00:00:33.000At the time, uh the American government spent more money on security in Athens than they spent anywhere else in the world, including Beirut.
00:01:13.000Because 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.
00:01:38.000And 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.
00:01:50.000And you were completely honest about it.
00:01:53.000Um it was essentially about the U.S. torture program.
00:02:56.000But then there was Abu Zubeda, and then there was this unknown person that we later learned was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
00:03:03.000So 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.
00:03:15.000So it just so happened that in February of 2002, we got a lead on Abu Zubeda, and um, and we captured him.
00:03:24.000It took us six weeks to track him down, and we were close a couple of times.
00:03:28.000Close where we would bust down the door, and there's like an uneaten, like half-eaten sandwich on the counter, a cigarette still burning.
00:03:36.000Sometimes we were a day or two behind him, but he knew we were looking, and he knew we were close.
00:03:41.000So we finally got him, and then the question is, what do you want to do with him?
00:03:47.000And 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.
00:03:53.000So 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.
00:04:08.000But um that is that all just need to know?
00:04:55.000And 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.
00:05:01.000Just 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.
00:05:07.000And 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.
00:05:23.000I meant to ask you, do you want to be certified in the use of enhanced interrogation techniques?
00:05:28.000And I had never heard that term before.
00:05:59.000I 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.
00:06:36.000Somebody's gonna be a cowboy, they're gonna go overboard and they're gonna kill a prisoner.
00:06:41.000And 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.
00:06:49.000I said, No, I don't want to go to prison.
00:06:51.000As it turned out, I was the only person who went to prison, but I said, No, I don't want to go to prison.
00:06:56.000I went back downstairs, I said, Listen, I have a moral and ethical problem with this.
00:07:01.000I think it's illegal, and I don't want any part of it.
00:07:04.000The 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.
00:07:12.000And the reason I got passed over, they said, was because I turned down the training.
00:07:17.000The head of the counterterrorism center said in my promotion panel that I had displayed a shocking lack of commitment to counterterrorism.
00:07:25.000And 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.
00:07:34.000So I I realized then I was up against something that was gonna be tough.
00:07:38.000And then there was a psychiatrist at the agency whom I had known for years.
00:07:43.000We 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.
00:07:52.000And he said to me one day, buddy, you know they call you the human rights guy behind your back.
00:08:39.000I'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.
00:10:39.000Or the the first one was called the belly slap.
00:10:43.000Uh 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.
00:10:53.000But 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.
00:11:04.000Like for example, there was the cold cell.
00:11:06.000So 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.
00:11:16.000And 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.
00:11:26.000Oh but we killed people with that technique.
00:11:29.000The Justice Department never said we could kill people.
00:11:32.000And when we would kill people done with that.
00:11:35.000At least two with that technique that hypothermia committed to from hypothermia.
00:11:40.000And there wasn't a protocol in place to stop them from dying?
00:11:44.000There was later, but in those early days, no.
00:11:47.000Later, we always had a doctor on scene.
00:11:49.000Like 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.
00:11:58.000It's like, you know, didn't the Germans do that?
00:12:04.000Is 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?
00:12:17.000Was did they ever implement something where they would give someone something?
00:12:24.000Not 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.
00:12:39.000But 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.
00:13:00.000And so only about 20% of the MK Ultra documents still exist.
00:13:05.000So we don't really know exactly exactly what it was that was learned in that program, like what worked and what didn't work.
00:13:14.000We hear these stories about, you know, dosing the the fog laden um air of San Francisco just to see if everybody gets sick.
00:13:23.000We've all read the stories about this bakery in France where apparently we dosed the bread and everybody in the village went nuts.
00:13:30.000Uh but we don't really have fulsome documentation that we could have used operationally while interrogating prisoners.
00:13:39.000Aaron Powell So just to avoid prosecution, they figured out a way.
00:13:59.000You 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.
00:15:19.000We only know a small fraction of what was done.
00:15:23.000So 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.
00:15:40.000Yeah, I I think that is that's the whole story, right there in a nutshell.
00:15:44.000When 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.
00:15:51.000There was one in particular, he was the National Intelligence Officer for warning.
00:15:55.000So 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.
00:16:01.000And then somebody writes a paper about it.
00:16:03.000He had been there for forty two years.
00:16:05.000He had to get a waiver from the director because he had aged out.
00:16:10.000Well, these guys make no secret of their belief that they can outweigh pretty much any president.
00:16:45.000And it's unelected and it's generally unaccountable to anybody.
