08/14/15 – John Kiriakou – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Live here on the Liberty Radio Network, noon to two eastern time, eleven to one Texas time.
Next up, it's another former CIA counterterrorism officer.
This time it's John Kiriakou, associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, former CIA officer and former senior investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
I wasn't aware of that part.
Welcome to the show.
How are you?
Hey, doing well, thanks.
Thanks for having me.
I appreciate you joining us today.
So, this is the first time we've spoken, and I think it's probably pretty likely we will again, considering the kind of things you like writing about nowadays.
But so, first of all, I was wondering if we could do a little bit of just to get to know you thing.
Perhaps starting with the first time that you were, as far as I know, on TV, claiming, I believe you later said that you were misinformed and it wasn't a deliberate lie, that only three people had been waterboarded and what's the big deal.
And I don't know the story that well, John, but my understanding is something along the lines.
You found out that that really wasn't true, and then you decided to become an anti-torture activist.
Something along those lines.
I tried to make two points in an interview that I did with ABC News in December of 2007.
And the two points were that, I'm sorry, three points, were that the CIA was torturing its prisoners, that torture was official U.S. government policy and not the result of some rogue operative, and three, that the policy had been approved by the President.
Now, the mistake that I made was in saying that the issue of torture could be looked at in two ways.
Number one, was it moral and was it right?
And I said it was not.
It was immoral.
But the second was, did it work?
And I said that I believed it had worked.
Because the reporting from the field, from these secret prisons where torture was taking place, indicated that it was working.
At least that's what we were being told inside the CIA.
Now, we know now from the CIA Inspector General's report that was released in 2009, and especially from the Senate torture report, that that was a lie.
That the reporting from the field was that the torture was not working.
But once that reporting got back to headquarters, CIA leaders were telling CIA employees that it was working.
And that we were going to continue with this program.
But then, so you were already retired at that point, or they put you on TV to say?
Because what I remember of that, and maybe this was just because this is what stuck out to me the most, but it seems to me, thinking back on it, that the headline that came out of it was, only three guys were waterboarded, and it was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
You'd waterboard him yourself.
Who cares about him?
And that was what we all learned from the previous interview, that interview that got this all started.
Well, a lot of the right-wing media picked it up and parsed it and chose to report only what they wanted to hear.
That was my first lesson in dealing with the press.
That the press is generally hewing to its own agenda.
And that the press is ideological one way or the other.
And there are very few members of the press who are really interested in the truth.
So you're right.
What came out of that interview was not what I said, but what a lot of right-wing media wanted to hear.
And that's what they repeated.
And that's what I got out of it, was what I didn't want to hear.
And I admit, John, that actually I think even after you decided that you were going to talk about torture in a much more forthright way after that, I still held it against you that, yeah, that's the guy that said that only three were waterboarded or whatever.
And it turned out they put you in prison for the truth that you told about this torture program.
So can we now go back to before that terrible interview and who and what you were at the CIA?
What you knew about or what any role you had in the torture program or any of that stuff?
And make all that clear and then explain where you went after that interview and before prison.
Yeah.
I joined the CIA in January of 1990 as an analyst, focused mostly on Iraq.
And I did that for about seven and a half years.
I got bored and I switched to operations.
That was a very unusual switch, but I spoke both Greek and Arabic and I wanted to go overseas.
So I moved to the Directorate of Operations in 1997 and spent the next seven and a half years working in counterterrorism.
So after September 11th, I was named the chief of the CIA's counterterrorist operations in Pakistan.
And in that role, I led a series of raids in March of 2002 that resulted in the capture of 52 al-Qaeda figures, including Abu Zubaydah, who at the time we believed was the number three in al-Qaeda.
That turned out to not be true.
In fact, Abu Zubaydah was never a member of al-Qaeda.
He certainly helped al-Qaeda.
He ran their training camps.
He served as sort of a logistician, but he never pledged fealty or loyalty to Osama bin Laden.
That was just bad information that we have.
So I went back to headquarters in 2002.
