All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I'm the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and the brand new Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism, and I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2003, almost all on foreign policy, and all available for you at scotthorton.org.
You can sign up for the podcast feed there, and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
All right, you guys, I got John Kiriakou on the line, and as you know, he's a former CIA officer, but he went to prison for confirming the names of some CIA torturers to the, hmm, journalist, parentheses, question mark, Matthew Cole, and so now he's a committed one of us fighting against the national security state, writing the truth, in this case, for responsible statecraft, and it's called Supreme Court to Hear Whether Abu Zubaydah's Torture is Secret.
Check out this, I know it's not called, really, the sub-headline, there's a better name for this, The Slug, I Witnessed It All, and after 20 years in Gitmo, without charge, his story remains our country's greatest shame, and boy, John, when you say I witnessed it all, you really mean it.
Welcome back to the thing.
How are you doing?
Thanks for having me.
Good to be with you.
Man, so you led the raid to capture Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan.
Go ahead and, first of all, just tell us all about that, especially for people who aren't that familiar with you, so they get a little bit of a taste of who they're listening to here.
Sure.
We believed at the time that Abu Zubaydah was the number three in Al-Qaeda.
That turned out to not be true, but he was a bad man.
He was a logistician for Al-Qaeda.
If you wanted to go home, you were tired of the fight, Abu Zubaydah would get you a fake passport and a ticket home.
He created and ran Al-Qaeda's two training camps in southern Afghanistan.
He created and ran the House of Martyrs safe house in Peshawar, Pakistan.
So bad guy, but we thought he was the number three, incorrectly.
At the time, I was the head of CIA counterterrorism operations in Pakistan, and we got word one day that he was in Pakistan.
We had to catch him.
It took us about six weeks to track him down, but we finally did, and we caught him.
He was severely wounded during the capture.
A Pakistani policeman shot him with an AK-47 three times, no less.
I sat with him for the first 56 hours of his captivity.
Then a CIA plane flew in, picked him up, and took him to the first of what was a series of secret prisons, and then he's been in Guantanamo since 2006.
One of the main points that I make in this piece is that the man has never been charged with a crime.
That's after undergoing merciless torture at the hands of the CIA.
Eighty-three times he was waterboarded.
His heart stopped.
He drowned.
He had to be revived so that he could be tortured some more.
He underwent sleep deprivation.
He was put in a coffin for 11 days.
Wait, wait, wait.
Slow down just a second there, and I just want to remind you.
We got a little bit of time here, so I don't want you to feel ...
You're going so fast, it sounds like you feel like you're going to have to summarize too quickly, but you have time to go ahead and elaborate, especially about this part.
For example, how much of this you know firsthand from being in the CIA at the time, compared to what you learned in the Senate torture report, all these things we want to know.
Right.
Almost all of it I learned at the CIA.
When I got back from Pakistan in the middle of 2002, I got promoted on the strength of the Abu Zubaydah capture, and they made me the executive assistant to the CIA's deputy director for operations.
In that job, I had access to literally everything that the CIA was doing around the world.
Abu Zubaydah was talking to the FBI.
He was giving us information that was new and fresh, and it was information on Al-Qaeda that we had never had before.
The CIA was angry and jealous that the FBI was taking the lead.
George Tenet asked President Bush to expel the FBI and let the CIA take over.
For reasons that we don't understand, Bush agreed to that.
On August 1st, 2002, the CIA began torturing him.
They were supposed to start with just a shove, right?
Or you grab him by the lapels and give him a shake.
That was the plan, the program.
But that's not where they began.
They began with the most serious torture technique, and that was waterboarding.
And then it just got worse for him from there.
Yeah.
And so now, it's funny because if you watch some idiot reenacting this on YouTube, waterboarding doesn't seem so bad.
I saw one guy recently did a thing where they had the cloth over his face folded so many times that I don't even think his lips got wet.
You know?
Right.
Right.
What is it?
Waterboarding.
You're drowning a guy almost to death over and over again, but in this case, they actually did kill him and had to shock him back to life.
Is that what you said?
Exactly right.
His heart actually stopped and he had to be revived.
That's how bad it was.
And then talk about the coffin too, because they have said in the past, bugs, but you're a bit more specific here.