00:16:50.000And they just wait for the president to leave if they don't want to do what he wants.
00:16:56.000So you find out about this torture program, you won't participate, so that puts you on the outs.
00:17:04.000And when do you know that this is going to be like a significant problem in your career?
00:17:10.000You know, honestly, I didn't know until well after I left the agency.
00:17:15.000You 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.
00:17:28.000And in that position, you have access to literally everything that the CIA is doing around the world.
00:17:35.000And 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.
00:17:44.000Nobody said we're gonna torture people.
00:17:50.000Or 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.
00:18:00.000That means she sends a cable to headquarters saying, I'm coming home, I'm not doing this anymore.
00:18:05.000That is a career-ending decision to curtail an assignment.
00:18:09.000And I remember thinking, so I'm not the only one who thinks this is this is illegal.
00:18:16.000Certainly somebody's gonna come out and say something.
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00:19:29.000Like what are the techniques that they were using that were like causing her to faint?
00:19:34.000The big ones were waterboarding, the cold cell, and sleep deprivation.
00:19:39.000Sleep deprivation doesn't sound like any big deal.
00:19:41.000And 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.
00:19:50.000He said, There is no such thing as sleep deprivation.
00:19:54.000He said, I have a stand up desk in my office.
00:19:58.000I don't even have a chair in my office.
00:19:59.000And sometimes I'll work 24 hours and then into the next day, 36 hours.
00:20:05.000But that's not what we're talking about here.
00:20:07.000We know from the American Psychological Association that people begin to lose their minds at day seven with no sleep.
00:20:15.000And they begin to die, their organs begin to shut down at day nine.
00:20:20.000But the CIA was authorized to keep people awake for twelve days.
00:20:24.000And that was another thing that caused prisoners to just die.
00:20:28.000They would have heart failure, you know?
00:20:58.000And 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.
00:21:10.000There 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.
00:21:16.000And 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.
00:22:29.000But 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.
00:22:39.000And Abu Zubeda just gave him the silent treatment for weeks.
00:24:07.000The other thing that he told us, and he he laughed actually, because Ali didn't know what the heck he was talking about.
00:24:15.000He was talking about Muhtar, a guy using the Nom de Gera Mukhtar.
00:24:20.000We knew from our own files that there was this guy out there who called himself Muchtar, who was a very bad guy.
00:24:29.000In 1996, he had initiated something called the Bojinka operation.
00:24:35.000It 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.
00:24:49.000It just so happened that one day Muchtar, working on his plan, his diabolical terrorism plan, he went out to have lunch.
00:24:58.000And 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.
00:25:52.000And Abu Zubeda said, his name is Khalid Sheikh Muhammad.
00:25:57.000That's the first time we ever heard that name.
00:25:59.000We didn't have any documents in any files that were about any guy named Khalid Sheikh Muhammad.
00:26:04.000But that was the very first time we were able to piece it all together.
00:26:08.000And it was thanks to Abu Zubedah, in turn, thanks to Ali Sufan's treating Abu Zubeda with respect.
00:26:15.000But 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.
00:26:24.000He asked the president to turn over primacy to the CIA.
00:27:30.000And 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.
00:27:46.000And then the CIA comes back in again and starts torturing him again.
00:28:23.000The 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.
00:28:33.000And 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.
00:28:45.000And so we were chomping at the bit at the agency to try this thing out without using the word torture.
00:28:51.000We paid those guys a hundred and eight million dollars to say, oh, we think you should torture people.
00:28:58.000Here's here are the torture techniques.
00:29:00.000Just let us know when you want us to start.
00:29:31.000My 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.
00:29:42.000And um, and still I waited for somebody to say something, and nobody did.
00:29:46.000Now, I wish that I could tell you that I stood up and I took a stand and that wasn't it at all.
00:30:38.000In the meantime, President Bush, I remember it being a Monday.
00:30:44.000President Bush gives a press conference, and the International Committee of the Red Cross had said in a paper that the CIA was torturing prisoners.
00:30:54.000Uh human rights watch said CI is torturing prisoners, and Amnesty International said CIs torturing prisoners.
00:31:00.000So a reporter says, look, all these international human rights organizations are saying that the CIA is torturing its prisoners.
00:31:44.000And 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.
00:31:53.000And a torture shout uh torture, a reporter shouts another question about torture.
00:31:58.000And this time he stops and he turns and he says, Well, if there is torture, it's because of a rogue CIA officer.
00:32:07.000And I said to my wife, Brian Ross's sources at the White House, and they're gonna pin this on me.
