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 scotthorton show.
All right, you guys, you know how I'm always telling you that even though Gareth Porter wrote a book called The CIA Insider's Guide to the Iran Crisis, From CIA Coup to the Brink of War, that doesn't make Gareth a CIA guy, it's his co-author, John Kiriakou, the torture whistleblower who's the CIA officer, and they co-wrote the book together.
That's the thing of it, and man is it good too.
Now Manufactured Crisis by Gareth Porter, of course, is the book on Iran's civilian nuclear program, but this one is all about that and more, and the entire American policy, and updated through the Trump years and all that.
The CIA Insider's Guide to the Iran Crisis by Gareth Porter and John Kiriakou, former CIA counterterrorism officer.
Welcome back to the show, John.
How are you?
Thanks.
Doing well.
Thanks.
Happy to be back with you.
Well, good.
I'm happy to talk to you again, and especially on this important topic, hardly anybody knows this name.
It hasn't seemed to have caught on as a viral cause, celeb with anything or anything like that.
I've been told, Pamela Anderson, that this guy Daniel Hale is going to prison.
He's already in prison, even though he hasn't been sentenced yet for telling the truth about American atrocities, especially in Afghanistan and in Pakistan, I think.
So go ahead, tell us the story, and tell us why it is that he's already in prison if he's supposed to be out on bail right now.
You got it.
So Daniel Hale was an NSA contractor who was involved in the drone program as a targeting analyst.
He recognized very early on that the drone program was carrying out illegal strikes on civilian targets all over the place, Yemen, Afghanistan, Somalia, all over.
He went to the intercept, to Jeremy Scahill, and he wasn't covert about it.
He was pretty well out there, to the point where he even appeared in a documentary with Jeremy and on a college campus to talk about the drone program.
He was immediately arrested and charged with multiple counts of espionage, and has been fighting it ever since.
So, you know, Daniel, as you might expect, has been depressed, very depressed at the prospect of going to prison.
What makes it worse is that he's broke, and he's represented by federal public defenders.
Now, the federal public defenders, even in the Eastern District of Virginia, are terrific.
They're cleared, they're experienced, but like any public defender, they're overworked and underpaid, and they have other cases to worry about, too.
So the guy is just petrified at the prospect of spending a good chunk of the rest of his life in prison.
So I've been in close, regular touch with him, and here's what happened.
Earlier this month, you know what, I'm going to back up to March 31st.
March 31st, he decided to do something that was very unorthodox on his lawyer's advice.
He decided to plead guilty to a single count of espionage, which carries a maximum sentence of 10 years.
There are four other espionage charges pending against him, but his calculation was, if I plead guilty to this one count, which essentially covers everything that he did, the other four counts were just heaped on.
He was hoping that, or is hoping, that the judge takes pity on him, gives him a short sentence, and dismisses the other charges.
Well, because he decided to take this plea on his own, and not as part of a deal with prosecutors, the prosecutors have refused to drop the other four charges.
So instead of facing under 10 years, which is what he was hoping, he's still looking at 50 years in prison.
So in early May, he and I got together, and he was telling me that he's very depressed, but he's committed to fighting this thing.
He explained his reasoning behind the plea deal, and said that his lawyers kept bandying about the number five, five years, you know, maybe a little bit less.
And I said, Daniel, five years is a steal, and there's a trick to doing this.
I said, if you've got a problem with drugs or alcohol, you go into something called the RDAP program, the Residential Drug and Alcohol Program that the Bureau of Prisons runs.
You sit there every week for a year, and you watch a DVD of the A&E Network show, Intervention, and they take 12 to 18 months off your sentence.
And then with good behavior, they take another 15% off, and then six months in a halfway house, next thing you know, you're out in two and a half years.
Well, for whatever reason, the court-appointed shrink that they ordered him to talk to every week decided, you know what, this guy's depressed, and maybe he's suicidal, just in case I'm going to have him locked up for his own safety.
Well, I can tell you from personal experience, he was not suicidal.
Now he is, because he's in solitary confinement, quote unquote, for his own safety, and he's stuck there.
He's not going to be sentenced until July 13th, and then, you know, what's he going to get?
Is he going to get five, 10, 50?
We don't know.
And so that's what he's most worried about.
Yeah, you got to love the idea that if somebody really is suicidal, the way we put them on suicide precautions is to lock them in solitary.
Ridiculous, ridiculous.
And to make matters worse, even if he wasn't suicidal, which he isn't, because of COVID, these holding facilities are all locked down.
So he would be in solitary confinement no matter what.
Well, the United Nations has said that the US practice of solitary confinement is a form of torture.
And we know that when people are isolated in prisons, they become suicidal.
But then again, maybe that's the calculation.
Maybe that's what they were trying to do, was to make him suicidal.
Who knows?
And anybody, I mean, if you just think about this for a second, you know, people say sometimes imagine being locked in a thing the size of your bathroom, but everybody's got kind of a nice bathroom, porcelain throne and shower and cushy thing on the floor, you know, the bath mat and all that.