I remained until March of 2004 and I resigned to take a job in the private sector.
And then in 2007, in December of 2007, I got a call from Brian Ross at ABC News, who said that he had a source who said that I had tortured Abu Zubaydah.
I said that was absolutely untrue.
I was the only person who was kind to Abu Zubaydah.
I said I've never laid a hand on him or anybody else.
In fact, when I got back from Pakistan, I was approached by a senior officer in the CIA's counterterrorism center, who asked if I wanted to go through training that would certify me in what he called enhanced interrogation techniques.
I said I didn't know what that meant, enhanced interrogation techniques.
And he said we're going to start getting rough with these people.
And he explained to me what these torture techniques were.
I said look, I have a visceral problem with this.
I don't want to be involved.
And I had nothing to do with it.
But then in 2007, Brian Ross made this call.
And I denied that I had anything whatsoever to do with the torture program.
And he said, well, you're welcome to come on the show and defend yourself.
So that same week, within just a day or two of that phone call, President Bush went on TV and, in response to a reporter's question, he looked right in the camera and he said, we do not torture.
And then later in the week, see, I knew that was a lie.
But later in the week, he said that if there was torture, it was the result of a rogue CIA officer.
And I thought, my God, they're going to try to pin this on me.
Somebody told Brian Ross that I was the one doing this.
So I decided, okay, I'm going to go on ABC and I'm going to defend myself.
Now, I went on ABC and I defended myself with incorrect information.
All I knew was what I had been told by colleagues or former colleagues, former co-workers in the CIA's counterterrorism center, that the torture did work.
That was a lie.
That was a lie perpetrated by senior CIA officers, not just to other CIA officers, but to Congress and to the White House as well.
All right.
And then, so, after that, how did you get in so much trouble that they locked you in the pen?
Because it's pretty ridiculous when people say that in the entire torture program, the only guy that was ever held accountable was a guy who had told the truth about it rather than participated in it.
Right.
The very next day after that interview, the CIA filed what's called a crimes report against me with the FBI.
And the FBI began investigating me.
And that investigation lasted from December of 2007 until January of 2012.
They ended up charging me with five felonies.
I will admit to you that I made one mistake.
I confirmed the name of a former CIA colleague who was involved in the torture program to a reporter who wanted to interview him.
The reporter never contacted him and never released the name.
But I was charged with a felony count of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act.
And then, for the interview, I was charged with three counts of espionage.
And then, just for good measure, they threw in a felony count of making a false statement as well.
All right.
Now, hold it right there.
We'll be right back, everybody, with John Kiriakou.
Forgot to say he's got an article at AntiWar.com today.
Let's talk about torture.
And we're going to do some more of that on the other side of this.
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All right, y'all.
Welcome back.
Talking with John Kiriakou, former CIA officer, author of this new article, Let's Talk About Torture, running at AntiWar.com today.
And we got it from other words.
They said we could.
Now, where we left off, you went to prison for espionage, for talking to an American reporter, which I think no matter who we're talking to about pretty much anything, people got to understand just how crazy that is right there, that federal charges can be applied in ways where the meaning of words has to be completely destroyed.
But they can do it anyway.
I mean, they might as well charge you for weapons of mass destruction for having an unregistered handgun.
Because, hey, as long as we're making up stuff, I mean, what is espionage about talking to an American reporter?
That must have been what your lawyer told the court, right?
It would have been funny if it hadn't been so serious.
You know, the lead espionage charge, I should add, all three of the espionage charges were dropped, as was the false statements charge.
But the lead espionage charge said that I had revealed top secret code word information to a reporter from the New York Times.
And the information had been declassified solely for the purpose of prosecuting me.
And that information was that after the 9-11 attacks, the CIA had a program to kill or capture members of Al Qaeda.
Oh, yeah?
That was it?
Yeah.
I allegedly said that in 2008.
So apparently that was so top secret protected that I needed to be charged with espionage, which in its extreme form is a death penalty charge.
And then I got two other charges of espionage as well.
Now, the other two espionage charges were even funnier.