Yeah.
In the course of his interrogation, Abu Zubaydah said that he had this, what amounted to an irrational fear of bugs.
He was just freaked out by bugs.
I don't know why he said it, but he did.
And so the CIA put him in this coffin-like box.
There were several different boxes.
There was a dog cage.
They would just open the door of the dog cage and he would whimper and just climb into it.
It was, you know, that learned helplessness.
But then there was this coffin.
They slept a diaper on him and they put him in the coffin and then they dumped a box of cockroaches in on top of him and then closed it.
And they would open it each day only long enough to change his diaper and to throw some food in there with him and with the cockroaches.
But they did it just to make him insane.
They knew that it would drive him insane.
Yeah.
But wait a minute.
I'm sorry.
It sounds like you're talking about some anecdote from the 1940s in Nazi Germany.
I thought we were talking about something that the Americans had done, the CIA to Abu Zubaydah.
I'm sorry.
I must have spaced out for a second and lost track.
Yeah, seriously.
Seriously.
And you know what?
In 1946, Scott, we executed Japanese soldiers who had waterboarded American POWs.
That was a death penalty offense.
And I know I've said this before, so forgive me if I'm repeating myself.
But in January of 1968, the Washington Post ran a front page photograph of an American soldier waterboarding a Vietnamese prisoner.
The day that that picture ran, Robert McNamara, the secretary of defense, ordered an investigation.
The soldier was arrested.
He was charged with torture and he was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Well, the law never changed.
So why was this a death penalty offense in 1946 and worthy of 20 years in prison in 1968?
But then in 2002, no problem.
We can do it.
We'll do it to Abu Zubaydah.
We'll do it to a couple of other guys.
Hey, Ed Meese, Ed Meese, the attorney general under Ronald Reagan, prosecuted a Texas sheriff for it in 1983.
See?
It's against the law.
It's against the law.
And I say this all the time, but we are supposed to be a nation of laws, a nation ruled or governed by the rule of law.
And we can't just decide that we're going to ignore the laws that we don't like or the laws that don't fit into our personal ideology.
Especially the anti-torture laws.
Especially.
Yeah.
I don't know.
A little old war crime statute.
How does that measure up against the do whatever you want as long as you cash a federal government paycheck statute?
Now so now when you say you know this from being there and all of this, just you're there in Thailand.
You're telling me you didn't torture the guy, but you were there or you were in the office next door listening through the wall or what?
I'm proud to say that I refused all trips to the secret sites to all of them.
I wanted no part of this at all.
And it's funny, you know, a friend of mine told me years later, I said, you know, everything got so hard when I blew the whistle on the torture program.
And he said, no, buddy, he said, your problems began in 2002 when you refused to be trained in the torture techniques and they started referring to you as the human rights guy.
He said in the post 9-11 era at the CIA, that was not a compliment.
You binko.
It's true, though.
That's what they thought.
I was not willing to to, you know, go along.
I was trouble.
All right, but then so in other words, you're sitting in the cafeteria and your friends are going, yeah, here's what we did to him or what?
Yes.
No.
And I was in that position.
I had access to everything happening around the world.
And this was a special compartment.
It was a very highly restrictive compartment.
So, you know, nobody nobody could talk about it because most people didn't know about it.
When when the torture program was first created, it was fewer than two dozen people in the world knew that it was happening.
That's how highly classified it was.
And so, you know, it was it was happening and they were reporting back to headquarters.
Here's what we did.
This is what happened.
This is what how how he reacted.
But they were lying to us and they were telling us that he was providing this actionable intelligence.
In fact, what they had done is they knew that the CIA and the FBI reporting channels were incompatible.
So they took all of the FBI's reports about what he had said during their their interrogations.
They rewrote it in CIA channels and said, well, we waterboarded him one time and here's what he said.
Look what he gave us.
He gave us everything.
It's the whole kitchen sink here.
And it was always that is just incredible, isn't it?
And the thing is, too, is you've got to rewind in your brain the Fox News narrative, the George W. Bush administration narrative at the time of, oh, man, how crucial this was that.
And it was Zubeda above all who Bush invoked over and over again that this is the number three guy in Al Qaeda.
He knew all this stuff and we tortured him.
