Hey guys, I finally did it.
I published the book.
It came out, Fool's Errand.
Time to end the war in Afghanistan.
It's at foolserrand.us, foolserrand.us.
It's on Amazon and paperback and in Kindle.
And check it out, last night I got a brand new blurb from Colonel Douglas McGregor.
He says he recommended it to be part of the coursework at the Army Command and General Staff College.
That's how much he liked it.
Great read, vitally important.
Brilliant achievement, he said.
So check that out, foolserrand.us.
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Clausewitz for dummies.
The Scott Horton Show.
Taking out Saddam Hussein turned out to be a pretty good deal.
They hate our freedoms.
We're dealing with Hitler revisited.
We couldn't wait for that Cold War to be over, could we?
So we can go and play with our toys in the sand.
Go and play with our toys in the sand.
No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.
Today, I authorize the armed forces of the United States to begin military action in Libya.
That action has now begun.
When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.
I cannot be silent in the face of the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, my own government.
All right, you guys, Scott Horton Show.
Check out the full archives at scotthorton.org, 4,500-something of them there for you.
Going back to 2003.
The book is Fools' Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
You can find that at foolserrand.us and follow me on Twitter, at Scott Horton Show.
All right, introducing John Kiriakou.
He was CIA during the torture era and did 30 months in prison, but not for torturing anybody, but for verifying the names of CIA torturers to a reporter.
He's the only CIA officer held accountable during that entire thing, and it was for telling the truth about it, not for participating in it.
And check this out.
I'm so excited about this.
I mean, obviously, I haven't had a chance to read it yet, but I just saw this headline last week.
It's Joseph Hickman and John Kiriakou together, the convenient terrorist, Abu Zubaydah.
This is so important.
You guys, of course, in this audience are familiar.
Joseph Hickman is the Guantanamo Guard who blew the whistle about the murder of three men at the CIA's secret Camp No, or Penning Lane site down there at Guantanamo Bay back in 2006.
And the other Scott Horton, the international human rights lawyer from Harper's in Columbia, has written a lot of great stories about that.
And then, so now, these two together, Kiriakou and Hickman together, with a book all about Abu Zubaydah.
And Abu Zubaydah, we all remember, was the poster boy for, of course, we torture people.
We love torturing people.
We gotta torture people.
We don't torture people, though.
But yeah, we do.
And when we do, we do it because of guys like Abu Zubaydah.
And then, according to Ron Suskind, when CIA Director George Tenet told George W. Bush that, actually, yeah, it turns out this guy's not really al-Qaeda and is not really that big of a deal, that Bush said, I said he was important.
You're not going to make me lose face on this, are you, George?
And so that was why they continued to pretend that Abu Zubaydah deserved to be tortured, needed to be tortured, that good information was gained from his torture, not just lies about Saddam Hussein.
Welcome to the show, John Kiriakou.
How are you doing?
Thank you, Scott.
I'm very happy to be with you again.
Tell me, how many different lies about Saddam Hussein did Abu Zubaydah tell under torture?
Oh, my gosh.
You know, this is really the crux of the whole matter, isn't it?
Abu Zubaydah was not the number three in al-Qaeda.
Not only that, Abu Zubaydah never even joined al-Qaeda.
And the CIA and the White House were trumpeting the notion that not only was he the number three in al-Qaeda, but that he was instrumental in the planning of the September 11th attacks.
That was just simply a lie.
And then when we were looking for justification for the Iraq War, the administration pointed at Abu Zubaydah and at Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and said that they were the ones who arranged or organized the contact between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.
Absolutely preposterous on its face, al-Qaeda hated Saddam Hussein as much as they hated us.
Saddam Hussein was a secular leader.
Whether we liked his politics or not, there was nothing Muslim about him.
He was hated by al-Qaeda and vice versa as much as we were.
And so really, if you look back to that period from September 11th, 2001, until the end of the Bush administration, everything was based on a lie.
Yeah, you know, let me ask you this.
