 So we have 57 on the call. Why don't we begin? Thank you, Hanya, for posting the agenda in the chat. No problem. Why don't you go ahead and begin with the updates? Sure. Well, as some of you may know, I'm already on the president and co-founder of Muslim Delegates and Allies. We are a female Lib Coalition born from the DNC, Democratic National Convention, by two Bernie Sanders delegates, actually. And if I can have everyone please upon entrance, mute yourselves, that would be wonderful. Thank you. So a couple of things I wanted to go over. One is the Georgia Senate run-offs, which Muslim Delegates and Allies has been heavily involved in. We have hosted up to date over 101 events, phone banking events, and postcard writing events. And we have about 4,000 volunteers who make daily phone calls. They also give volunteers some of their time over their weekends to make phone calls. And we just launched in direct collaboration with the Warnock and Asaf campaign, the first ever multi-langual postcard writing event where we write in Ordu in Korean. Oh, all right. Korean, Ordu, as well as Vietnamese, and I am forgetting one, Spanish, which is the most important. But I also wanted to go over an initiative that Nadia and I had launched in collaboration with Muslim alliances to save and protect America from infiltration by religious extremists, as well as American Muslim Democratic Caucus Center for pluralism. And there is a petition that we have circulated for signatures, which I will like to share with you, on recommending not only Muslim activists, attorneys, and officials, but also progressives. The writing campaign stays true to their promise and give everybody a chance and make his cabinet as diverse as possible, if he, in fact, is obviously, again, pro-diversity, which we see some of that right now in his campaign. But so far, from the recommendations that we made, Marcia Fudge was appointed, Ali Zeidi was appointed, and Deb Haaland as well. I think I'm missing one more, but if there is, if it comes to mind, I will share with you. But yeah, we're very excited about that. I'll share this with you all, and I'll hand it over to Marcia and Nadia, and thank you for being here. Thank you very much. My pleasure. Thank you for that, Barnes. All right, so I'm Marcia Winograd, most often, you know who I am. My update is to thank everybody who participated in our campaign challenging Michelle Flournoy for Secretary of Defense zeroing in on her hawkishness on China. There was an article that I'm going to briefly summarize in Foreign Policy Magazine, recently, which is really interesting, by Mark Perry, and his point about Austin. And I'm gonna. Okay, his point about Lloyd Austin, who was nominated for Secretary of Defense, passing with Biden, passing on Michelle Flournoy. The journalist's point is that it all comes down to China, really, that, I'm gonna read you the last lines. Paragraph, for Washington's China as a threat crowd, the appointment of Lloyd Austin looms as a counterpoint to their foreign policy agenda, one of larger defense budgets, less resilience on diplomacy, and a greater willingness to use force, all reasons why Biden appointed Austin in the first place. So that is good news. Also, the article mentions how he opposed backing Saudi Arabia, and it's a salt on Yemen from the very beginning, whereas we know that Flournoy wanted to continue selling military hardware to the Saudis. Also, I wanted to update you on, I'm working now, volunteering with Code Pink. It's as the volunteer coordinator or the coordinator for Code Pink Congress. And this is an effort that began here with all of you, making calls last week to Capitol Hill. We are going to be tracking about anywhere from five to 15 pieces of legislation and other issues in here. We'll have a separate portal on the Code Pink website. And as part of this legislative watch, we'll be mobilizing cosponsors for peace and foreign policy legislation and mobilizing votes as well. And then we'll track that and announce the results. And we may give points and demerits and so forth as part of our accountability. And then ultimately issue some certificates. You might be in the Hall of Fame or you might be in the Hall of Shame. So that's my update. Medea? Yes, hi, great to see everybody. And a number of you have been helping on this latest process campaign, which is focusing on Mike Morel and Averill Haynes. Now in the case of Mike Morel, it's interesting because just like Michelle Flournoy, she was only two months ago cited all over the press as being the most likely get the job of CIA director. And the campaign that many people around the country did around Michelle Flournoy was a great success. And now because there has been a lot of speaking out around Mike Morel, his odds of him getting the job have gone down. And so we felt like it was important to keep the momentum going. And perhaps the person who really has done the most to affect Mike Morel's standing has been Senator Ron Wyden, who came out and openly called him a torturgist. We hear from Senator, I