We don't torture, but we beat it out of him, all right, or whatever you call it.
And so that was why it was so crucial.
And then, of course, it's Ron Susskind tells the story that he obviously got from George Tenet, the chief of the CIA, that he told George Bush in a briefing, hey, it turns out this Zubeda guy isn't who we thought he was.
In fact, remind me to ask you in a minute if I bite and brain and forget it about the cousin situation and all this stuff.
But he says to W. Bush, this isn't, you know, what we had told you before.
But, you know, sorry, boss.
And Bush said to Tenet, well, you're not going to make me lose face on this, are you?
I said he was important.
In fact, he had said he was important over and over again.
He was the number one main public justification for the torture program.
If they hadn't tortured Zubeda, they wouldn't have been able to stop all those plots.
They stopped.
And, of course, in fact, I need you to talk about this part, too, because there's very little about this.
You know, we can.
It's pretty easy to find about Sheikh Ali, but they tortured lies about Saddam Hussein out of Abu Zubeda, too, didn't they?
Oh, sure.
They did.
You know, let me tell you real quickly about the conversation between between Bush and Tenet.
That account is true.
And Condoleezza Rice was was in the meeting, of course.
And when Tenet objected and said that, you know, he we owed it to the public to tell the truth about Abu Zubeda, that he wasn't the guy we thought he was.
Condi Rice chimed in George, meaning George Tenet.
She said, George, you're just going to have to take one for the team.
And I don't think I have ever seen George Tenet as angry as he was that day that Condi Rice had spoken down to him and told him he's going to have to take one for the team.
He was livid.
Yeah.
Well, and let me tell you a little bit about the cousin that you mentioned a second ago.
Well, wait, hang on just on that for a second.
You know, the CIA has a reputation because of the neoconservatives in the Pentagon lying us into war, digging through the CIA analyst trash and, you know, repurposing it all and following all the lies from the Israelis and the Iraqi National Congress and all of this stuff that, yeah, the poor old CIA got caught up in this or whatever.
But the CIA tortured lies about Saddam Hussein out of at least two guys, Zubaydah and al-Libi.
And these were used to lie us into war.
And I'm not certain about Zubaydah.
Maybe you can tell me.
But al-Libi's lies were featured in almost certain Bush's State of the Union, and absolutely they were certain that they were featured in Colin Powell's U.N. address in January of 2003.
That's right.
Zubaydah said under torture exactly what the CIA wanted him to say.
And that was that there was a connection between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.
Of course, there was no connection.
Al-Qaeda hated Saddam Hussein as much as they hated the United States.
But he gave us false information that there had been a meeting in Prague between the Iraqi station chief there and Mohammed Atta, the head hijacker.
We were supposed to believe that there was this connection, whether it was financial or logistical or whatever, between Iraq and al-Qaeda.
It just simply wasn't true.
And so we went to Abu Zubaydah to try to get the same information.
And of course, under torture, under duress, he confirmed the information.
And everybody knows that when you're torturing somebody, they will admit to anything you want them to admit to you just so that you can get them to stop.
You know, just stop the torture.
They just can't take it anymore.
Of course, right?
What would you do?
Seriously?
Some of the things in here you talk about, and, you know, there's an excellent book by Alfred McCoy where he talks about how, you know, they claim here, well, they copied this from the seer methods that were copied from the communists to protect our guys from the communists.
And McCoy says, no, the truth is the communists and the Americans copied these torture techniques from the Nazis.
And that's where all of this stuff comes from.
And a lot of it is this kind of no touch torture.
Oh, gee, all we did was force them into the most uncomfortable stress position and leave them tied up like that for hours.
All we did was freeze him almost to death over and over again.
All we did was keep him up for weeks and weeks and weeks.
But it's not like we pounded nails under his or, you know, spikes under his fingernails or screws in the knees.
So, you know, therefore, it's, you know, all we did was give him a mega dose of LSD and play new Metallica and strobe light and drive him out of his goddamn mind.
It's not like we beat him up or anything, but I mean, this stuff gets really extensive, right?
Especially the freezing.
I mean, I'm cold as hell if it's in the low 40s, you know, I don't know.
Seriously.
And what we did, that's a technique they called the cold cell, which I actually think is worse than than waterboarding.
