All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am 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 I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
You can also sign up for the podcast fee.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, you guys, introducing John Kiriakou, former CIA guy, now does journalism and hosts a show on Sputnik, and he wrote the book The Reluctant Spy.
And I'm sorry, I am forgetting, John, the title of the book that you wrote with Joe Hickman about...
Right.
It was about Zubeda.
And then I wrote one called Doing Time Like a Spy, which won the Penn First Amendment Award.
And I got a new one coming out.
Oh, with Gareth Porter.
With Gareth Porter.
Right.
The CIA Insider's Guide to the Iran Conflict.
Great.
And when's that coming out?
That's coming out January 21st.
So right around the corner.
Great.
That's awesome.
Looking forward to it.
And I know from talking with Gareth that he's been hard at work on that thing, so...
Oh, boy, did he take it seriously.
Yeah.
Well, he is the best of the best on it.
He really is.
He's a committed researcher and truly an expert on Iran.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He wrote the book Manufacture Crisis, of course, about the program there.
Exactly.
Listen, we've got to bring up some old stuff and fight a little bit here.
The first time anybody ever saw you on the TV, you were saying, ah, the torture.
They just tortured three guys in just a little bit, and what's the big deal?
Right.
Isn't that right?
Yeah.
That's what I said.
Yeah.
So...
Yeah, the truth of the matter was that the contractors who were carrying out the torture program, Mitchell and Jessen, were lying in official channels.
They were sending back these lies from the field in order to justify this bogus program, and so we didn't even know that they had lied until the CIA Inspector General's report was released in 2009.
So all those years, they had fooled so many of us.
Yeah, but we knew long before that that there were CIA ghost prisons at Diego Garcia and on ships at sea and in Morocco and in Poland, and of course that people were being tortured.
I mean, the Abu Ghraib scandal broke in 2004, and all that was traced immediately back to Copper Green Special Access Program in the military and to the CIA black site torture program that had been authorized at the highest levels of the White House.
No, I've got to disagree with you.
We knew that there was a military torture program, certainly.
There was never a CIA program at Diego Garcia.
There's no CIA presence at Diego Garcia.
That was entirely military.
Well, it had at least been reported that there were ...
I'm almost certain that the ghost prison black site story that was originally reported in The Guardian in like 2004 included secret CIA prisons on ships at sea, as well as ...
I don't think they had name Morocco and Romania and Poland yet, but ...
No, they had ...
Well, those sites hadn't yet existed.
They came later.
And Thailand was one.
There was no CIA program on ships at sea.
That was a conclusion that the media had drawn that was ...
It's like they were on the right trail, but they were just getting the details wrong.
Well, but the point was we still knew that there were CIA black sites, and that the ...
I mean, wasn't it the case even in the Mora report and all of that from Abu Ghraib that all this started with the CIA and it bled over to the military?
Yes, that was true.
It started ...
The CIA, of course, had that one black site in the very beginning.
And yeah, there were military personnel who were aware of the program, and it did bleed into the military.
And it was only because of a military whistleblower, who happened to be the general counsel for the Department of the Navy, who finally blew the whistle on the military's torture program.
That was the Alberta Mora thing.
Yeah.
When you talk about the black site, are you talking about the Salt Pit Dungeon in Kabul, north of Kabul, or are you talking about in Thailand?
You know what?
I'm not allowed to ...
The CIA has never declassified the location of any of these places, even though they've been reported on extensively in the media.
And so I'm just ...
I can't say the word.
You say it.
Go ahead.
I love that you say it.
The Salt Pit.
I'm not saying it.
And these locations.
Salt Pit started off early.
Salt Pit started off before the other secret prisons, and it was because Salt Pit had already existed first under the Soviets, and then later under the Taliban.
And so we just took over this godforsaken Taliban dungeon and torture chamber, and used it for our own purposes.
Yeah, the base in Poland, where you guys, to put it loosely, tortured people, was a former Soviet base as well.
No comment.
All right.
Now, so look, you write about in the book how you were involved in the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi bin al-Shib and Abu Zubaydah, right?
Those three in Pakistan?
No, just Abu Zubaydah.
Oh, just Zubaydah, not the other guys?
Yeah.
No, no, just Abu Zubaydah.