I mean, this is just sort of an opinion speculation question, not really a factual or a yes, no type question, but why do you think that they bothered really torturing lies out of Zubaydah and out of Sheikh al-Libi?
And there may have been others, I don't know off the top of my head, of others who were made to implicate Saddam Hussein.
Why was that better than just making up lies?
Like, for example, the lies that al-Libi told that Saddam had trained them how to make chemical weapons and had trained them how to hijack airplanes and all these things.
I mean, why not just pretend he said that or that somebody did?
You know, that's a great question.
And I'm not even sure I have an answer for you.
I think this is gonna be, this is gonna sound very sad, but I think that there was a group during the Bush administration, a group made up of neoconservatives, and I mean Democrats as well as Republicans.
Remember, Richard Perle is still a registered Democrat.
That's right.
Who just loved the idea of torture because they loved the idea of getting tough.
Remember, when I was first approached and asked if I wanted to be trained in these torture techniques, well, what it was was I was at the CIA and a senior counterterrorism center officer approached me and said, hey, I'm glad I ran into you.
Do you wanna be trained in the use of enhanced interrogation techniques?
And I had never heard that term before.
So I said, what's that mean?
And instead of explaining it directly, he very excitedly said, we're gonna start getting rough with these guys.
And so I think maybe that that was really a part of it.
It was that they wanted to be cowboys.
They wanted to be tough guys.
Well, that's what Trump said, right?
Trump said, look, if it doesn't work, they deserve it anyway.
It's their punishment.
It's that attitude that got us to the situation that we were in.
And then, yeah, so this is the thing too is what a red herring that it doesn't work, it doesn't work.
Sure, it works.
It works great.
And it, you know, in fact, well, I mean, I don't wanna oversimplify.
I was reading this piece at salon.com where you guys are kind of introducing your new book here, The Road to Torture, How the CIA's Enhanced Interrogation Techniques Became Legal After 9-11.
And you guys really do a great job of explaining what the previous interrogation techniques were not just the FBI's options, but the CIA's options and how they considered, you know, what they considered to be tried and true methods of interrogation.
But it seems like, I mean, maybe this is just hindsight, you know, kind of thing or, you know, whatever, mischaracterization.
But it sort of seems like when they're saying that torture doesn't work because it results in false information, that what they were really saying is torture works great for getting false information and we need some.
And that maybe that was why they did it in the first place.
I mean, I'm trying to picture a CIA guy torturing Zubeda or Alibi or something and saying, you know, tell me about Saddam.
And then they go, oh yeah, Saddam.
Yeah, he taught me how to make chemical weapons.
And I'm trying to picture a CIA guy believing this rather than smiling that he succeeded in torturing the lies he needed out of this schmuck.
Exactly, exactly right.
I think that's exactly right.
I told ABC News way back when in 2007 when I first went public on this thing that if you torture a guy long enough, he's gonna confess to kidnapping the Lindbergh baby.
I mean, if that's your point, if your point is to get him to just admit to something, anything, then sure, sure, torture works.
All right, now, so tell us a bunch of stories about how all this started because you were in on the nabbing of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi bin al-Shibh and or al-Zubeda.
I get this all mixed up there in the early days of the terror war, right?
Yeah, I'll correct you on that one.
Yeah, I was the chief of counterterrorism operations in Pakistan post 9-11.
And so I led a series of raids in March of 2002 that resulted in the capture of Abu Zubeda.
We caught him that night.
And I'm not allowed to say the exact number, but many dozens of other al-Qaeda fighters, including some senior people.
I transferred to a different job inside the CIA when I got back that summer of 2002.
So Ramzi bin al-Shibh and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed happened, oh, six or eight weeks after I had switched over.
I wish I could take credit for those guys.
No, I'm sorry I got that wrong.
I was going from memory instead of rereading this morning to make sure.
All right, but now, so, well, once you got back to the States, then what was your job?