mean, I'll be saying that. They don't. Diane Feinstein, who was in charge of the torch part hasn't come out and said anything that we can find about Mike Morel. But Ron Wyden not only called him a torture apologist but said that his position as CIA director for Wyden was a non-starter. And that really showed the Biden administration that there was gonna be a fight around him for the confirmation hearing. And so we have for months now been working on the two positions of Mike Morel and Averill Haynes who was already nominated for National Intelligence Director. Marcy, was it back in August that you had the... You wanna explain that? At the DNC virtual convention, 450 delegates signed a letter, open letter to Biden, higher new foreign policy advisors. Michelle Flournoy was one of those we objected to as was Averill Haynes. So that was back in August, which was really great. We at Code Pink have been having a campaign which included getting many thousands of people to sign a petition against Mike Morel. And the latest was this thing that we have done over the last less than a week of getting the detainees at Guantanamo as well as torture victims from in America. Many of them had been trained by US forces at the pool of the Americas. We got the head of school of the Americas to join with us. And the wonderful group, Witness Against Torture. I don't know if we have Jeremy on the call. I don't think so, not yet. Well, Against Torture is gonna be helpful in... It says his name, but I'm taking his place. Wonderful. Great. Thank you. I see we also have Nancy from Close Guantanamo who is extremely helpful in this. And so in the course of just a couple of days, we managed to get a coupendous list together. I think, Ania, can you put that up there with the sunnies? I can send it to you again, honey. Perfect. Thank you. We had a very impressive list also of people like our guest speaker tonight and other former or retired members of the intelligence community, people from the CIA, the FBI. And so we put out the letter. We didn't get a lot of mainstream press on it. I think it's a tough week between vacation and the COVID relief package. But we did get about... We wrote an article that got out in about 20 different sites. It's coming out tomorrow on Salon. And it keeps being put out in different places. Our Common Dreams did a great job on it, alternate. And so we also took that letter and sent it to the Biden transition team and to the individual member of the Senate Intelligence Committee. So that is what we have done so far. And then this call is to continue to work on that campaign. We don't know when the announcement for who the CIA director will be, but it could be within the next couple of days or they could wait until after the holidays. But it will certainly be soon. It's one of the key positions that hasn't been announced yet, which shows that it is controversial. I did post it, if you're on Facebook, it's on my Facebook page, and please do share the article that we wrote that contains links to the letter and the press release and so forth. So on Marcy Winograd, you can just come visit my page. Okay. And you can see the links in the chat and if you can help us spread the word on that to your own list, that would be wonderful. And so now I think unless Marcy, you have any other update before me. No, I think we're ready for your introduction to our honored guest tonight. All right. Well, it's my great pleasure to introduce John Kiriaku, who is, he was a CIA officer, a senior investigator for the Senate Fine Relations Committee, and a counter-terrorism consultant for ABC News. He was responsible for the capture in Pakistan in 2002 of Abu Zubaydah, who was then believed to be the third-ranking official of al-Qaeda. And in 2007, he blew the whistle on the CIA's torture program. Tell ABC News that the CIA indeed, your prisoners, that it was the U.S. policy and that the policy had been approved by the then President George Bush. John became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act, a law designed to punish violence. He served 23 months in prison. Well, I guess I'll get behind you. Oh, I'm sorry. We need... Now, please mute yourself. Yeah. He served 23 months in prison as a result of that revelation. I also want to say that John is a dear friend and an all-round wonderful guy and thank you so much for being with us tonight. Thank you. Yes, John. Thank you for your talk. Thank you. Thanks very much for having me. I have to say the same thing about Medea. A dear friend, a long-time friend who was there for me when I really needed a friend. I am honored to be here and you didn't have to ask twice. So let's talk about Mike Morel at all and Avril Haines. I knew Mike Morel through my entire CIA career. I met Mike in early 1990 when he was a junior China analyst. He had been sort of identified as someone who was going to rise to the top quickly. And indeed he did. One thing about Mike that so many people ignore, especially in the media, is that he has successfully pretended to be a political for