Yeah, I was the leader of the team that caught Abu Zubaydah.
I had gone back to CIA headquarters, and then we caught Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, to the best of my recollection, it was in August of 2002, and then Ramzi bin al-Shib right about the same time.
I think he was in Karachi.
Okay.
So I screwed that up.
But anyway, so you got Zubaydah, he ended up writing a book about this guy.
You turn him over.
So the CIA, I know, originally allowed the FBI, Ali Soufan, to come in and interrogate the guy, and apparently was getting some stuff out of him.
And then that was all canceled, and Mitchell and Jessen and the torturers were brought in.
But at this point, what?
You went home and weren't involved in any of that?
Right.
We caught Abu Zubaydah March 22nd, 2002.
I went back to CIA headquarters on May the 1st.
Abu Zubaydah went to the secret site.
He recovered from his gunshot wounds for about six weeks.
And then you note correctly that Ali Soufan of the FBI began interrogating him.
Remember, at the time, the 9-11 attacks were still an open criminal investigation.
And so even though normally the CIA has the lead on cases overseas, and the FBI has the lead on cases domestically, the FBI had the lead in that one.
And so Ali Soufan did what the FBI does so well.
He established a rapport with Abu Zubaydah.
It took weeks, but he ended up getting Abu Zubaydah to start talking, and he was providing actionable intelligence.
For whatever reason, in late July 2002, George Tenet, who was the CIA director at the time, went to President Bush and asked Bush to expel the FBI from the secret site and let the CIA take over.
There was no reason to do that, but he did it anyway.
And Bush agreed.
And so on August 1st, the FBI withdrew from the secret site.
And not only just the site, they actually left the country because they knew what was coming and they didn't want any part of a torture program.
And so the CIA began torturing Abu Zubaydah on August the 1st.
He immediately clammed up and provided nothing else.
That went on for months.
And finally, Ali Soufan went back out, reestablished this relationship with him.
He started talking again, and then Mitchell and Jessen did the whole thing all over again.
And really, they tortured him just for the sake of torturing him.
They called it learned helplessness.
And it was far less about gathering intelligence than it was about just ruining this guy's life.
Well, you say here he was not the number three.
He had never even joined Al-Qaeda, and he had never pledged loyalty to bin Laden.
And so at what point did the CIA know that?
Well, the CIA will tell you that Joe Hickman and I made that up.
They're lying.
We're telling the truth.
So it became apparent early on in the interrogations that Abu Zubaydah just did not have the information that we expected him to have.
And the truth of it was this.
It was that he has a first cousin whose name is also Abu Zubaydah.
He had lived in the United States.
He fled to Jordan as soon as trouble started after 9-11.
And when you put their two files together, you know, not knowing that it's two people, this looks like a terrorist superman.
In fact, it wasn't.
It was one bad cousin.
And Abu Zubaydah himself, the one that we caught, was a bad guy.
But he was no worse than many of the other people that we caught and who have subsequently been released.
He had founded Al-Qaeda's two training camps in southern Afghanistan.
He had founded the House of Martyrs, the Al-Qaeda safe house in Peshawar.
But he was not the number three in Al-Qaeda.
He was not the terrorist mastermind that we said he was.
He had never joined Al-Qaeda.
As you said, he had never pledged fealty to Osama bin Laden.
And we knew that, I'm going to say, by the later part of the year, 2002, early 2003, that this had been a mistake.
And now Bush, famously at least quoted by Ron Susskind, told George Tenet, was briefed on this by George Tenet, and said to him, well, you're not going to make me lose face on this, are you?
I said he was important.
This was the guy that Bush brought up over and over again when defending the torture program.
This is why we have to torture.
We have people like Abu Zubaydah who we have to torture into telling us the truth.
It's not torture, but yeah, it's torture.
And anything less wouldn't do the job.
And it was all a lie.
And one of the important things, Scott, that we learned in the Senate torture report, not even in the body of it, but in the footnotes, which to me is where the real story is told, was that George Tenet had gone repeatedly to the White House to brief President Bush on the program, and repeatedly had been rebuffed by Dick Cheney.
And then Cheney finally went to Tenet and said, I briefed him, everything's good.