00:32:14.000So I called Brian Ross and I said, I'll give you your interview.
00:32:46.000And 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.
00:33:00.000I said that the CIA was torturing its prisoners.
00:33:03.000I 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.
00:33:15.000And 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.
00:33:27.000The FBI then investigates me from December of 07 to December of 08.
00:33:34.000And then they send my attorney a letter called the declination letter, declining to prosecute.
00:33:39.000They 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.
00:33:50.000But most importantly, torture is a crime, and it is illegal to classify a crime for the purpose of keeping it from the American people.
00:34:06.000Three, four weeks later, Barack Obama becomes president.
00:34:12.000And he names John Brennan at first, CIA director, but the liberals went crazy because Brennan was one of the fathers of the torture program.
00:35:29.000I believe it was it's hard to swallow.
00:35:32.000There's a book by Harvey Silverglate, who's a professor of law at Harvard University.
00:35:37.000The book is called Three Felonies a Day.
00:35:39.000And 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.
00:35:58.000So if they want to Get you, they're gonna get you.
00:36:02.000And there's nothing you can do to protect yourself.
00:38:10.000It 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.
00:38:26.000So that's the National Security Council's director for intelligence programs, who happened to be this guy named George Tennant.
00:38:38.000Two alpha dogs, cigar smoking, hard drinking.
00:38:42.000There used to be a kiosk right at the corner of 17th and Pennsylvania Avenue, uh adjacent to the White House that sold cigars.
00:38:49.000Tenant had had a heart attack and he wasn't supposed to smoke, and his wife would yell at him.
00:38:53.000So 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.
00:39:59.000By the way, during which he approves the visas for the 9-11 hijackers.
00:40:05.000And uh then he comes back as the deputy executive director of the whole CIA, right?
00:40:14.000So it's director, deputy director, executive director, and then the deputy directors for operations intelligence science technology administration.
00:40:25.000So he's now one of the five most senior people in the entire CIA.
00:40:30.000He does that for a couple of years and then becomes the executive director.
00:40:33.000By 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.
00:40:44.000I'm meeting with Brennan every single day.
00:40:47.000So we're we're doing the Iraq war, we're doing terrorism and Al Qaeda and all this stuff.
00:40:54.000He didn't like me and I didn't like him.
00:40:56.000And then when I became the quote, unquote human rights guy, that just kind of sealed it for me.
00:41:03.000But I didn't care because I didn't respect him anyhow.
00:41:07.000I will say that that Jim Pavitt, the deputy deputy director for operations, legendary officer, and a really great guy.
00:43:04.000Kerry said, Oh, I want you to do this and do that, and we're going to investigate this and investigate that.
00:43:09.000And then he would kill all the investigations because he wanted to be Secretary of State.
00:43:13.000And he didn't want to piss anybody at the White House off.
00:43:16.000So 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.
00:43:24.000I 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.
00:43:36.000Can't talk about any of that stuff, because you want to be the Secretary of State.
00:45:55.000So they come up, I recount the whole the whole lunch and they said, all right, here's what we want you to do.
00:46:01.000We 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.
00:46:11.000And I said, because I'm a patriot I said, you want me to wear a wire?
00:46:17.000And they said no, we're going to be at the next table.
00:47:40.000They said come down to the Washington field office Thursday morning at 10.
00:47:43.000I said done I go down there the next Thursday and they're waiting for me at the entrance which I thought was odd.
00:47:52.000And 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.
00:48:19.000I loved it hey what about this that you said in your book and I was like yeah okay yeah it was a cool story.
00:48:34.000Yeah of course I got it cleared 22 months it took me to get it cleared.
00:48:38.000I'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.
00:49:00.000And then I said wait a minute are you investigating me?
00:49:06.000And 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.
00:49:16.000That was the only reason that they didn't arrest me.
00:49:18.000And 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.
00:49:34.000So you're in the DC jail Thursday night, Friday night, Saturday night, Sunday night, getting the shit beaten out of you.
00:51:18.000And 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.
00:53:52.000He came up to Washington, we got him a security clearance, and uh, which was another thing.
00:53:58.000We 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.
00:54:08.000And I said, Who at the White House said we have enough security clearances?
00:54:12.000Well, they had to tell us that it was John Brennan.
00:54:19.000We're like, it's not up to John Brennan to decide if I have enough attorneys.
00:54:24.000Yeah, they have an unlimited number of attorneys, an unlimited budget.