Because I thought I had remembered that you were commenting pretty specifically about what had happened in Thailand with these guys, right?
Yeah, yeah.
My job was to be the executive assistant to the CIA's deputy director for operations.
And so I was his morning briefer and the director's morning briefer for the following year.
And in that position, because you're the deputy director's right-hand guy on all the reporting worldwide, I had access to literally everything that was coming in from every CIA station and base around the world.
And that's how I knew about all of it.
I see.
I was on the receiving end.
That's quite a position.
I didn't realize that you were that high a rank.
You were the guy telling the director of the CIA what the rest of the CIA wanted him to know that morning, huh?
Yeah, yeah.
That's pretty interesting.
Hey, well, just on that point, how much difference is there between the truth and what you guys tell the director?
It depends on what the truth is, you know?
Because everybody, it seems like everybody out there wants their truth to be known.
And you've gotta be able to read through the lines.
You've gotta be, or between the lines, I should say, you've gotta be able to see what officer is out there trying to promote himself to get himself in front of the director and telling you something that's patently not true, which happens every single day, let me tell you.
And then, you know, people have a very short memory.
Because I spent seven and a half years as an analyst in the CIA's Directorate of Intelligence, I had a longer term view of things than most operations people.
And so somebody would say something about Iraq, for example.
You know, well, the Iraqis have a nuclear program.
Actually, the Iraqis don't have a nuclear program.
They dismantled it, and it's been confirmed by the United Nations weapons inspectors.
Well, they've only been on their job, the CIA people have only been on the job for six months or 12 months.
They don't know what the heck happened three years ago with the UN weapons inspectors.
So you need somebody who's an institutional memory.
And in the Directorate of Operations, you really don't have that.
You have guys just clawing to get ahead of each other, to recruit somebody, to get face time with the director so that they can get promoted and become a station chief.
So the truth is the first casualty.
I could see that.
The economics of office politics, but even worse, in a government bureaucracy.
Well, and let me go even further.
Let me say this.
A CIA psychiatrist once told me that the CIA actively seeks to hire people who have sociopathic tendencies.
They don't seek to hire sociopaths, because sociopaths have no conscience, they easily pass a polygraph, and they're impossible to control.
People who have sociopathic tendencies do have a conscience, but at the same time, they are comfortable working in moral or legal or ethical gray areas.
The problem is it's very easy for sociopaths to slip through the cracks, through the system, and every once in a while, a psychopath will slip through.
Because again, they're impossible to control and hard to weed out.
And you need dirty work done.
And you need dirty work done, and that's very attractive to a lot of people.
And so not only are you dealing with office politics, but you're dealing with CIA case officers who are all alpha dogs by their nature.
And then at the same time, half of them are sociopaths with no conscience.
So it's no wonder that these things happen.
I think that the amazing thing is that more horrible things don't happen.
All right, hang on just one second for me.
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Somebody just sent me, I was caught on Twitter this morning.
There was a story at Mondoweiss about how some settlers had chopped down a bunch of olive trees on the West Bank.
And someone said, oh yeah, American and Israeli shared values, destroying private property, you know.
And it was right when he sent me that, was right when I was reading in your article about the Palestinian example, or the Israeli example for why, actually it is okay to torture people, as long as you put it in a memo and you say that you're trying to prevent worse harm.
And I'm sorry I'm talking about Twitter, but I just like the guy's response.
He said, it's another shared value.
We are the new Machiavellians, but with a twist.
The end justifies the means, but the end never comes.
Oh, very, very insightful.
Isn't that great?
You know, I had a guy, when I was stationed in Bahrain between 1994 and 1996, I had an intern working for me.
He was a young kid from Yale.
You know what, I'm not even gonna use his name.
And he was really bright and he spoke Farsi.
And I thought, boy, this kid's going places.
And indeed, he did go places.
He ended up getting his PhD from Yale.
And he became a major neocon thinker, writer, and author, major.
He very briefly did a rotation, not a rotation.