many years. He's not a political. He's very conservative. He's always been very conservative. And he proved that when the CIA began its torture program. Now Mike was in, Mike essentially had every senior position that you can have at the CIA. And to show you what kind of a political player he was, he had been the executive director of the CIA. That's the number three ranking position. That's the guy who or the woman who makes sure that the CIA runs on a day to day basis. Just before Barack Obama became president, he asked for a demotion to deputy director for intelligence, the head of all the analysts. Now why would he do that? Because the executive director position is political. And he was so closely tied to George W. Bush that he knew he couldn't survive that initial flurry of appointments and keep his position, his senior position in the CIA. So he moved from a political position to a non-political position, a civil service position, ingratiated himself with Barack Obama and then became deputy director of the CIA. It was a brilliant move of political survivorship. I had never seen anything like it. The big lie about Mike's career is that he had nothing to do with the torture program and knew nothing about the torture program. That is just simply and patently untrue. Mike was up to his neck in the torture program. And then after it was, well, after I blew the whistle on it, he came out and tried to justify it. There was a group of senior CIA officers, people like George Tennant and Philip Mudd and John Brennan and Jose Rodriguez who wrote a book together. It has like a dozen authors on it. And it was this weak attempt to justify torture. It was published just after the Senate Torture Report was released in December of 2014. Mike didn't co-author that book but he was certainly on the talk shows every day defending it. And so here we are now with a president-elect who isn't nearly as progressive as he wants people to believe. And we're having a serious conversation about this neocon torture lover maybe becoming the CIA director, utterly unacceptable. Now, Admiral Haynes, I think, is actually even more dangerous because Mike Morel's a known entity. Mike's been around forever. We all know him. But Admiral is a lifelong Democrat. She was on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Actually, when I joined the committee, that's when she was leaving the committee. My apology. When I was joining the committee, she was leaving the committee and she was the deputy chief counsel there. She went to the State Department briefly. Then she went to the White House as the deputy national security advisor replacing Tony Blinken, who was her boss at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Admiral rose very quickly through the ranks. Why? Because she's very bright. She's very competent. And she loves the drone program. This is really what I wanted to talk about the most tonight because she's another one that has pulled the wool over the eyes of the mainstream media. It was Avril who would take these calls in the middle of the night, asking, should we launch or should we not launch? Listen, I've been in the room when these calls have taken place early on in the drone program where a drone operator will call, whether it's the CIA's counter-terrorism center or the general counsel or later on during the Obama administration, Avril Haynes, and they say, we have the vehicle in the sights, do we launch? It was Avril that said, yes. It was Avril that decided whether it was legal to incinerate someone from the sky just because you don't like their politics. Think back about Anwar Alaki, for example. Anwar Alaki was an American citizen. He was killed by a drone during the Obama administration. That drone strike was justified by Attorney General Eric Holder. And Anwar Alaki had never been charged with a crime. He never had due process. Soon after he was assassinated, his son was assassinated, a nephew was assassinated. Again, American citizens. Well, it was Avril that approved those assassinations. Again, I'm gonna repeat myself because it's so important. I think that this has to be a mantra for us. They were not given due process. They were never accused of a crime. They never faced their accusers in a court of law and they were American citizens. And that is who Joe Biden wants to name as the director of our National Intelligence Organization. It's something that's utterly stunning to me. I wanna say one other thing. Oh, I see a wonderful comment from Sage von Speck. I wanna repeat it. It's sociopaths float to the top. Yes, they do. Let me tell you about that. And forgive me if you've heard this before in other venues. But a CIA psychiatrist once told me that the CIA actively seeks to hire people who have sociopathic tendencies. They don't seek out sociopaths because sociopaths have no conscience. They blow right through a polygraph exam. You can't catch them in a polygraph. But because they blow through the polygraph, you can't really weed them out either. And so it's those sociopaths who have no