00:54:28.000As it turned out, they spent six million dollars to put me in prison.
00:54:33.000Was society really better off spending six million dollars to put me in a low security prison for for twenty three months?
00:54:42.000So in the end they said, best and final offer, thirty months, you do 23.
00:54:53.000Well, 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.
00:55:04.000Uh the only other person that was charged with it was a woman named Sharon Scranage.
00:55:09.000She was a CIA secretary in Ghana in the 80s, and she was having an affair with a member of Ghana's intelligence service.
00:55:18.000And 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.
00:55:27.000And so the Ghanaians executed these guys.
00:56:40.000I believed in my heart I hadn't done anything right.
00:56:43.000This was political, it was a vendetta by John Brennan.
00:56:47.000And 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.
00:57:02.000And it's because it that came from Brennan.
00:58:06.000And 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.
00:59:13.000And this was in the Eastern District of Virginia, the espionage court.
00:59:18.000And 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.
00:59:32.000But 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.
00:59:42.000He said, Buddy, you don't have a prayer.
01:00:31.000And your friends and family just drive away.
01:00:33.000And 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.
01:00:41.000I said, Okay, so I'll go across the street.
01:00:43.000And uh I said, I'm I'm John Kiriaku, I'm here to turn myself in.
01:00:47.000And uh, and the guy takes me by the arm.
01:00:50.000We go outside, and we start walking around to the back of the prison.
01:00:54.000And I said, No, no, I'm supposed to be at the at the minimum security camp across the street.
01:01:00.000And the guy laughs at me and he goes, not according to my paperwork, you're not.
01:01:05.000And I was like, oh my God, take it easy.
01:01:08.000We later learned, Brennan was so angry at the shortness of my sentence that he told them, make it as difficult as possible.
01:01:51.000And then I started that whole odyssey.
01:01:54.000And so what kind of prison were you in?
01:01:57.000I 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.
01:02:10.000It 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.
01:03:31.000I was I was so angry that that it it wasn't even healthy for the people around me.
01:03:39.000But 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.
01:03:51.000So I thought, okay, well, I'm I'm highly educated.
01:03:55.000I have a bachelor's degree in Middle Eastern Studies, I have a master's degree in legislative uh policy analysis.
01:04:01.000I finished my PhD case uh uh classwork in uh in international affairs.
01:04:08.000I got rejected by McDonald's, by Safeway, by Target, by Uber.
01:05:31.000And 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.
01:05:42.000And 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.
01:05:48.000And he said, Senator McCain says, Welcome home, and he wants to know what he can do to be helpful.
01:06:36.000It was a great idea to write an amendment.
01:06:40.000My 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.
01:07:03.000So of course, I'm the only person in the world that that refers to.
01:07:07.000So he he said, Nobody reads these 1,500 page bills.
01:07:11.000We're gonna slip it in there, and he said, I'm gonna be on the conference committee, we'll get it taken care of.
01:08:03.000And I said, I can't do this, it's untenable.
01:08:06.000And so I just decided, look, no company is gonna hire me, right?
01:08:12.000I can't go back into government again.
01:08:14.000And so I'm gonna have to work for myself.
01:08:17.000So I I had already written my first book, made number number five on the New York Times bestsellers list.
01:08:24.000My second book I wrote longhand from prison.
01:08:27.000I ended up winning two literary awards for that book.
01:08:29.000I 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.
01:08:40.000I thought I'm gonna keep writing books.
01:08:42.000I started writing a column that ended up being syndicated through the consortium for independent journalism.
01:08:49.000So it's like 200 small town papers around the country.
01:08:54.000And um, you know, a little bit here, a little bit there, consulting.
01:08:58.000And then the Greek government, I'm I happen to be Greek American, my grandparents all came from the island of Rhodes.
01:09:06.000As soon as I was arrested, like within a day, the Greek ambassador called me and he said, What can we do to be helpful?
01:09:13.000And I said, You can give me citizenship.
01:09:16.000And man, like that, I got Greek citizenship.
01:09:20.000And so as soon as I got out of prison, the Greek government hired me to help them write a new whistleblower protection law.
01:11:09.000You have to, you have to engage with the individual.
01:11:13.000Like I I never thought that I would be agreeing with Marjorie Taylor Green on some of these civil liberties issues, right?
01:11:19.000Or Thomas Massey, or Bernie Sanders for that matter.
01:11:24.000But 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.
01:11:40.000A 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.
01:11:52.000He was the DDO when Brennan was the director of the CIA.
