.

00:42:48.000 And I'll tell you what, they they knew they didn't have a case.

00:42:51.000 So there's a little bit of background.

00:42:54.000 From 2009 to the end of 2011, I was the senior investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee working for John Kerry.

00:43:02.000 It was a terrible job.

00:43:04.000 Kerry said, Oh, I want you to do this and do that, and we're going to investigate this and investigate that.

00:43:09.000 And then he would kill all the investigations because he wanted to be Secretary of State.

00:43:13.000 And he didn't want to piss anybody at the White House off.

00:43:16.000 So I can't talk about how Afghanistan produces 93% of the world's heroin and all of it is because the CIA said they could. 1.00

00:43:24.000 I can't talk about the Dashty Laley massacre where 2,000 Taliban soldiers were suffocated to death in container trucks because the CIA didn't punch holes for them to breathe in the in the containers.

00:43:36.000 Can't talk about any of that stuff, because you want to be the Secretary of State.

00:43:39.000 So I left in 2011.

00:43:42.000 And right before I left, I got a call from a Japanese diplomat.

00:43:49.000 And this is one of the things that I I loved about that job is this constant engagement with foreign diplomats.

00:43:56.000 Like, who's doing what?

00:43:58.000 And what do you think about Israel?

00:43:59.000 What do you think about China?

00:44:00.000 What do you think about what's going on in Mexico or Cuba or whatever?

00:44:05.000 And um I get a call from this Japanese diplomat, and he invites me to lunch.

00:44:08.000 I said, Great.

00:44:09.000 We meet at a place uh on Capitol Hill.

00:44:12.000 And um I I remember that lunch very well.

00:44:15.000 I remember we talked about Israeli elections, we talked about Turkish elections, and we talked about the Arab Israeli peace process.

00:44:22.000 And at the end of the lunch, he says to me, and I should add, his English was so bad that we had to do the lunch in Arabic.

00:44:33.000 So he said, What's next for you?

00:44:35.000 And I said, Well, I think I'm going to resign soon.

00:44:38.000 I promised Senator Kerry I'd give him two years.

00:44:40.000 It's been two and a half.

00:44:42.000 I have five kids, and I really need to make some money and put my kids through college.

00:44:46.000 And he goes, Oh, no.

00:44:49.000 Don't do that.

00:44:51.000 If you give me information, I can give you money.

00:44:56.000 And I said, what the fuck is wrong with you?

00:44:59.000 You have any idea how many times I've made that pitch, shame on you, cold pitching me like that.

00:45:04.000 And I got up indignantly and I walked out.

00:45:07.000 And I walked, and I mean directly without stopping to the office of the Senate security officer.

00:45:14.000 And I I knocked on the door, I went in, I said, hey, I was just pitched by a foreign intelligence officer.

00:45:20.000 And he goes, was it that damn Russian again? 0.98

00:45:22.000 And I said, no, it was Japanese. 0.65

00:45:24.000 He goes, Japanese. 0.99

00:45:25.000 I said, I know, right?

00:45:27.000 He goes, well, no, sometimes they poke around looking for trade information.

00:45:31.000 I said, this didn't have anything to do with trade information.

00:45:34.000 I don't think.

00:45:35.000 I don't know.

00:45:36.000 We didn't even get that far.

00:45:37.000 He said, okay, do me a favor.

00:45:39.000 He said, I've got a standalone computer here that's not connected to the internet.

00:45:43.000 Write it up as a memo and I'm going to courier it over to the FBI.

00:45:47.000 So I sat there and I wrote the whole thing, blow by blow.

00:45:50.000 The next day he calls me and he says two FBI agents are going to come up and talk to you.

00:45:54.000 And I said, okay.

00:45:55.000 So they come up, I recount the whole the whole lunch and they said, all right, here's what we want you to do.

00:46:01.000 We want you to call him back, invite him to lunch, and then try to get him to tell you exactly what information he wants and how much he's willing to pay for it.

00:46:11.000 And I said, because I'm a patriot I said, you want me to wear a wire?

00:46:17.000 And they said no, we're going to be at the next table.

00:46:19.000 We're going to listen to everything.

00:46:20.000 I said but he only speaks Arabic.

00:46:22.000 That's okay.

00:46:23.000 We got a guy who speaks Arabic, don't worry.

00:46:25.000 I said, all right.

00:46:26.000 So I call him.

00:46:26.000 I invite him to lunch.

00:46:28.000 We go to lunch, do the whole thing.

00:46:30.000 But before the lunch, right before the lunch, they called and they said, operation came up, just write us another another memo.

00:46:37.000 Do the lunch and write us another memo.

00:46:39.000 I said, fine.

00:46:40.000 So I read another memo.

00:46:41.000 They asked me to do it a third time, a fourth time and a fifth time.

00:46:45.000 The fifth time, he says to me, I have great news.

00:46:49.000 He said, I got my dream job.

00:46:51.000 I've been promoted and I'm going to be the deputy ambassador in Cairo.

00:46:56.000 And I said, congratulations, I shook his hand, never saw him again.

00:47:02.000 So I've written all this to the FBI.

00:47:05.000 One day in January of 2012, so I've been out of the Senate for about nine months, the FBI calls.

00:47:14.000 And I look at myself and it says Federal Bureau of Investigation.

00:47:17.000 I was like, I wonder what that's all about.

00:47:19.000 So I answer and they said hey you remember that thing you helped us out with a year ago and I said yeah.

00:47:26.000 And they said we've got a similar situation and we need your help.

00:47:30.000 And again, because I'm a patriot I said anything for the FBI.

00:47:35.000 I kick myself now for saying it.

00:47:37.000 I said anything for the FBI.

00:47:39.000 What do you want me to do?

00:47:40.000 They said come down to the Washington field office Thursday morning at 10.

00:47:43.000 I said done I go down there the next Thursday and they're waiting for me at the entrance which I thought was odd.

00:47:52.000 And we go up to a conference room and they said we're both cleared S I T Kamma and then there were two compartments above top secret that I was cleared for that they said they were cleared for it so if the if the conversation necessitated it we could go into that area so they said well before before we start just wanted to ask you just read your book it was great.

00:48:19.000 I loved it hey what about this that you said in your book and I was like yeah okay yeah it was a cool story.

00:48:25.000 What about this other thing?

00:48:26.000 Yeah I had fun.

00:48:28.000 I said it was kind of hard you know it took me nine months to write the book 22 months to get it cleared.

00:48:33.000 Oh yeah you got it cleared.

00:48:34.000 Yeah of course I got it cleared 22 months it took me to get it cleared.

00:48:38.000 I'm thinking what an odd question then they start asking me about something called the Sam Adams project and I said I'm sorry I don't know what that means and then the bad cop of the two says we know you've been giving information to the Guantanamo defense attorneys.

00:48:57.000 I said what are you talking about?

00:49:00.000 And then I said wait a minute are you investigating me?

00:49:06.000 And they said yeah and we're raiding your house right now as we speak and I said thank God I said I want to speak to my attorney right now.

00:49:16.000 That was the only reason that they didn't arrest me.

00:49:18.000 And one of the things that I learned and this became painfully evident when they started arresting January 6th people was the FBI in Washington likes to make its arrest on Thursdays Because there are no federal arraignments on Friday.

00:49:34.000 So you're in the DC jail Thursday night, Friday night, Saturday night, Sunday night, getting the shit beaten out of you.

00:49:40.000 And then they arraign you on Monday.

00:49:43.000 And then you want to make a deal just so you don't ever have to go inside that prison again.

00:49:48.000 But because I asked to see my attorney, they let me go.

00:49:52.000 So I called the attorney as soon as I I got out of the office.

00:49:55.000 Actually, when I was walking out, one of them went over to, I didn't know it at the time, but it was Peter Strzok.

00:50:03.000 And Peter Strzok says, tell me he implicated himself.

00:50:08.000 And the guy said, not really, no.

00:50:11.000 We have to let him go.

00:50:13.000 And so I grabbed my cell phone and I left.

00:50:15.000 Went to the attorney's office.

00:50:17.000 They had already called my attorney and said they were charging me with espionage.

00:50:21.000 I hadn't committed espionage.

00:50:23.000 They knew I hadn't committed espionage.

00:50:26.000 And in fact, since then, I'm fast forwarding a lot.

00:50:30.000 Three FBI agents have reached out to me.

00:50:33.000 Well, two to my attorneys.

00:50:34.000 One reached out to me directly to apologize, saying that this came from the top.

00:50:40.000 They thought it was a BS case.

00:50:42.000 They were sorry they were involved, but there was nothing they could do.

00:50:45.000 One guy reached out to me through eBay of all things, like to try to cover up the uh the trail.

00:50:52.000 He's like, listen, I've I've been losing sleep over this for the excuse me, for the last 13 years.

00:50:57.000 I just wanted to tell you how sorry I am.

00:50:59.000 Blah, blah, blah.

00:51:01.000 It's like, well, I hope you feel better.

00:51:03.000 My whole life fell apart.

00:51:04.000 But I'm glad you got that off your chest.

00:51:07.000 So it became a matter of of just survival after that.

00:51:13.000 You know, you have to take it seriously.

00:51:15.000 I was facing 45 years in prison.

00:51:18.000 And then when the Justice Department um made a request for a proffer meeting, the proffer meeting is they'll give you a little idea of what they have against you, and then they make an offer.

00:51:29.000 You can take it or leave it.

00:51:31.000 And they offered me 45 years.

00:51:34.000 And I said, I'm not doing 45 minutes.

00:51:40.000 I didn't do anything wrong.

00:51:43.000 And this woman, she became deputy attorney general uh for the criminal division under Biden.

00:51:49.000 She said, Take this deal, Mr. Kiriyaku, and you may live to meet your grandchildren.

00:51:56.000 Oh my God.

00:51:57.000 Oh, it was I went home that night and I went home.

00:52:02.000 I'm I'm ashamed to even say it.

00:52:04.000 That night we we put the kids to bed.

00:52:07.000 And my wife and I were watching TV and she said, Come on, let's go to bed.

00:52:11.000 I said, I can't sleep.

00:52:13.000 I uh there's no way I'm gonna be able to sleep.

00:52:15.000 And she said, No, come on, let's go to bed.

00:52:17.000 She knew I was gonna go down into the garage, turn the car on, and just lay across the back seat.

00:52:24.000 And she said, No, come on.

00:52:25.000 You need to try to get some sleep.

00:52:28.000 She saved me that night, but 45 years.

00:52:32.000 And so they waited 10 months before they were even willing to engage in a conversation.

00:52:40.000 And then they offered 10 years on a Monday.

00:52:44.000 On Wednesday, they offered eight, and on Friday they offered five.

00:52:48.000 My lead attorney was this legendary guy named Plato Cocheris.

00:52:54.000 And Plato said, you know, I've been a criminal defense attorney in this city for 52 years.

00:53:01.000 And this is the first time I've ever seen them come down in time.

00:53:06.000 He said, usually they offer you 10, you say no, the next offer's 15.

00:53:10.000 Then the next offer's 20.

00:53:12.000 I said, Why are they coming down in time?

00:53:14.000 He said, because they have a shit case and they know it's shit.

00:53:17.000 And that's why we're gonna go to trial and we're gonna win this thing.

00:53:20.000 I said, Great.

00:53:21.000 Well, they s they they stayed at five, and then they came back and they said, three and a half.

00:53:32.000 And I said, I'm going to trial.

00:53:34.000 I'm gonna win this thing.

00:53:36.000 Turned out at the time, my best friend, his wife had an uncle who was O.J. Simpson's jury consultant.

00:53:43.000 And she called him for me and she said, Hey, my friend John, he's in this situation.

00:53:47.000 He's like, Yeah, I read about this in the papers.

00:53:49.000 He could use your help.

00:53:50.000 He came up, didn't charge me a cent.

00:53:52.000 He came up to Washington, we got him a security clearance, and uh, which was another thing.

00:53:58.000 We asked for a security clearance, and then uh the uh the uh Justice Department called and said, the White House said Kiriaku's attorneys have enough security clearances.

00:54:08.000 And I said, Who at the White House said we have enough security clearances?

00:54:12.000 Well, they had to tell us that it was John Brennan.

00:54:16.000 No more attorneys for Kiriaku.

00:54:18.000 Fisher cut bait.

00:54:19.000 We're like, it's not up to John Brennan to decide if I have enough attorneys.

00:54:24.000 Yeah, they have an unlimited number of attorneys, an unlimited budget.

00:54:28.000 As it turned out, they spent six million dollars to put me in prison.

00:54:33.000 Was society really better off spending six million dollars to put me in a low security prison for for twenty three months?

00:54:42.000 So in the end they said, best and final offer, thirty months, you do 23.

00:54:53.000 Well, I was the only the second American who had ever been charged with this crime of um violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982.

00:55:04.000 Uh the only other person that was charged with it was a woman named Sharon Scranage. 0.99

00:55:09.000 She was a CIA secretary in Ghana in the 80s, and she was having an affair with a member of Ghana's intelligence service.

00:55:18.000 And in the course of pillow talk, she revealed the names of all of the CIA officers in the station and the names of the sources they were running.

00:55:27.000 And so the Ghanaians executed these guys.

00:55:30.000 Oh my God.

00:55:31.000 She got nine months in prison.

00:55:34.000 Nine months, and they offered me 45 years for blowing the whistle on the torture program.

00:55:42.000 So my wife and I stayed up all night, literally all night, and because Sharon Scranage had taken a plea, there was literally no case law.

00:55:51.000 So what we found, we found several things.

00:55:54.000 Um we found several articles from the Harvard Law Review saying this law is unconstitutional.

00:56:00.000 It violates the First Amendment, and it is prior restraint, right?

00:56:06.000 Like it tells you in advance you can't say X, Y, and Z. But because there was no case law, you can't you couldn't challenge it in court.

00:56:14.000 And I said, Well, can't we just appeal the charge?

00:56:19.000 And maybe, you know, all the way up to the Supreme Court.

00:56:22.000 And they said, Yeah, we can do that post-conviction.