conscience, who are willing to step on the backs of those around them to get to the top that actually make it to the top. They're the ones that become the leaders of the CIA, of NSA, of DNI, and all of these other three-letter organizations that we have. It's almost impossible to keep them from practicing their sociopathy. And here we find ourselves in that position again, where we've got a democratic president who is not at all progressive, surrounding himself with those same sociopaths who had served the last president. It's a sickening situation that we find ourselves in. And that's why the work of Code Pink is so important. We saw what happened in the last couple of weeks with Michelle Flournoy, thank God. But God's not done between Everle Haynes and Mike Morel. I will say one more thing. There's another person being considered for CIA director. Now I'm on record of saying, I don't think we need a CIA. I think it should be disbanded. Certainly it hasn't had any major intelligence successes in the last 60 or 70 years that we can really point to. It's missed every major world development in that period of time. But if there's going to be a CIA director, I think that the person being considered who would do the least amount of damage is a guy named Darryl, oh my God, I'm blanking, Darryl Blocker. Darryl Blocker would be the first African-American CIA director. He's a career CIA officer who specialized in African affairs and he doesn't have the stink of torture on him. He legitimately had nothing to do with the torture program. He didn't know there was a torture program. He wasn't read into it. He was off in Africa for many years doing his own thing. So if there has to be a CIA director, let's pick the one who's not an overt murderer. Maybe that's a good place to start. Thank you, John. And I just wanted to share with our participants that Avril Haynes, in addition to compiling the drone kill list on a weekly basis, and basically being the architect of the legal framework that justified these attacks and shielded people from accountability. In turn, Marcy, we lost you. We lost your audio. Try again, Marcy. Can you hear us? Yeah, you can't hear me at all? No, we can't. OK, so she led the team that redacted the torture report. This was a 6,000-page report and she redacted it to reduce it to a 500-page summary that's discovered with black ink, so many redactions. In addition, she was, I believe, the deputy director of the CIA. She let all those agents off the hook who hacked into the computers of the investigators looking into the CIA's use of torture. So that was a clear violation of separation of powers, the firewall between the legislature and the legislative and executive branches. She has a lot to explain. And I wanted to ask John, what questions would you want Senate Intelligence Committee members to ask? Can we hold on to that for one sec? Sure. We'll let you think about that, John. I just wanted to acknowledge a couple of people. I see Marcy John here from Democratic Socialists, from Progressive Democrats of America, PDA, and to say how PDA has been very helpful in this campaign, as well as Roots Action. Norman Solomon and David Swanson. And I also see on here that we have Todd Pierce, who is a retired major from the Army. And he was an attorney that's called a JAG attorney, Judge Advocate General, on the defense teams for Guantanamo Military Commission Defendants. And Todd, I wonder if you want to add something before we go into the Q&A part. Not much to add to what John has expressed so well. The program is ongoing. I mean, if you think of an indefinite detention as a form of torture, which Guantanamo is, so it's an ongoing torture program, when you look at it accurately, correctly enough. Not even knowing what's going on inside there today. But John really addressed the issue of drone warfare. And there's so much involved with that and how it creates and cites more hostility toward the US. It's exactly the opposite of what we should be doing. But with that, I'll stop. But I want to thank John for putting this all on the picture. Thank you, Todd. It's always good to see you. Likewise with you. Thank you, Todd. OK, so let's go back to Marcy's question. Oh, yeah, my question was, so the Senate Intelligence I wanted to get three mayonnaise, but they're not out anymore. Are you able to get them? Thank you, Ruth. Yes, sir. Can I please ask everyone to please mute yourselves? Use that mute button as your best friend tonight. Please. OK, so the question is, so these hearings, I'm not sure when they're going to be in late January, early February sometime. And the Senate Intelligence Committee will be questioning Avril Haynes if she's still in the running. I mean, if she's still in the nominee. And I assume she probably will be. What questions do you think the Intelligence Committee members should be asking? Wow. There are so many questions, I think, that need to be asked of Avril Haynes. There are so many ugly things in her near term personal history. Besides the drone program, the legality, or