01:11:55.000He tweeted at me, and he said, Don't drop the soap with a laughing emoji.
01:12:02.000I gave myself a couple hours to cool off.
01:12:05.000And then I texted back and I said, Jose, I'm on the right side of history, and you are not.
01:12:36.000One 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.
01:12:47.000Once you get there, once you get comfortable, just send me a letter and I'll send it around to these people.
01:14:08.000And then the guy across the hall from me was the boss of the banana family.
01:14:12.000And 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.
01:14:21.000He asked me, let me ask you something, he says.
01:14:25.000Why you sit with those Nazi retards in the cafeteria?
01:14:44.000They were absolutely wonderful, honorable, honest, fun, the smallest so-called gang in the prison, but the one that commanded the most respect.
01:14:58.000And once word was out that I was with the Italians, it was hands off.
01:15:03.000And it was thanks to one guy, shout out to Mark Lanzolotti.
01:15:07.000Mark was from Philly, and he saw in the New York Times I was going to be assigned to that prison on a Sunday.
01:15:13.000I 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.
01:17:33.000We 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.
01:17:45.000And I said, Ah, Shaf Bibtik, it's very nice to meet you.
01:17:48.000And he says, Ah, Tatkalam Arabi, why Arab Anam in Iraq?
01:17:52.000I said, Yeah, great, you're from Iraq.
01:17:54.000I was in Iraq, it's very nice to meet you.
01:17:57.000Turns out he was there on a terrorism charge.
01:17:59.000He 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.
01:18:12.000So I get called into the lieutenant's office the next day.
01:18:16.000And usually if you're being called into the lieutenant's office, you're going straight to solitary.
01:18:20.000So I hear my name, Kiriaku, Lieutenant's office, immediately, always with the immediately.
01:18:27.000And they know you can't do it immediately because all the doors are locked.
01:18:30.000So I wait for a 10 minute move period, the the bells ring, and I go to the lieutenant's office.
01:20:30.000The 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.
01:20:50.000Well, that's in an off-limits part of the facility.
01:20:53.000So the warden calls me in, he's like, I'm gonna send you to solitary right now.
01:20:59.000And I thought, You know, is now the time to be to be humble before the warden, or should I stake my claim?
01:21:07.000And I said, Warden, with all due respect.
01:21:12.000I've gone nose to nose with Al Qaeda, with Hezbollah, with the Iranians, and you want me to be afraid of you?
01:23:04.000They're gonna try to set you up and add years on.
01:23:08.000So 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.
01:23:15.000And I put my hands up so as to not touch him.
01:23:19.000And 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.
01:23:33.000And he said, Oh, come on, man, come on.
01:24:34.000When 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.
01:24:46.000And so they have a vested interest in repeating this lie over and over and over again that it was the right thing to do.
01:24:54.000But what I don't understand is wouldn't they want to be effective?
01:24:59.000You would think that that's if they were clear-headed.
01:25:02.000Yes, 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.
01:26:34.000So I have a letter that uh that Ronald Reagan's former deputy attorney general generously wrote asking the president to pardon me.
01:26:44.000Tucker 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.
01:26:59.000And then I sent it to uh to Ed Martin, the U.S. Parton attorney.
01:27:04.000And then other people have said, oh, I would have signed that.
01:27:15.000Um 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.
01:27:55.000But um I I genuinely don't know what else to do.
01:28:01.000Now you you're doing all these conversations.
01:28:04.000You 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.
01:28:10.000Do 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?
01:28:25.000I'm told that all of my detractors are either dead or retired.
01:28:30.000A 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.
01:28:46.000And she said everybody started to boo.
01:29:56.000Because there's a lot of cases where people are setting people up.
01:30:00.000And 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.
01:30:37.000Like when when I was having a conversation about this, we brought up the uh the governor that they were planning on kidnapping Governor Whitmer.
01:30:52.000Which 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.
01:32:08.000He 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.
01:32:19.000So they can build their careers by making these arrests.
01:32:22.000Not 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.
01:32:34.000Yeah, and as it turns out, the only one who was actually plotting to overthrow the government was John Brennan.
01:32:40.000How was he plotting to overthrow the government?
01:32:42.000In twenty fifteen and twenty sixteen with Russia Gate.
01:33:22.000Then it's up to the analyst to decide this is great, this is crap, this is not true, this is a partially true, whatever.
01:33:31.000So 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.
01:33:44.000He hired prostitutes to pee on Barack Obama's bed.
01:34:34.000Again, 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.