It was only later in 2005 that it became apparent that Bush was never briefed by George Tenet, that he was purportedly briefed through Cheney.
And Cheney just lied about the entire thing.
You're saying even including that so-called conversation that Susskind reported, that that never happened?
That never happened.
At least according to the torture report, it never happened.
It's crazy.
This is not how to run a government.
This is not how you run an international terrorist-catching program.
You can't have a president who's so aloof and so cut off.
That was in the movie of the report, too, that, oh, Bush didn't know till 06.
Well, the Abu Ghraib scandal broke in 2004, and all this stuff started coming out then.
Yes.
And Bush was just clueless.
And worse than that, Bush didn't care.
Well, I wonder, on a specific point about that Susskind quote, because it's a very particular quote, you're not going to make me lose face on this, is it possible you think that there was some kind of debriefing, at least on the issue of Abu Zubaydah, where Tenet said to Bush, hey, you really should stop bringing up this Zubaydah guy, because it turns out he's not that big of a deal?
And that Bush ...
Sure.
That's entirely possible.
Does the report say that that didn't happen?
No.
No.
It doesn't refer specifically to that conversation.
What it's talking about is the overall program.
I remember when the program was first approved, and George Tenet said in a meeting, repeatedly, he would just open his mouth and say, I can't believe the president approved that program.
They asked for the moon and the stars, thinking, well, somebody at the White House is going to take this out, they'll take that out, and they'll strike this out and that out.
And they didn't.
They just approved the whole program.
And at the agency, they couldn't believe it had all been approved.
And so, as it turned out, Bush hadn't approved it.
Cheney had approved it, and said that it had come from Bush.
And that's what we learned in the Senate Torture Report.
Hey, guys, Scott Horton here from Mike Swanson's great book, The War State.
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All right, now, so on the subject of Zubeda's torture, what'd they do to him?
Oh, wow.
What didn't they do to him?
Talk about learned helplessness.
In addition to the torture techniques that we know about, those 10 techniques, waterboarding, the cold sell, the attention grab, the attention slap, you know, all these different kinds of techniques, there were other things that they did.
They learned, for example, that he had this irrational fear of insects.
And so they put him in this coffin with a diaper.
They left him in there for weeks.
But they would open it up periodically to change his diaper.
And then they would throw in cockroaches, right?
A box of cockroaches, just to make him crazy.
They wanted him to- Well, and by the way, say, for example, you don't have a phobia of insects in any particular way, but the CIA locks you in a coffin with a box of cockroaches.
It's just about as bad as having a phobia like that already.
Can you imagine?
Oh, yeah.
You'll come out with a phobia, without a doubt.
It's just sick.
That's all there is to it.
It's just sick.
They would keep him in this dog cage.
It was a large dog cage, like for a German shepherd.
But you're all cubed up in that kind of thing.
And they would leave him in there for weeks.
And he would soil himself, and he couldn't stretch, he couldn't lay, he couldn't stand.
They would chain him to an eye bolt in the ceiling for the same reason, just so he couldn't stand or- I'm sorry, he couldn't sit or lay down or get comfortable.
And they would leave him like that for weeks at a time, with music blasting and the lights on all the time, and you're stripped naked, and the cell is chilled to 50 degrees, and they throw ice water on you.
It got to the point where as soon as either Mitchell or Jessen would enter the cell, he would just start to cry and curl up into a ball.
And that was the whole point.
That was the whole point, but then would they say to him, okay, now tell us the secret?
And then would he?
He would tell them literally anything he thought they wanted to hear just to get them to stop.
So where he was telling Ali Soufan real intelligence, he was just babbling gibberish to Mitchell and Jessen.
You know, with Ali Soufan, Ali would ask him a question like this.
And let me preface this by saying what he gave Ali Soufan that was so important was two things.
Number one was the identity of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who we only knew as Muhtar, right?
We knew that there was this bad guy somewhere out there in the world named Muhtar, and he had masterminded the Bojinka operation where they were going to hijack 747s out of Manila and then fly them into buildings along the U.S. West Coast.
That was in 1996, and it was disrupted.
So we knew Muhtar had been the mastermind of that.
But we didn't know that Muhtar's real name was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
Ali Soufan got that from Abu Zubaydah, number one.