00:56:26.000 And then you're gonna be 45 years waiting and hoping that the Supreme Court does the right thing.

00:56:31.000 We can't do that.

00:56:33.000 So um.

00:56:36.000 So I decided by 6 a.m.

00:56:38.000 I'm gonna turn it down.

00:56:40.000 I believed in my heart I hadn't done anything right.

00:56:43.000 This was political, it was a vendetta by John Brennan.

00:56:47.000 And Obama, by all accounts, I had friends, of course, who were still working at the agency and working at the uh at the CIA or at the uh White House, and they said that Obama had this Nixonian obsession with national security leaks.

00:57:02.000 And it's because it that came from Brennan.

00:57:04.000 Obama was a senator for two years.

00:57:06.000 He didn't have any experience doing anything.

00:57:09.000 So he did what John Brennan told him to do.

00:57:11.000 And Brennan said, you gotta crack down on these leaks.

00:57:14.000 They do nothing but embarrass us.

00:57:17.000 So I decided I'm gonna turn it down.

00:57:19.000 6 a.m., I send an email to my attorneys.

00:57:22.000 I had 11 attorneys.

00:57:24.000 I was paying half of them, five of them.

00:57:27.000 And um, and then one of them writes back and says, put on a pot of coffee.

00:57:31.000 We'll we'll be at the house by seven.

00:57:33.000 So they come to my house, the the four main ones came to the house.

00:57:37.000 Plato was the first one in.

00:57:39.000 Now imagine this like 80-year-old six foot two, two hundred and eighty-pound mean old man.

00:57:46.000 He comes in and I said, Good morning, Plato.

00:57:49.000 And he said, You stupid son of a bitch, take the deal like that.

00:57:54.000 I said, Take the deal.

00:57:55.000 You're the one that told me not to take the deal.

00:57:57.000 You're the one who told me we're gonna go to trial and win this thing.

00:58:01.000 And he says, I only told you that to keep your spirits up.

00:58:05.000 Oh God.

00:58:06.000 And then the second one, his partner, Bob Trout, a sweet gentleman, a southern gentleman, he says, if you were my own brother, I would beg you to take this deal.

00:58:21.000 And I'm like, now what do I do?

00:58:23.000 And then the third, who is the guy, Mark McDougall, what one of the best attorneys I've ever encountered in my life.

00:58:32.000 And and the one that I liked and respected the most out of all of them.

00:58:37.000 I liked all of them and respected all of them, but but I felt a connection in this guy.

00:58:41.000 He pulls me aside.

00:58:42.000 He was a little bit angry.

00:58:43.000 And he said, You know what your problem is?

00:58:46.000 Your problem is you think this is about justice.

00:58:48.000 And it's not about justice.

00:58:50.000 It's about mitigating damage.

00:58:52.000 Take the deal.

00:58:55.000 And I looked at my wife.

00:58:57.000 She's just like, what are we going to do?

00:59:01.000 So I took the deal.

00:59:03.000 And I got two and a half years in prison.

00:59:06.000 And they made me do every single day of it.

00:59:10.000 In fact, we went to his sentencing.

00:59:13.000 And this was in the Eastern District of Virginia, the espionage court.

00:59:18.000 And the reason why we didn't go to trial in the end was that the O.J. Simpson uh jury consultant said, if we were, if we were in any other district in America, I would say, let's go for it.

00:59:31.000 We're going to win this thing.

00:59:32.000 But the Eastern District of Virginia, your entire jury is going to be people from the CIA, from the FBI, from DOD, from intelligence community contractors.

00:59:42.000 He said, Buddy, you don't have a prayer.

00:59:44.000 Take the deal.

00:59:47.000 Yeah.

00:59:49.000 It was bad.

00:59:50.000 Wow.

00:59:50.000 So I it's sentencing.

00:59:52.000 My attorney said, Your Honor, we request that Mr. Kiriaku be sent to a minimum security work camp.

00:59:57.000 She says, Any objection from the Justice Department?

01:00:00.000 They said, No objection.

01:00:01.000 She goes, Okay, minimum security work camp. 0.99

01:00:03.000 No bars on the windows, no locks on the doors.

01:00:06.000 You're free to come and go as you please.

01:00:08.000 You're just on your honor not to abscond.

01:00:10.000 And then most of the guys work, there's a little college in town.

01:00:14.000 You go sweep the floors or whatever.

01:00:17.000 So I got to the prison three months later.

01:00:22.000 And uh it's it's weird the system that we have, Joe.

01:00:25.000 You just you walk up and you knock on the door and you say, Hi, I'm I'm John Kiriac, I'm here to turn myself in.

01:00:30.000 That's all you do.

01:00:31.000 And your friends and family just drive away.

01:00:33.000 And so they said, Yeah, uh, you got to go across the street to the actual prison, they'll process you, and then they just bring you back over here.

01:00:41.000 I said, Okay, so I'll go across the street.

01:00:43.000 And uh I said, I'm I'm John Kiriaku, I'm here to turn myself in.

01:00:47.000 And uh, and the guy takes me by the arm.

01:00:50.000 We go outside, and we start walking around to the back of the prison.

01:00:54.000 And I said, No, no, I'm supposed to be at the at the minimum security camp across the street.

01:01:00.000 And the guy laughs at me and he goes, not according to my paperwork, you're not.

01:01:05.000 And I was like, oh my God, take it easy.

01:01:08.000 We later learned, Brennan was so angry at the shortness of my sentence that he told them, make it as difficult as possible.

01:01:20.000 So I told myself, take it easy.

01:01:24.000 If you make any ruckus, they're gonna put you in solitary, don't say a word.

01:01:27.000 So I didn't say a word.

01:01:28.000 It took them about 40 minutes to process me.

01:01:32.000 Then they walked me to my cell.

01:01:34.000 The only thing the cop said to me, he says, a word of advice, buddy.

01:01:39.000 If anybody comes into your cell uninvited, that's an act of aggression.

01:01:44.000 And I said, Great, thanks.

01:01:46.000 I'm here 40 minutes, and now I'm gonna get my ass kicked.

01:01:49.000 I appreciate it.

01:01:51.000 And then I started that whole odyssey.

01:01:54.000 And so what kind of prison were you in?

01:01:57.000 I was in FCI, the federal correctional institution at Loreto, Pennsylvania, which is a low security prison, but it's called a low medium, and then there's a high medium.

01:02:09.000 So this was a low medium.

01:02:10.000 It took me five days to get access to a phone, and I called Mark McDougall, the attorney that I liked so much, and I said, Mark, they put me in the actual prison with the pedophiles and the mafia dons and the drug kingpins. 0.85

01:02:26.000 I said, What do I do?

01:02:27.000 He says, Oh my God.

01:02:29.000 Well, he said, we could file a motion, but it'll be two years before we get a hearing, and you'll be home by then.

01:02:36.000 He said, Buddy, I'm sorry, you're gonna have to tough it out.

01:02:39.000 And so that's what I did.

01:02:42.000 Wow.

01:02:47.000 So you have this long career working for the government.

01:02:50.000 They put you away.

01:02:52.000 And what is it like for you to feel so betrayed?

01:02:58.000 And to get out.

01:03:01.000 And what what do you what do you what do you do when you get out?

01:03:04.000 I was frankly very angry when I got out.

01:03:07.000 I didn't realize how angry I was.

01:03:10.000 Like people would mention it to me.

01:03:12.000 Like maybe you should talk to somebody, maybe you should, you know, think about a pharmaceutical option.

01:03:18.000 And I was like, why?

01:03:19.000 There's nothing wrong with me.

01:03:21.000 I'm ready to fight and march and you know, raise my fist against the Obama administration.

01:03:27.000 And so um I was wrong, of course.

01:03:31.000 I was I was so angry that that it it wasn't even healthy for the people around me.

01:03:39.000 But I'll tell you the Joe, the hardest thing is you think you can just step back into your life again, and you'll never be able to step back into your life.

01:03:51.000 So I thought, okay, well, I'm I'm highly educated.

01:03:55.000 I have a bachelor's degree in Middle Eastern Studies, I have a master's degree in legislative uh policy analysis.

01:04:01.000 I finished my PhD case uh uh classwork in uh in international affairs.

01:04:08.000 I got rejected by McDonald's, by Safeway, by Target, by Uber.

01:04:14.000 We don't hire uh felons. 0.83

01:04:17.000 I mean, I couldn't get a job anywhere.

01:04:20.000 And you broke.

01:04:21.000 And I was broke, bankrupt.

01:04:24.000 Mm-hmm.

01:04:24.000 So you couldn't even get a job driving for Uber?

01:04:27.000 No, Uber turned me down.

01:04:29.000 Wow.

01:04:29.000 Yeah, it's crazy.

01:04:30.000 It's crazy.

01:04:31.000 But you know what though?

01:04:33.000 What did you do?

01:04:34.000 Well, I was confident that I was right and they were wrong.

01:04:40.000 And my my wife, she unfortunately she's now my ex-wife, but she gave me some of the best advice anybody ever gave me.

01:04:48.000 She said, You have to keep telling your side of the story because eventually they're gonna move on to their next victim.

01:04:56.000 And if you keep talking, your side of the story is gonna be the side of record, and eventually the truth is gonna come out.

01:05:04.000 And sure enough, six weeks before um before I uh was released from prison, I called her.

01:05:11.000 I was I was allowed to call her every other day for 15 minutes.

01:05:16.000 So I called her and I said, How was your day?

01:05:18.000 And she said, It was great.

01:05:19.000 And I said, Really?

01:05:20.000 Great?

01:05:21.000 Why was why was it so great?

01:05:23.000 And she said, Because the Senate torture report was released today, and it proved that everything you said was true.

01:05:29.000 And I said, That is great.

01:05:31.000 And she said, John McCain stood up on the floor of the Senate and said, if it weren't for John Kiriaku, the American people would never have had any idea what the CIA was doing in their name.

01:05:42.000 And so when I got home, God bless him, I the one of the first calls I received was from John McCain's chief of staff.

01:05:48.000 And he said, Senator McCain says, Welcome home, and he wants to know what he can do to be helpful.

01:05:54.000 And I said, Oh my God.

01:05:55.000 I said, Tell him I said thank you.

01:05:57.000 I liked McCain very much from when I was working on Kerry's staff.

01:06:01.000 Carrie was a little jealous of McCain. 1.00

01:06:03.000 Um and McCain would go out of his way to shake my hand and say hi.

01:06:07.000 Kerry said to me one time, why don't you two get a room or something?

01:06:10.000 And I said, No, I said it's we have this connection over torture.

01:06:13.000 I said, McCain takes me seriously, and I take him seriously.

01:06:17.000 And so when I when I spoke to McCain, I said, uh these damn Obama people, they confiscated my pension.

01:06:25.000 And I'm gonna have to work until the day I die.

01:06:28.000 They drove me into bankruptcy and took my pension.

01:06:33.000 So he came up with this idea.

01:06:36.000 It was a great idea to write an amendment.

01:06:40.000 My attorney wrote this amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act of 2016, and it said that every American convicted of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act between October first and October 31st, 2012, shall hereby have his pension reinstated.

01:07:03.000 So of course, I'm the only person in the world that that refers to.

01:07:07.000 So he he said, Nobody reads these 1,500 page bills.

01:07:11.000 We're gonna slip it in there, and he said, I'm gonna be on the conference committee, we'll get it taken care of.

01:07:15.000 And then he got sick.

01:07:17.000 He got a brain tumor, and he wasn't named to the conference committee.

01:07:21.000 And so they pulled it back out again.

01:07:24.000 And then he died.

01:07:26.000 And so here I am, ten years later.

01:07:30.000 The only way that this can be made right a presidential pardon.

01:07:38.000 And that's what I've been working on for years now.

01:07:42.000 So what have you what did you do for money?

01:07:45.000 I was offered a job at a small think tank in Washington called the Institute for Policy Studies.

01:07:51.000 And they said, we'll give you an office, but you're gonna have to raise your own salary.

01:07:57.000 And so it was just like constant go fund me.

01:08:00.000 So I did that for a year.

01:08:01.000 I made $20,000 for the year.

01:08:03.000 And I said, I can't do this, it's untenable.

01:08:06.000 And so I just decided, look, no company is gonna hire me, right?

01:08:12.000 I can't go back into government again.

01:08:14.000 And so I'm gonna have to work for myself.

01:08:17.000 So I I had already written my first book, made number number five on the New York Times bestsellers list.

01:08:24.000 My second book I wrote longhand from prison.

01:08:27.000 I ended up winning two literary awards for that book.

01:08:29.000 I won the uh the Penn First Amendment Award, which along with the Penn Faulkner, the Pulitzer, and the Edgar Allan Poe is one of the big four, and then I won the Forward Reviews Memoir of the Year that year.

01:08:40.000 I thought I'm gonna keep writing books.

01:08:42.000 I started writing a column that ended up being syndicated through the consortium for independent journalism.

01:08:49.000 So it's like 200 small town papers around the country.

01:08:54.000 And um, you know, a little bit here, a little bit there, consulting.

01:08:58.000 And then the Greek government, I'm I happen to be Greek American, my grandparents all came from the island of Rhodes.

01:09:06.000 As soon as I was arrested, like within a day, the Greek ambassador called me and he said, What can we do to be helpful?

01:09:13.000 And I said, You can give me citizenship.

01:09:16.000 And man, like that, I got Greek citizenship.

01:09:20.000 And so as soon as I got out of prison, the Greek government hired me to help them write a new whistleblower protection law.

01:09:27.000 And then they passed it quickly.

01:09:29.000 The parliament passed it into law, and then the European Union adopted it.

01:09:34.000 So I went to Brussels and I testified there, and then they repackaged it.

01:09:39.000 Now it's the law of the land in all of the European Union.

01:09:42.000 And then people in the States began taking me more seriously.

01:09:45.000 I started doing some paid speaking gigs.

01:09:48.000 I got hired as an adjunct professor at a couple of different universities.

01:09:52.000 And then, you know, after a while, you can make an okay living.

01:09:57.000 I'm still gonna have to work until the day I die because I have literally nothing saved.

01:10:03.000 It all went to the attorneys.