01:36:14.000Um 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.
01:36:28.000Um how is that not being investigated as a serious crime?
01:36:36.000And like that that is a serious it's a violation of what you're supposed to be doing in the first place.
01:36:44.000If the FBI was on that loan uh on that lawn, I would hope what they would be doing is informing people.
01:36:51.000Entering into this building is a felony.
01:36:54.000Breaking these windows, getting into this building is you do not want to do this.
01:37:00.000If you want to peacefully protest, do that.
01:37:02.000But I'm telling you, this will fuck with you for the rest of your life and most likely ruin it.
01:37:08.000I think you're a hundred percent right.
01:37:10.000That's what I would hope from law enforcement.
01:37:12.000I wouldn't hope that they would be trying to set people up.
01:38:43.000And I think you work for that system, and just like all these Congress people that wind up insider trading, everybody else is doing it.
01:38:51.000It's the culture, you get wrapped up in it just like bad cops.
01:38:55.000You know, you get assigned to a precinct that's filled with corrupt cops, and you have to Do things to stay with them.
01:39:01.000They'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.
01:39:45.000So 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.
01:39:51.000Aaron Powell And there's also the narrative that's very difficult to shake.
01:39:55.000So 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.
01:40:05.000Or 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.
01:40:13.000And then you watch the footage that they wouldn't release during the trials, and you see them getting a guided tour.
01:40:19.000The guided tour through through like they're the security guards are walking them into the Senate.
01:40:26.000Like what is and why is no one outraged?
01:40:29.000And why is it only one side that's outraged?
01:40:31.000God, 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?
01:40:44.000This is you're you're using this to go after Donald Trump.
01:41:06.000And 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.
01:42:15.000And this is what you were talking about, too, that presidents come and go.
01:42:18.000But those people, that's the real power.
01:42:20.000You 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.
01:42:30.000But you you're really foolish if you don't believe in conspiracies.
01:44:03.000And 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.
01:44:14.000But anyway, his first assignment was in the counterintelligence center, which at the time was being run by James Angleton.
01:44:22.000And 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.
01:44:34.000And she said, Whatever you do, don't look in those folders.
01:44:41.000Well, 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.
01:44:52.000And the CIA is forbidden by law from spying on Americans.
01:45:03.000The 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.
01:45:17.000You know, it was hope and change, right?
01:45:51.000Part of his campaign was protection of whistleblowers.
01:45:55.000It was in the Hope and Change website.
01:45:57.000Yeah, well, look at the Dashty Laley massacre that I mentioned earlier.
01:46:00.000It was part of his campaign to open an investigation of Dash Dilely.
01:46:05.000What 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?
01:46:19.000And the Northern Alliance called us and said, What do what do we do with all these guys?
01:46:26.000So 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.
01:46:34.000And if we have to, we can send some to Pakistan.
01:46:38.000But there were no air holes in the containers, there was no food, there was no water, and of the 2,000, 14 survived.
01:46:51.000And one of the 14 said that when they opened the trucks in the desert, the bodies fell out like sardines from a can.
01:46:59.000So Barack Obama said in 2008, if he's elected president, he's gonna investigate this massacre and get to the bottom of it.
01:47:09.000So I said to John Kerry, I said, Listen, this is part of the Obama campaign.
01:47:13.000Let me go to Afghanistan and investigate this thing.
01:47:16.000And 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.
01:47:30.000So 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.
01:47:39.000So we went to uh Johns Hopkins University.
01:47:42.000There was a classroom that wasn't being used.
01:47:44.000We 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.
01:48:12.000So 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.
01:48:26.000Um I had it auto penned John Kerry, chairman.
01:48:30.000Six weeks later, a colleague comes into my office and he says, Hey, you got a response from the agency to your letter.
01:48:37.000I said, I didn't see any response from the agency.
01:48:54.000So 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.
01:49:19.000What is it like for m for you on the outside now watching what's going on in the world?
01:49:28.000There are some places that I'm optimistic about.
01:49:32.000And actually there are some developments that may look ugly on the surface that I'm optimistic about.
01:49:38.000First 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.
01:50:43.000Man, I follow Iran more closely than anybody I know.
01:50:48.000You remember, you're you're a little bit younger than I am, but not much.
01:50:52.000Um when we were kids, we had a terrible relationship with China.
01:50:57.000And Richard Nixon was the most anti-China person that could possibly have been elected president.
01:51:03.000Yet it was Nixon that went to China and made peace with the Chinese and opened diplomatic relations.
