Valuetainment - July 10, 2025


＂CIA's Motive Was REVENGE＂ - CIA Whistleblower BREAKS DOWN Post-9⧸11 Interrogation TORTURE Tactics

Hosted by
Patrick Bet-David
Mentioned
Donald Rumsfeld Robert McNamara John Kiriakou Brian Ross Leavenworth Fahrenheit Patrick
＂John Brennan Is A BAD Guy＂ - CIA Whistleblower John Kiriakou EXPOSES Former Director’s Secrets ＂Israel Tried To Bug The CIA＂ - Ex-CIA Whistleblower CLAIMS Mossad Was BANNED From Langley

Episode Stats


Length

9 minutes

Words per minute

151.61

Word count

1,383

Sentence count

144

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, Patrick and Mark discuss CIA interrogation techniques, torture, and the cover-up that went on in the CIA's secret detention and interrogation sites. They discuss the tactics and techniques used, and how the CIA covered it up.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Listen, Patrick, it is like a kick in my gut to have to compliment the FBI.
00:00:05.500 But if there's one thing that they are really good at, it's interrogation.
00:00:11.680 And we should have just let them do their job.
00:00:14.040 Legal interrogation.
00:00:15.300 Correct.
00:00:15.680 Not creative CIA, the stuff that you guys...
00:00:18.000 Precisely.
00:00:19.300 Really? So you give them credit on...
00:00:21.440 They've been doing it since the Nuremberg investigations.
00:00:23.720 What is the different tactics they use in interrogation from the CIA?
00:00:27.420 Oh, yeah. Well, that's a good question. It's the most basic one.
00:00:31.100 Their tactic is to sit across the table like you and I are doing right now.
00:00:36.180 Treat each prisoner with respect.
00:00:38.560 Maybe you give him an apple or a cup of tea or a cigarette.
00:00:43.820 And you establish this rapport, this relationship.
00:00:47.560 Eventually, he's going to talk to you. Eventually.
00:00:50.820 For the CIA, there was this element of revenge.
00:00:53.600 9-11 was the worst intelligence failure in the history of the Republic.
00:00:57.420 And so there was this idea that we had to avenge the deaths of 3,000 Americans.
00:01:02.940 We had the deaths of 3,000 Americans on our shoulders.
00:01:06.260 And so you want to go in there with fists flailing.
00:01:10.400 And that just didn't accomplish anything.
00:01:13.480 Besides the fact that the CIA did not stop at those 10 techniques,
00:01:20.140 they did things that the Justice Department had never approved,
00:01:24.360 that nobody had ever been trained in,
00:01:27.660 you know, things well beyond waterboarding,
00:01:29.740 things that I thought were worse than waterboarding.
00:01:31.620 Like what?
00:01:32.240 Like, for example, what they called the cold cell.
00:01:35.320 A cold cell, you're stripped naked.
00:01:38.340 You're chained to an eye bolt in the ceiling,
00:01:40.880 so you can't sit or lay or get comfortable in any way.
00:01:44.860 Your cell is chilled to 50 degrees Fahrenheit.
00:01:48.680 And then every hour, a CIA officer throws a bucket of ice water on you.
00:01:55.680 Okay, we killed prisoners with that technique.
00:01:59.320 They had hypothermia and they died.
00:02:00.860 And what do we do?
00:02:01.500 We just dig a hole outside the interrogation room
00:02:04.260 and put them in the hole and cover it up.
00:02:05.540 Literally?
00:02:06.280 Yeah.
00:02:07.220 You can't send the body back to their families.
00:02:10.500 You don't even know where they're from half the time. 0.87
00:02:13.400 The other one was sleep deprivation, which sounds kind of silly.
00:02:18.860 But, for example, Don Rumsfeld was the Secretary of Defense at the time
00:02:22.860 and he poo-pooed this whole thing in the press saying,
00:02:27.800 I have a stand-up desk in my office
00:02:31.060 and sometimes I work for 24 hours standing there
00:02:35.420 The sleep deprivation doesn't hurt anybody.
00:02:38.020 Well, we're not talking about standing for 24 hours at Don Rumsfeld's desk.
00:02:44.220 We're talking about something far worse.
00:02:46.860 The American Psychological Association, the APA,
00:02:49.160 was on contract to the CIA at the time.
00:02:51.600 They told us that people begin to lose their minds at day seven with no sleep.
00:02:58.100 They begin to die of organ failure at day nine.
00:03:03.060 The CIA was authorized to keep people awake for 12 days.
00:03:07.380 Now, imagine, again, you're chained to that eye bolt in the ceiling
00:03:10.140 with industrial strength lighting on you 24 hours a day
00:03:14.800 and death metal at volume 11 in your cell 24 hours a day
00:03:19.880 and then your organs just shut down and you die chained to that eye bolt. 0.57
00:03:26.120 And you heard and saw many stories of people that died that didn't make it past night.
00:03:32.200 Oh, yeah. We would get cables, you know, the next morning saying,
00:03:34.840 unfortunately, prisoner so-and-so passed away as a result of interrogation.
00:03:39.880 We will, you know, dispose of his body in this way.
00:03:43.880 And I'm like, again?
00:03:44.840 All this stuff is being documented and communicated.
00:03:47.780 Yep.
00:03:48.800 How does the CIA protect that somebody right there doesn't take a screenshot
00:03:53.920 and keep it in their phones for later on in case if the CIA flips and comes after them