01:10:06.000 And uh, you know, hope for the best.

01:10:08.000 I will say that I was a third generation Democrat.

01:10:14.000 I left the Democratic Party ages ago.

01:10:17.000 Um John Brennan and Barack Obama's actions convinced me that I had done the right thing.

01:10:25.000 And now I have found common cause with populist Republicans.

01:10:33.000 You know, you don't have to agree on every issue, right?

01:10:36.000 You don't have to like everybody and everything that they believe in and everything they stand for.

01:10:42.000 But I've struck up a great friendship, for example, with Tucker Carlson.

01:10:49.000 Sweetest guy in the world, and a great supporter of mine.

01:10:53.000 And Judge Napolitano.

01:10:56.000 It's a love fest every time that the two of us get together.

01:11:00.000 And I realized that, you know, this thing, this political system we have, it's antiquated.

01:11:08.000 It doesn't work.

01:11:09.000 You have to, you have to engage with the individual.

01:11:13.000 Like I I never thought that I would be agreeing with Marjorie Taylor Green on some of these civil liberties issues, right?

01:11:19.000 Or Thomas Massey, or Bernie Sanders for that matter.

01:11:24.000 But I've realized that I've got a I've got to stand up for what's right, not what the DNC happens to think what's right, or some politician that I used to, you know, think I had respect for, thinks is right.

01:11:40.000 A couple of nights before I left for prison, the director, the former director of the CIA's counterterrorism center, who later became the deputy director for operations and was very close to Brennan.

01:11:52.000 He was the DDO when Brennan was the director of the CIA.

01:11:55.000 He tweeted at me, and he said, Don't drop the soap with a laughing emoji.

01:12:02.000 I gave myself a couple hours to cool off.

01:12:05.000 And then I texted back and I said, Jose, I'm on the right side of history, and you are not.

01:12:13.000 And that gave me such peace.

01:12:17.000 I knew I could go to prison, survive this just fine, and come out and still make an impact.

01:12:24.000 And you know, knock on wood.

01:12:26.000 That's how it's worked out.

01:12:32.000 It's it's ugly.

01:12:34.000 You know, and you get to prison.

01:12:36.000 One of my attorneys said, Hey, I've had I've collected a list of 600 emails, email addresses from people who want to know how you're doing.

01:12:47.000 Once you get there, once you get comfortable, just send me a letter and I'll send it around to these people.

01:12:54.000 I said, okay, great.

01:12:55.000 It took me, you you don't realize it, but you're in shock for the first week or two.

01:13:00.000 And then I started settling into the routine.

01:13:04.000 And it was kind of I mean, it was pretty screwed up.

01:13:08.000 That first day, 20 minutes after the cop warned me about people coming into my room unannounced.

01:13:15.000 These two guys just walk in boldly, just walk in.

01:13:18.000 I jump up, I put my fists up, I go, What do you want?

01:13:21.000 One of them has a swastika on his neck.

01:13:24.000 It took up his entire neck, it came up onto his face.

01:13:27.000 The other one had fuck you tattooed on his eyelids.

01:13:31.000 So I go, What do you want?

01:13:33.000 And and the the swastika guy says, You the new guy?

01:13:36.000 I said, Yeah, so he says, You a fag?

01:13:40.000 I said, No, I'm not a fag. 1.00

01:13:42.000 He said, You a rat?

01:13:44.000 I said, No, I didn't have anybody else in my case.

01:13:46.000 I'm not a rat.

01:13:47.000 And he says, You a chomo?

01:13:49.000 I go, I don't know what that word means.

01:13:52.000 He goes, chomo, child molester. 1.00

01:13:54.000 I said, No, I'm not a child molester.

01:13:57.000 And he goes, Okay, you could sit with the Aryans in the cafeteria. 0.94

01:14:01.000 And I was like, Oh, hmm.

01:14:03.000 I guess I'm with the Aryans now. 0.87

01:14:05.000 Oh grand.

01:14:07.000 Yeah.

01:14:08.000 And then the guy across the hall from me was the boss of the banana family. 0.94

01:14:12.000 And uh one day he said to me, I I I would get the New York Times and and he would get the New York Post and we would trade at the end of each day.

01:14:21.000 He asked me, let me ask you something, he says.

01:14:25.000 Why you sit with those Nazi retards in the cafeteria? 1.00

01:14:29.000 I said, I don't know, Pete.

01:14:30.000 My my first day here, they told me to sit with them.

01:14:33.000 He goes, from today, you're with the Italians. 0.99

01:14:38.000 And I said, Awesome.

01:14:39.000 And they became my closest friends.

01:14:42.000 I mean, I got a book out of it.

01:14:44.000 They were absolutely wonderful, honorable, honest, fun, the smallest so-called gang in the prison, but the one that commanded the most respect.

01:14:58.000 And once word was out that I was with the Italians, it was hands off. 0.98

01:15:03.000 And it was thanks to one guy, shout out to Mark Lanzolotti.

01:15:07.000 Mark was from Philly, and he saw in the New York Times I was going to be assigned to that prison on a Sunday.

01:15:13.000 I was assigned on Thursday, and he took it upon himself to go to every one of the Italians to say, there's a CIA guy coming here.

01:15:24.000 He's not an FBI agent.

01:15:26.000 The FBI are cops and rats.

01:15:29.000 The CIA protected us from the Muslims. 1.00

01:15:33.000 And they're like, oh, okay.

01:15:35.000 And so it was, you know, welcome.

01:15:39.000 No problem.

01:15:40.000 God, it has to be insanely stressful.

01:15:43.000 It was like it was like living in the twilight zone.

01:15:45.000 The stress, the stress will kill you.

01:15:48.000 It's incredible.

01:15:48.000 You see, people break down all the time.

01:15:50.000 They just lose it.

01:15:51.000 And it's not like you're gonna, you know, be taken out to some medical unit someplace.

01:15:56.000 You go to solitary and you can live or die down in there.

01:16:00.000 Yeah.

01:16:00.000 Oh, so I was telling you, so I I I waited about six weeks before I was comfortable enough to to write a letter.

01:16:08.000 So I I very arrogantly called it letter from Loreto because I had such respect for Martin Luther King's letter from Birmingham jail.

01:16:16.000 And so I said two things in this.

01:16:19.000 I mean, I talked about the food and I talked about the Italians and but I said two things.

01:16:24.000 I said there was this one guard who was really abusive.

01:16:27.000 She was absolutely horrible.

01:16:28.000 You know that phrase rode hard and put away wet.

01:16:32.000 That was this that was this woman, all tatted out from you know the neck down and just a nasty, mean old awful, awful person. 1.00

01:16:41.000 So I was walking through the hall one day and she said, Hey, are you that motherfucker whose name I can't pronounce at mail call? 1.00

01:16:49.000 And I go Kiriyaku just like it's spelled.

01:16:54.000 She goes, How about if I call you fuckface? 1.00

01:16:57.000 Like that.

01:16:58.000 So I said classy and I walked away.

01:17:03.000 Somebody later told me, they're not allowed to talk to us that way.

01:17:06.000 That's a violation of, you know, code eleven point eight subsection, you know, B, whatever.

01:17:12.000 So I wrote it in the um in the letter, and I was just like, you know, life in prison, what am I gonna do?

01:17:18.000 This this woman swears at me, there's nothing I can do. 0.98

01:17:21.000 The other thing was more important.

01:17:23.000 I had been there three days, and one of my cellmates was an Australian arsonist.

01:17:28.000 And he said, Let me walk you around and introduce you to the guys.

01:17:32.000 I said, Okay.

01:17:33.000 We go to this other housing unit, and there's a little tiny guy there who didn't speak any English, and he said, This is I forget what his name is, Ahmed or something.

01:17:44.000 He's from Iraq.

01:17:45.000 And I said, Ah, Shaf Bibtik, it's very nice to meet you.

01:17:48.000 And he says, Ah, Tatkalam Arabi, why Arab Anam in Iraq?

01:17:52.000 I said, Yeah, great, you're from Iraq.

01:17:54.000 I was in Iraq, it's very nice to meet you.

01:17:57.000 Turns out he was there on a terrorism charge.

01:17:59.000 He was the imam of some mosque in New York, and somebody was trying to sell a stinger missile to somebody, and he translated the the document, the bill of sale, and he got wrapped up in this terrorism case.

01:18:12.000 So I get called into the lieutenant's office the next day.

01:18:16.000 And usually if you're being called into the lieutenant's office, you're going straight to solitary.

01:18:20.000 So I hear my name, Kiriaku, Lieutenant's office, immediately, always with the immediately.

01:18:27.000 And they know you can't do it immediately because all the doors are locked.

01:18:30.000 So I wait for a 10 minute move period, the the bells ring, and I go to the lieutenant's office.

01:18:36.000 I said, You wanted to see me.

01:18:38.000 And they have the this guy's picture on uh on a computer screen.

01:18:43.000 You know this guy?

01:18:44.000 I said, I don't know him.

01:18:45.000 I met him yesterday.

01:18:47.000 What'd you say to him?

01:18:49.000 I said, I said nice to meet you.

01:18:51.000 What did he say to you?

01:18:53.000 He said, nice to meet you too.

01:18:55.000 Oh yeah?

01:18:56.000 Well, after you walked out, he called a number in Pakistan and they told him to kill you.

01:19:02.000 I said, get the fuck out of here.

01:19:04.000 I could kill this guy with my thumb.

01:19:06.000 Oh no, don't do that.

01:19:07.000 We've been looking for a reason to to transfer him out.

01:19:11.000 I'm like, okay.

01:19:12.000 So every time I see this guy, I give him the stink eye, right?

01:19:16.000 And then he gives me the stink eye back.

01:19:19.000 But then the more I thought about it, the more I thought, that doesn't make any sense.

01:19:23.000 He's Kurdish.

01:19:25.000 He only speaks Arabic and Kurdish.

01:19:28.000 Why would he call a number in Pakistan when they don't speak Arabic in Pakistan?

01:19:33.000 That just didn't make sense.

01:19:34.000 So I saw him in the yard and I went up to him and he got kind of scared like he was going to try to defend himself.

01:19:39.000 And I had, you know, six inches and a hundred pounds on this guy.

01:19:43.000 So I said, I said, wait a minute, I just want to ask you a question.

01:19:47.000 Did the cops say anything to you about me?

01:19:51.000 And he said, Yeah.

01:19:52.000 I said, What did they say to you?

01:19:54.000 And he said, They told me that after we met, you called a number in Washington, and they told you to kill me.

01:20:01.000 And I said, Oh, they did, did they?

01:20:03.000 So I went back to the law library and I looked this up, and this was a class D felony.

01:20:08.000 It was conspiring to commit violence in a federal facility.

01:20:13.000 It's punishable by up to five years in prison.

01:20:16.000 So I wrote it in my letter, and I sent it to my attorney.

01:20:20.000 And I didn't give it a second thought.

01:20:21.000 I didn't know my attorney was friends with Ariana Huffington, who then put it on Huffington Post with this banner headline.

01:20:29.000 Millions of hits.

01:20:30.000 The next thing I know, Jake Tapper drives to the prison to interview me, and it's in I mean it's everywhere from from CNN to Playboy to the Economist and and Time Magazine when Time Magazine was a thing, and NPRs calling the prison to interview me, and the next thing I know I'm called to the warden's office.

01:20:50.000 Well, that's in an off-limits part of the facility.

01:20:53.000 So the warden calls me in, he's like, I'm gonna send you to solitary right now.

01:20:59.000 And I thought, You know, is now the time to be to be humble before the warden, or should I stake my claim?

01:21:07.000 And I said, Warden, with all due respect.

01:21:12.000 I've gone nose to nose with Al Qaeda, with Hezbollah, with the Iranians, and you want me to be afraid of you?

01:21:22.000 Give me some credit.

01:21:24.000 He said, Yeah, we'll see what you say when you've spent some time in solitary.

01:21:29.000 I said, I've lived in Yemen in Pakistan.

01:21:33.000 I'm not afraid of your Loreto, Pennsylvania, solitary.

01:21:38.000 Besides, I said, go ahead and send me to solitary.

01:21:42.000 CNN's gonna be waiting for you next to your car in the parking lot.

01:21:46.000 And I just looked at him.

01:21:48.000 I never went to solitary.

01:21:50.000 Not for a minute.

01:21:52.000 Wow.

01:21:55.000 Jeez.

01:21:56.000 So they're trying to set you guys up.

01:21:58.000 Mm-hmm.

01:21:59.000 Trying to get you guys at each other's throat, and hopefully one of you'll do something.

01:22:03.000 They did it one other time.

01:22:06.000 Did you know who orchestrated that?

01:22:09.000 No.

01:22:10.000 Do you think it was the warden himself?

01:22:12.000 No.

01:22:12.000 I don't think he was smart enough.

01:22:14.000 I don't think he cared enough.

01:22:15.000 It had to come from the agency.

01:22:18.000 Oh my God.

01:22:19.000 There was one other incident too.

01:22:21.000 Um I lived in the same block of cells with uh with an Afghan American pharmacist who had an oxy problem.

01:22:31.000 Nice guy.

01:22:32.000 And he came up to me one day and he said, Hey, um the spokesman for the Taliban is here now and he wants to meet you.

01:22:39.000 I said, The spokesman for the Taliban. 0.56

01:22:41.000 I said, Are you talking about that case in New Jersey?

01:22:44.000 And he said, Yeah.

01:22:46.000 I said, I don't have anything to say to the spokesman of the Taliban.

01:22:49.000 I don't want to meet him.

01:22:50.000 And he said, Oh, okay, I'll tell him.

01:22:53.000 So I'm out in the yard one day, and my attorney had warned me they're they're upset at the shortness of your sentence.

01:23:02.000 So be very careful.

01:23:04.000 They're gonna try to set you up and add years on.

01:23:08.000 So I'm out in the yard, and here comes this guy with a beard down to his waist, and he's got his hand out to shake my hand.

01:23:15.000 And I put my hands up so as to not touch him.

01:23:19.000 And I looked just past him and there's a guard in the woods outside the thing with a long distance camera lens and he's going click click click.