01:51:09.000And 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.
01:51:17.000It 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.
01:51:33.000Well, 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.
01:51:59.000Ask, you know, the the Africans that he's weighed in for, and we have peace in sub-Saharan Africa now.
01:52:06.000Or 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.
01:52:17.000What is your take on Netanyahu's position?
01:52:22.000Because if war is over, Netanyahu will no longer be running Israel.
01:52:34.000Netanyahu has a vested interest in making sure that this war lasts as long as possible because remember, he's still under indictment for corruption.
01:52:43.000Also, 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.
01:53:29.000So 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.
01:53:39.000So that narrows it down to like six or seven parties.
01:53:42.000But then the party that comes in first, first past the poll, gets an extra 50 seats.
01:53:47.000Then you don't have to go into any coalition governments with anybody.
01:53:50.000And you can run the country for four years or five years, whatever it happens to be.
01:54:10.000The 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.
01:54:27.000I 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.
01:54:52.000There's an ongoing uh dispute that the Israeli Supreme Court has weighed in on a number of times.
01:54:58.000So the Minister of Justice is appointed, of course, by the Prime Minister.
01:55:03.000But the Supreme Court is independent of the Prime Minister and the Minister of Justice.
01:55:08.000So the Minister of Justice says you can't prosecute him while he's prime minister.
01:55:12.000And the Supreme Court says, oh yes, you can, and orders the court then to continue the case.
01:55:19.000So if the case is going to be continued, Netanyahu's only viable strategy is delaying tactics.
01:55:26.000Appeal 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.
01:55:43.000But the best argument that he has is I can't focus on my own defense because I have a war to prosecute.
01:55:50.000Well, if there's peace, then he's gonna have to go on trial.
01:56:13.000In 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.
01:56:23.000And what is the sp specific corruption that he's being accused of?
01:56:27.000You know, it's changed over the years.
01:56:30.000Some 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.
01:56:41.000But you know, I I read the accusations when they first came out, they weren't strong.
01:57:17.000Um there was a there was a joke in uh the Onion the other day.
01:57:21.000It 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.
01:57:35.000It's because they know that they can they can outweigh us.
01:57:39.000We 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.
01:57:54.000We have we have uh 190 bases in 144 countries.
01:58:08.000In 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.
01:58:27.000So it's a lesson that I think we haven't learned as a country that there are other ways of winning hearts and minds.
01:58:37.000Well, it's also they're actively engaged in making sure that people are arguing online, which is fascinating.
01:58:44.000You know, th they're very good at these kinds of behind the scenes like quasi uh spy-like surreptitious actions.
01:58:56.000They actively promote us arguing, fighting, disagreeing, they promote these societal disruptions that we're all so uh so worried about.
01:59:07.000And 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.
01:59:15.000And I think that most Americans don't realize how much we should be worried about that and trying to counter it.
01:59:22.000Well, what could be done to counter it?
01:59:24.000Because 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.
01:59:44.000And there was a story recently about um China getting caught using chat GPT for various different services where they were using bots.
01:59:55.000And you know, so they they had done it automated through chat GPT.
01:59:58.000Brad Parcell is doing it right now on behalf of the Israelis.
02:00:01.000He recently won a six million dollar contract to train chat GPT to be more pro-Israel.
02:00:09.000It was in Reason Magazine a couple of days ago.
02:00:12.000Um you have the also have the recent purchase of TikTok and a lot going on.
02:00:19.000Which I think uh could be very helpful uh for us.
02:00:22.000One of the things that we're bad at is identifying bots and controlling bots once they've been identified.
02:00:29.000Um 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.
02:00:48.000And it was it was by obviously anonymous um writers.
02:00:53.000I can't imagine that these writers are human beings, they had to be bots.
02:00:57.000One called me virulently anti-Semitic.
02:01:02.000Because I said this deal that it it appears the president has negotiated was a good idea.
02:01:07.000So 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.
02:01:46.000But if you just say things, enough people are gonna believe it that it's effective.
02:01:49.000It at least it moves a narrative into a certain direction.
02:01:52.000You know, and ChatGPT and these other chat bots are very easy to um to influence.
02:01:58.000When when ChatGPT first came out, just for fun, I said, who is John Kiriaku?
02:02:03.000And it said, John Kiriyaku is a former CIA officer, blew the whistle on the torture program, etc.
02:02:08.000John Kiriaku graduated from the University of Maryland and earned a master's degree in peace studies from the University of Bruges in Belgium.