That's a bad analogy.
I like the one about a parking space.
Imagine being locked in something the size of a parking space by yourself for an indefinite period of time there.
And that's a fate worse than death.
I'd figure out a way to kill myself immediately in that circumstance, pretty much.
I don't know immediately, but if I if I knew I wasn't getting out of there any time soon.
Yes.
Well, guess I had my chance at being alive and now it's over.
I spent 10 days in solitary confinement one time and, you know, it was difficult, but not crazy because I knew it was going to just be 10 days.
But what made it hard was they took my glasses from me and I'm blind without my glasses.
So I couldn't read anything.
There was literally nothing to do 24 hours a day.
They would let me out for one hour every day to take a shower and to exercise.
Otherwise, what I decided to do was to get 10,000 steps a day.
Now, this this cell I was in was six feet by 16 feet.
So like you say, it's a parking space.
And I would just walk in circles all day long.
And you sleep on a steel bunk with no mattress, no pillow.
So I had to like ball up a bath towel just to use as a pillow.
But it would make my back and hips hurt so much laying on a steel slab that I would get up three or four times a night and just keep walking in circles any more than 10 days.
Yes.
You're going to start going nuts.
And then because you're locked down, you know, breakfast is is a little bit of oatmeal and maybe an apple.
And then lunch and dinner are a bologna sandwich, a bag of chips and a and a little half pint of Kool-Aid.
And that's it.
Every single day.
Yeah.
You know, I think it's pretty easy to conceive if anybody ever read the encyclopedia of serial killers or anything about the worst sorts of true crime stuff, people who commit horrendous atrocities against children, something like that, you think, you know, I don't care what happens to them.
Right.
But there's a lot of people in prison who aren't the worst of the worst like that at all and get sent to the hole for pretty much anything.
And in some states like in Louisiana, and I was reading, I think in Michigan, they just keep people in there for years at a time sometimes and for the slightest thing.
And these are people, even if they're convicted of the very worst crimes, that just means that the D.A. prosecuted them.
That doesn't mean they did anything at all, as far as I'm concerned.
That's right.
You know, unless there's obvious open public proof beyond a shadow of a doubt, I don't trust a D.A. and a judge and a jury to do the right thing.
And so totally.
And really.
Right.
Like even even someone that, you know, beyond a shadow of a doubt is guilty of the worst crimes against helpless, innocent people, then still it's wrong.
It's obviously a huge mistake to empower anyone to have the authority, the supposed authority then to treat them in this way, because you see how they abuse it.
And probably who deserves to be in the hole more than anybody else.
The people who are throwing people in the hole.
Amen.
So true.
Anyway.
And this guy is an American hero.
This guy.
And that's the bottom line.
That's the bottom line.
This guy sacrificed everything that he has in his life to make this important information public.
Remember.
And I know that this is a mantra with me and people are probably tired of hearing it.
But it is illegal to classify a crime if something is a criminal event.
Right.
If the government is doing something that is that is criminal, like killing civilians in something is in a zone, an area that has not been declared a war zone, that is illegal.
And because it's illegal, it's illegal to classify the program.
And so as far as I'm concerned, the guy hasn't committed a crime in the first place.
Yeah.
Well, and clearly they're killing innocent people in the way that in this is everybody can read this at the Intercept, the assassination, the drone papers, it's called at the Intercept in the book.
It's the same thing in book form is called the assassination complex.
And I relied on his leaking, you know, in my book, Fool's Errand about the war in Afghanistan and the way he talks about how they're just blindly killing people based on not even cell phone numbers, but numbers of people who ever were associated with a cell phone that ever called another cell phone that ever called another cell phone and this kind of thing.
And then whoever they kill, they just label them all enemies killed in action unless it's proven otherwise, which it never is because they don't go to investigate how guilty they are.
And so but then they also admit that they have this incredibly low score on their so-called jackpots where they actually kill the guy they're trying to kill, presuming that their intelligence is saying that he's an enemy is even correct at all.
And it's infinitesimally small compared to the amount of collateral damage.
So it's not really the same as the full scale invasion of Iraq or something like that, where a million people were killed.
But still, it's thousands and thousands and thousands and probably tens of thousands of Afghans, certainly thousands and thousands of Pakistanis and Somalis and Yemenis in the drone wars of the Obama years.
Yeah, you're absolutely right.
And you know, there's no media outrage, outrage.
Nobody's marching in the streets.
Aside from Code Pink and the Answer Coalition, maybe.
But this is not an issue that the American people have latched on to.
If it weren't for Daniel Hale, we wouldn't even have any idea really that it was going on.
Hey, you said he was featured in a documentary.
Which one was that?
Yeah.
It's called National Bureau.
OK.
Yeah.
It's I haven't seen that in a long time now, but I'll have to go back and look.
And he's he goes.