01:23:33.000 And he said, Oh, come on, man, come on.

01:23:36.000 We have a lot in common.

01:23:37.000 I said, We have nothing in common.

01:23:39.000 I spent half my career trying to kill people like you.

01:23:42.000 I said, get away from me, don't touch me, or you're gonna end up unconscious on the ground.

01:23:47.000 And he walked away, and then he got transferred out.

01:23:50.000 And I said, Isn't it interesting that the spokesman for the Taliban was sent to our prison and was only here for four days?

01:23:59.000 Isn't that interesting?

01:24:01.000 And then they just gave up.

01:24:03.000 Wow.

01:24:04.000 Mm-hmm.

01:24:08.000 This kind of stuff is so hard to believe.

01:24:10.000 It's America.

01:24:11.000 You you don't want to believe this about America.

01:24:13.000 You want to believe we're the good guys.

01:24:15.000 Yeah.

01:24:15.000 And you want to believe that we would never turn on our own like that over something that's just.

01:24:21.000 Yeah, but they do.

01:24:23.000 But the crazy thing is it's like the CIA torture program wasn't even effective.

01:24:28.000 No.

01:24:29.000 That's the thing.

01:24:31.000 It wasn't even effective.

01:24:32.000 But you know what though, Joe?

01:24:34.000 When these guys die, and they've started to die, in their obituaries, it's gonna say that they were among the creators of the CIA's torture program.

01:24:46.000 And so they have a vested interest in repeating this lie over and over and over again that it was the right thing to do.

01:24:54.000 But what I don't understand is wouldn't they want to be effective?

01:24:59.000 You would think that that's if they were clear-headed.

01:25:02.000 Yes, that's the only thing that makes the least sense to me like I Idealistically, I like to think of the people that are in charge of the CIA of having a very important role in national security And if you're in a position where you have a very important role in national security, it's it's imperative to do what is most effective.

01:25:25.000 And if torture is not most effective.

01:25:29.000 Then don't do it.

01:25:30.000 Then you would abandon torture and use those coercion tactics that the other guy was using.

01:25:36.000 Yeah, that's right.

01:25:36.000 And in fact, they ended up abandoning the torture program.

01:25:42.000 Yeah.

01:25:42.000 The Mitchell and Jesson took their hundred and eight million dollars and they retired to Florida.

01:25:48.000 And uh and then subsequent CIA directors following George Tennant said, Yeah, you know, this didn't work.

01:25:54.000 We're not gonna do it anymore.

01:25:58.000 God.

01:26:01.000 I mean I I have to laugh just because it's so nuts.

01:26:06.000 What else can you do?

01:26:07.000 It's beyond nuts.

01:26:09.000 It's disgusting.

01:26:12.000 And it's just amazing that they could get away with that.

01:26:15.000 Yeah, and they have.

01:26:17.000 Nobody's been prosecuted.

01:26:19.000 Nobody.

01:26:20.000 Does Trump know about all the stuff?

01:26:24.000 About my stuff?

01:26:25.000 Yeah.

01:26:26.000 Like have you ever tried to get a pardon out of him?

01:26:29.000 I I've tried.

01:26:30.000 Um I let me rephrase.

01:26:32.000 I am trying.

01:26:34.000 So I have a letter that uh that Ronald Reagan's former deputy attorney general generously wrote asking the president to pardon me.

01:26:44.000 Tucker Carlson signed it, Judge Napolitano signed it, Doug Deeson, who's a friend of the president signed it, Sid Miller, who's here in in Texas, um has signed it, and the president's former U.S. attorney in Utah has signed it.

01:26:59.000 And then I sent it to uh to Ed Martin, the U.S. Parton attorney.

01:27:04.000 And then other people have said, oh, I would have signed that.

01:27:09.000 So we have a second letter.

01:27:11.000 Dr. Phil um has agreed to sign it.

01:27:15.000 Um there are a couple of other people, high-level people, Ken Higgins, who was the head of the president's uh transition team has signed it.

01:27:24.000 Uh and there are a couple of others.

01:27:26.000 We had really good news yesterday from the CIA director John Ratcliffe.

01:27:31.000 Um and he said that the CIA has no objection if the president were to pardon me.

01:27:38.000 That that's a big deal.

01:27:40.000 That's great news.

01:27:40.000 We we have also a nice one-sentence statement from Tulsi Gabbard saying that she has no objection to a pardon.

01:27:48.000 So I don't know, man.

01:27:49.000 I'm I'm hoping for the best.

01:27:51.000 You know what they say in business school?

01:27:53.000 Hope is not a strategy.

01:27:55.000 But um I I genuinely don't know what else to do.

01:28:01.000 Now you you're doing all these conversations.

01:28:04.000 You did the conversation with Tucker, you did his show, you're you're now doing my show, you've done a bunch of other shows.

01:28:10.000 Do you have any concern that in exposing more of what has been done to you that it somehow limits your possibility of being pardoned because you're exposing so many people that may still be working there?

01:28:25.000 I'm told that all of my detractors are either dead or retired.

01:28:30.000 A friend of mine from the CIA um called me the other day to say something very funny that she was sitting in a uh a mandatory uh security briefing, and she said one of the slides was just a picture of me, and it said the insider threat underneath.

01:28:46.000 And she said everybody started to boo.

01:28:49.000 And the instructor said, why?

01:28:52.000 Why are you booing?

01:28:53.000 And one of the guys said, he's not an insider threat.

01:28:57.000 He's a whistleblower.

01:28:59.000 And she said in the next running of the class, my picture was removed.

01:29:04.000 So I won.

01:29:05.000 I won, and John Brennan lost.

01:29:08.000 That's really what it's come down to.

01:29:12.000 Ugh.

01:29:15.000 It's so hard to hear these stories.

01:29:17.000 It's terrible.

01:29:18.000 It's so hard to imagine that our government could be so disgusting.

01:29:22.000 Oh my god, I wouldn't wish this on my worst enemy.

01:29:24.000 Truly.

01:29:25.000 I wouldn't wish it on anybody.

01:29:27.000 And you know, think of it this way.

01:29:28.000 Also, at the working level, these FBI agents don't get promoted by not arresting you.

01:29:35.000 Right.

01:29:36.000 The the assistant U.S. attorneys don't get promoted by not prosecuting you or by giving you a short sentence.

01:29:43.000 Right.

01:29:43.000 Right?

01:29:44.000 They all see themselves as, you know, having the corner office at the law firm someday or running for Congress or for the governor.

01:29:52.000 And they're gonna make that career on your back.

01:29:55.000 That's the problem, right?

01:29:56.000 Because there's a lot of cases where people are setting people up.

01:30:00.000 And you know, I I was talking to a friend of mine about this one case where there was a I'm sure you remember it, there was a 19-year-old um I think he was probably at the very least intellectually challenged guy and they tricked him into uh they radicalized him, gave him a fake bomb, gave him a cell phone.

01:30:19.000 Do you know the story?

01:30:20.000 I know exactly what you're talking about.

01:30:21.000 And then swept in and and got him.

01:30:24.000 And he wasn't planning on doing anything.

01:30:27.000 No.

01:30:27.000 It was they talked him into doing the whole thing.

01:30:30.000 He wasn't a bright person, and they got a arrest because of that.

01:30:35.000 So it it adds to their career.

01:30:36.000 That's it.

01:30:37.000 Like when when I was having a conversation about this, we brought up the uh the governor that they were planning on kidnapping Governor Whitmer.

01:30:45.000 Yeah.

01:30:46.000 Uh Michigan.

01:30:48.000 Yeah.

01:30:48.000 And that twelve of the fourteen people were working with the FBI.

01:30:52.000 Yeah.

01:30:52.000 Which is just there are well documented cases where the FBI infiltrates a group and they go to a meeting, and literally everybody in the meeting is an FBI agent.

01:31:05.000 Like, what is that?

01:31:06.000 Is this a joke?

01:31:09.000 This is what the American taxpayers' money goes for.

01:31:11.000 Do you remember have you heard of the Route 82 Bridge plot in Cleveland?

01:31:15.000 No.

01:31:15.000 There are three morons sitting in a bar getting drunk.

01:31:20.000 Oh, I did hear about this.

01:31:21.000 The other guy comes in, hey, you know what we should do?

01:31:23.000 It'd be so much fun.

01:31:24.000 Blow up the road Route 82 Bridge.

01:31:26.000 I have some explosives.

01:31:28.000 And these guys are drunk.

01:31:29.000 They're like, yeah, let's do Route 82 Bridge.

01:31:31.000 Well, the guy with the explosives is an FBI informant.

01:31:33.000 He set them all up.

01:31:34.000 And they got like twenty, eighteen and fifteen years in prison.

01:31:38.000 It was the FBI's idea.

01:31:40.000 Not their idea.

01:31:41.000 They're just sitting in a bar drinking.

01:31:43.000 Well, how about January sixth?

01:31:44.000 How about January sixth?

01:31:45.000 This is the I was trying to explain to Jim Gaffigan one day.

01:31:50.000 Jim Gaffkin was talking about what they did in January 6th.

01:31:53.000 I go, Do you understand that there were paid people that were working for the federal government?

01:31:59.000 They were employees of the federal government that were on that lawn trying to convince people to go in.

01:32:06.000 And he was very incredulous.

01:32:08.000 He w he did he did not believe it, and I said they are agent provocateurs that are that is their job to try to get you to do something illegal.

01:32:18.000 Exactly.

01:32:19.000 So they can build their careers by making these arrests.

01:32:22.000 Not just that, but demonize the president, the former president to of a much larger extent to charge him with insurrection to say that he was plotting to overthrow the government.

01:32:34.000 Yeah, and as it turns out, the only one who was actually plotting to overthrow the government was John Brennan.

01:32:40.000 How was he plotting to overthrow the government?

01:32:42.000 In twenty fifteen and twenty sixteen with Russia Gate.

01:32:46.000 Oh right, right.

01:32:47.000 You know, I remember talking to CIA friends of mine saying, you know, they taught us in training that you've got to follow the evidence.

01:32:57.000 And there's no evidence that any of this happened.

01:32:59.000 I worked with Christopher Steele on an operation in London twenty five years ago, twenty-six years ago.

01:33:09.000 There was this fundamental misunderstanding of what an operations officer was supposed to do.

01:33:16.000 An operations officer goes out and collects intelligence and then sends it back.

01:33:21.000 And that's it.

01:33:22.000 Then it's up to the analyst to decide this is great, this is crap, this is not true, this is a partially true, whatever.

01:33:31.000 So he goes out there, talks to whatever low level terrible sources he happened to have, writes all this nonsense down, sends it back, and they're like, Oh, look what Donald Trump did.

01:33:44.000 He hired prostitutes to pee on Barack Obama's bed. 0.99

01:33:48.000 No, he didn't.

01:33:50.000 One guy made this up and Christopher Steele wrote it and sent it back.

01:33:55.000 That doesn't make it fact.

01:33:57.000 And wasn't it funded by the Hillary Clinton? 0.99

01:34:00.000 It sure was.

01:34:02.000 Yes, it was.

01:34:03.000 Yeah.

01:34:04.000 Which is equally wild.

01:34:06.000 You made another point I wanted to address.

01:34:08.000 These January sixth people. 0.97

01:34:11.000 Let's say that some of them did do whatever, broke the window or went into the building unauthorized.

01:34:22.000 Okay.

01:34:23.000 Then that's deserving of a smack on the hand and and a strongly worded letter and maybe a thousand dollar fine.

01:34:30.000 don't do that again.

01:34:31.000 Thirty years in prison?

01:34:34.000 Again, is society really better off by locking all these people up and spending millions and millions of dollars of the taxpayers' money to do it.

01:34:46.000 Of course not.

01:34:47.000 No, of course not.

01:34:48.000 But it it also just divides us even further.

01:34:50.000 It does.

01:34:51.000 And it also very much distorted the narrative with people like Jim Gaffigan, who's a friend of mine, who's a very left-leaning comedian.

01:35:00.000 And he had it in his mind that these people went in.

01:35:04.000 And they also they also have this thing where they say a cop was murdered.

01:35:07.000 Right.

01:35:07.000 That's not true.

01:35:08.000 I hate that.

01:35:09.000 They say it over and over again.

01:35:10.000 That's not true.

01:35:11.000 One cop died after the fact of a heart attack.

01:35:16.000 You could say maybe it was because of the stress of January 6th, perhaps.

01:35:22.000 Maybe.

01:35:22.000 Maybe not.

01:35:23.000 Maybe not.

01:35:24.000 Maybe he shouldn't have been a cop.

01:35:25.000 Yeah.

01:35:26.000 I mean, if you can't die of it, you can get health problems.

01:35:28.000 Right.

01:35:29.000 Like that's not normal to just die of a heart attack because of a very stressful day.

01:35:33.000 Mm-hmm.

01:35:34.000 That's but that's it.

01:35:35.000 This idea that they killed cops, that keep that narrative keeps coming out.

01:35:41.000 It was an insurrection.

01:35:42.000 They murdered cops.

01:35:43.000 They broke into the White House.

01:35:45.000 They were looking for Nancy Pelosi.

01:35:47.000 They were gonna kill her.

01:35:48.000 Like, okay.

01:35:49.000 Are you sure?

01:35:50.000 Because there's a lot of this story that's bullshit.

01:35:52.000 Now it turns out at one point in time they were saying it was 20 FBI agents.

01:35:56.000 Now the the latest number is 270.

01:35:59.000 That's right.

01:36:00.000 Yeah.

01:36:01.000 That's huge.

01:36:02.000 That's a lot of people.

01:36:03.000 That's a lot of people that are encouraging people to break in.

01:36:08.000 And there's many instances of these suspected people that are on camera.

01:36:12.000 A lot of them are wearing face masks.

01:36:14.000 Um there's one of them where a guy's removing the broken glass from the window and encouraging people to go in, and another guy gets in his faces and goes, do not do that, and then he pushes that guy, fuck you, and the other guy backs off.

01:36:28.000 Um how is that not being investigated as a serious crime?

01:36:36.000 And like that that is a serious it's a violation of what you're supposed to be doing in the first place.