I had worked with an analyst who left the CIA to work for Mitchell and Jessen, the two notorious creators of the torture program, the two psychologists.
And this former colleague had given me his business card.
So a reporter from the New York Times said, hey, do you know how I can get in touch with this guy?
And I said, you know, I haven't talked to him in years, but I have his business card.
And I gave him a copy of the business card.
And then I gave another copy to a reporter for ABC.
And I was charged with two counts of espionage for giving them that business card.
Now, this is a CIA officer who had never been undercover in his life.
And his business card specifically says Mitchell and Jessen Associates, which everybody in America knew had created the torture program.
But somehow that business card was so highly classified that it warranted two additional espionage charges for me.
What was it that you were eventually convicted of only?
I was convicted of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982.
I was only the second American ever charged with violating that law.
And what I did was I was working for ABC News at the time.
And one of my colleagues there said, hey, do you know how I can get in touch with somebody from the Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation program?
I said, I really didn't know any of those guys.
And he said, well, you mention a guy in your book who you saw in the tarmac in Pakistan at an airport when we were transporting Alba Zubeda.
And he says, I'm going to call him John.
He says, you know, you called him John.
And I said, oh, right, that's John Doe.
I don't know whatever happened to him.
He's probably retired by now.
That conversation put me in prison for two years because that officer was undercover and I confirmed his last name.
Now, the reporter never contacted this guy and the name was never released to the public.
But it bought me a felony conviction, forfeiture of my pension, and two years in prison.
Well, now, so that wasn't the real reason that they locked you up, though.
What was?
No.
No.
I maintained and my attorneys maintained from the very beginning that the CIA was so angry that I had outed them on the waterboarding issue.
And that I continued to talk about torture, that they just asked the Justice Department to find something, find anything with which they could charge me.
You know, I want to add, too, there's an awesome book that came out in 2012 written by Harvey Silverglate, who's a professor of law at Harvard University, and it's called Three Felonies a Day.
And he argues in this book that we are so over-criminalized in this country that the average person on the average day going about his normal business commits three felonies every day.
And so if you're the subject of a federal investigation and they really want to get you, they're going to get you, whether it's with the conspiracy laws, mail fraud, wire fraud.
I mean, those laws are so broadly written that they can apply to just about anybody on almost any day.
And that's really what they did in my case.
Well, and in fact, a few years ago they officially legalized, just within Justice Department guidelines, going out on fishing expeditions.
Sure.
And targeting people, not crimes.
That's right.
That's what they do.
That's official policy now.
That's just not how they really operate.
That's how they operate.
You know, one of the things that really struck me as hypocritical and funny, not in a ha-ha way, but in an odd way, is one of the things they did with me was they said, Your Honor, he was seeking to build a business and he was seeking to capitalize on this monetarily.
Well, first of all, that was utter nonsense.
They knew what my bank accounts looked like because they had access to them.
And I was broke.
And I mean, I was literally broke after I went on ABC.
I lost my job.
I lost my contract.
I lost everything.
In fact, it was the prosecutor who went on to a $6 million a year job at a big-name firm in Chicago.
It's the prosecutors who end up running for governor or running for president.
It's not the people who, you know, allegedly committed these crimes.
There was no money involved.
Right.
All right, now, so I'm glad we got a chance to talk about that, but now we have little time to really get into that.
But I want to say a couple things from the news here just to bring this current and why this is still important.
Jeb Bush will not rule out resuming the use of torture is the headline at The Hill newspaper yesterday.
And at The Intercept, there's a piece where they point out an interview with CIA Executive Director Krongaard where he says, quote, well, let's put it this way, it, you know, meaning the stress positions, et cetera, are meant to make him as uncomfortable as possible.
So I assume for without getting into semantics, that's torture.
I'm comfortable with saying that we were told by legal authorities that we could torture people, end quote.
Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but he's going a little bit off script here.
The script is what we did, if somebody else did it, might have been torture.
But when we do it, it's an enhanced interrogation technique that does not rise to the level of torture because if it did, they might have to go to prison for that.