He very briefly was chosen by the Bush administration to work at the Pentagon in the run-up to the Iraq War.
But I didn't even know he was a neocon.
I ran into him at a conference when I was the deputy director's executive assistant.
And I said, hey, why don't you come over to the agency and you can brief the deputy director and the associate deputy directors on what's going on in Iraq.
So he came over and started talking about, I mean, it was just this litany of neocon nonsense in the run-up.
And then he capped it off by saying that one of the things that he was recommending to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld was a targeted assassination program.
And you could just see people guffaw, right?
So at the end of it, the deputy director said, I think your friend's a little nutty.
And I walked him out to the car and I said, dude, when did you become a fascist?
And he says, John, everything changed on 9-11.
We've got to take the bull by the horns, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And he's still out there advocating targeted assassinations and all these other different crimes against humanity.
The shame of it is that it's become mainstream and mainstream to the point where a person like Donald Trump can say that if elected, he's gonna bring back waterboarding and quote, a hell of a lot worse.
So, you know, there's been a real disservice in this country by the neoconservative and neoliberal movements that war is good, war on our terms is better, and we're just not gonna respect previous arrangements to quote Junior Soprano.
Well, and the thing is about it is torture's been illegal in America since the Revolutionary War.
General Washington said, anybody who tortures anybody, I'll shoot you, right?
That was the order.
Yes, and Scott, we executed Japanese soldiers after World War II because they had waterboarded American prisoners of war.
In fact, Ronald Reagan prosecuted a Texas sheriff, the DOJ.
And everybody knows any cop can commit any crime, I mean, give me a break, right?
But it was Ed Meese, put a Texas sheriff in prison for waterboarding a guy, call it torture.
Yeah, and the law never changed.
You know, I say all the time in speeches that in January of 1968, the Washington Post ran a front page photograph of an American soldier waterboarding a North Vietnamese prisoner.
And the day that that picture was published, the Secretary of Defense ordered an investigation, that soldier was arrested, he was prosecuted on charges of torture, and he was convicted and sentenced to 20 years in a military prison.
So torture was illegal in 1946, and it was illegal in 1968.
But then suddenly, somehow, it's not illegal in 2002, despite the fact that the law never changed.
We changed.
But now, okay, so take me back again.
You are now the, I forget which I'll title, but you're the morning briefer for the director and the deputy director from which date to which date again?
Yeah, from August of 2002 to August of 2003.
Mm-hmm, so in the entire run-up to Iraq War II.
Yeah, in the entire run-up.
And in fact, I would go so far as to say that 90% of the information that I briefed had to do with Iraq.
Well, and so are you then confessing that you're the world's greatest liar, or you're saying you're accusing the director of pretending to not know the truth that you told him, which is it?
You know, there's a funny story that I told in my first book, The Reluctant Spy, where on my first day in that job, I went up to the associate deputy director, and I said, okay, I'm ready to go.
So what are we doing?
And he said, you know what?
I can't even tell you what we're doing until you go upstairs and sign your secrecy agreements.
I thought that was odd, but I went up to the seventh floor, knocked on the appropriate door, and said, hey, I'm here to sign my secrecy agreements.
They gave me six or seven different agreements that I needed to sign, promising that I would never talk about this information until the day I died or until it was declassified.
So it's been declassified.
And I signed the agreements, and I said to the guy, okay, so what's up?
And he says, here's the deal.
Next year, we are going to invade Iraq, we're gonna overthrow Saddam Hussein, we're gonna install a pro-US government in Baghdad, and we're gonna open the world's largest air force base in Southern Iraq so that we can move all of our air assets out of Saudi Arabia and deprive Osama bin Laden of the ability to say that we're polluting the land of the two holy mosques.
I was dumbfounded.
And all I could think to say to the guy was, but we haven't caught bin Laden yet.
And he kind of chuckled and he said, buddy, the decision's been made.
And let me tell you how this is gonna play out.
He said, battle lines have already been drawn.