So this goes to what you said, too, about he was pretty open about this.
And, you know, the Intercept has gotten a lot of people caught.
And I know this is an entire subspecialty of yours, John.
You know, Matthew Cole, the guy that got you busted, works there.
And he's the same guy that got Reality Winner busted.
But so, you know, this has been lumped in in the same way that Jeremy Scahill or the Intercept somehow failed this guy, Daniel Hale.
But so I wanted to follow up on that.
Do you really think it's the case that this guy just got himself caught?
He wasn't being careful.
He got himself caught.
Correct.
So it wasn't anything that the Intercept or Scahill did sloppily or anything like that?
No.
I mean, trust me, I'm happy to be the first one to point the finger at the Intercept.
But no, that that's not what happened in this case.
He Daniel decided that he was going to go public and be public about the drone program.
Right.
They didn't blow his identity.
And guys, you have to see National Bird, everybody.
It's so important.
And I don't know how to find it online, but I'm sure it's at one of these things.
You know what?
There's at least a trailer on YouTube.
And I see here you can actually rent it on YouTube and on Amazon.
Oh, great.
Yeah.
It's a it's an absolutely terrific documentary, award winning documentary.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's really something else.
And, you know, it addresses the issues of PTSD and what psychiatrists are now calling moral injury.
Right.
And those are two really important themes that have run through this case.
Hey, wait.
So let me tee that up for you a little bit.
Oh, come on.
A bunch of cowards hiding in a trailer in Nevada, murdering people hiding on the other side of the planet from the people they're killing.
They have PTSD like they're the infantry on the ground.
Come on, John Kiriakou.
You know, you'd be surprised.
People act like tough guys and they're really not tough guys.
They're they're human beings.
So they spend all day killing people like they're playing a video game and then they go home to their families and they act like everything is is normal.
I was giving a speech at a at a college in St. Paul, Minnesota, a few years back, and a guy came up to me after the speech and said that he had been a drone operator and that there was there was an event that had sort of pushed him into activism.
He said that he was sitting there with his his little joystick and and his screen in Nevada.
His boss was at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, and they were both looking at their screens and they identified what they thought was the enemy.
And the boss said, fire.
And the guy said, I can't fire.
There's a child there.
And the boss said, that's not a child.
It's a goat.
And he said, it's not a goat.
I'm looking at it.
It's a child.
And the guy says, I'm ordering you to fire.
And he said, I can't fire if there's a child there.
And the guy threatened to to court martial him.
And he said, I'm not going to fire.
And he didn't fire.
And it was a child.
And so he was given a general discharged and pushed out of the military.
But he said, you know, we kill people all day long, every day.
I have to be able to convince myself in my own mind that I'm only killing bad people.
I can't just kill a child and pretend it didn't happen.
Pretend that it was a goat.
And you see this kind of thing all the time.
There's a lot of footage in National Bird about where they've got audio of the drone operators talking to each other, saying, go ahead and fire.
No, I think I see a kid.
That's not a kid.
No, I think it's an infant.
I think the woman's holding an infant.
Oh, are we supposed to shoot women, too?
Well, she is with the bad guy.
You know, these kinds of conversations.
Yeah.
Where everything is black and white.
It's all very stark.
And then they end up firing and just killing everybody.
Right.
And, you know, and then what is my one of the comments, too, was, you know, if you're flying an F-16 or something like that and whatever the hell and dropping a bomb on somebody, you don't even really know if you hit your target to get home or, you know, you don't know much about it.
Right.
But when you're a drone pilot, you're sitting there hovering around, following these people around sometimes for weeks and you see their life.
You know who they are, where they work.
You see them with their friends.
You see them with their family.
And you start, even though it's all from a bird's eye point of view, you start to kind of, you know, understand their humanity and fill in the gaps with your own imagination about who they must be and and what it is that they and then now you kill them.
And so, yeah, you're hiding behind the entire diameter of the earth.
I said circumference earlier.
I meant diameter.
But so you're not in danger.
But still, it's the moral injury.
It's not the it's not the mortal fear.
It's the guilt for looking back at those people that you killed.
And then, in fact, like even on the children thing, like obviously we want to rule you don't kill children.
But then that sort of de facto means that any adult is fair game.
You know, if they do jumping jacks or, you know, carry a bag of something over their shoulder, that's the signature of a terrorist.
And now you kill them.
Will that be murder in any other circumstance in the world in that murder?
And these drone operators are very clear, too, that that any male over the age of 12 is a target, is a legitimate target, because any male over the age of 12 can pick up an AK-47 and shoot an American soldier.
So it doesn't matter in many cases if there are children there.
They're perfectly happy to kill the children, too.
You know, you see a lot of it.
Wait a minute.
Stop for a second.
Stop for a second.
Just to be clear here.
We're talking with former CIA counterterrorism official John Kiriakou.
And you're telling me the rule is 12 years old.
Yeah.