02:02:18.000I don't even know where the University of Maryland is located specifically.
02:05:34.000I I don't know, but I I'll tell you, I used Chat GPT.
02:05:37.000I teach a class in a graduate school class in the history of terrorism at the University of Salamanca in in Spain.
02:05:45.000And 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.
02:06:05.000So for the 14 sessions of the pod, it gave me 14 different links.
02:06:12.000Every single one of the links was fake.
02:07:08.000Uh 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.
02:07:20.000Every 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.
02:07:30.000They're just curious as to what you're up to.
02:08:22.000When people say we need to dismantle the CIA and dismantle, I'm like, what are you talking about?
02:08:27.000You know, like Mike Baker, I've had long conversations with him about threats overseas.
02:08:31.000Like 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.
02:08:40.000Like, don't say we should not pay attention.
02:09:49.000I don't know enough about that world to comment on, honestly.
02:09:52.000But 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.
02:10:03.000But but Americans get only just a little a little tidbit of what's happening in the world.
02:10:12.000Like we don't read about these emerging threats, for example.
02:10:17.000We'll never know about some kind of counterterrorism operation that succeeded, you know, and that saved Americans from a terrorist attack.
02:10:27.000We'll just never know because that's the that's the nature of Intelligence.
02:10:44.000Do 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.
02:10:57.000And 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.
02:11:12.000And 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.
02:11:24.000And he said, I saved this as a kind of a souvenir.
02:11:28.000He said, You've chosen a difficult path.
02:11:31.000I only wish that I had had the guts to do it myself.
02:12:15.000I'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.
02:13:04.000You know, I think I think at the end of the day, that's populism.
02:13:09.000It's just a different way of looking at government.
02:13:13.000It's funny because under populism, the feeling is very strong that they work for us, and they answer to us.
02:13:22.000And 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.
02:13:39.000And that's how things like the Patriot Act get snuck in.
02:13:54.000You 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.
02:14:25.000The only thing the Cubans really care about watching from us is baseball.
02:14:30.000So we would broadcast a lot of baseball games.
02:14:32.000But 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.
02:14:47.000Well, that's illegal because it's a propaganda station, and Americans can't watch American propaganda.
02:14:52.000And 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.
02:15:07.000So now the government can produce any propaganda that it wants and foist it on the American people.
02:15:31.000Well, lazy and also just taking advantage of an opportunity.
02:15:35.000Because 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.
02:16:53.000I 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.
02:17:09.000I 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.
02:17:24.000And 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.
02:17:32.000He 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.
02:20:13.000We 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.
02:20:22.000We 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.
02:20:34.000We're not gonna accomplish anything diplomatically if we just talk to the British and the French and the Germans.
02:20:40.000So keeping the lines of communication open, I think are very important to settling this.
02:20:45.000I 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.
02:20:55.000Um 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.
02:22:53.000Where where just two weeks ago a Christian village ceased to exist because settlers from New Jersey took all their houses.
02:23:02.000You know, w what happens next in the West Bank from New Jersey?
02:23:06.000Yeah, 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.
02:23:40.000So what do you think their overall strategy is?
02:23:43.000They they eventually want to just take over all Palestine.
02:23:46.000I 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.
02:24:26.000What are you worried about Israel's influence on American politics?
02:24:30.000Because 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.
02:24:38.000And then also seeing what happens when you criticize Israel.
02:24:44.000They are very quick to primary elected officials who criticize Israel, and usually they'll win those primaries.
02:24:55.000It's it's the gold standard of of lobbying organizations.
02:25:00.000I've never understood why APAC doesn't have to register as a foreign agent with uh the Justice Department when everybody else does.
02:25:09.000Why why is APAC special that it doesn't have to register?
02:25:14.000You 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.
02:25:26.000Uh and it was because I was gonna write op-eds that supported American business in Abu Dhabi, right?
02:25:37.000So 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.
02:26:22.000And whenever you see like just dozens of senators and congresspeople going over to Israel, you're like, Oh, oh man.
02:26:30.000My 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.
02:26:38.000They're coming in asking for something.
02:26:40.000So um these two guys came in, could not have been any friendlier.
02:28:38.000We go to this briefing, and it's just two people.
02:28:41.000It's uh a woman who was the Mossad officer and uh an older guy who was the Shinbet officer.
02:28:48.000So because we were all overt, we were giving our true names.
02:28:52.000And 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.
02:29:02.000So I said, My name is John Kiriaku, and I'm going to brief you on Saddam Hussein's current psychology.