01:36:44.000 If the FBI was on that loan uh on that lawn, I would hope what they would be doing is informing people.

01:36:51.000 Entering into this building is a felony.

01:36:54.000 Breaking these windows, getting into this building is you do not want to do this.

01:37:00.000 If you want to peacefully protest, do that.

01:37:02.000 But I'm telling you, this will fuck with you for the rest of your life and most likely ruin it.

01:37:08.000 I think you're a hundred percent right.

01:37:10.000 That's what I would hope from law enforcement.

01:37:12.000 I wouldn't hope that they would be trying to set people up.

01:37:16.000 And from a civil society.

01:37:19.000 Right.

01:37:19.000 You know?

01:37:20.000 Do we we want to set people up to go to prison?

01:37:23.000 We want to wreck families and wreck people's lives.

01:37:27.000 Why would we want to do that?

01:37:29.000 Also what was there did they turn down the idea of bringing in the National Guard.

01:37:37.000 You know, I I really don't understand it appears, yes.

01:37:41.000 It it appears that that's exactly what happened.

01:37:45.000 Also significantly deterred people from committing these crimes.

01:37:49.000 That's right.

01:37:50.000 That they were encouraged to do.

01:37:51.000 I'll tell you if I was at a demonstration and all of a sudden the National Guard showed up, I'd say, ah, this isn't for me.

01:37:57.000 Yeah.

01:37:58.000 Yeah.

01:37:58.000 And I think most people would do that as well.

01:38:00.000 You're right.

01:38:04.000 It's crazy.

01:38:05.000 It's just so gross that our legal system gets used against political opponents in that way, in such a devious and just a sinister way.

01:38:16.000 Harry Truman once famously said, if you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.

01:38:25.000 Yeah.

01:38:26.000 Yeah.

01:38:27.000 God, what a gross business.

01:38:29.000 It's just sad because I also am a patriot, and I want to think of us as better than that.

01:38:35.000 Yeah, we're the good guys.

01:38:36.000 And I don't think it's necessarily the fault of these individuals.

01:38:40.000 I think the system really sucks.

01:38:43.000 And I think you work for that system, and just like all these Congress people that wind up insider trading, everybody else is doing it.

01:38:51.000 It's the culture, you get wrapped up in it just like bad cops.

01:38:55.000 You know, you get assigned to a precinct that's filled with corrupt cops, and you have to Do things to stay with them.

01:39:01.000 They're your blood brothers and you're all in this together, and so you wind up doing some criminal activities that you think are just everybody does it, is what we do.

01:39:09.000 Yep.

01:39:10.000 And you're an FBI agent, well, we gotta set this guy up.

01:39:13.000 Okay, let's set him up.

01:39:14.000 This is what we do.

01:39:14.000 Hey, if he doesn't do it, he's not committing a crime, we got nothing on him.

01:39:18.000 Okay.

01:39:19.000 And then you just convince him to do it, and he's a fucking idiot. 0.71

01:39:22.000 And so he does it, and he hits that cell phone, and now you're arresting him, and he's like, What?

01:39:26.000 Yeah.

01:39:27.000 And he's so dumb, he barely knows what happened.

01:39:30.000 Mm-hmm.

01:39:31.000 And the chances are he can't afford a decent attorney.

01:39:35.000 Right.

01:39:35.000 Or he's not notorious enough and newsworthy enough to to get, you know, A-list attorneys volunteering pro bono.

01:39:45.000 Right.

01:39:45.000 So he's stuck with a a public defender that's gonna spend eight hours on the case and he's gonna get screwed in the end.

01:39:51.000 Aaron Powell And there's also the narrative that's very difficult to shake.

01:39:55.000 So if you get accused of some sort of a heinous crime, the narrative for most people that are casual viewers of that story is that you're a terrorist.

01:40:05.000 Yeah.

01:40:05.000 Or you're a guy who's gonna kidnap the governor, or you're a guy who is an insurrectionist who's trying to overthrow the government on January 6th.

01:40:13.000 And then you watch the footage that they wouldn't release during the trials, and you see them getting a guided tour.

01:40:19.000 The guided tour through through like they're the security guards are walking them into the Senate.

01:40:24.000 Like, what the fuck what is this?

01:40:26.000 Like what is and why is no one outraged?

01:40:29.000 And why is it only one side that's outraged?

01:40:31.000 God, if I was a uh a if I was a a a Democrat congressman or a senator, or if I was any sort of a politician on the other side, I'd be like, Do you know how disgusting this is?

01:40:44.000 This is you're you're using this to go after Donald Trump.

01:40:48.000 Of all things.

01:40:49.000 In instead of just better political opposition.

01:40:52.000 Exactly.

01:40:54.000 And the media are to blame in part as well.

01:40:56.000 Well, they're bought and paid for.

01:40:57.000 Absolutely.

01:40:58.000 I mean, one hundred percent.

01:40:59.000 The the media in this country is a complete and total failure.

01:41:02.000 The the only thing that's real media in this country are independent journalists.

01:41:06.000 That's right.

01:41:06.000 And there's a mostly people who worked for large media corporations and either were fired or had to leave because of their own ethics and morals and eventually branched out on their own, and now they're in grave danger.

01:41:20.000 Yeah.

01:41:20.000 You know, and they're worried about being prosecuted or set up or killed.

01:41:26.000 Yeah.

01:41:26.000 It's super sketchy because that's we like to think of ourselves as better.

01:41:32.000 We're this is the shining example for the rest of the world.

01:41:36.000 This is the experiment in self-government that the whole world follows this lead, and when you see that not just tolerated but standard.

01:41:48.000 Yeah, it hurts.

01:41:49.000 It really does.

01:41:51.000 I was raised in a family like you were, uh, where I was taught that this was the greatest country on earth.

01:42:00.000 I still think it is.

01:42:01.000 And I do too.

01:42:02.000 And that's why we have to weed out the likes of John Brennan.

01:42:08.000 God.

01:42:10.000 But it seems like there's a lot of people like that.

01:42:12.000 Yeah that are deeply rooted.

01:42:14.000 Yes, indeed.

01:42:15.000 And this is what you were talking about, too, that presidents come and go.

01:42:18.000 But those people, that's the real power.

01:42:20.000 You know, this c this term the deep state, a lot of people that are you know, there's a lot of people that don't like to entertain any kind of conspiracies because they think it's like a fool's journey.

01:42:30.000 But you you're really foolish if you don't believe in conspiracies.

01:42:35.000 Yeah.

01:42:35.000 Because just how many of them have to be proven true before you go, maybe I should reassess my position on these things.

01:42:47.000 We're still learning new information.

01:42:49.000 Yeah.

01:42:50.000 Information that's been kept from us.

01:42:52.000 And still being kept.

01:42:53.000 There's still a lot of it.

01:42:54.000 I mean, they were supposed to that was the one of the more disappointing things about this administration.

01:42:58.000 Like immediately, right off the jump, we're supposed to get all the CIA files, all the JFK files.

01:43:03.000 We're we're supposed to know exactly what happened to him.

01:43:06.000 We know very little.

01:43:09.000 Very little new information has been released that uh illuminates any aspects of that case.

01:43:15.000 Yeah.

01:43:16.000 It's a shame.

01:43:16.000 Well, it's it's d terrible.

01:43:19.000 Because most likely at least some part of our government was involved in assassinating the president.

01:43:26.000 And no one went to jail.

01:43:29.000 No.

01:43:29.000 Nothing Happened, and in fact, people succeeded and thrived after that.

01:43:35.000 Sad truth.

01:43:36.000 Yeah.

01:43:36.000 That's exactly what happened.

01:43:38.000 I mean, it goes back, there's so many cases.

01:43:40.000 Like with uh I've had conversations with people that like they, you know, they don't want to be fools, right?

01:43:45.000 So that's a lot of the people that don't want to believe in conspiracies.

01:43:48.000 Like most of it can be explained away by incompetence or coincidence and this and that.

01:43:53.000 Like that's not even true.

01:43:55.000 It's not even most of it.

01:43:56.000 It's some things can be explained.

01:43:59.000 Some things.

01:44:00.000 I had a a friend at the agency.

01:44:01.000 He was one of my first bosses.

01:44:03.000 And he had started out in uh in this like internship program that the agency had the the it was a you had to be working on a master's degree.

01:44:14.000 But anyway, his first assignment was in the counterintelligence center, which at the time was being run by James Angleton.

01:44:22.000 And um on his first day, the secretary walked him around, and you know, this is what we do over here, and this is what we do over there, and there was this entire wall of file folders.

01:44:34.000 And she said, Whatever you do, don't look in those folders.

01:44:39.000 You're not cleared for that.

01:44:41.000 Well, he said, Well, of course, the very first minute that he's left alone, he runs and looks in the folders, and he said, Every single one of those folders was on an American citizen.

01:44:52.000 And the CIA is forbidden by law from spying on Americans.

01:44:57.000 Oh God.

01:45:01.000 Yeah.

01:45:03.000 The crazy thing, too, in a lot of people's eyes, is the difference between what they uh thought of, what what the narrative is of the Obama administration in terms of like whistleblowers and like what what the hope was.

01:45:17.000 You know, it was hope and change, right?

01:45:19.000 Oh, hope and change.

01:45:20.000 And you know the statistic.

01:45:22.000 The the Espionage Act was written in 1917 to combat German saboteurs during the first world war.

01:45:29.000 Between 1917 and 2009, three Americans were charged with espionage for speaking to the media.

01:45:38.000 Under Barack Obama, eight people were charged with espionage for speaking to the media.

01:45:45.000 So he was the enemy of whistleblowers.

01:45:48.000 Not only that, that was part of his campaign.

01:45:50.000 Yeah.

01:45:51.000 Part of his campaign was protection of whistleblowers.

01:45:55.000 It was in the Hope and Change website.

01:45:57.000 Yeah, well, look at the Dashty Laley massacre that I mentioned earlier.

01:46:00.000 It was part of his campaign to open an investigation of Dash Dilely.

01:46:05.000 What happened was uh at Dashty Leli, Afghanistan, on November the 30th and December the first, 2001, 2,000 Taliban soldiers gave up on MAS, right?

01:46:19.000 And the Northern Alliance called us and said, What do what do we do with all these guys?

01:46:24.000 We don't have room for them.

01:46:26.000 So we told them put them in trucks, take them out to the desert, and just hold them there until we can divide them up and send them to smaller jails all around the country.

01:46:34.000 And if we have to, we can send some to Pakistan. 1.00

01:46:38.000 But there were no air holes in the containers, there was no food, there was no water, and of the 2,000, 14 survived.

01:46:51.000 And one of the 14 said that when they opened the trucks in the desert, the bodies fell out like sardines from a can.

01:46:59.000 So Barack Obama said in 2008, if he's elected president, he's gonna investigate this massacre and get to the bottom of it.

01:47:07.000 And then there was nothing.

01:47:09.000 So I said to John Kerry, I said, Listen, this is part of the Obama campaign.

01:47:13.000 Let me go to Afghanistan and investigate this thing.

01:47:16.000 And so I went, and there are still bones just sticking out of the sand, their clothes that have just been laying there in the desert all these years.

01:47:25.000 All the bodies are still there.

01:47:26.000 What's left of them?

01:47:28.000 Really?

01:47:28.000 Yeah, it's gr it's grisly.

01:47:30.000 So I come back and I get a call from a kind of a prominent human rights activist, and he said he wanted to see me, but it had to be private.

01:47:39.000 So we went to uh Johns Hopkins University.

01:47:42.000 There was a classroom that wasn't being used.

01:47:44.000 We met there and he said, Listen, I have a witness who was twelve years old at the time, and he was hiding behind a rock, and he saw what happened when they opened the trucks and the bodies fell out.

01:47:59.000 I said, okay.

01:48:00.000 And he said, but what's new is he says that there were two men there wearing blue jeans and black t-shirts and they were speaking English.

01:48:10.000 I said, okay, that's all I need.

01:48:12.000 So I wrote a letter to the agency and I I asked, you know, for clarification, were any CIA personnel on site at the box up or at the uh at the location where the trucks were opened.

01:48:26.000 Um I had it auto penned John Kerry, chairman.

01:48:30.000 Six weeks later, a colleague comes into my office and he says, Hey, you got a response from the agency to your letter.

01:48:37.000 I said, I didn't see any response from the agency.

01:48:39.000 I just checked my mail an hour ago.

01:48:41.000 And he said, they classified it top secret, it's down in the vault.

01:48:44.000 I said, Tom secret.

01:48:46.000 I said, Well, what did it say?

01:48:47.000 And he says, it says, go fuck yourself.

01:48:51.000 I said, Great.

01:48:52.000 That's how they want to play it.

01:48:54.000 So I went to Carrie, and Kerry says, Ah, you know, we're stirring up a Hornet's nest here, and I think we should just let this fade into history.

01:49:04.000 I was like, again?

01:49:06.000 Because you want so badly to be Secretary of State again.

01:49:14.000 God, what a gross business.

01:49:17.000 It's awful.

01:49:18.000 Hideous.

01:49:19.000 What is it like for m for you on the outside now watching what's going on in the world?

01:49:28.000 There are some places that I'm optimistic about.

01:49:32.000 And actually there are some developments that may look ugly on the surface that I'm optimistic about.

01:49:38.000 First of all, this C SPA, we're recording this on uh I guess today's Thursday, but the ceasefire that was announced this morning, this is huge.

01:49:46.000 Huge.

01:49:48.000 And I think this is not a victory for the Israelis.

01:49:52.000 I think that I think that it makes Donald Trump stronger and Benjamin Netanyahu weaker.

01:49:57.000 Netanyahu's decision to bomb gutter was too much.

01:50:02.000 Just too much.

01:50:04.000 It served, it could have served to embarrass the president.

01:50:08.000 What it ended up doing is it weakened Netanyahu's position.

01:50:11.000 So that's a victory for the for the White House, as far as I'm concerned.

01:50:14.000 Can I stop you real quick?

01:50:15.000 Yeah.

01:50:16.000 The pr correct pronunciation?