Yes.
And and in National Bird, you'll hear these drone operators talking about it like, well, is the target old enough?
Oh, he looks like he's older than 12.
He can pick up a gun and then they just fire.
Can pick up a gun.
Yes.
Not that they have the gun, but that they could pick up a gun that makes them a legitimate target.
And this isn't this is one of those things that Americans don't know.
Is that any different than the Gestapo rounding up all the people that they want to murder in the center of town and just machine gunning them all to death?
Yeah.
You're absolutely right.
When I was at the CIA, I worked for a guy who was in a very, very senior position, an agency wide leadership position.
And he had authority over the kill list.
And so he only lasted in the job about six weeks because they would call him in the middle of the night and say, you know, we've got the guy in our sights, the drones right on top of him, request permission to fire.
And he would say, well, you know, let's think about this.
Is his wife with him or his kids with him?
Are we sure that it's the guy?
Are you sure you're on the right, you know, jeep or whatever?
And then by the time he's made up his mind, the guy's gone.
And they said, look, when people are asking you for permission to launch, that's just a formality.
You're supposed to say launch.
And he wasn't willing to do that.
And they fired him.
There was another guy I used to sit, you know, 10 feet away from.
And every day we'd say, hey, man, how you doing?
Hey, how was your weekend?
How's your family?
What's new?
What's going on?
And then I said to a colleague, I said, you know, he's such a nice guy, but I don't even really know what he does for a living here.
I sit 10 feet away from him.
And my friend said, John, he works in the special activities division.
What do you think he does here?
And I thought, oh, crap.
Yeah.
He's out killing people every day, like he'll disappear for a week at a time and come back.
Hey, buddy, how you doing?
And I'm thinking now, geez, how many people did you kill over the last week?
Good grief.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's all to keep us safe.
Right.
OK, you guys, check it out.
The new book is finally done.
Enough already.
Time to end the war on terrorism.
It's available in paperback and Kindle.
Also, the audio book is coming, although that might take a little while for all those who participated in the big fundraiser of twenty nineteen.
I have the list and you will be getting all your stuff as soon as my boxes of wholesale copies arrive.
Thank you so much to everybody for your support of the show and of the Libertarian Institute.
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Listen, we're going to get back to Daniel Hale in a second, but.
Your job was grabbing the actual co-conspirators in the 9-11 attack out there in Pakistan in the early days of this thing.
So, yes, on some level, and I read one of your books, I forgot if I read to I got what Biden's got nowadays.
Kiriakou, forgive me, but so obviously you're going to defend some of what you did there as absolutely necessary.
But then at what point you're telling me the real terror war ended and the bogus one began.
That's a great question.
You know, right after 9-11, when I was sent out to Pakistan to head counterterrorism operations there, my orders were very simple.
My orders were to capture and send them to to Guantanamo, where they would wait for two, three weeks before going on trial in the United States, in the federal districts of Boston, New York and Washington.
That was the original plan.
And when we made our first captures, I called headquarters and I said, well, we got these guys.
What do you want me to do with them?
And they said, oh, put them on a C-12.
We're going to send out a C-12 and send them to Guantanamo.
And I said, Guantanamo, Cuba?
And they said, yeah.
I said, why in the world would we send them to Cuba?
And they said, we're just going to hold them there for a couple of weeks until we can figure out which federal district court to send them to for trial.
And I said, oh, OK, that's a great idea.
So my job was to was to take them alive, put them on a plane and send them home for trial.
And that actually never happened.
Guantanamo became a permanent way station.
Nobody went on trial, and I recognized relatively early on that this just wasn't going to work.
I recognized it when we captured Abu Zubaydah March 22nd, 2002.
He was shot and wounded and we sent him to a secret prison and then began torturing him on August 1st, 2002.
So it was clear to me then that the system that we knew and loved as Americans that was enshrined in the Constitution was not going to work.
These guys were not going to get the constitutional rights that that they, you know, deserved.
And of course, they're still being held down there.
The people who are actually guilty are still yet to be convicted of that crime.
That's right.
You really deserve it.
Right.
Like Ramzi bin al-Shibh and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
Exactly.
How many of those guys are really guilty, John, down there out of the 40 that are left at Guantanamo?
You know, probably around a dozen were truly bad guys.
But then you have people like Mohamed Oudslahi from Mauritania.
I've become friendly with Mohamed.
You know, this poor son of a gun.
The reason why the CIA grabbed him was because he had a cousin who was a low level nobody in bin Laden's circle.
And the cousin had called him on a cell phone to ask him to check in on the cousin's dad because he heard that his dad was sick.
So he calls Mohamed Oudslahi and says, hey, can you go in the village and check on my dad?
I heard he's not doing very well.
And he's like, sure, I'll go check on your dad.
And the agency grabs him.
You got a phone call from a known cell phone near bin Laden and the poor guy's 14 years in Guantanamo.