00:03:58.540 for them to say, let me tell you what I have on you guys.
00:04:00.520 Leave me alone.
00:04:01.580 I don't mean to smile.
00:04:03.160 But the CIA would tell you that that's an easy answer.
00:04:07.100 It's called the Espionage Act.
00:04:08.380 Because if you breathe one word, one word to the press,
00:04:12.960 we're going to charge you with espionage.
00:04:15.560 Is that what happened to you?
00:04:16.500 Three counts.
00:04:19.480 So walk me through it when this happened.
00:04:21.280 Because from the moment you left, it didn't happen eight years until after you left the CIA, right?
00:04:27.720 Seven or eight years.
00:04:28.420 I wish I could tell you that I took a moral stand and I went up there and I told them.
00:04:37.740 That wasn't it at all.
00:04:39.500 It was actually selfish on my part.
00:04:42.660 So I'm seeing these cables come back from the secret sites.
00:04:46.420 And I'm thinking to myself, this is wrong, wrong, wrong.
00:04:50.780 This is absolutely illegal.
00:04:53.720 Listen, we've got a law in this country called the Federal Torture Act of 1946
00:04:58.720 that specifically outlawed these techniques.
00:05:03.580 And not only are we signatories to the United Nations Convention Against Torture,
00:05:09.160 we wrote the United Nations Convention Against Torture,
00:05:12.460 which, again, specifically outlawed these techniques.
00:05:16.320 And then, like magic, in 2002, it's all legal.
00:05:21.060 Well, the law never changed.
00:05:23.120 Let me add, before I get to your specific point,
00:05:26.640 in 1946, 1945, we executed Japanese soldiers who had waterboarded American POWs.
00:05:35.760 That was a death penalty crime to waterboard somebody.
00:05:39.520 In January of 1968, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara
00:05:45.260 saw a front page photograph in the Washington Post
00:05:49.280 of an American soldier waterboarding a North Vietnamese prisoner.
00:05:52.060 He ordered that the soldier be investigated.
00:05:55.860 That soldier was arrested.
00:05:57.580 He was convicted of torture and sent to Leavenworth for 20 years.
00:06:02.840 And as I said, the law never changed.
00:06:05.540 We changed.
00:06:07.360 And so, like magic, in 2002, because we didn't like that law,
00:06:11.760 we're just going to pretend it doesn't exist.
00:06:13.980 So I'm seeing all these cables come back.
00:06:16.020 I'm thinking this is wrong, wrong, wrong.
00:06:18.040 Certainly somebody's going to say something.
00:06:20.280 And then I'm seeing cables from people who were out there at the secret site
00:06:24.280 saying, whoa, I never signed up for this.
00:06:27.120 I think this is illegal.
00:06:28.720 I quit.
00:06:29.620 People are saying that in the...
00:06:30.560 In writing, in the cables.
00:06:31.940 And you're seeing people quitting.
00:06:33.160 Yeah.
00:06:33.340 How often did that happen?
00:06:34.500 With regularity.
00:06:35.800 I'm going to say at least a dozen people either resigned, retired, or curtailed.
00:06:41.540 Because of this specific reason.
00:06:43.180 We had a secretary who passed out while watching somebody be tortured. 1.00
00:06:49.520 We had doctors.
00:06:50.960 There was a doctor who revived Abu Zubaydah when his heart stopped during waterboarding.
00:06:57.440 Revived him so he could be tortured more.
00:07:00.000 And he's like, look, I took a Hippocratic oath.
00:07:02.020 First, do no harm.
00:07:03.300 I'm not doing this.
00:07:04.760 That's a career-ending decision to curtail an assignment and come back.
00:07:08.900 But they did.
00:07:10.200 They quit.
00:07:11.360 They retired.
00:07:12.180 Or they curtailed.
00:07:13.120 So I thought, well, certainly somebody's going to say something.
00:07:17.640 And then I left in 2004.
00:07:23.200 My resignation was effective 2005.
00:07:26.200 I went into the private sector.
00:07:28.280 And then in 2007, December of 2007, I get a call from Brian Ross at ABC News.
00:07:33.620 And he said, he had a source who said that I had tortured Abu Zubaydah.
00:07:39.580 I said, that was absolutely untrue.
00:07:42.780 I was the only person who was kind to Abu Zubaydah.
00:07:46.420 I said, I never laid a hand on him or on anybody else.
00:07:50.680 And so he said, and I didn't know this was an old reporter's trick because I'd never spoken to a reporter before.
00:07:57.160 He said, well, you're welcome to come on the show and defend yourself.
00:07:59.940 I said, yeah, I'll think about it.
00:08:02.400 Hi, everybody.
00:08:03.160 I'm John Kiriakou, former CIA officer.
00:08:06.160 Please find me on Manect.
00:08:07.440 We have a lot to talk about.
00:08:09.160 CIA, FBI, DOD, torture, secret prisons, international renditions.
00:08:15.180 Maybe you or your child want to apply for a job at the CIA and are looking for some tips.
00:08:20.160 Let me know.
00:08:20.960 There's a lot we can talk about.
00:08:23.080 You pick the subject.
00:08:24.060 We'll make it happen.
00:08:25.120 Again, it's on Manect.
00:08:26.680 Thanks, and I'll see you soon.
00:08:27.940 If you enjoyed this video, you want to watch more videos like this, click here.
00:08:31.320 And if you want to watch the entire podcast, click here.
00:08:34.100 We'll see you soon.
00:08:35.920 We'll see you soon.
00:08:36.960 We'll see you soon.
00:08:37.360 We'll be back.