01:50:17.000 How did you say it?

01:50:18.000 Gutter.

01:50:19.000 You said gutter.

01:50:20.000 Uh-huh.

01:50:21.000 It's back here.

01:50:21.000 It's called a kaf.

01:50:23.000 But so I've heard cutter.

01:50:24.000 Yes, it's cut cutter, but gut.

01:50:26.000 You're saying it like a g?

01:50:28.000 They use a g sound.

01:50:29.000 Got it.

01:50:30.000 Other Arabs would call it Qatar with a like a K. Uh-huh. 0.97

01:50:34.000 But in the Gulf dialect, it's way down here.

01:50:39.000 Qatar.

01:50:39.000 Uh-huh.

01:50:40.000 Okay.

01:50:41.000 The other thing is Iran.

01:50:43.000 Man, I follow Iran more closely than anybody I know.

01:50:48.000 You remember, you're you're a little bit younger than I am, but not much.

01:50:52.000 Um when we were kids, we had a terrible relationship with China. 0.99

01:50:57.000 And Richard Nixon was the most anti-China person that could possibly have been elected president.

01:51:03.000 Yet it was Nixon that went to China and made peace with the Chinese and opened diplomatic relations.

01:51:09.000 And I call me crazy, but I think that if there's going to be peace with Iran, Donald Trump's going to make that peace with Iran.

01:51:17.000 It may not be in the form of a trip to Tehran, but I could see a trip to Riyadh and have a meeting brokered by by Mohammed bin Salman, and maybe we can come to some sort of an agreement on it on issue number one or issue number two.

01:51:33.000 Well, it seems to be a part of what he wants to accomplish in these four years, is that he wants to go down as having made significant change in the world in a positive direction.

01:51:44.000 And and we're seeing it.

01:51:48.000 That's part of the problem because of narratives.

01:51:50.000 That's it.

01:51:51.000 You know, peace between India and Pakistan doesn't fit in the Democratic Party's narrative that Donald Trump is a warmonger.

01:51:57.000 He's not a warmonger.

01:51:59.000 Ask, you know, the the Africans that he's weighed in for, and we have peace in sub-Saharan Africa now. 0.98

01:52:06.000 Or this agreement today between Hamas and and uh the Israelis, you know, I think this is the first of several new developments that's going to lead to the end of this conflict.

01:52:17.000 What is your take on Netanyahu's position?

01:52:22.000 Because if war is over, Netanyahu will no longer be running Israel.

01:52:30.000 Is that correct?

01:52:32.000 Eventually.

01:52:34.000 Netanyahu has a vested interest in making sure that this war lasts as long as possible because remember, he's still under indictment for corruption.

01:52:43.000 Also, one thing that most Americans don't understand is the Israeli political system is such that it is literally impossible for any party to win a working majority in the Knesset.

01:52:54.000 Right?

01:52:54.000 There are just too many parties and too many individual interests.

01:52:58.000 So you've got, you know, a dozen parties represented.

01:53:01.000 Benjamin Netanyahu has never won more than twenty-seven percent of the vote.

01:53:06.000 Wow.

01:53:07.000 He's very unpopular.

01:53:09.000 It's just that he's the least unpopular of the unpopular pal uh politicians.

01:53:15.000 And it's a crazy way to run a country.

01:53:17.000 One of the things that the Greeks did, because the Greeks had the same problem.

01:53:20.000 They're just too many parties, right?

01:53:22.000 So you win 20% and you become the prime minister.

01:53:26.000 20%.

01:53:27.000 Nobody wants you.

01:53:28.000 Right.

01:53:29.000 So what they did is they they raised the threshold to which you have to which you have to meet to to win election to the parliament from three percent to five percent.

01:53:39.000 So that narrows it down to like six or seven parties.

01:53:42.000 But then the party that comes in first, first past the poll, gets an extra 50 seats.

01:53:47.000 Then you don't have to go into any coalition governments with anybody.

01:53:50.000 And you can run the country for four years or five years, whatever it happens to be.

01:53:54.000 That's what the Israelis need to do. 0.97

01:53:56.000 But but but Netanyahu, longest serving prime minister in Israeli history, wildly unpopular.

01:54:03.000 And it's funny because he used to be considered a right wing extremist, and now he's the moderate of the government.

01:54:09.000 Really?

01:54:10.000 Mm-hmm.

01:54:10.000 The likes of Itamar Ben Gavir and uh and uh Smothrich and these other guys who have come in from the right, they were attacking him to the point where he had to bring their parties into this coalition government just to get him to shut up.

01:54:27.000 I mean, these are people that have felony convictions for anti-Arab hate crimes, and now they're you know, Minister of National Security, Minister of Finance with responsibility for the West Bank.

01:54:40.000 What's that?

01:54:41.000 Wow.

01:54:42.000 It's a terrible, untenable position.

01:54:46.000 Haven't they decided to go ahead and prosecute him even while he's in office?

01:54:51.000 Yeah.

01:54:52.000 There's an ongoing uh dispute that the Israeli Supreme Court has weighed in on a number of times.

01:54:58.000 So the Minister of Justice is appointed, of course, by the Prime Minister.

01:55:03.000 But the Supreme Court is independent of the Prime Minister and the Minister of Justice.

01:55:08.000 So the Minister of Justice says you can't prosecute him while he's prime minister.

01:55:12.000 And the Supreme Court says, oh yes, you can, and orders the court then to continue the case.

01:55:19.000 So if the case is going to be continued, Netanyahu's only viable strategy is delaying tactics.

01:55:26.000 Appeal after appeal after appeal, you make uh you submit uh motions on little technical issues, maybe you get them to focus on Mrs. Netanyahu, who's also under indictment, and you just delay it as long as you can.

01:55:43.000 But the best argument that he has is I can't focus on my own defense because I have a war to prosecute.

01:55:50.000 Well, if there's peace, then he's gonna have to go on trial.

01:55:56.000 Wow.

01:55:58.000 Which incentivizes him to stay at war, which is so crazy.

01:56:02.000 Isn't it though?

01:56:04.000 Strange situation.

01:56:05.000 Well, a lot of people aren't aware that there was hundreds of thousands of people protesting in the streets before October 7th.

01:56:11.000 Oh, you're exactly right.

01:56:13.000 In fact, in August, we saw the biggest protests in American history I'm sorry, in Israeli history demanding that Netanyahu resign, and it was all because of corruption.

01:56:23.000 And what is the sp specific corruption that he's being accused of?

01:56:27.000 You know, it's changed over the years.

01:56:30.000 Some of it had to do with business, others had to do other accusations had to do with him um trying to essentially sell positions in the government.

01:56:41.000 But you know, I I read the accusations when they first came out, they weren't strong.

01:56:47.000 They're defensible.

01:56:49.000 So I I don't know why he doesn't just grab the bull by the horns and and go for it.

01:56:54.000 Wow.

01:56:59.000 So out of all the issues that we face internationally, do you think that the Israel Palestine is the most significant one? 0.87

01:57:08.000 I don't actually.

01:57:10.000 I think the threat is greater from China.

01:57:13.000 The Chinese are incredibly patient.

01:57:17.000 Um there was a there was a joke in uh the Onion the other day.

01:57:21.000 It was a bunch of Chinese guys just sitting around a table, and it said, uh the Chinese government sits and waits for the United States to uh self-destruct or continue its self-destruction or something like that.

01:57:35.000 It's because they know that they can they can outweigh us.

01:57:39.000 You know?

01:57:39.000 We we we have convinced ourselves over the decades that we have to be all around the world uh protecting the weak and those without a voice and being the peacemaker, you know.

01:57:54.000 We have we have uh 190 bases in 144 countries.

01:58:01.000 We have to do all that.

01:58:02.000 And the Chinese say, yeah, yeah, you have to. 0.99

01:58:05.000 Go ahead.

01:58:06.000 Spend all your money on that stuff.

01:58:08.000 In the meantime, we're gonna have 350 mile an hour trains and the best highways in the world and the best schools and the best hospitals and the nicest airports, and then all of our extra money, we're gonna essentially bribe foreign countries to do things that we want them to do.

01:58:27.000 So it's a lesson that I think we haven't learned as a country that there are other ways of winning hearts and minds.

01:58:37.000 Well, it's also they're actively engaged in making sure that people are arguing online, which is fascinating.

01:58:44.000 You know, th they're very good at these kinds of behind the scenes like quasi uh spy-like surreptitious actions.

01:58:56.000 They actively promote us arguing, fighting, disagreeing, they promote these societal disruptions that we're all so uh so worried about.

01:59:07.000 And you know, we we blame the Russians all the time, and certainly the Russians do this kind of thing too, but it's the Chinese that have really perfected it. 1.00

01:59:15.000 And I think that most Americans don't realize how much we should be worried about that and trying to counter it.

01:59:22.000 Well, what could be done to counter it?

01:59:24.000 Because a lot of it is what's going on in social media is echo chambers, people exist in these echo chambers, they're completely addicted to their smartphones, they're on the algorithm all day long, they're checking things and getting ramped up by things, and they're being told various narratives, whatever it is.

01:59:44.000 And there was a story recently about um China getting caught using chat GPT for various different services where they were using bots.

01:59:55.000 And you know, so they they had done it automated through chat GPT.

01:59:58.000 Brad Parcell is doing it right now on behalf of the Israelis.

02:00:01.000 He recently won a six million dollar contract to train chat GPT to be more pro-Israel.

02:00:09.000 It was in Reason Magazine a couple of days ago.

02:00:12.000 Um you have the also have the recent purchase of TikTok and a lot going on.

02:00:19.000 Which I think uh could be very helpful uh for us.

02:00:22.000 One of the things that we're bad at is identifying bots and controlling bots once they've been identified.

02:00:27.000 I'll give you an example.

02:00:29.000 Um I've uh I write columns all the time and have my own little podcast and I said that I was optimistic that a deal seemed to be at hand, you know, between Israel and the Gaza Palestinians, and then immediately I started getting attacked. 0.88

02:00:48.000 And it was it was by obviously anonymous um writers.

02:00:53.000 I can't imagine that these writers are human beings, they had to be bots.

02:00:57.000 One called me virulently anti-Semitic.

02:01:01.000 Whoa.

02:01:02.000 Because I said this deal that it it appears the president has negotiated was a good idea.

02:01:07.000 So I'm virulently anti-Semitic, and then they built on that, and by the end of it, and nobody else was commenting, but by the end of it they said that I was um I was morbidly obese and ugly and stupid too.

02:01:24.000 It's like what the fuck is that?

02:01:25.000 That's not Chinese. 1.00

02:01:31.000 Morbidly obese, ugly, and stupid too.

02:01:34.000 Uh-huh.

02:01:34.000 You don't even look a little fat.

02:01:36.000 No.

02:01:37.000 No, I I'm 6'1, 190.

02:01:40.000 I feel like I'm okay.

02:01:41.000 You look great.

02:01:43.000 That's so funny.

02:01:45.000 It's kind of hilarious, though.

02:01:46.000 But if you just say things, enough people are gonna believe it that it's effective.

02:01:49.000 It at least it moves a narrative into a certain direction.

02:01:52.000 You know, and ChatGPT and these other chat bots are very easy to um to influence.

02:01:58.000 When when ChatGPT first came out, just for fun, I said, who is John Kiriaku?

02:02:03.000 And it said, John Kiriyaku is a former CIA officer, blew the whistle on the torture program, etc.

02:02:08.000 John Kiriaku graduated from the University of Maryland and earned a master's degree in peace studies from the University of Bruges in Belgium.

02:02:18.000 I don't even know where the University of Maryland is located specifically.

02:02:22.000 I know it's called College Park.

02:02:23.000 I don't know how to get there.

02:02:25.000 Never been to the University of Maryland.

02:02:27.000 I didn't know there was a university in Bruges, let alone one that gave me a degree in peace studies.

02:02:32.000 So I said, John Kariaku graduated from George Washington University with degrees in this and that.

02:02:39.000 And it says, you are incorrect.

02:02:41.000 And I said, No, you are incorrect.

02:02:43.000 And then it says, No, you are incorrect.

02:02:46.000 And then I just gave up.

02:02:48.000 Why didn't you just say, I'm actually John Kuriaku?

02:02:52.000 You fucking idiot.

02:02:56.000 But I mean, you did you ask it where are you getting your f your information from?

02:03:00.000 No, but it pulls from literally everywhere.

02:03:02.000 Right, so there's a narrative out there somehow or another that there's universities that you never attended.

02:03:08.000 Right.

02:03:09.000 Huh.

02:03:09.000 Yeah.

02:03:11.000 Yeah.

02:03:12.000 And then, you know, if you make somebody angry, you can be just deleted from chat GPT.

02:03:19.000 Uh a friend of mine, pull the surprise nominated political cartoonist, Ted Raw.

02:03:25.000 He did the same thing.

02:03:26.000 Who is Ted Rawl?

02:03:28.000 Well, Ted Raw, we know is 15 years at the Los Angeles Times as a an award-winning editorial cartoonist.

02:03:35.000 It says there is no such person as Ted Raw.

02:03:38.000 Hmm.

02:03:39.000 Mm-hmm.

02:03:40.000 So I wonder who he pissed off.

02:03:43.000 Have you tried subsequently?

02:03:45.000 No.

02:03:47.000 Let's see what perplexity says.

02:03:48.000 Okay.

02:03:49.000 Pull up that's what we use.

02:03:51.000 That's one of our sponsors.

02:03:52.000 Let's see who is John Kiriaku.

02:03:55.000 Let's see if they get it wrong too.

02:03:57.000 Because if that's the case, that means somebody probably planted this incorrect information out there into it.

02:04:04.000 Which is like how and why?

02:04:06.000 Like what would be the purpose of doing that?

02:04:09.000 What I mean, especially something that's not even derogatory.

02:04:11.000 It's just factually incorrect.

02:04:13.000 Yeah.

02:04:14.000 About your education.

02:04:15.000 You gave you different places that you went to school, which is weird.

02:04:19.000 Like that doesn't even make sense.

02:04:21.000 No.

02:04:21.000 Like what would what would be the benefit of that?