Number two, he gave us al-Qaeda's wiring diagram, which we had no idea of.
We didn't know what it looked like.
We didn't know who reported to whom.
We didn't know where they were located.
And so Ali would ask him, and I'm just making this up as an example, if you were going to do an operation in Dusseldorf, how would you do that?
And Abu Zubaydah would answer, well, I know this guy Mohammed, and here's his phone number.
And Mohammed has a friend Abdullah, and Abdullah's an expert in bomb making.
And Abdullah's got a friend Rashid, and Rashid knows these people that get weapons.
And then we could call the Germans and say, listen, you've got a problem in Dusseldorf.
Here's who you need to round up, and then they could disrupt that cell.
That's the kind of information that he was giving to Ali Soufan.
But then twice, Ali and the rest of the FBI were thrown out of the secret site, and Mitchell and Jessen took over, and all of the information dried up.
Now, the way they were able to get along with this lie by perpetuating this lie for so long is, remember, at the time, the CIA and the FBI still hated each other with a special passion, and the computer systems weren't compatible.
And so Ali's doing these debriefings, he's putting all the intelligence into an FBI cable, he's sending it back to FBI headquarters, and the CIA's none the wiser.
So what Mitchell and Jessen did is once Ali and the FBI guys left, they pulled all of Ali's reporting, they retyped it in the CIA computer system, and they said, oh, we waterboarded him one time, he cracked, and look at all the amazing information that he gave us.
That's how they pulled the wool out over our eyes for so long.
And by our, you mean you were back at CIA headquarters approving all this?
Well, I was at CIA headquarters reading all of it, and I said to a colleague of mine, I said, you know, maybe I'm wrong about all this, because I said, I said, not only was torture immoral and unethical, and in my view, illegal, but it didn't work.
And then they're sending these cables back saying, oh, not only did it work, but it worked fantastically.
Here's the information he's giving us.
And I said, you know, maybe I'm wrong about this.
I still object to it on ethical and moral grounds, but maybe it does work if he's given us this kind of information.
Well, in fact, he wasn't giving us that kind of information.
He was giving it to Ali Sufyan, and we stole it from Ali and just put it in CIA channels.
And when did you find out about that, that that was where they were getting it from?
Not until 2009, when the inspector general's report was released.
And then, so I want to go back to the salt pit torture dungeon for a second, because that's where Golrahman died, and there was another guy.
Mrs. Abu Ghraib was the military prison in Iraq, but it was the CIA that murdered a guy named al-Jamadi there by hanging him from the ceiling with his arms behind his back and suffocating him to death.
Something the Nazis used to do.
Okay.
Thanks for the clarity on that.
And now, according to Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, and then later the AP confirmed his same number, 108 people were killed by the military, or at least died in military captivity after being subject to torture to one degree or another.
As far as I know, I don't know about you, as far as I know, the CIA killed two.
Oh no, because there was the guys that they killed down at Guantanamo too in 2006.
The three guys down there that your partner Hickman wrote all about.
That's right.
I can add those three, so there's five murdered by the CIA, at least during this.
And to tell you the truth, I always believed it was more than five.
When I was at the CIA, my last job at headquarters was I was the executive assistant to the associate deputy director for operations.
So I'm reporting, briefing all this stuff in the morning.
There were the two early on that I briefed in 2002, and then Hickman reported on the other three at Guantanamo.
But you know, there were people sort of just dying in the process all along, and I always wondered if we were killing other prisoners off the books and just simply not reporting it.
You know, if you're in a place like Salt Pit, for example, which is literally hell on earth, what's to keep you from killing somebody and just burying them there and just not reporting it?
And I often wondered if that was the case.
Well, do you have any kind of estimate on the numbers of people that you would hear about dying?
I don't.
But if, you know, Larry Wilkerson, who I have incredible respect for, is saying that the number was as high as that, whether it's all military or a combination of military and CIA, I'm going to believe Larry Wilkerson.
Yeah.
Well, and the AP confirmed his exact same number, 108.
There you have it.
Yeah.
But supposedly those are all military.
That excludes the CIA ones.
That doesn't count even the two, Rahman and Ramadi, much less the three that died at Guantanamo that they still won't admit to.