Well, there were a lot of people like that and a lot of people who had done even less than that who ended up in Guantanamo.
Man, I interviewed a Air Force colonel who was representing, you know, was the mandated attorney, defense attorney representing a guy who was in there.
I guess this would have been in 2014 or something like that.
So he'd done a good dozen years in there or more.
And they finally admitted the evidence against him was salt and sugar.
Or the precursor chemical weapons, you know, Al-Qaeda terrorism links that he had.
Yeah.
See what they do.
I mean, like you said a minute ago, Scott, there are some bad people down there.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is a bad guy.
He has the blood of 3000 Americans on his hands.
But how do you put a guy on trial when his confession and most of the evidence you have against him, you you collected as a result of torture?
You know what?
Why don't they just parachute him into the Idlib province to join forces with Abu Mohammed al-Jalani and his friends there, the moderate rebels against Assad?
Exactly.
He must be so jealous of Jalani, right?
That's not fair.
CIA gives this guy a billion dollars.
I'm languishing in prison down here.
Right.
And he's legitimately Al-Qaeda.
Oh, yeah.
Well, and in fact, I can't wait till the full front line documentary comes out.
But, you know, he says, oh, yeah, no, we're not really part of Al-Qaeda anymore.
But Martin Smith evidently did not say to him, oh, yeah, we'll denounce Ayman al-Zawahiri right now.
And let's hear it.
You know?
Yeah, I didn't hear it.
That didn't come up.
Anyway, let's talk about my man here.
50 years.
So tell me, I understand he was throwing himself on the mercy of the court and the DOJ.
Bad call.
They're prosecuting him under the Espionage Act.
So his lawyer just could not get a deal.
They just would not give him a deal.
So he just decided to plead guilty anyway and just hope that somehow that would, you know, change their mind a little bit.
They would go easy and they're just not.
So he's essentially and he's going to be sentenced in what, two months?
Yeah.
July 13th.
The feds would not budge off of 10 years.
And Daniel, the last time I talked to him, he was so distraught.
He just kept saying, I can't do a decade.
I can't do half a decade.
I can't.
I can't get through it.
And I kept telling him, Daniel, you're far tougher than you realize you are.
And then with ARDAP and good behavior and house arrest and and halfway house, it's not going to be a long period of time.
I said, listen, I was in prison for like a week and the acting boss of the Banano crime family asked me to take a walk with him.
It was snowing.
It was evening.
It was dark.
And we're just walking in circles around the outdoor basketball court.
And he said to me, how much time do you have?
And I said, 30 months.
And it feels like 30 years.
And he said, let me give you some advice.
If someone asks you how long you have, you tell them you have five years, because if people find out that you have a sentence that's so short, they're going to kick your ass because they're they're jealous.
So tell people that you're here for five years.
And then he says to me, two and a half years.
Are you crazy?
He said, you can do that standing on your head between good behavior and halfway house.
You're going to be out in a year and a half, maybe two.
And I ended up going home after 23 months.
He's like, you could do the time on the surface of the moon for 23 months.
And he was right.
You know, it was just depression clouding my my judgment.
And I tried to convey this to Daniel, too.
It seems like a lifetime.
But it's not.
You know, I was facing a maximum of 45 years, but realistically, 12 to 18 years had I gone to trial.
And one of my lawyers said he told me to take the deal for two and a half years.
And he said, this can be a blip in your life or it can be the defining event of your life.
Make it the blip.
And I know that's what Daniel's trying to do, but he's still so close to the issue that he just can't get past the idea of five to 10 years.
Now, with that, he's really lucky to have a friend in you, though, John, to give him all this advice from, you know, your first person point of view there.
Thank you.
That means a lot to me.
I'm I I'm so worried about the guy.
I'm so worried about his mental health.
I'm afraid he's going to do something out of desperation and I'm trying to get him to just relax.
But how do you do that in solitary confinement?
Well, you know, I think you told me before, too, that the Italian mobsters all really liked you because they're really patriotic and they like CIA.
Oh, you're CIA.
All right.
You can be friends with us.
Does that work if you're NSA, too?
Yes.
I'll tell you who it doesn't work for is FBI.
We're going to hate the FBI as much as I do.
And that was one of the reasons we were able to bond like we did.
In fact, I'm still in touch with all these guys.
We're meeting up again in a couple of weeks in Atlantic City.
Maybe I shouldn't even say that.
But but, you know, they're they're honorable guys.
They're criminals in their own little worlds.
But honor and duty and patriotism mean something to these guys.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, let's change the subject now.
Daniel Ellsberg has not exactly recently leaked a document he posted on the Internet two, three years ago when his book on nuclear weapons came out, The Doomsday Machine.
Yeah.
And I think from what I read and well, it's Charlie Savage.
So you never know.
But in Charlie Savage's, you know, rendition of the story in The New York Times, he posted a footnote in the book that said, hey, listen, you can go and look at this document.
And it's got things that are not in the redacted version.