Scott, you are exactly right.
This is the issue, and this is what we need to be shouting from the rooftop.
It's all about the semantics.
You've got George Tenet now, Porter Goss, and Mike Hayden, three former directors of the CIA, and eight former, I'm sorry, and five former deputy directors coming out with a book soon saying exactly the same thing.
If we do it, it's not torture.
If the Justice Department says it's legal, it's not torture.
That's semantics.
And the reason why they're so up in arms about this is because this is their legacy.
When their obituaries are written, they're going to say that these men were instrumental in implementing the torture program, and they don't want to go down in history as torturers.
They want to go down in history as patriots.
Now, I don't doubt their patriotism, however misplaced it might be, but we need to call this what it is.
It's torture, and we need to accept responsibility for it.
Now, if they're of the ideological persuasion that torture is something that they needed to do, okay, that's fine.
I suppose we can all agree to disagree on an issue like that.
But we can't continue to play games that then finally indicate that it wasn't torture and that it worked, because it was torture and it didn't work, and those are historic facts.
Yeah.
Well, a couple things there.
I mean, first of all, though, I'm not certain that's true.
I think it didn't work if you assume the premise that the goal was to gain good intelligence to protect the American people, but that's fairytale Disney World crap.
The purpose was to hurt this guy until he says he's friends with Saddam Hussein, and it worked perfect for that, didn't it?
That's right.
Yes.
You know, in the halls of the CIA, while Dick Cheney was leaking information to the press, false information in the press linking Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda, in the halls of the CIA we called that the big lie.
And I remember analysts like myself who had spent most of our adult lives working on Iraq, I remember thinking, surely no educated American is going to place any intellectual value on this at all.
Al-Qaeda hated Saddam Hussein more than they hated us.
There was nothing Muslim about Saddam Hussein at all.
He famously made a trip to Mecca to make the umrah, the minor pilgrimage, and didn't even know the prayers, and had to have an aide whisper the prayers into his ear.
So there was nothing religious or Muslim about him at all, and there was certainly no tie whatsoever between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
None.
In fact, two or three weeks before the invasion, Osama put out a podcast urging the people of Iraq to rise up and overthrow the socialist infidel Saddam and fight the Americans too.
That's right.
That's exactly right.
It was all a big lie, and it all came out of Dick Cheney's office.
Alright, now, so then the other point is something that is almost unbelievable to me, and I'm sorry I'm keeping you an extra minute here if that's okay.
George Tenet, Porter Goss, Michael Hayden, and several of their underlings, I presume that means their lawyers, they're writing a book together to justify torture?
They don't have all the power in that sentence?
They don't have a PR advisor who could tell them to just shut the F up about it?
This is what they want to do right now?
I said the same thing yesterday to a former colleague.
Why can't they just let it go?
And like I said, the only conclusion that I can come to is that this is their legacy.
This is how history is going to remember them.
And they think, somehow, in their warped little minds, that they are going to be able to twist the truth, and to twist history, and to convince people who have to be either stupid or so gullible that they just don't know any better, that this terrible program works.
And especially when, I mean, what's the introductory chapter here?
You can trust me, Tenet, and him, Hayden, because we were in charge of the CIA and NSA on September 11th, so we really know what we're talking about.
That's the other part of their legacy.
They're the greatest failure in the history of all bureaucrats, in all of humanity.
It really was.
It was the greatest intelligence failure in the history of the country, and somehow, none of them have borne any responsibility for it.
Well, and by the way, now that we're into that, and you were there in some capacity, I want to ask you about the Rich Blee podcast, especially part two.
You may be familiar where Richard Clark, when confronted with just how much George Tenet absolutely knew, must have known about the San Diego group, is just flabbergasted and says, well, man, I don't know, I guess they must have been trying to recruit them, and I can't believe that he lied to me about this for so long, because according to Clark, he and Tenet would talk on the phone like girlfriends, late into the night, about Al-Qaeda all the time, and George Tenet was keeping from him, the director of counterterrorism in the White House, that there was real-ass Al-Qaeda in the country.