really the illegality of the drone program. One of the first things that I would ask her, if I were a senator. This one is locked now. OK. Is why she overruled the CIA's Inspector General and declined to punish in any way any of the CIA officers who were involved in the torture program. I know several of the officers who were involved in the torture program. Not only were they not punished, they were all promoted. They were all given the career intelligence medal, every one of them. Is that something that she did, she promoted them? Yes, yes. She would have been the one to make that decision in the end. Another thing, too, is, as you said, Marcy, and this bears repeating, the Senate Democrats and the Intelligence Committee did not release the Senate Torture Report. They released a heavily redacted version of the executive summary of the Senate Torture Report. I'd like to know what her role was in the discussions about destroying that report at the end of the Obama administration. Was it destroyed? And why wasn't the report itself reviewed for release? Why wasn't the report itself released even in a redacted version? So I said at the time that the executive summary was released, that if you want the real story of torture, read the footnotes in that report. That's where the real story is told. Well, even just the footnotes in the actual report, I think, would have been invaluable for historians and invaluable in educating Americans to teach them what not to do in future generations. As Todd Pierce said, that program had exactly the opposite effect of what it was supposed to have done. It turned people all over the world against us. It reduced us to the level of the people that we were trying to fight. And really, I think it made us worse than the people we were trying to fight, because in their own view, they were fighting oppression. We were just out killing people. So she's never answered for the drone program. She's never answered for her refusal to punish torturers. And I'm not saying people who were told that the Justice Department approved the torture program, so go ahead and do it. I'm talking about even people who went over and above and murdered prisoners in their custody. Nobody at Justice ever told the CIA they could just want to murder people. And she's never responded to questions over the reductions of the report. So there's a lot to talk about in her nomination hearing when it finally takes place, which I assume is going to be sometime in late January or early February. And John, can you explain for people who don't remember, what was the issue around the Senate Intelligence Committee is the hacking of? Oh, yeah. Thank you. Thank you. I meant to mention that as well. Talk about a constitutional violation. To me, this was a constitutional crisis. So the Senate Intelligence Committee, the Democratic staff on the Senate Intelligence Committee, was investigating the CIA's torture program. We know from the movie, the report, just how involved this was. And here is John Brennan, a Barack Obama appointee as the director of the CIA. And Admiral Haynes is the deputy director of the CIA. They ordered their own CIA hackers to hack into the Democrats' computers on the staff that was investigating the torture program to see what it was they were writing, what it was they were collecting. I mean, to me, this is a Watergate level kind of scandal. And finally, Diane Feinstein gave a very angry speech on the floor of the Senate. And then nothing ever came of anything. Eric Holder refused to press charges. Actually, after Feinstein asked that charges be pressed against the CIA officers, Brennan asked that charges be filed against the Senate Intelligence Committee investigators. Nothing ever happened. But Admiral Haynes was responsible for that, along with John Brennan. She needs to answer those questions, as well. And before I think we're almost ready to open it up, but I see that Jeremy Rohn is now with us, and he helped very much on this campaign. If you want to add anything, Jeremy? Thanks. Yeah, just briefly, I mean, the response to the letter we circulated was tremendous. A bunch of former detainees signed some of them authoring specific statements for this campaign. Executive directors of major peace organizations, it all happened rapidly. And I think that's just a sign that a lot of people are still deeply passionate about this issue. I mean, this letter was sort of a catalyst for four years of pent-up frustration and anguish to kind of explode. And I think there's a lot of potential on the nominations themselves and then a related set of issues that are going to confront us very quickly. And then just in general, we don't want Biden to be Obama 2.0, who talks a good game about reckoning with American corruption, but then gives a pass to the unfinished business of Biden, you know, Obama, and a pass to the corruptions of Trump. It's sort of all of a piece. And then the tone set in the first couple of weeks and months of the administration is vital, I think. And then on top of that, we should