But nobody really noticed that or picked up on that.
I don't remember that.
But then apparently a historian at the National Security Archive at George Washington University did notice it and went and found it.
And then somehow I forget exactly the cause and effect where this came back to Ellsberg's attention.
And Ellsberg decided to promote it and give it to Savage to publish in The New York Times.
And it's a document describing the debate over whether to nuke China over Taiwan in 1958.
Yeah.
And Ellsberg also said to Charlie Savage, you tell the Department of Justice, I said, indict me.
Oh, and people if people are wondering, he stole this document back.
He liberated this document back when he liberated the Pentagon Papers.
Yeah.
This was one of the few that he was able to hang on to on the nuclear weapons topic.
He apparently lost most of them, he says.
But he's 90 years old now, John.
Yeah, he celebrated his 90th birthday a few weeks back.
I'll tell you what, I'm I'm almost 57 years old, so I'm sort of beyond the age of having heroes.
But Dan Ellsberg is my hero.
He's sort of the the godfather to all national security whistleblowers.
But I am so honored to be able to call him a friend.
I mean, I still listen to this show, too.
He tells me, oh, you're kidding me, walking on my treadmill, listening to your show, Scott.
And that's just the highlight of my life.
That's wonderful.
Dan is a wonderful patriot.
Hi, Dan.
He's a patriot.
And, you know, even after all these years, all these decades now to stand up to the to the Justice Department and to the national security apparatus like he is doing is inspirational.
Yeah.
And by the way, we're going to have him on the show next week.
He's busy writing an op-ed for The New York Times right now.
Oh, fantastic.
But then so we're going to have him on the show next week to talk about this.
And he is essentially I mean, the plan this to be very clear for everybody here, John, the he is trying to get indicted and prosecuted on what could be a life sentence charge for leaking this top secret information about nuclear war, although it is out of date, it's still highly classified.
And he's daring them to indict him and prosecute him and convict him for espionage the same way they did to you, the same way they're doing to Daniel Hale right now, the same way they did to Thomas Drake and so many other great whistleblowers of this century so far.
And then he wants to take it to the Supreme Court.
And he's confident that the First Amendment will protect him and that the Supreme Court in the case of Ellsberg versus these pigs will finally strike down this practice once and for all.
You know, he and I had a conversation back in 2013 or 14 about appealing an Espionage Act conviction to the Supreme Court in order to try to have it ruled unconstitutional, which I believe it is.
And my lawyers did, too.
It's unconstitutionally broad and unconstitutionally vague.
It's it was written in 1917 to combat German saboteurs.
And it doesn't even mention the words classified information because the classification system hadn't been invented when it was written.
It refers only to national defense information and then doesn't define what national defense information is.
So he said that that the problem with appealing it is that there were only two people withstanding who could appeal it.
One was Chelsea Manning and the other was Jeffrey Sterling because they had gone to trial and were convicted at trial.
But then, you know, Chelsea said she just couldn't do it.
Like she just didn't have it in her to go all the way to the Supreme Court.
Jeffrey Sterling was excited about it for a short while and then said the whole process was so depressing he just wanted to get past it.
And so once he lost at the appellate level in the in the Fourth Circuit in Richmond, that was the end of it.
So here's Dan, you know, in the twilight of his of his years.
Trying to write a historical wrong and using himself as as bait for the Justice Department, the guy's a giant.
Yeah, the guy's a giant.
And I know that history is going to be very kind to him.
Yeah.
Well, everybody already loves him and everybody already knows that he's the guy that ended the Vietnam War.
Yeah.
And he's on top of all that.
He's just a really great guy.
Yeah, he is.
He is.
You know, he's a guy that you want to have a beer with or have dinner with.
Just a really great human being.
Yeah.
You know, I've known him for like a dozen years or more now.
Oh, no, I've known him since what?
Oh, four or three or four.
I guess four or five maybe was the first time I talked to him.
So quite a while now.
But I've never met him in person yet.
Oh, yeah.
He's one of those days I need to go visit Erica and the guys in San Francisco and see if I can meet him.
But before the feds take him away, I better hurry.
Now, so is this going to work?
Is Merrick Garland going to take the bait and indict Daniel Ellsberg?
I can't imagine.
You know, Dan would have such a strong defense because in the United States we have a mandatory declassification law where unless unless a document contains sources and methods where the source is still alive, it has to be declassified after 30 years or you have to present a compelling reason why it shouldn't be declassified.
I would argue and I think Dan's attorneys would argue that a document that dates to 1958 should have been declassified decades ago and and that prosecuting Dan for a document that's so old is, you know, not justice.
Right.
I can't imagine.
I can't imagine they would go after him like this.
I think a Trump Justice Department may have done it.
But I can't imagine that Joe Biden would want to pick a fight.
This is the Obama team.
Well, that's the thing.
It is the Obama team.
You're correct about that.
OK, well, I guess we'll see.