And by the way, I should clarify here, I do hope people will Google this and read about the Guantanamo murders, but it's the other Scott Horton, the heroic human rights lawyer from Harper's Magazine and Columbia University who did all that great journalism.
I just interviewed him and Hickman about it.
I don't want anyone to get confused.
I wouldn't, you know, that's his great journalism on that case.
And it's pretty ironclad, too, with his follow up articles and everything and with Hickman's book about what happened there.
But you know, it was John Durham who was brought in by Obama and Eric Holder to perform the cover up there, which is exactly what he did.
Yeah, that is exactly right.
And now John Durham finds himself in the news again.
You know, it's kind of fun to think that you would have this bulldog prosecutor, they keep calling him a bulldog.
You have this bulldog prosecutor come in and, you know, do something heroic like, and he has the power to indict and prosecute John Brennan, who guess who I want to see go to prison?
John Brennan.
Oh, yeah.
Boy, what a great day in American history would that be?
Yeah, but I dare not hope or believe.
There's just no way.
He's the same guy that let John Brennan and friends get away with murder here.
He is.
He is.
Yeah.
John Durham is the U.S. attorney for Connecticut.
He's got this reputation as being a pit bull.
I've not seen it yet.
I hope that he is a pit bull on this issue.
I will say that that I have hung my hat on this one hook of hope.
And that is that three or four weeks ago, John Durham said that his investigation was not an inquiry.
It was an investigation and that it had become criminal in nature.
So the New York Times yesterday reported that Durham is specifically investigating John Brennan, that he has asked the CIA to turn over Brennan's emails, Brennan's call logs and copies of contemporaneous notes that Brennan took during meetings with other senior officials, including former FBI Director Comey.
So we can hope that these allegations that Brennan was telling Congress one thing and telling colleagues the opposite thing might result in a couple of charges.
We'll see.
So there's this CIA officer, I'm sorry, his name is escaping me.
It's Larry Johnson.
Yeah.
Larry Johnson.
Yeah.
Former CIA officer Larry Johnson.
Another great researcher.
I'm sorry?
He's another great researcher.
So he had a story that he wrote over at Patrick Lange's blog, another former intelligence official there, DIA and I forget if CIA too.
But anyway, a lot of these intelligence guys hang out over at Patrick Lange's blog, six Semper Tyrannis.
And Larry Johnson said that he had a single source and he wasn't claiming to know it.
He was he was describing it as a single source story.
But he was saying, and I don't know if there have been follow up since then.
I know there was one follow up that was no more conclusive.
But what he says is that his source tells him that John Brennan created a task force in early 2016 for the purpose of entrapping Trump and drumming up this Russiagate plot in the first place.
And and and actually one part of that, a side point on that was he said that when it comes to going after Brennan now that Gina Haspel is on board because they've got beef from before.
And so she has every reason to want to, one, ingratiate herself with Trump and to get back at Brennan by telling the truth about him.
So I wonder if you shed any light on any of that.
Phil Giraldi tells the same story, that there was an actual formal task force that John Brennan set up at the CIA for the specific purpose of going after Donald Trump.
I don't know if that's true.
I actually kind of hope that it is just because I'd like to see Brennan get what I believe he has coming to him for a whole bunch of different reasons.
I believe what you're saying about Gina Haspel, not because not because Gina is the savior of of, you know, all that's right and just and true, but because they're all sociopaths over there and they care only about themselves.
And this is exactly what a senior CIA officer would do to another senior CIA officer if she thought that he was getting in the way of her legacy.
So I absolutely believe that.
Well that's good because that means she does have the rope to hang him with.
But I guess, you know, what would have to happen here would be Trump would have to say to Barr, hey Barr, I really, really, really, really mean it.
I want you guys to pursue this thing to the bitter end.
And then Barr would have to really mean it when he said, yes, sir, and turn around and tell Durham, hey, if we got to tear down all of Langley, Virginia, we are doing this thing.
You know, you have my full support and my full insistence that you go all the way with this.
Anything short of that, it's not going to happen.
It's not.
And don't forget, too, that John Durham now is accomplished enough and famous enough and has enough support on Capitol Hill that he's got to see himself as a future attorney general.
So he's going to want to really put a cherry on top of this thing, too.