let you know that a number of the groups that we contacted and some individuals said they would have signed it if it was only against Mike Morel. And they didn't have the same feelings about Averill Haines. And that's why I'm really glad tonight you focused a lot, John, on Averill Haines. And we have to get more and more information out about her because, yes, she is the softer side of the policy. But as you said, perhaps even more dangerous. And there is a really good chance that the administration of the Biden people say, well, we didn't give you Mike Morel. So we've got Averill Haines and it's kind of, you know, quote, win, win. So that would be a win. And we will have the chance during her confirmation hearings to really ask our senators to get these issues out. So thank you. And I think you're gonna open it up for questions. Yeah, there's a couple of really great questions in the chat, John. There is one question here that is, is it possible that John or other CIA whistleblowers can be appointed to CIA executive positions? No, unfortunately. The truth is that with a national security conviction, which was the whole point of my prosecution in 2012, I'm ineligible for a CIA position unless I get a presidential pardon. And apparently I was passed over tonight. President Trump pardoned 15 people this evening, including all of his cronies from the Russia scandal, but I wasn't one of them. So I don't think that I'll end up at the CIA. Seriously though, there are a lot of former CIA people or former intelligence people who I think would be absolutely fabulous going back to the CIA and trying to bring order to the place. People like Ray McGovern, although raised a little long in the tooth and he probably would decline. Can you imagine Ray McGovern back at the CIA? I know a half a dozen people like that who could really, I think, change the place if they had the opportunity, but the short answer is no. I don't think it's possible. There's another question from Phil, which came before the one I just asked. John, are there any members of Congress who think like you are saying? That's a good question. Well, you know, there is no Ron Dellems anymore. There were so many members of Congress back in the 70s and 80s who did think like I think. I think that that's changed. You know, I had a lot of high hopes for, oh, for heaven's sake, what's wrong with me tonight? Jamie Raskin. And when Push came to shove, he sort of fell in line behind Nancy Pelosi on these intelligence issues. So I've been really disappointed. In the Senate, no. In the Senate, you know, we've got Ron Wyden. I confronted Ron Wyden one time years ago about my own case. I thought maybe he would have been more supportive. And he said, and he said it very convincingly, look, it takes all of my energy just to not lose my security clearance. And so that's what they're up against on Capitol Hill. They have to be very careful about how far they push. Somebody's mentioning Bernie Sanders, Rachel Kay is. Bernie, yes, Bernie's great, but he doesn't really focus on intelligence issues. He's mostly domestically focused. Of those members of the Senate who are on the Intelligence Committee, really Ron Wyden's the only hope. What about Heinrich? Yeah, Heinrich is good most of the time, but he doesn't really have the political juice to push these things. Can you talk about Diane Feinstein in her role? I think Diane Feinstein is one of the greatest disappointments on Capitol Hill. She is completely and totally bought in to the intelligence community as it stands now. And that's why her attack on John Brennan was so unusual because she was a longtime supporter of John Brennan's and then he disrespected her by hacking into her staff members' computers. Feinstein's, there are reports that Feinstein is beginning to slip cognitively too. She's had two conversations just recently in the last few weeks with other senior Democrats who are urging her to step aside from these top positions, from the vice chairmanship of the committee and from her position on the Judiciary Committee. So even in her right mind, I don't think Diane Feinstein is terribly reliable on these CIA overreach issues. And John, I do see another question, great question actually, two-part question from Jeremy. Jeremy, if you'd like to unmute yourself, I think it'd be best that you ask the question yourself from our honorable speaker. Okay, so John, I mean, lovely seeing you again. First, you know- Jeremy, let me interrupt you. Thank you very much for that fantastic chapter that you wrote in the recent whistleblower book. I absolutely loved it and I'm indebted to you. Thank you. Great, likewise. Yeah, so just for the sake of our messaging, how can you verify that Morrell knew about the EIT program? He must have known, like what's the closest of proof that we could point to? EIT, the EIT Proctor of Enhancement Terrorism. That's a very important question because his position has been to deny that he was read into the program. And my guess is that he probably was not read into the program officially, but