The pro-war side is OVP, the Office of the Vice President, OSD, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and the National Security Council.
The anti-war side is CIA, which still wanted to hunt bin Laden, State Department, and Joint Chiefs of Staff.
I began participating in these video teleconferences with major players.
I mean, they were chaired by either Condi Rice or Dick Cheney, depending on who was available that day.
And every principal and deputy were participating in these things.
And I mean, the battle lines were clear in these video teleconferences.
Finally, I was backbenching George Tenet one day, and Condi Rice asked the Central Command, the CINCENT, the Commander-in-Chief of Central Command, for a briefing on our plans to go across the Kuwait-Iraq border.
And he said, well, we have X, Y, and Z divisions on the border.
We're gonna attack day after tomorrow.
We're gonna cross, blah, blah, blah.
And then he said, we can be in Tehran by August.
And George Tenet shut off his microphone, turned around to me, because I was the note-taker, and he said, did he say we could be in Tehran or we could be in Baghdad by August?
And I said, he said Tehran.
And he says, have these people lost their minds?
And then he turned back around and turned his microphone back on.
But this is what we were up against.
I mean, lie or no lie, the fix was in from the beginning.
Don't forget that on September 12th, 2001, Richard Perle went to the White House and told Condoleezza Rice, we have to attack Iraq.
So it really didn't matter if Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
It didn't matter if Iraq had something or nothing to do with al-Qaeda.
The decision was made from the very beginning of the Bush administration that Saddam Hussein was gonna die.
Man, well, great anecdote.
I mean, I actually have a part in the book where I quote Paul Wolfowitz on the record saying something a lot along those lines about the motive for attacking Iraq.
And then another anonymous quote, which I think may actually also be Wolfowitz, both saying that same thing, where they're basically, you hear that, everybody, right?
The note of Ron Paul in there.
9-11 happened because America was occupying Saudi Arabia.
And we gotta get those bases out of Saudi Arabia.
It got us attacked.
We wanna deflate, take the wind from Bin Laden's sails by moving those bases.
But then, so what do they do?
Invade Iraq and kill a million people.
And so, yeah, we gotta be able to move those bases to the north.
Yeah, they won't mind dying, though, as long as the bases aren't near Mecca and Medina, which, of course, Iraq just replaced the Saudi bases on the list, and there are still a few bases in Saudi anyway, so it makes little difference.
But they actually invoked blowback as the reason why they needed to start a new war, just to move the damn bases a few hundred miles north.
Yep, yep, that's right.
And listen, when I was an analyst, I was reading the Saudi press, and I was reading the Al-Qaeda pronouncements.
I was reading all that stuff.
And the complaints were that U.S. soldiers were having sex at the Holy Kaaba in Mecca, that female soldiers were walking around their bases naked, and after their workday was over, they were going out into the towns and working as prostitutes.
I mean, people who have no real exposure to the United States or to Westerners, they believe this stuff.
These allegations have legs.
And the truth is, it was better for us, and it would have been safer for us just to not have anything to do with Saudi Arabia.
We could have established forward positions if we really needed them in Kuwait, in Bahrain, in Qatar, in the United Arab Emirates, in Oman, all over the region.
We have plenty of places all over the region that we can base ourselves that aren't Saudi Arabia.
And you know, another thing too, Scott, is, and actually Dr. Paul mentioned this last weekend at the Ron Paul Institute event at Dulles Airport.
He said that we really don't have a special relationship with Saudi Arabia.
We say we do, the Saudis say we do, but when you cut right to the chase, there's nothing special about it.
We sell the Saudis weapons, and they sell us oil, and that's it.
There's nothing else.
This is all about weapons sales and capitalism, it's not about a special relationship.
So if we weren't dependent on Saudi oil, and the truth is we're less and less dependent every year, a little bit at least, but if we weren't dependent on Saudi oil, we wouldn't have any reason to keep our bases in Saudi Arabia.