Yeah.
Well, but yeah, I mean, that's where his political interest is in not crucifying these guys, because look at how bad what they did is.
I mean, if you really prosecuted John Brennan for framing Trump for treason, I mean, what's right?
You'd have to put him in prison for life.
You'd have to banish him and his family from the country forever.
You'd have to, you'd have to turn D.C. upside down.
Unless they decide to to charge him with process crimes that are going to result in whatever, like the George Papadopoulos sentence of 14 days or or 65 days in jail like Rick Gates got the other day.
But with that comes a felony conviction, the loss of a firearm, the loss of a federal pension, the loss of the right to vote.
You know, the little final paragraph on your Wikipedia bio that you finished your career by going to prison for two weeks or two months or two years or whatever it was.
So who knows?
I'm I'm kind of enjoying this.
You know, a friend of mine at the agency told me one time that he really believed in that old adage.
The bigger they are, the harder they fall.
We were talking about the former CIA director under Bill Clinton.
Oh, my God.
His name escapes me right now.
We'll see.
But no, it was after Woolsey.
It was he he he wanted to write his memoirs, and so he took an agency laptop with him after he retired.
John Deutch.
John Deutch.
It was OK.
I'm sorry.
I thought he was before Woolsey.
Pardon me.
No.
Remember, Woolsey was the first one and he lasted about a year and a half and then he he resigned or was forced out and endorsed Bob Dole for president.
Yeah.
And the anecdote there was that Bill Clinton met him once and said, I don't want that guy anywhere near me ever again.
Yeah.
We just totally understand.
I hate to sympathize with old Bill, but when it comes to Jim Woolsey, I'm with him.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
I agree.
Anyway, sorry.
So John Deutch, you were saying.
Yeah.
So John Deutch, he ended up he ended up taking a plea.
They bumped it down to a misdemeanor just so he could save face.
But it ruined his reputation and nobody ever heard of the guy again.
He required he retired quietly to Massachusetts and that was the end of it.
Right.
Well, you know, I don't know.
I hadn't noticed this.
I'm not much of a film buff, but someone was pointing out to me a spoiler alert for anybody who hasn't seen the report yet.
I'm about to ruin one part of it, which is that John Brennan is played by the guy that played the psychopathic murder in the Silence of the Lambs.
She puts the lotion on her skin or she gets the hose again or whatever.
They got that guy to play John Brennan, which is just perfect.
And they really do a great job of showing, you know, his temerity to spy on the Senate and falsely accuse those staffers of breaking into CIA computers to have them prosecuted and all that.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, that's, you know, I'm proud to say that that I was the script consultant on that film.
Oh, yeah.
The writer director.
Yeah.
Scott Burns.
He's an old friend of mine.
He came to me in 2015 and said that he was going to write a spec script for HBO.
He had a first look deal at HBO and he was kind of looking for something to do.
He's written huge blockbusters.
He wrote The Bourne Ultimatum, for example.
The informant.
He had some big, big blockbuster movies under his belt, but he was looking for something more serious and he wanted to both write it and direct it.
So he came up with the script and HBO just wasn't interested in it.
And so he held on to that script for years, two, three, four years.
And then finally, Amazon said that they would take it.
Now it's a big hit.
Yeah, it is.
It's really great, too.
And, you know, I got to say, because I'm interested in all of this stuff.
And so the whole time that Dianne Feinstein's committee was writing this report and doing their investigation, you know, me and my guests, we would cover it all the time, all the news stories about it and whatever.
And yet still, there are these faceless bureaucrats somewhere, these kind of imaginary people in some basement somewhere supposedly doing some work.
And then we find out after the fact they wrote a 7,000 page report.
But they're still completely opaque, these characters.
And so this movie, I really appreciate the way it was all brought to life.
It's kind of weird, that weird guy from the new weird Star Wars movies is in it.
Adam Driver.
I guess he's a big star these days.
So that's good.
If it's driving people to the movie and showing that part of the story, terrible pun there.
But yeah, no, I hated episodes seven and eight, and I'm probably going to hate nine when I see it in an hour or so.
But I got to respect that guy now because he did do a good job of bringing that character to life, I think.
And I really enjoyed watching that film.