in the positions that he had, it would have been impossible for him not to know about it. You know, when I was briefing, my last job at headquarters was as executive assistant to the CIA's deputy director for operations. And so every single morning, I had to brief the director who was George Tenet at the time. The deputy director was John McLaughlin and all the deputy directors of the four directorates, right, operations, intelligence, administration and science and technology, and then their deputies, the associate deputy directors. Once we attacked Iraq, the executive director and deputy executive director began sitting in on those high level meetings. And so he was one of those people sitting in every single day. So after I would give the normal briefing on Iraq, then we would go to a smaller group and talk about counter-terrorism. He participated in those meetings. And you had to be read into the compartment to be able to participate in those meetings or get what was called a DCI waiver, that even if you weren't technically read in, you could still be briefed on the subject. He's been very good, very successful in doing this dance that, sure, I was in every senior position in the CIA, but I knew nothing about the program. But people actually believe that. Great, thanks. Thank you. We can move on to the questions of others if you want. The second one's sort of complex, so feel free to move on. Well, Medea, I'll let you handle. Do we wanna wrap it up with Q&A or do we wanna ask one more question? Well, why don't we give Jeremy the chance to do his last and then we'll do one more and then we'll wrap it up. Sure. Okay, I mean, the spirit of the last one is to say that a lot of people in Washington don't think that the drone program was a problem, right? Targeted as assassinations is more humane. There was criteria for targeting. It was broadly legal. She was simply carrying out something controversial, but doesn't have any special culpability. How do we raise drones and maybe we can hear from Medea too so that they occur as a problem in the context of her vetting as opposed to a credential? Well, I think this is where Code Pink comes in because what you've done against drones, Medea and my Code Pink friends, is that you've brought it to the public's attention. You're right, Jeremy. People don't think that the drone program is necessarily bad because the drones are out there to kill bad guys before they kill us. But I can't even begin to tell you how many weddings we accidentally bombed because there was a tall guy wearing white. And if he was tall and wearing white, he must be Osama bin Laden. So we killed 30, 40, 50 people and then apologize and send in sacks of cash or we bombed the wedding and then we bombed the funerals too because everybody's tall and wearing white. So I think it's up to us to humanize these attacks. Now, Donald Trump, I think changed the rules so nobody's allowed to talk about civilian casualties. We need to talk about civilian casualties and we need to humanize these attacks so people can understand exactly who's dying in them. These are not pinpoint attacks like the government wants us to believe, at least not all the time. You can't fire a rocket into a tea house or a cafe to kill one bad guy or two bad guys and not think you're gonna kill everybody else in the cafe. And that's what we need to talk about. That's what the government doesn't want us to talk about. One thing we could do is look at some of the cases of civilians killed during the time that Averill Haynes was in charge of that program because they're putting her forward as somebody who redid the rules so that fewer civilians would be killed. And they love to put people forward like that. Obama tried to change his own rules that he had where they were killing so many civilians and then make it fewer civilians. So I think getting concrete examples of civilians killed and telling their stories would be a great way to counter that narrow and Averill Haynes wanted to kill fewer civilians. We don't want to kill any civilians. That's right. Todd Pierce had a question. Yeah, so John already explained this so well but want to remind people of all that code pinked it years ago, 2012, 2013, whenever it was on the drone program. And John, I'd ask you can you comment has a CIA people that you knew where they were considering everything we've just talked about torture, the drone program, which is killing civilians killing civilians is a war crime. So these people, what we're talking about here are all war criminals under the Nuremberg standards. They would have been tried as war criminals and convicted just on the facts that we know. And it seems worthy of bringing up that Averill Haynes is on the facts that we know a war criminal. And yet here we are stalking the government once again, never stop with war criminals. I would just add one more sentence. We've been given them all impunity, won't go through the legal analysis of how they have that but even a victim cannot bring a case against a CIA war criminal because