We killed several prisoners with the cold cell.
But what they do is they they chain a prisoner to an eye bolt in the ceiling so that he can't get comfortable in any way, can't sit or lay down.
And and they strip him naked.
They chill the cell to 50 degrees Fahrenheit.
And then every hour, a CIA officer goes into the cell and throws a bucket of ice water on him.
And, you know, you can't withstand that kind of treatment.
People died.
They died of hypothermia.
Yeah, that's crazy.
And I mean, there's one that they admit to this guy, Golrahman, that they killed, froze to death in the salt pit.
But you're telling me, you know, for a fact that there's more than him.
Oh, yeah.
There's more than Golrahman.
Yeah.
So now, I mean, to be clear here, man, I mean, the official record is that two men, Rahman and God damn it.
I knew his name one moment ago, Joe Jamadi, right, in Abu Ghraib was hung from the ceiling with his arms behind his back till it suffocated him to death.
Right.
Did I get his name right?
Yes.
And so these are the two that officially the CIA, they were investigated by Durham.
The guy who's doing this sort of quarter assed job of prosecuting the Russiagate conspiracy right now is the same guy who let the CIA get away with that.
And actually, you told me before, John, that there were more people who sort of disappeared, people who died in custody, but nobody ever, you know, you guys keep your secrets.
So you don't even tell each other exactly how people die or whatever.
They just go away.
And we know from an independent AP reporting and also the claims of Colin Powell's former chief of staff, Lawrence Wilkerson, that there were 108 who died in military custody.
And you know, maybe some of those were heart attacks, but many of those were tortured to death.
You know what I mean?
Those are, you know, whatever illnesses.
So many of them.
But how many, how many more people died in CIA custody that you know about?
Like capital N know about, not read in the torture report, but that you know, because again, that's, those are the only two in the torture report.
So who else?
To be honest, to God's truth, I probably shouldn't answer that.
But you can tell me that, you know, it's, can you tell me, you know, it's more than five or 10 or 50?
You know, I, I don't want you to go back to prison, John, but God dang, man, that's kind of important.
I would, I would point people to, to Joe Hickman's book about his experience at Guantanamo.
Oh yeah.
See, I left that out.
Those three aren't admitted to, but we do know about those.
And it's the other Scott Horton, by the way, when people look up this story, that's not me.
That's the international human rights lawyer.
The other Scott Horton, a law professor at Columbia university and some sort of editor, I forgot the exact title, editor at Harper's magazine, who wrote the incredible series of stories for Harper's about what Joe Hickman witnessed.
And just very quickly in 2006, the CIA murdered three guys at their secret black site at Guantanamo Bay, not the military prison, but the other one over the hill, it's called Penny Lane or Camp No.
So there's that.
So there's five.
But you don't want to tell me about it anymore because, because if you read that in Harper's, so did I.
And I interviewed other Scott about it at the time and it was important, but, and Hickman's a hero for telling that story.
But it's a hero.
I agree.
I agree.
But tell me something else, Kiriakou, come on.
More secrets.
Well, or at least tell if you can really say that, you know, for a fact that there were other people tortured to death by the CIA in the black sites beyond the five that we've now, you know, discussed back and forth here today, then can you please tell us that or not?
Well, I'll tell you, one of the things that the CIA does is it turns people over to other countries and then they're never heard from again.
Right.
But if I put it that way.
Yeah.
Hey, that's easy enough.
I mean, and we already know that from Robert Bear too.
So if you want somebody interrogated, you send them to Jordan.
If you want them tortured, you send them to Syria, Bashar al-Assad.
And if you want them to disappear forever, you send them to Egypt.
Exactly right.
And I think he was even talking about the Clinton years.
I don't even, I don't even think he was talking about during W. Bush.
Yeah.
Because he, he left during the Clinton years.
Yeah.
I mean, that was in the new Statesman.
So, um, and I should say though, that guy makes a lot of claims that are completely ridiculous lies and including on Russiagate and including accusing the Ayatollah of doing nine 11 and whatever.
So put on that, he was, I'll buy it.
Sounds right to me.
Um, uh, otherwise confirmed by multiple sources too.
All right.
Now, so wait a minute.