I'm really glad it was made.
And I guess I'm really glad that you helped consult on it and make sure that it was tight.
Thank you.
He did a good job.
He really did.
He took the whole thing very, very seriously.
And he wanted to be completely true to the record.
And he was.
Yeah.
Was it your idea to get the guy from Sons of the Lambs to play John Brennan?
I wish.
How perfect.
See, you know, this is the strength of a really great casting director.
You know, like how The Sopranos was perfectly cast and Goodfellas perfectly cast.
That's how this was.
It was perfect casting.
Yeah.
Well, that's good.
It's a real skill.
You know, I did hear, I tried to get ahold of the guy, I haven't been able to, I need to double down on that.
But I did hear the interview with Daniel Jones.
That's the character that the movie is based around there by Jeremy Scahill.
And it was really good.
He had a lot to say.
That was really good.
He did a good job.
Did you, by the way, you know him or did you spend time working with him or talking with him about this stuff?
He said he was uncomfortable meeting me.
And so I just left it at that.
Oh, okay.
Well, you were involved in a way, right?
So he wants to, I guess, keep any conflict of interest out of that.
Yeah.
And that was cool.
I testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee back then, not before the Intelligence Committee.
And the truth is that the Intelligence Committee was in up to its neck with the torture program.
They had approved it.
They had financed it.
And then they expressed outrage that it had gone as far as it had gone, which was kind of funny to me just because they were all in on it.
You know, this is this is my beef with Dianne Feinstein.
Dianne Feinstein was one of the foremost cheerleaders for the CIA on Capitol Hill.
There were very few people, Democrats or Republicans, who loved the CIA as much as Dianne Feinstein did.
And in fact, when Obama became president, remember, he had trouble finding a CIA director.
He had offered the job to three or four different people.
Nobody wanted it.
He couldn't name Brennan because the progressives were up in arms.
Brennan had been the number three at the agency during the torture program under George W.
Bush.
And so finally, Leon Panetta agreed to take the job.
But Dianne Feinstein said she would vote for Panetta only if Panetta chose Steve Kappas as his number two.
But why would you name Steve Kappas when Steve Kappas was one of the godfathers, one of the creators of the CIA torture program?
But he got that job because Dianne Feinstein insisted that it be him.
So to have Dianne Feinstein portrayed in this movie as this great champion of human rights, it's just nonsense.
Yeah.
Well, and as you say, she was the, I guess the Republicans were in the majority, most of the time in the Senate.
They were in the minority.
Oh, no, actually, because Jeffress had switched, right?
So she was the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee from the time of the start of, you know, the terror war on, because Jeffress had switched before 9-11 even.
That's right.
He became an independent.
So she was not just the ranking member.
She was the, or was she the chairman?
She was the chair.
She was the chair.
Because I was trying to think, I guess there were some senators who had come and gone by then.
But, uh, right.
No.
So, and so she really had to prove this all along.
So she, she, I guess we give her the credit for ordering this investigation up.
Yeah.
You know, I do.
I give her credit for that.
But then I fault her.
But it's only, yeah, the thing is she created in the first place, so.
Yeah.
And I fault Wyden and, uh, and I fault Udall for not going public with the whole damn thing at the end, especially Udall.
Udall had given up his seat.
He was retiring.
He could have put the entire 5,000 plus page torture report in the, in the congressional record and just declassified it in the, in a matter of seconds.
Yep.
And he refused to do that.
Yep.
And, um, well for that matter, there have been at least dozens of people in DC with access to this thing.
And at the beginning I know that they turned over copies of the report to the department of justice and I'm not sure which other agencies, and then they ended up giving them back.
We don't even want this thing in our safe.
Take it.
Yeah.
And, and if the intercept is to be believed, most of those copies have been destroyed.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Good point.
Yeah.
I believe, but yeah, depending on, um, you know, as long as it's not Jim Risen, the Russiagate truth or lunatic who gave up all of his credentials as an investigative reporter might be all right, but, or Murtaza Al-Qaeda over there.
Certainly not him, but, but the rest of them, they're okay though.
A lot of them, most of them.
Well, we can agree to disagree on that.
Well, oh yeah, I guess there's Matthew Cole who got you put in prison.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Matthew Cole.