We could just move them elsewhere.
Well, and we're not even really dependent on Saudi oil.
I mean, the whole thing is really just a military strategy, so in case there's a war with China, we have the ability to shut off their tap.
I mean, we get all our oil from Venezuela and stuff.
That's right.
We export oil now.
Yeah, we do.
Again.
Now, okay, so, all right, we only have a few minutes left here, and well, you and I aren't done talking by a long shot here, but I'm not sure, there's too many different directions to go, but I'm gonna go with this one.
The other day, you and I together were interviewed by Kelly Vlahos for the American Conservative Magazine's 9-11 video podcast special thing there, and you said this thing, and I actually had a friend transcribe this for me.
Thank you, Nico, appreciate it.
You said this to Kelly.
Well, and this is a little bit out of time, but I think it's same difference anyway.
Well, the truth of the matter is that the drone program is probably the most potent recruiting tool that foreign terrorist groups have.
I can tell you that I interrogated dozens of al-Qaeda fighters in my CIA years, and to a man, they all said that they had no beef with the United States.
They had no personal problem with the United States until we rocketed their villages with drones, and we killed their cousin, or their parents, or their brother and sister, or whatever it was, and they were compelled to take up arms against the United States.
So, there are people in countries all over the region, not just in the Middle East, but South Asia and the Horn of Africa that otherwise would never have had reason to take up arms against us, and did so solely because of the drone program.
So, you know, drone program is a bit more specific, but so I wanna ask you a couple of follow-ups from this, which is, first of all, can you help us with the timeframe of when exactly you were personally interrogating these guys, and then can you, I guess, just verify that this isn't just a figure of speech.
You really mean to say, to a man, they all said that this was about violence, this was about Earth, this was not about, my Imam promised me virgins in heaven if I only believe in radical Islam hard enough and kill you for being innocent, or whatever.
Right, I'm talking about 2002 to 2004, the early years of the drone program, but I'll go even further than that.
There were others who told me that they were, how should I say this, they were residents of isolated villages in their home country, whatever the country was, doesn't matter, Yemen, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, whatever.
They had no jobs, no job prospects, no prospects for getting married, they were illiterate, and what man would want his daughter to marry someone who was illiterate and had no job training?
And so the local Imam went up to them and said, hey, what are you doing staying in this village?
You should go make jihad against the Americans.
And if you do, we'll give you $50 a month, and if you're martyred, we'll give your family $500 as a martyrdom bonus.
And so, you know, they would go through training, and it was really no big deal for them.
They didn't know the Quran, they had never read the Quran, they didn't know the prayers, they weren't religious really.
I mean, they were Muslim, but not- It's the economic draft is what you're talking about.
That's exactly what it was, that's exactly what it was.
And what it comes down to is they were really not motivated to fight against us.
Even the ones who went through training weren't really motivated to fight against us.
But then we started killing their families with drones or with rocket attacks.
Yeah, I went to Yemen in 2011 with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and it was my fifth trip to Yemen over the previous 20 years.
And every time I go to Yemen, it's worse than the previous time.
Now it's a failed state, the whole place is in chaos.
I was in a taxi, and I said to the taxi driver, so how are things going with this Houthi rebellion up north?
I've read that it's getting pretty bad.
And he said, yeah, the Houthis are dangerous, but we're confident in victory because the Saudis are bombing them with drones.
And I said, the Saudis don't have drones.
And that was the first time I had heard that we were droning Houthi rebels in Yemen.
We didn't have the Yemeni government's permission to fly drones, armed drones over their territory, let alone to kill Yemeni citizens.
And technically, we're supposed to be neutral in that war.
But those had to have been our drones killing those people up north.
See, we dig ourselves this hole, and then we just keep digging deeper and deeper and deeper until we're at war, and then we can't get out of the hole we've dug.
Yeah, well, that was what Hillary Clinton said, was when you look around, you see all the deep holes that we're in, and you figure everybody better grab a shovel and get digging.