Now tell me about the cousin here.
Sorry.
So one of the things that, that made us get the Abu Zubaydah situation so bloody wrong was that Abu Zubaydah has a cousin also named Abu Zubaydah.
And um, and you know, in the CIA, we didn't know that there were two Abu Zubaydah's with the same name.
And so when you put both files together, this looks like a terrorist Superman, right?
Like how can this guy, it's amazing, right?
Yep.
This guy is everywhere.
He's in different countries and carrying out operations and planning new operations.
It's incredible.
Well, it turns out it's because they're two different people.
And once word got out that quote unquote Abu Zubaydah was of interest to the CIA, that was in Time Magazine in early 2002, the, the cousin Abu Zubaydah fled.
Uh, he, he was in the United States and he fled to Jordan and then just kind of disappeared.
And nobody's ever seen him or heard from him again.
Now we looked for him for ages, but couldn't find him.
Uh, and then never publicly admitted, you know what?
We made a mistake.
We put these two files together.
It's two different guys never admitted it.
So Joe and I wrote this book called the convenient terrorist.
And like, I'm, you know, compelled to do, I sent it to the CIA for clearance and they cleared it with no changes.
So that for what it's worth, huh?
I don't know exactly how to take that at all.
Well, I have a few different ideas of how I could take it.
Like one, there was a really cool clearance guy who liked you and your story and your work that week or, um, lady or whatever he got nowadays.
I don't want to prejudge, you know?
Um, uh, or, um, you're giving us a limited hangout, but it sure doesn't sound like it.
So, uh, yeah, no, I don't know, man.
Um, very interesting.
And I'm sorry that I have not read that book yet.
I have it here on the pile.
Of course, one of these days I'm going to stop time and spend a year catching up on all these books.
I should have already finished reading the same way.
Um, but, um, and listen, I'm sorry, cause now we're running out of time.
And I just realized that we haven't really talked about this court case going on and the state secrets.
And we also, I forgot to, um, uh, ask you a project to talk about how they took his eye out without his permission.
That was part of the torture that we missed.
It's this is, this is a crime against humanity.
Um, I was a beta when we caught him.
One of the first things that I noticed was he had a brown eye and then a very pale, glassy, light blue eye that was clearly blind.
And, um, it turned out that he had been wounded by a piece of shrapnel, uh, in Afghanistan when he was fighting the Soviets.
So the, I never bothered him, right?
Like he never said anything about it.
He never complained about it.
And then one day during his captivity, uh, he was sedated.
He was taken into an operating room and, and his eye was taken.
And when he woke up, he had one eye.
So the CIA gave him a glass eye, which he has steadfastly refused to wear.
Uh, because he had never consented to having the eye removed.
So now he wears a patch over his eye, but you know, this is a very clear case of, of a crime against humanity.
You just can't operate on someone against his will.
You can't remove an eye against the guy's will.
And again, you know, as a policy, we never, ever apologize for anything.
Right.
Ah, man.
Um, and so, okay, now he's still in Guantanamo Bay.
They're never going to put him on trial because anything they do have on him is essentially negated by the brutality and the torture that they put this guy through.
And so they can't give him a trial.
They still in 20 years, hadn't figured out how to slap together this ad hoc thing.
Uh, to hold real military tribunals for these people either.
So they're apparently just going to hold him indefinitely, but now he's trying to sue the, he can't sue the CIA.
They've got sovereign immunity, like a British King or something like that, but he's trying to sue their contractors who tortured him.
And it says here in your piece that a federal appeals court had ruled in his favor and said that he could sue.
And now the CIA is appealing to the Supreme court, trying to say that because of national security and the state secrets privilege, they need to be able to not even have a trial at all, not have secret testimony that only the judge with top secret clearance can see back in his chambers, but not even have a trial at all because that would reveal secrets.
And then you're kind of summarizing here, the rebuttal to that from the point of view of his lawyers.
Part of which is that we do have this torture report.
And as you mentioned here, we have, I didn't even know this, that, that Porter Goss, Michael Hayden, George Tenet, and John McLaughlin all put their names on a book called the rebuttal to the CIA, uh, the Senate's torture report here.
So, um, people read it.
Yeah.
Oh, I'm sorry.