02:04:25.000 I have no idea.

02:04:28.000 Well, I was trying to get the it didn't give the education.

02:04:31.000 But just ask it, who is John Kiriaku?

02:04:34.000 Let's see what it says.

02:04:36.000 Who is John Kuriyaku?

02:04:38.000 Okay.

02:04:38.000 Uh American whistleblower, author, journalist, former intelligence officer, all that stuff's true.

02:04:43.000 Personal background, CIA, 1990, all this is accurate.

02:04:48.000 Yeah.

02:04:48.000 All of that is accurate.

02:04:49.000 Whistleblowing and legal case, recognition and advocacy.

02:04:54.000 Remain active and speaking out against torture and advocating for government transparency and ethical intelligence policies.

02:05:00.000 All that's true.

02:05:01.000 Yep.

02:05:01.000 So perplexity.

02:05:03.000 All of that's it absolutely correct.

02:05:05.000 Um ask a follow-up.

02:05:08.000 What is his education history?

02:05:10.000 There it is.

02:05:11.000 Graduated from Newcastle High School, Washington University.

02:05:14.000 All this is accurate.

02:05:15.000 All that's all that's correct.

02:05:16.000 Okay, so it seems like whatever it was was just in ChatGPT.

02:05:20.000 Yes.

02:05:21.000 Which is really weird.

02:05:23.000 Well, I'm using perplexity from now on.

02:05:25.000 What do you think it could have been?

02:05:26.000 Like what would be the benefit of giving incorrect information about your education in ChatGPT?

02:05:33.000 I don't know.

02:05:34.000 I I don't know, but I I'll tell you, I used Chat GPT.

02:05:37.000 I teach a class in a graduate school class in the history of terrorism at the University of Salamanca in in Spain.

02:05:45.000 And so I was very proud of the the course outline that I had written up, and I put the whole thing, I just cut and pasted it into Chat GPT, and I asked it to recommend scholarly journal articles that I could use to supplement, you know, the the books that I had recommended.

02:06:05.000 So for the 14 sessions of the pod, it gave me 14 different links.

02:06:12.000 Every single one of the links was fake.

02:06:15.000 Whoa.

02:06:16.000 Every single one of them.

02:06:17.000 There were no such links.

02:06:19.000 There were no such articles.

02:06:21.000 It just made it all up.

02:06:24.000 Is it possible that Chat GPT is like has a mandate to fuck with you?

02:06:30.000 You know what I mean?

02:06:31.000 It's possible.

02:06:32.000 Because imagine if you weren't doing your due diligence.

02:06:34.000 Right.

02:06:35.000 And you just incorporated those links and they're like, oh my God, Kariaku is a fraud. 0.90

02:06:39.000 These aren't even real articles.

02:06:40.000 This is bullshit.

02:06:42.000 Right?

02:06:42.000 That's crazy.

02:06:43.000 Yeah.

02:06:44.000 Do you I mean you must be paranoid?

02:06:46.000 I mean, you have to be, right?

02:06:47.000 I'm paranoid.

02:06:47.000 You have to be.

02:06:48.000 I mean, but you you must be because of what's happened to you.

02:06:52.000 When you see something like that, you must be like, what the fu it's almost like they're just always trying to get you.

02:06:58.000 Yeah.

02:06:59.000 Yeah.

02:07:00.000 I do feel that way somewhere sometimes.

02:07:02.000 I'm sure that you do too.

02:07:04.000 You know, the old saying, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you.

02:07:07.000 Yeah.

02:07:08.000 Uh there were times when I after I got out of prison, the the first two years after I got out of prison, that every once in a while, and I'll preface this by saying I was a surveillance detection instructor at the CIA.

02:07:20.000 Every once in a while I would see surveillance, and um, and I would write down the license number and just call my lawyer, and then he'd call me, you know, a day later and say, It's the FBI.

02:07:30.000 They're just curious as to what you're up to.

02:07:32.000 Oh god.

02:07:33.000 And I'd say, all they have to do is ask.

02:07:36.000 It's all they have to do.

02:07:38.000 They don't have to follow me to get pizza with a buddy of mine and rest in.

02:07:41.000 You know, you see them following you?

02:07:43.000 They're really not good at surveillance.

02:07:50.000 Which is horrible because that's our job.

02:07:52.000 Right.

02:07:53.000 God, John.

02:07:55.000 You've been through a quite an odyssey.

02:07:58.000 That's awful.

02:08:00.000 It really is awful.

02:08:01.000 I I'm serious when I say I I wouldn't wish it on anybody.

02:08:04.000 It's a horrible thing.

02:08:05.000 But it's it's also awful because you've done so much good for your country.

02:08:11.000 That's what's even that's what's crazy.

02:08:14.000 And that's I look, I'm you know, we I criticize intelligence agencies and everybody else for doing wrong things.

02:08:20.000 But I think they're important, very important.

02:08:22.000 I do too.

02:08:22.000 When people say we need to dismantle the CIA and dismantle, I'm like, what are you talking about?

02:08:27.000 You know, like Mike Baker, I've had long conversations with him about threats overseas.

02:08:31.000 Like if you talk to someone who's actually worked in the field, they will give you an understanding of all the bad things that are happening in the world that we have to keep tabs on.

02:08:40.000 Like, don't say we should not pay attention.

02:08:42.000 That is fucking crazy talk.

02:08:44.000 You just don't want to corrupt CIA.

02:08:46.000 That's right.

02:08:47.000 That's it.

02:08:48.000 That's the bottom line right there.

02:08:49.000 We don't want to corrupt CIA.

02:08:51.000 We don't want to politicize CIA.

02:08:53.000 Politicize, yes.

02:08:54.000 I'll give you another example.

02:08:55.000 Yesterday, just yesterday, the deputy director of the CIA Ellis named himself the acting general counsel.

02:09:01.000 And people were like, Oh my god, I woke up and I see these podcasts, oh my god, Ellis has taken over the CIA.

02:09:08.000 So I I do a little bit of research.

02:09:11.000 And by the end of it, I was like, yeah.

02:09:18.000 Right?

02:09:18.000 He he's had all the the relative jobs.

02:09:21.000 NSA, ODNI, CIA, House Intelligence Committee.

02:09:27.000 He's done all these jobs.

02:09:30.000 He wants the Office of the General Counsel to do what it's told to do to further the mission of the CIA, and they refuse to do it.

02:09:38.000 And so he took over.

02:09:41.000 You can't criticize that.

02:09:42.000 Yeah, that seems like a if he's a just man, that seems like a good response. 0.56

02:09:48.000 But I don't know.

02:09:49.000 I don't know enough about that world to comment on, honestly.

02:09:52.000 But getting back to your point, and Mike Baker's point, you know, we and I'm out of the CIA, so I I don't know as much as I used to know on a daily basis.

02:10:03.000 But but Americans get only just a little a little tidbit of what's happening in the world.

02:10:12.000 Like we don't read about these emerging threats, for example.

02:10:17.000 We'll never know about some kind of counterterrorism operation that succeeded, you know, and that saved Americans from a terrorist attack.

02:10:27.000 We'll just never know because that's the that's the nature of Intelligence.

02:10:30.000 Right.

02:10:31.000 You're not supposed to know.

02:10:32.000 Right.

02:10:32.000 You know, the likes of Timothy Weiner will write a book about failures, but the successes have to remain secret.

02:10:43.000 Wow.

02:10:44.000 Do like what is it like having been a public servant, having worked for the government and having done all these things that are so critical and important for national security.

02:10:57.000 And then to have that machine turn on you, do your time in prison and come out and now being someone who talks about it all.

02:11:06.000 Yeah.

02:11:06.000 It it was hard at first, Joe.

02:11:08.000 I won't lie to you.

02:11:09.000 I felt really alone in the world.

02:11:12.000 And then a couple of days after my arrest, I got an email from a retired deputy director of the CIA, a guy that I had worked for at the very start of my career.

02:11:24.000 And he said, I saved this as a kind of a souvenir.

02:11:28.000 He said, You've chosen a difficult path.

02:11:31.000 I only wish that I had had the guts to do it myself.

02:11:34.000 Whoa.

02:11:35.000 And that made it, that changed my entire outlook on what I was facing.

02:11:42.000 That I I actually wasn't alone.

02:11:44.000 And most of my CIA friends, like the people who were truly friends of mine at the CIA are still friends of mine today.

02:11:52.000 Oh, that's great.

02:11:53.000 They had to be discreet about it for a little while, but they never walked away from me.

02:11:57.000 Well, that's great.

02:11:59.000 Oh.

02:12:02.000 You're a strong man.

02:12:04.000 You know, I gone through all this.

02:12:07.000 Um come out on the other side as uh a person who comments on the state of the intelligence agencies.

02:12:14.000 Yeah.

02:12:15.000 I'll add to that the election of Donald Trump in in kind of an odd way freed me up to be more vocal because the Obama people and the Biden people were far, far more willing to say that is speech that we don't like.

02:12:44.000 That needs to be prosecuted.

02:12:47.000 And with Donald Trump, and I don't know if he even meant to do this or not.

02:12:54.000 It's like so much more is out there and in the public realm, the public domain.

02:13:02.000 Why do you think that is?

02:13:04.000 You know, I think I think at the end of the day, that's populism.

02:13:09.000 It's just a different way of looking at government.

02:13:13.000 It's funny because under populism, the feeling is very strong that they work for us, and they answer to us.

02:13:22.000 And with these mainstream administrations, whether it's Obama, Biden, George W. Bush, it's like, well, the wise men are running the government, so we need to sit by quietly and let them do their important work.

02:13:39.000 And that's how things like the Patriot Act get snuck in.

02:13:41.000 Exactly right.

02:13:42.000 That's a great point.

02:13:45.000 Yes.

02:13:46.000 And and the NDAA.

02:13:48.000 And the NDA.

02:13:49.000 We're not going to use that.

02:13:50.000 Right.

02:13:51.000 We don't use that on, don't worry.

02:13:54.000 You know, when I was when I was in the on the Senate uh foreign relations committee staff, the Obama administration passed the NDAA in 20, whatever it was.

02:14:07.000 15.

02:14:08.000 Where they legalized propagandization of the American people.

02:14:12.000 Right.

02:14:12.000 This came out of the most innocuous issue.

02:14:16.000 We had this propaganda station, radio and television called Radio TV Marty, and it was beamed at uh Cuba.

02:14:24.000 Right.

02:14:25.000 The only thing the Cubans really care about watching from us is baseball.

02:14:30.000 So we would broadcast a lot of baseball games.

02:14:32.000 But the way it was being broadcast from Florida, there was this little strip of land on the Gulf Coast in Southern Florida where they could pick it up, but only with like Dish Network, I think is what it was.

02:14:47.000 Well, that's illegal because it's a propaganda station, and Americans can't watch American propaganda.

02:14:52.000 And so rather than like not broadcast it anymore or move the satellite or whatever, they decided we'll change the law to make it easier and more and legal to propagandize the American people.

02:15:07.000 So now the government can produce any propaganda that it wants and foist it on the American people.

02:15:14.000 It's like thank you, Barack Obama.

02:15:16.000 Now I don't even know if the news that I'm reading is real or not.

02:15:21.000 Thank you.

02:15:22.000 That is so insane.

02:15:24.000 That is so insane that that's the origin of it.

02:15:28.000 Wow.

02:15:29.000 Yeah.

02:15:29.000 Lazy bastards.

02:15:31.000 Well, lazy and also just taking advantage of an opportunity.

02:15:35.000 Because this is an opportunity to push something through that could be beneficial if you want to push propaganda on the American people, and up until now it's been illegal.

02:15:44.000 That's right.

02:15:45.000 Has there ever been any talk of turning that back?

02:15:49.000 No.

02:15:49.000 A lot of people believe that after Ed Snowden's revelations, it would be turned back.

02:15:54.000 Even if it were just, you know, one part at a time.

02:15:58.000 And that's just never happened.

02:16:00.000 No.

02:16:01.000 Where's where's the outrage?

02:16:02.000 No, where is the outrage, and he's gotta hide in Russia.

02:16:05.000 Mm-hmm.

02:16:07.000 Yep.

02:16:08.000 Crazy.

02:16:13.000 Depressing.

02:16:14.000 Do you think it could possibly push further in that direction?

02:16:19.000 Oh, I think that that first of all, 100% yes.

02:16:24.000 I think that it's natural that it would push it would push further.

02:16:28.000 It's up to us to to push back.

02:16:31.000 And I don't think the American people have their act together enough.

02:16:36.000 Well, we're too divided.

02:16:37.000 Yeah.

02:16:38.000 That's part of what we're doing.

02:16:38.000 We really are.

02:16:39.000 But something like the NDA should be a nonpartisan issue.

02:16:42.000 That's right.

02:16:42.000 Everyone should be looking at that and go, this is crazy.

02:16:45.000 Something like using propaganda against American citizens.

02:16:49.000 Like, what's the pros and what's the cons?

02:16:52.000 I want two columns.

02:16:53.000 I want you to write down all the things that are going to be negatively affected by propaganda on American citizens, all the ways that could be used corruptly, and then all the positives we're going to get out of it.

02:17:04.000 Oh, we can lie to Cuba.

02:17:06.000 Fuck you.

02:17:07.000 That's not enough.

02:17:08.000 No, it's not enough.

02:17:09.000 I went to Cuba last year because they they translated my first two books into Spanish and put them in the National Library of Cuba and they had this ceremony during the international book something or other for a bunch of American authors.

02:17:24.000 So I went.

02:17:24.000 And before I went, my editor at Consortium News said, do me a favor, he said, ever since I was a little kid, I've been an avid radio listener.

02:17:32.000 He said, tune in aft after sunset when the signals are stronger, tune in to American radio stations and tell me if the Cubans are jamming them or if you can hear stations.

02:17:44.000 I said, that's a great idea.

02:17:46.000 So I had a radio there in my hotel room, and I got too many American stations.

02:17:55.000 Miami and Fort Myers and anything you want to hear in Cuba from the United States, you can hear.

02:18:02.000 They don't jam anything.

02:18:04.000 And it's baseball, baseball, baseball.

