 Our first speaker today is John Kiriakou. John is an author and a brave whistleblower who confirmed that the CIA was torturing people accused of being terrorists following the 9-11 attacks. John, take it away. Hi everybody, thanks so much for inviting me. I wanna talk just a little bit for a minute about the actual date of September 11th, 2001. I was at CIA headquarters like, you know, so many thousands of other people were. And the one thing that sticks in my head from that day was thinking about Al-Qaeda, my God, do you have any idea what you've done? Do you have any idea how many innocent people are going to be killed now because of this? I mean, certainly I knew what my government was capable of doing. I just assumed that others knew what the American government was capable of doing too. You know, it's no accident that the Washington DC area now has the highest concentration of anywhere in America. And it's because those military contractors and intelligence community contractors saw their opportunity and they got rich. They got rich because they knew that we would enter into what turned out to be a permanent wartime economy. I think that something even worse than that that came out of September 11th was the number of precedents that we sent that made it okay to kill innocent people. It was okay to develop a drone program. It was okay for the military to cross borders and indiscriminately drop bombs or fire rockets. And then when we kill entire families at weddings or funerals, just say, well, there was a terrorist there. We knew what we were doing. Take our word for it. If you could see the intelligence that we have, you would know that we did the right thing. Well, I saw the intelligence that they had and it was all a lie. It was all made up. The problem with that, besides the obvious, is that many Americans believe those lies and now 20 years later, continue to believe those lies. We've gone from the hunt for al-Qaeda, the hunt for bin Laden, to the hunt for Saddam Hussein, to the hunt for ISIS. And now there's this group, ISIS-K, in Afghanistan. And when we send drones to blow up the leadership of ISIS-K and then kill an entire family, including seven children, five of whom were under the age of five, we're again told, take our word for it. We know what we're doing. There were terrorists there. We can't. If the rest of the country didn't learn it's lesson after 9-11, at least we've learned our lesson. And it's up to us. It's especially up to us. Don, you're breaking up. Take the mantle of the, begin the change of public opinion. Was that any better? Yes. Any better now? You might shot a few videos to make sure it doesn't happen again. Okay, I'm gonna do that. I'm gonna try that right now. So it's up to the young people of our country to make sure that it doesn't happen again. It is the young people who can take these leadership positions and can fight for peace and justice. And one of the things that's been so important to me in my post-CIA career has been, we must be relentless about, a whole archeology of secret prisons that we're not rendering prisoners to third countries to face torture that they might not face here in the United States, but we can't take their word for it because everything that they tell us is a lie. You know, they tell us that they're weapons of mass destruction, that was a lie. They tell us that there are no secret prisons, that was a lie. They tell us that there was no torture program, that was a lie. So why should we believe anything they say? We have to question everything. It doesn't matter who's in the White House, it doesn't matter if it's a Democrat or Republican, they're all guilty of the same thing. So it's up to us to keep up the fight. We can't let these last 20 years go for naught. We have to make sure that people understand that there are Americans like us who stand for peace and justice, that we will fight against these unnecessary illegal wars. We will stand up for human rights and civil rights and civil liberties and we will not give up. I apologize for my audio and my video. Thanks to everybody and enjoy the rest of the event. Bravo, thank you very much, John. And thanks for the shout out to the youth and I put some information in the chat to corroborate your feelings on it. Thank you very much.