I think about eight people read it.
Oh yeah, no, I I'm sure.
I, I didn't even know the thing existed for crying out loud.
Um, but so it sounds like he's got a pretty good case here.
What you're saying is that this stuff is already declassified.
All that he needs to be able to prove his case in court is already declassified.
He's not even as is, am I right?
He's not even necessarily asking for more things to be declassified in his case or what?
Exactly.
That's exactly right.
What he wants is the two contract psychologists, uh, uh, Bruce Mitchell, or, or Bruce and Jim and James.
Anyway, Mitchell and Jessen, right.
Um, he's asking that they be deposed right under oath to confirm what they've already said in their memoirs, what George Tenet and Porter Goss and Mike Hayden at all have already said in their rebuttal, what the Senate torture report has already said using declassified cables.
He's just asking for them to confirm that.
Yes, indeed.
They tortured him.
Yeah.
So, and then, and then that's it, right?
It's not like he's going to open up a new bank account with his, uh, winnings of punitive damages here or anything like that.
He's just trying to force them to what?
Admit it and say, sorry, or what?
Pay him a dollar.
And yeah, admit it.
He doesn't even want a sorry.
He, he wants to be charged with a crime.
He wants, he wants some kind of, of finality to this thing.
You know, the guy's been incarcerated now.
It's going to be 20 years on March the 22nd, 20 years.
And I don't mean 20 years at a, at club fed.
I mean, 20 years of torture and solitary confinement and secret prisons.
And it's time for us to fish or cut bait either charged with a crime or let him go.
Man, we're, we're still having this conversation about Guantanamo Bay in 2021, man, it's just unbelievable.
You know, the Bush people said they wanted to close it on the way out and then they didn't, but some of them even said that they support, I think Robert Gates, um, you know, while he was under Obama said he supported closing it.
They just never did it.
They tried to move some of them to trial in New York and then they all back down.
And that was the, you know, that was the original plan.
You know, when, when I was still in Pakistan, uh, my, my Pakistani counterpart came to me one day, it was brigadier general.
And he said, listen, our jails are full.
Cause every time we'd catch Al Qaeda people, we would just stick them in the local jail.
Raul Pindi Lahore, you know, Peshawar, wherever we happen to catch them, we just stick them in jail and we filled the jail, the jails.
So he said, you guys are going to have to do something with these Al Qaeda people.
We can't hold any more of them.
So I cabled headquarters and I said, the jails are full here.
What do you want us to do with the prisoners?
And they said, put them on a C12 and send them to Guantanamo.
And I said, Guantanamo, Cuba.
And they said, yeah, we have an idea.
We're going to hold them in Guantanamo for three or four weeks until we can figure out what federal district to charge them in either Boston, New York, or Washington.
And I said, yeah, that's a great idea.
And here we are 20 years later and they still haven't been charged with any crimes.
Yep, man.
It's just, and you know, but the Biden people have said that they want to close it.
You take that seriously at all, or we're just going to have the same conversation other 20 years from now.
No, I, I think that Biden wants to close it and I think Obama wanted to close it, but you know, the Congress under the Republican Congress under Obama passed a law that Obama was pressured into signing saying that, that the federal government can't appropriate any money for the purpose of shutting down Guantanamo.
So it's not going anywhere.
Yeah, man.
All right.
Well, there you go.
And that's the other interview today is Gareth Porter on the self-licking ice cream cone and military projects that can never end and must never end.
So there it is.
All right.
Well, thank you so much for your time, John.
Great to talk to you.
Great to talk to you.
Thanks for having me.
All right, you guys, that's John Kiriakou.
He used to be a CIA analyst.
Then he was a CIA actual officer out there.
And then, uh, he went to jail and now he's, uh, an author and a journalist.
And he wrote the convenient terrorist with Joseph Hickman, the same guy who was the heroic whistleblower from the CIA murder of those three men in 2006 down there at Guantanamo as well.
So, uh, go and read that stuff.
Thanks.
Oh, this one, I'm sorry.
Responsible statecraft.org Supreme court to hear whether Abu Zubaydah's torture is secret.
The Scott Horton show anti-war radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA.
APS radio.com antiwar.com scotthorton.org and libertarianinstitute.org.