02:18:06.000 They want to hear every baseball game.

02:18:08.000 We don't need radio TV Marty.

02:18:10.000 You know, I get a kick out of uh the Washington Post, just clobbers Kerry Lake all the time. 1.00

02:18:16.000 Every time every time she testifies on Capitol Hill about the voice of America, they're like, no, we need voice of America.

02:18:24.000 We need to spend another fifty million dollars to why? 0.78

02:18:28.000 We don't need to propagandize them.

02:18:31.000 First of all, have you ever heard of this thing called the Internet?

02:18:34.000 Right?

02:18:34.000 Because that's where almost everybody gets their information.

02:18:37.000 You want to propagandize people, do it on the internet.

02:18:40.000 Not on some AM radio station that you're beaming off into space in the middle of the night.

02:18:45.000 They must be doing that anyway.

02:18:46.000 They must be easy to do that.

02:18:47.000 I should hope so.

02:18:49.000 I should hope so.

02:18:50.000 I mean, uh these bots that we're worried about from China, a bunch of them have to also be from America.

02:18:54.000 I would assume some agency.

02:18:56.000 Yeah.

02:18:58.000 Which is just like and then as AI gets more and more powerful, and it's the race like who's in charge of that. 0.88

02:19:04.000 Yeah.

02:19:04.000 Like, how does that go?

02:19:06.000 And what happens when everything gets automated?

02:19:09.000 And what happens when everyone gets on universal basic income and then they're relying entirely on the government.

02:19:15.000 Right.

02:19:15.000 Yeah.

02:19:16.000 Good point.

02:19:16.000 And this is maybe a decade away.

02:19:18.000 It's coming.

02:19:19.000 Yeah.

02:19:20.000 Um is there anything else you're concerned about before we wrap this up that you want to talk about?

02:19:25.000 I'm less concerned about the Russians. 0.60

02:19:26.000 Um I think the president has played this right.

02:19:29.000 He he tried to kind of force the two sides together.

02:19:34.000 He got pushback, he did what he could.

02:19:36.000 We just have to wait until they slug it out.

02:19:39.000 And then when it looks like one's going down, then we can step in and try to negotiate something.

02:19:44.000 But what are you gonna do?

02:19:45.000 Is that really the only solution at this point?

02:19:47.000 You know, I have a lot of friends who are um professors of Russian studies, Soviet studies, all this stuff.

02:19:55.000 And they all say the same thing that the Russians are winning.

02:19:58.000 The Ukrainians are losing. 0.87

02:19:59.000 So the policy decision is do we really want to jump in on the side of the Ukrainians?

02:20:05.000 Or do we want to let diplomacy let diplomats do what they're paid to do?

02:20:11.000 And I always say, sure.

02:20:13.000 We used to make fun of the Bush administration when I was at the agency because we had never seen an administration work so hard to not speak to our enemies.

02:20:22.000 We weren't allowed to talk to the Russians or the Chinese or the North Koreans or the Iraqis or the Iranians or the Cubans, the Venezuelans, like.

02:20:32.000 Like, my God, who do we talk to?

02:20:34.000 We're not gonna accomplish anything diplomatically if we just talk to the British and the French and the Germans. 0.93

02:20:40.000 So keeping the lines of communication open, I think are very important to settling this.

02:20:45.000 I think eventually what everybody predicted at the very beginning of the hostilities is going to be the final result, and that is that the Ukrainians are gonna lose territory.

02:20:55.000 Um and the Russians are gonna have to agree to probably fast track membership into the European Union for Ukraine and not NATO membership, but major non NATO ally status, the same status that we have for Australia and Japan and Bahrain and Saudi Arabia and the Emirates and Ukraine.

02:21:15.000 I think that's how it's gonna end up.

02:21:18.000 I just can't imagine why they would want to keep it going.

02:21:23.000 I mean, at this point they're Well what I'm told is that Putin is under great pressure from his military establishment.

02:21:31.000 That that the Russian people don't necessarily want this to continue as much as the Russian military leadership does.

02:21:37.000 That's what these professors are telling me.

02:21:39.000 And why do they want to continue it?

02:21:41.000 Because they want to destroy Ukraine. 0.99

02:21:43.000 They want to take Kiev.

02:21:45.000 They they want it to to collapse.

02:21:49.000 You know, there are a lot of Russians who don't believe that Ukraine is a legitimate country.

02:21:54.000 You know, even Crimea, Crimea was Russian until 1953.

02:21:58.000 Khrushchev gave it to the Ukrainians as a gift.

02:22:00.000 And then the Russians took it back in 14. 0.87

02:22:05.000 And so they feel the same way about Kiev.

02:22:07.000 Mm-hmm.

02:22:10.000 It's just so horrible to see like sixty-year-old men getting conscripted.

02:22:14.000 Oh, it's off right off the street.

02:22:15.000 And yeah, kidnapped.

02:22:17.000 Just sent right to the front of the line, right to the wood chipper.

02:22:20.000 Yeah.

02:22:21.000 It's just terrible.

02:22:22.000 And we don't even know the real numbers of casualties.

02:22:24.000 No, we don't.

02:22:25.000 It's gotta be huge.

02:22:27.000 For the Ukrainians at least.

02:22:30.000 So you're not concerned about that.

02:22:33.000 Do you think that's gonna work itself out as tragic as it is?

02:22:36.000 I th I think it's gonna burn itself out eventually.

02:22:38.000 I'm I'm very worried that the Israelis are gonna attack Iran again. 0.99

02:22:43.000 I'm i I'm worried that the Israelis aren't gonna respect the the deal that appears to be in process in Gaza.

02:22:50.000 Or the West Bank.

02:22:51.000 I mean, we're we're not talking about the West Bank.

02:22:53.000 Right.

02:22:53.000 Where where just two weeks ago a Christian village ceased to exist because settlers from New Jersey took all their houses.

02:23:02.000 You know, w what happens next in the West Bank from New Jersey?

02:23:06.000 Yeah, there are a lot of uh synagogues in New York, New Jersey, Toronto that have these things called called real estate seminars where you can put your name on a list and then they call you and say, Hey, uh house just opened up over here in this Arab village that's not Arab anymore. 0.99

02:23:26.000 Come and take your house. 1.00

02:23:28.000 And the two weeks ago, the village that the Israelis cleared out was one of the last remaining Christian villages.

02:23:37.000 Drives me crazy.

02:23:40.000 So what do you think their overall strategy is?

02:23:43.000 They they eventually want to just take over all Palestine. 0.60

02:23:46.000 I think we should we should believe the Israelis when they tell us that that they believe in Greater Israel, which includes the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the southern quarter of Lebanon, a strip in In South uh Western Syria, and I mean the map that Netanyahu had at the UN the other day included the Sinai Peninsula, for heaven's sake.

02:24:09.000 What's that all about?

02:24:11.000 They took the Sinai in the 67 war and gave it back after the Camp David Accords.

02:24:19.000 So this, yeah, we've we've I'm worried about Israel.

02:24:26.000 Yeah.

02:24:26.000 What are you worried about Israel's influence on American politics?

02:24:30.000 Because that's one of the things that's coming to light over the last couple of years since the invasion, where people are paying more and more attention to Israel.

02:24:38.000 And then also seeing what happens when you criticize Israel.

02:24:44.000 They are very quick to primary elected officials who criticize Israel, and usually they'll win those primaries.

02:24:51.000 APAC is very well funded.

02:24:53.000 It is very, very well organized.

02:24:55.000 It's it's the gold standard of of lobbying organizations.

02:25:00.000 I've never understood why APAC doesn't have to register as a foreign agent with uh the Justice Department when everybody else does.

02:25:09.000 Why why is APAC special that it doesn't have to register?

02:25:14.000 You know, back in 2008, I guess it was, I won a very small contract to write um it was like six op-eds for the Abu Dhabi Chamber of Commerce.

02:25:26.000 Uh and it was because I was gonna write op-eds that supported American business in Abu Dhabi, right?

02:25:37.000 So I had to go on Farah.gov, F-A-R-A.gov, it's the foreign um agents registration act, and there's a form there, and I said, Yeah, I took, you know, I I won this contract, it was like 30 grand to write these six op-eds, and the source of the income is the Abu Dhabi Chamber of Commerce, and here's my name and my address and my phone number.

02:26:01.000 Enter.

02:26:01.000 Done.

02:26:02.000 I registered.

02:26:04.000 So if you're doing something, anything, on behalf of a foreign government, you have to register.

02:26:11.000 Except if you're APAC.

02:26:14.000 And I just don't understand that.

02:26:20.000 That seems so insane.

02:26:22.000 And whenever you see like just dozens of senators and congresspeople going over to Israel, you're like, Oh, oh man.

02:26:30.000 My very first week in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff, these lobbyists came in, and we had it was a parade of lobbyists all the time, every day.

02:26:38.000 They're coming in asking for something.

02:26:40.000 So um these two guys came in, could not have been any friendlier.

02:26:45.000 Hi, welcome to the Capitol Hill.

02:26:49.000 I said, Oh, thanks.

02:26:50.000 It's not my first go-round.

02:26:51.000 I've I've worked on Capitol Hill before.

02:26:54.000 Well, we wanted to welcome you with uh an all expenses paid trip to the Holy Land.

02:27:01.000 I said, uh thanks.

02:27:03.000 No.

02:27:04.000 I can pay for my own vacations, but I appreciate it.

02:27:07.000 Oh nonsense.

02:27:08.000 We'll take you to all the Christian holy sites.

02:27:11.000 Thank you.

02:27:12.000 I've been, I don't want to go.

02:27:15.000 And some of my colleagues went for their all expenses paid trip to the holy land.

02:27:21.000 Yeah.

02:27:21.000 Courtesy of APAC.

02:27:23.000 I was like, yeah, no, thank you.

02:27:26.000 Not interested.

02:27:27.000 Yeah, and that's just the beginning of it.

02:27:29.000 That's nothing compared to helping out your campaigns.

02:27:33.000 Well, I'll tell you, I I tell this story a lot, but it I think it's I think it's appropriate here.

02:27:38.000 I had been at the agency for two and a half months, maybe two about two and a half months.

02:27:46.000 And I was uh told to give my very first liaison briefing.

02:27:51.000 So this is gonna be uh the Israeli Mossad and Shin Bet.

02:27:55.000 And uh I was gonna be one of about eight analysts, and I was the most junior, so I would go last.

02:28:03.000 Well, we don't allow the Israelis into CIA headquarters. 1.00

02:28:06.000 We used to, but every time they would come, they'd say, Hey, we brought gifts.

02:28:10.000 Here's a gift for you, and it's all packed full of listening devices and batteries.

02:28:14.000 Every one of them?

02:28:15.000 Every one of them, and we'd say, You guys, you can't come back here every single time and try to bug our conference rooms.

02:28:21.000 What'd they say to that?

02:28:22.000 Oh, ho, sorry. 1.00

02:28:24.000 Well, we're not sure how that happened.

02:28:26.000 So we're like, yeah, you can't come in here anymore.

02:28:28.000 So we rent an office where we meet the Israelis off campus.

02:28:34.000 Wow.

02:28:34.000 Yeah, because you just can't trust them.

02:28:36.000 So that is so crazy.

02:28:38.000 We go to this briefing, and it's just two people.

02:28:41.000 It's uh a woman who was the Mossad officer and uh an older guy who was the Shinbet officer.

02:28:48.000 So because we were all overt, we were giving our true names.

02:28:52.000 And first the senior political officer gives her briefing, and then the econ guy and the military guy and the oil guy, and it finally comes around to me.

02:29:02.000 So I said, My name is John Kiriaku, and I'm going to brief you on Saddam Hussein's current psychology.

02:29:10.000 And the Shinbet guy goes like this.

02:29:12.000 He goes, Spell your name.

02:29:15.000 So I spell it.

02:29:17.000 And he writes it down.

02:29:18.000 And he's looking at me over his glasses and he goes, You are Jewish?

02:29:24.000 And I said, I am not recruitable.

02:29:26.000 Don't even think about trying to recruit me.

02:29:30.000 Afterwards, I was furious.

02:29:33.000 I went back to the office.

02:29:35.000 My boss said, How did it go?

02:29:36.000 I said, that son of a gun Shinbet guy tried to recruit me. 0.97

02:29:40.000 Everybody started laughing.

02:29:42.000 I said, Why is that so funny?

02:29:44.000 And he said, they've done that to every single one of us.

02:29:48.000 It's like they can't help themselves.

02:29:52.000 It's crazy how effective it is, though.

02:29:54.000 Oh yeah.

02:29:55.000 Look at Jonathan Pollard.

02:29:56.000 Now he's running for the Knesset.

02:29:59.000 Bastard.

02:30:00.000 It's just crazy how much influence one country has.

02:30:03.000 Yeah, it really is.

02:30:05.000 On a much bigger country.

02:30:06.000 Much bigger.

02:30:07.000 And they have such a tiny population.

02:30:11.000 I know.

02:30:11.000 What is it like nine million people?

02:30:13.000 Yeah.

02:30:15.000 Pretty gangster.

02:30:17.000 It's pretty gangster.

02:30:18.000 Kudos.

02:30:19.000 Kudos to them.

02:30:20.000 It's like Chicago taking over the world.

02:30:22.000 That's right.

02:30:23.000 Right?

02:30:23.000 And saying we're going to do things our way.

02:30:25.000 Not even Chicago.

02:30:26.000 Chicago might have more people.

02:30:29.000 Fuck.

02:30:31.000 Wow.

02:30:32.000 Well, listen, John, I really appreciate your time.

02:30:34.000 And uh thank you.

02:30:35.000 And thank you for your story.

02:30:38.000 Thank you so much for having me.

02:30:39.000 This was a real treat too.

02:30:41.000 It's a horrible thing that they did to you, but uh it's I'm so glad you're out so we can get your insight.

02:30:47.000 Thank you very much.

02:30:48.000 Appreciate you very much.

02:30:49.000 Pleasure.

The Joe Rogan Experience - October 10, 2025

Joe Rogan Experience #2392 - John Kiriakou

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