That's the only way out.
Hillary's up, stupid.
She never saw a war she didn't wanna jump right into.
All right, now, so, oh man, I've only got one more second.
I'm gonna keep you one more minute here.
Mark Thiessen is this torture monger from the Bush administration.
I forgot what his position was in the Bush administration.
Yeah, he was a mid-level nobody.
He's at the American Enterprise Institute now.
Yeah, he was CIA then, right?
Not that I remember.
Oh, a mid-level White House nobody or something.
Yeah, White House, right.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay.
I'm sorry, I was getting it confused.
Anyway, so Thiessen, he wrote a thing in the Washington Post, and in the Washington Post, he quotes Mitchell the torturer, the CIA contractor, torturer, psychologist guy, and so he says, contrary to what you may have heard, which I take as real progress for our version of the narrative here, contrary to what you may have heard from the left and the right, Bin Laden was definitely not trying to lure us into a horrible no-win quagmire of bankruptcy and destruction like the Soviet Union.
No, not at all.
Mitchell says that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed told him that, nah, geez, we thought you guys would pack up and run away, like after Beirut and after Black Hawk Down, and we were so surprised when you came to invade, and I thought, you know, I don't know.
I guess it's possible that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Osama Bin Laden never talked about this, or is it likely even maybe that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's just jerking Mitchell's chain and Mitchell is reporting back, geez, boss, they say that the last thing that they want is for us to stay and spend every last dollar we've got, or what do you think about that?
You know, Thiessen is an idiot, first of all.
Secondly, Osama Bin Laden said publicly in audiotapes that he released to Al Jazeera that the whole purpose of the 9-11 attacks, well, it was twofold, one to punish the United States, but the other was to drag down the American economy.
That was it.
He wanted to shut down New York and shut down the stock exchange and really damage the American economy, and at least in the short term, he succeeded.
And he told all this to Abdel Bari Atwan of the Al-Quds Al-Arabi paper in London in 1997 or 1998, or whatever, right?
He explained all of it in depth.
He even said he was disappointed when Bill Clinton left after Blackhawk down.
That was supposed to provoke what he called a war of attrition there, and he didn't care how many Somalis were supposed to die in the thing.
He was wanting to get to replicating the battle against the Soviet Union right there in 1993.
Hell, that was when they first tried to topple one tower into the other.
You'd think somebody might've taken the hint from that.
Exactly.
Well, anyway.
All right, listen, I'm sorry.
I know you're out of time.
We have a lot more talking about 2002 and three and the run-up to Iraq at Langley headquarters over there, and I need to read your book, and so we'll be in touch.
Thank you very much, John.
I look forward to it.
Thanks for having me.
Always great to talk to you, Scott.
Yes, sir.
All right, guys, that is John Kiriakou, who's the only CIA guy punished over the CIA torture program for telling the truth about it to a reporter.
Really went to the penitentiary for it, and now he's got this great new book.
It's, well, I don't know how great it is, but I bet it is.
It's co-authored with Joseph Hickman, the heroic whistleblower from Guantanamo Bay about the Guantanamo, quote, suicides there.
It's called The Convenient Terrorist, Abu Zubaydah, coming out very soon here, I think it is.
Oh, no, it is already available right now, and you can read all about it at this great article at Salon.com, The Road to Torture, How the CIA's Enhanced Interrogation Techniques Became Legal After 9-11, by the both of them there.
I'm Scott Wharton.
Check out the book.
It's Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
I cover a lot of the same topics.
We just talked with John Kiriakou about some of these paragraphs.
His block quotes are gonna be in the next edition, I'm pretty sure.
Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
That's at foolserrand.us.
Then you go to scottwharton.org for all the interview archives, 4,500-something interviews going back to 2003 for you there.
And I'm the managing director of the Libertarian Institute at libertarianinstitute.org.
Read the bad news at antiwar.com, and follow me on Twitter, at Scott Wharton Show.
Thanks, guys.