the way that set up it immediately gets dismissed through legal chicanery. And so that's adding impunity onto the already existing war crimes because impunity is also a war crime. So our entire government has become so infiltrated with war criminals that I mean, we shouldn't even be able to walk in public holding our heads up anymore, but we do obviously. Jim Hart has a comment here too. Isn't it, isn't killing you as citizens without judicial process by drone or any other method illegal and to be disapproved? Absolutely. You can't just want to murder US citizens. But then you might recall near the end of the Obama administration, Eric Holder was being questioned by, oh, it was somebody on this Senate committee and I don't remember now who it was. Oh, yes, I do. It was Rand Paul. And he said, does the president have the authority to kill an American citizen on US soil if he believes that that citizen is a threat to public safety or to national security? And Eric Holder said, yes, but the president has the right to kill American citizens, not just overseas, but on American soil. Now that's never been challenged in the courts. He has cited the Patriot Act as giving authorization. It's not specifically laid out like that in the Patriot Act, but that's the excuse they're using. And Marcy's got a comment that you prefer not to differentiate between US citizens and others. I totally agree. Murder is murder and it's wrong. And someone who murders wantonly like this is a war criminal. Can I just add something that I learned going over to Yemen to interview families who were killed by the drones? So many of us was always careful to distinguish between innocent civilians and fighters. Until I learned and met mothers whose 17-year-old, 18-year-old sons joined Al Qaeda because they wanted to protest their government, heavy handedness, territorial rules, and couldn't find any other way to do it. And she, one of the mothers said to me, don't you have problem in the United States when young people, they're proud, they join a gang. And would you want them shared by a foreign government? Wouldn't you want them given some reeducation a chance to change their lives? And this woman had two of her young sons killed by US drones. And said that to me. And since then, it gives me a whole different perspective of who are the people that we're killing that we call the extremists. And how did they become extremists? And so just to say that, yes, it's easier to talk about the innocent civilians, but we should recognize that our drone program, after is, when we kill people with our drones, we're creating more people who then join these extremist groups. So we do the opposite in terms of trying to change the behavior of young men who are looking oftentimes for a way to protest abuses. May I add something to that, Medea? Yeah. When I was stationed in Pakistan, I led raids all the time and was responsible for the capture of, I'm not allowed to say the number, but it was many dozens of al-Qaeda, quote unquote fighters. And there was one thing that I learned very early on about these so-called fighters. First of all, most of them were children, 17, 18, 19 years old, they weren't fighters. And they all told essentially the same story. They were from isolated villages in their countries. They had no hopes of a job, they were largely illiterate, and they couldn't find a bride, because what man would want his daughter to marry someone who was illiterate and had no job skills. The local Imam said, you shouldn't stay in this village, you should go to Afghanistan to make jihad, because they'll pay you $500 a month. And if you're martyred, they'll give your family $500 as a martyrdom reward. Well, if you have literally nothing to live for and you're being offered $500 a month, that's incredible money for some of these guys. And they were young. And so they made their way to Afghanistan to go through training, not because they had any problem with the United States. They didn't know anything about the United States other than that we were bombing their countries. This was not religiously based. These guys didn't even know how to pray. They didn't know the Quran, they had never read it because they can't read. They went there just because they were desperate. And I decided early on that if you're gonna fight terrorism, the way you fight terrorism is through education and public works projects to develop economies. It's through foreign aid. And I don't mean USAID foreign aid. I mean like legitimate foreign aid, like the Danish were the ones who built the Sana'a Yemen sewer system, for example. The Italians built the Aden electrical grid like that. These guys were not born terrorists. They weren't ideologues who ran to Al Qaeda, shouting death to America. None of that ever happened. They were just children. Thank you so much, John. It's been our honor to have you with us tonight and Todd as well and everybody. There's so much we could talk about. And you've given me a lot of ideas for our campaign going forward. And I thank you for that.