Although this time it this time it doesn't include John Brennan.
And Brennan was the driving force back then.
And also, obviously, this is an ambush and, you know, they don't want to walk right into it, probably.
But yeah, then again, the president shall see that the law is enforced.
That's a big shall.
Yeah, well, that's that's a good point.
Yeah, I don't know.
But then we come back to that idea of prosecutorial discretion.
All right.
Well, you know what?
I don't want to see anything bad happen to Daniel Ellsberg.
But you know what?
I'd oblige him if this is what he really wants, you know.
Listen, so let's talk about the document for a second, because one of the reasons that he decided to make a big deal about it now was because there's a question and there's and I have no idea what whose likelihood and who measures this and how well.
But the idea is that China might decide to try to retake Taiwan by force sometime in the next near term future here.
And then so what are we going to do about it?
And in this document, it becomes clear that, well, geez, I mean, if we need to use nukes, we use them.
What's the point of view of all the people in the military at the time?
It was President Eisenhower who said, actually, we're not going to do that.
But evidently, and this is the way I learned it as a kid, too, that it was only because they were afraid of what the Russians would do.
Yes.
They thought that if they nuked China, then the Soviet Union would nuke America and all our allies in Europe.
And so that was why they decided not to do it.
Not because they gave a damn about nuking China or not.
And to them, it's just another bomb.
It's bigger.
And, OK, there's a bright flash and there's this, you know, so-called taboo against using it and crossing that threshold.
But, hey, Rubicons are crossed all the time.
Man, America's used nukes against civilian cities before twice.
And at the time, it was perfectly thinkable, according to these.
And in fact, everybody needs to read The Doomsday Machine by Daniel Ellsberg.
It's about exactly how thinkable the use of nuclear weapons really is.
And man, it's this is really something else.
Yeah, this is this is crazy.
And, you know, this is one of the points that that Dan makes is that this this attitude, this this analytic viewpoint that nuclear war is winnable lasted well into the 1980s.
You know, there were a lot of people on the right and certainly within the U.S. military who believed that you could launch nuclear weapons and.
You know, have an endgame and win.
This was a different situation because we were afraid of that Soviet response, but there this was a real debate inside, inside government and especially inside the Pentagon, that we could nuke China and win this thing.
Yeah, well, and you know what?
Yeah, we might lose a few cities, but that's acceptable.
Yes.
Right.
Yes.
And, you know, actually, I guess they think that they can shoot down enough of China's retaliatory capability and they have a couple of hundred nukes at least, what, three hundred or something.
And the Americans figure that, don't worry, we can shoot down enough of the incoming.
It'll be fine.
We might lose a few cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles and Denver and Houston.
And but other than that, though, it'd be OK.
Crazy, just crazy.
And, you know, it's funny, too, in the document that Dan leaked, there was a there was one general, I think he was an Air Force general who was the commander for the Pacific, who was specifically asking for authorization for a first use nuclear attack where he didn't have to go back to the White House or to the Pentagon for permission to launch.
He wanted permission in advance to make the decision on his own to attack China.
It's just insane to think about it.
Yep.
All right.
So and everybody can go read that by Charlie Russian Bounties, CIA stenographer Savage in The New York Times there.
He is, as I said in the book, he's the second or third least worst reporter at The Times.
You've got to grade these things on a scale.
Now, before you agree, before I let you go here, I got to let you say a word about Julian Assange.
Yeah, Julian's dad and brother are coming to D.C. soon.
They're in they're going to be in Boston next week, D.C. the week after.
And this is after having completed a speaking tour around Australia.
You know, what can you do besides shake your head?
I participated in a in a Zoom call the other day with a whole bunch of journalists.
It was chaired by Rob Reiner, of all people.
And there were there were three Knight Ritter journalists who were on.
And a friend of mine from veteran intelligence professionals for sanity asked the Knight Ritter guys why the mainstream media, especially people involved in national security reporting, weren't showing any support for Julian Assange when he was clearly a journalist.
Now, when you say Knight Ritter, I mean, Knight Ritter's been gone for a while, but I think is that a euphemism for Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel?
Yeah.
I mean, Knight Ritter is pretty, pretty well gone.
But yes, they were both on the call.
And and in unison, they said that Julian Assange is not a journalist.
He's an activist.
And I was flabbergasted.
Jonathan Landay, what is the matter with him?
Damn you, Landay.
I like him, too.
But these guys, it was clear that they did not want to talk about Julian.
So, you know, afterwards, he's an activist.
Didn't you know, Kiriakou, it says in the First Amendment that you're not allowed to have an opinion when you do journalism like Jonathan Landay doesn't have any opinions about, say, for example, how much he trusts his CIA sources when they feed him a bunch of crap about Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, for example.
Those aren't opinions.
That's doing the CIA's work.
That's real journalism.
You're absolutely right.
You are absolutely right.
Julian Assange is an activist.
And then what's the what's the rest of that sentence?