And not just me.
He got Reality Winner put in prison and he got Terry Albury, the FBI whistleblower put in prison.
I, I've always maintained that, uh, that once is an accident, twice is a terrible coincidence.
Three times you're secretly working for the FBI.
Yeah.
Uh, you know what?
He did great work on the Navy SEALs war crimes in Afghanistan, but then again, maybe that was all fraud too.
Probably not though.
I don't trust the guy.
Well, um, I still like Greenwald.
I do too.
I like Greenwald.
I went to college with him.
He's a good guy.
Serious journalist, dogged researcher.
I have a lot of respect for him.
Yeah.
And I think people are under the false impression that he runs that thing, which he is not the editor.
No, he's not.
No, he's not.
Yeah.
Um, I see, you know, whenever he says anything, I see people attacking him for Reality Winner all along.
And you can tell that he's tired of saying that he also very much disapproves of what happened in that situation, but it really wasn't him, you know?
Yeah.
But they, they never fired Matthew Cole.
He still has a job there.
Yeah.
Um, all right.
So you know what?
We didn't even talk about these pictures.
Can we mention real quick, these drawings of Abu Zubaydah that finally were published here before?
Sure.
Yeah.
You bet.
So Abu Zubaydah has been drawing pictures of himself being tortured in a variety of different horrific positions.
And these pictures were finally brought out of Guantanamo by his attorney, Mark Denbrough.
Mark is a professor of law at Seton Hall University in Newark and has long been Abu Zubaydah's, one of several pro bono attorneys representing Abu Zubaydah.
How in the world he ever got them declassified?
I don't know.
And, and he said that it took years to do, and it's funny, the CIA insisted on blacking out the faces of the stick figure drawings of the torturers that Abu Zubaydah had done.
Funny to me.
Like you can't identify your torture from a stick figure and that's what it is too.
But they insisted on putting black boxes over the faces of the torturers and the drawings.
Still, these are very, very powerful.
They ran in the Sunday New York Times a couple of weeks ago and there's been an outcry, justifiably so, that we really should never have been involved in this kind of thing in the first place.
Yeah, it really is something to see.
Even in the drawings, the expressions on the face of Zubaydah's drawing of himself as he's going through this and that kind of thing.
You know, it's, I'm not much of an artist or a critic of art, but it, you know, sometimes a real simple drawing can have so much expression in it, you know.
Oh yeah.
You see the horror on the guy's face, you know, the way it's drawn there.
Without a doubt.
Yeah, that's something I went through.
And listen, I don't have time, I really got to run, but I do want to mention this great article that someone forwarded to me.
This discussion came up in my Reddit room and it's called Marty Gotsfeld, Another Whistleblower in Solitary Confinement.
And he's been in solitary for more than nine months now.
Not just in solitary, but in something called a CMU, a communications management unit.
So he's not allowed to send or receive any mail except to the court.
He's not allowed to send or receive any, or make or receive any phone calls.
He's not allowed to have any visits.
They've really completely cut this guy off.
And this is something that we talked about in the past that people check on the site.
You can find my interviews with Will Potter on this.
And this is something that they use, you know, in the name of people like Ramzi Youssef or the Sheikh Rahman, these kinds of people, they go ahead and use this against left-wing political activists oftentimes is what we see here.
Yeah.
And it's funny.
Marty considers himself to be a conservative journalist and he truly is a whistleblower.
I mean, this is like the definition of whistleblowing, what he did.
He brought to light evidence that a young teenage girl was being abused at Children's Hospital in Boston.
And it turned out that everything he said was right.
Now they charged him with computer crimes because to bring attention to the case, he took down the children's sentence.
He got 10 years, and not just 10, but 10 in solitary and CMU.
Man.
All right.
Well, listen, I hope people look at that.
It's at Mint Press News.
Marty Gottsfeld, another whistleblower in solitary confinement.
That's from last March.
And then the subject of our interview today mostly here is ConsortiumNews.com.
Those torture drawings in the NYT.
Thank you again, John.
Thank you, Scott.
Good to talk to you.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at LibertarianInstitute.org, at ScottHorton.org, AntiWar.com, and Reddit.com slash Scott Horton Show.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at FoolsErrand.us.