How do you account for that?
I know both Dick Clark and George Tenet personally, and I can tell you that if Dick Clark says that George Tenet was lying to him, then George Tenet was lying to him.
And that's just how George operated.
Dick Clark was an intensely secretive person, even at the cost of a September 11th-style attack.
Dick Clark was one of the most highly respected, non-ideological counterterrorism professionals in government, anywhere in government, and I mean even on Capitol Hill.
And nobody wanted to disrupt an attack like September 11th as much as Dick Clark did.
Talk about shouting from the rooftops.
It was Dick Clark who had gone to Condi Rice and said, you're not listening to me, there's going to be a terrible attack, and it's going to be here.
So for George Tenet to lie, it really goes to the core of who George Tenet is.
And again, if Dick Clark says Tenet's a liar, Tenet's a liar.
Yeah.
Well, and you know, Michael Shoyer, your former colleague, has told the story on the show and in print to James Bamford, and it's been told other places where the CIA, where Tenet at the time was Director of Central Intelligence, boss of all the different agencies, and CIA kept trying to get NSA to share their intercepts from the Yemen switchboard house, and they wouldn't.
And supposedly at least, CIA had to build their own intercept station on Madagascar, but they could only get half the conversation, and Tenet would never make Hayden share the intercepts with the Bin Laden unit.
Is that really how business is done up there?
Come on, because a lot of this sounds like, I don't know, cover for something or another.
Oh, listen, it was even worse in the CIA's dealings with the FBI.
At least we had mutual respect between CIA and NSA, colleague to colleague, but our relations with the FBI were actively hostile.
And I've always been convinced that that's why the September 11th hijackers were able to move around the country like they did, because we hated the FBI and they hated the CIA, and so no information was exchanged.
But Mike Shoyer's exactly right.
Mike Shoyer's another one who was sort of shouting into the wilderness.
He was warning people as best he could that something terrible was going to happen, and nobody would listen to him.
And here the whole time, the operations people probably were on these 9-11 hijackers, at least the ones in San Diego, and those of us who were supposed to be working against al-Qaeda didn't even have any idea of it.
Well, now, so have you read the 28 pages?
No.
I wish I had, but here's another thing.
You know, Bob Graham, not only was he one of the most highly respected members of the Senate, he was one of the most highly respected members of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
And if Bob Graham says that those 28 pages would shake our government to its foundation, I believe Bob Graham.
And if leaks and rumors about Saudi involvement are what's in those 28 pages, I'm going to believe that the Saudi government was involved.
Yeah.
Well, listen, I would rather err on the side of conspiracy kookery rather than letting a CIA guy spin me if I have to, if it comes down to it.
So what about what could be pretty reasonably inferred here, possibly if you were to assume that Dick Cheney's mean enough to say, I don't know, torture people to death, maybe he would work with Bandar Bush to make sure that al-Qaeda had enough guys to get on those planes to carry out their successful attack, because they had some agendas and they liked Pearl Harbor attacks.
What about that?
I told Paul Jay at the Real News Network when he posed almost exactly the same question.
I said, in my heart, I don't want to allow myself to believe that something like that could possibly happen.
But with that said, there seems to be a lot of circumstantial evidence to indicate that it may have happened.
At least some version of what you just said may have happened.
We know that the Bush family and the Saud family go back generations.
We know that.
We know that nobody was closer than George W. Bush and Prince Bandar.
I mean, weekends at each other's homes, and Camp David, and vacations together.
So, you know, I've gotten myself to the point where I'll believe just about anything.
And until the White House decides to declassify these 28 pages, I just don't know what else people are supposed to conclude.
Well, I guess we could just bomb Iran.
Hey, thanks very much for coming on the show, John.
Good to talk to you.
Thanks for having me.
Good to talk to you.
All right, so that is John Kiriakou.
He's writing here for Other Words.
That's OtherWords.org.
And we're reprinting this one today at AntiWar.com.
It's called Let's Talk About Torture.
And he is at the Institute for Policy Studies.
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