So he goes to solitary confinement for doing journalism.
Well, what does that even mean anyway?
An activist?
That's a pretty malleable term.
Solitary confinement, you know, for for what reason?
He won the case, right, the extradition case.
It's being appealed right now.
But he's he's still in solitary confinement pending the appeal, despite the fact that the British courts on three separate occasions have upheld a lower court's refusal to extradite prisoners to the United States specifically for the reason that the United States uses long term solitary confinement.
So there's no way the Justice Department is going to win this case in the British appellate courts.
There's no way.
But then the Brits hold him in solitary, even though that's their objection to sending him here.
Can you imagine?
Can you imagine?
I was talking to Stella Morris the other day, Julian's partner and the mother of his children, and she said that his his emotional state is fragile.
You know, even the strongest person breaks in solitary confinement.
His health is bad because the guy has not been exposed to sunlight for something like nine years.
And the longer that he's in there, the worse it's going to be.
Man, you know, you think about it, too.
It's so obvious why there's no support among the people.
I mean, I understand about a CIA tool like Savage or Landay.
But for the people out in the country, the partisan population of the country that swing, you know, left or right on this, they'll have their reasons for hating this guy.
Right.
He undermined Bush and the war and made the Republicans look horrible when he's put out the Manning stuff.
And then he hurt the Democrats and in essence helped to get Trump elected by publishing all of the Podesta and DNC emails that showed how they rigged the game against Bernie and actually for Trump in the primaries because they thought he'd be the weakest guy to beat in the general, the Pied Piper strategy, all that in there.
And and so people have something against him.
But you just turn that around and go, hey, this guy's done something that your side really appreciated, too.
Right.
Remember that time he helped take down Hillary Clinton?
Remember that time he helped take down W.
Bush?
So can't we agree on the positive aspect of this?
Even if you're a partisan, can't you find enough to say like, hey, this guy, for God's sake and for anybody who's not a partisan, he told the truth about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and what was going on at Guantanamo Bay and all the State Department files.
There's 30,000 news stories must have come out of that stuff.
And then he saved the world from Hillary Clinton.
Exactly.
He saved humanity from a Hillary Clinton presidency that makes him like one of the greatest heroes who ever lived.
And he stopped Bush at the same time, too.
Come on.
Yes.
Well, he didn't really stop Bush.
That was Trump.
But anyway, Bush also lost that year.
And it was great.
Not that I'm a big Trump guy, but I'm very much an anti-Bush and Clinton guy.
And so I don't know.
It just seems to me like even if you're a partisan, you ought to be able to look with favor on Assange instead of just scorn, you know?
Yeah.
It's publishing great truth.
And you know what?
It isn't like he's a traitor who is, you know, like Aldrich Ames, who's like selling out the highest level American agents who are all getting their throats cut out, you know, behind enemy lines or something like that.
This is all secret level, not top secret, but it was the truth is what it was.
It wasn't the kind of thing that got sources and methods destroyed at all.
You're exactly right.
Exactly right.
We should be celebrating the guy.
Man, America's really messed up right now.
All right.
Now, listen, you and your article ConsortiumNews.com saying, hey, people can write to Daniel Hale and tell him how much you love him and how badly you need him to hang in there.
So how does that happen?
Yeah.
The poor guy.
Right to Daniel Hale, he he may not be able to write back to you because he's only allowed to purchase 10 stamps a week.
They're real dicks about about the the rules over there at the federal lockup in Alexandria.
So it has to be on plain white paper with no lines.
It has to be in black ink and it can't contain any photographs.
He's desperate for news.
He asked me specifically to please, please send news articles.
But what you have to do is cut them and paste them onto a white piece of paper and delete the photographs from them.
So it's just the you know, the the words.
But, yeah, he said he would try to write back if he gets permission to buy extra stamps.
But he's he's lonely and he's depressed and he has no idea what's going on in the world around him.
Man.
All right.
And then the address here is Daniel E. Hale, comma, William G. Truesdale, just like it sounds.
T.R.U.E.S.D.A.L.E.
Adult Detention Center.
William G. Truesdale.
Adult Detention Center.
2001 Mill Road, Alexandria, Virginia.
Two, two, three, one, four.
One more time, y'all.
Daniel E. Hale, William G. Truesdale.
Adult Detention Center.
2001 Mill Road, Alexandria, Virginia.
Two, two, three, one, four.
And let me add one more thing.
You can you can get a whole bunch of additional information at Stand with Daniel Hale dot org.
Oh, great.
I didn't know about that.
Yeah.
Stand with Daniel Hale dot org.
All right, listen, thank you so much for coming on the show and writing this great article and sticking up for this guy the way you are, John.
Thank you so much.
Always good to talk to you.
All right.
Have a good one.
Appreciate it.
The Scott Horton Show, antiwar radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
APS radio dot com, antiwar dot com, Scott Horton dot org and Libertarian Institute dot org.
