 So this is Jim at the house at Poo Corner again and there's the camera. So I will look at that camera. And we have had a number of very important guests over the last few months from geoengineering to all kinds of imperialistic, imperial adventures. And today your guest is John Kuriyaku, who is one of my heroes. Most of my heroes actually kind of fall into the whistleblower category from Daniel Ellsberg, whom I interviewed ages ago, and Sebel Edmonds, whom I've interviewed a few times on the radio. And here we are with another very important whistleblower, so important that Obama threw him in jail. And we're going to talk a little bit about what he did, having to do with the Bush administration's torture program, and he'll update us on certain status where he is and maybe talk a little bit about Mr. Binney and Mr. Ship, Kevin Ship and Bill Binney. All right. So let's, John, tell us a little bit about yourself and what happened, and we'll go from there. Well, my name is John Kuriyaku. I'm a 15-year CIA veteran. I was in the CIA from 1990 through 2014 and resigned in 2014, actually was effective 2015. And in 2000, you know what, let me fix that, that's not right. In 2005, not 15, and in 2007 I blew the whistle on the CIA's torture program. I had kept it inside for years, just waiting for somebody to come forward and to say something. Nobody said anything, and finally I decided that it had to be out there. And so I said something in a nationally televised interview on ABC News to make a long story short. I paid for it with my freedom. I was arrested by the FBI, charged with five felonies, including three counts of espionage coming out of that interview, hadn't committed espionage, and those charges were dropped. But I ended up going to prison for 23 months, all worth it. In the end, the price was high, certainly, but it was all worth it because I thought that this was a war crime, a crime against humanity. It was a violation of the U.S. law, it was a violation of international law, certainly, the United Nations Convention Against Torture. And I thought that our government shouldn't be in the business of doing it. So I got out of prison in February of 2015, and I've been talking about it and writing about it ever since. Now a couple of questions. One is what kind of support or communication of any kind have you had with your peers, with your former peers? And I'm also interested in the kind of communication you've had with Bill Binney and with Kevin Schipp. And that's already two questions. My third one is the Bush administration handled it one way, and the Obama administration really went whole hog. And that's a very important point, that's a very important component of this whole story. Well, to answer your first question first, my support inside the CIA, especially at the working level, has been absolutely fantastic. 70 of my former CIA colleague signed a letter to President Obama asking him to pardon me. All 70 signed a second letter. This went to President Trump asking him to pardon me. So my support inside the agency has been fantastic. This torture program was a blasphemy against what we were supposed to stand for. When I put my right hand up in the air and I swore to uphold the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic, I meant it. And sometimes the enemy is ourselves. And so I'm glad to say that I wasn't the only one who recognized that. One of the weird things about entering the world of whistleblowers is that we have something of a club where we've all become friends. You know, Dan Ellsberg is the granddaddy of all modern national security whistleblowers. He's an icon to all of us. And then there's Bill Binney and Kirk Wiebe and Ed Loomis and Tom Drake and Jaisalyn Radak and so many others. Ed Snowden even, we've all become friends. We stay in close touch. Those of us who are here in the D.C. area get together frequently, socially. And really you need that support network because when you blow the whistle on something relative to the national security, there's nothing in the world that makes you feel more alone and more isolated and more endangered than that. Without that support, you couldn't get through it. You literally couldn't get through it. I'm surprised, frankly, that more people charged with these national security crimes don't commit suicide than the handful that we've already seen. Kevin Ship is another one. It's funny. Kevin believed that he was alone. Kevin Ship blew the whistle on CIA malfeasance and they went after his family for it. And finally I reached out to him after reading his story in the Washington Post. And I said, listen, buddy, you're not alone. You've got some friends here. You probably have never even met, but you shouldn't be going through this alone. And so we've pulled him into it as well. We even have an organization called VIPS, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. We write policy recommendations for the president. They're usually ignored, but at least we get ourselves on paper. Yeah, I know Ray quite well. Ray McGovern. That's the support for people. And remind me, your third question. Oh, the third question had to do with the ramping up of prosecutions against whistleblowers under Obama. Yes, when I went on ABC News in 2007 and blew the whistle, I said three things. I said that the CIA was torturing its prisoners. I said that torture was official U.S. government policy, not the result of a rogue, as President Bush had intimated. And I said that the policy had been personally approved by the president. The FBI began investigating me the very next day and they investigated me for a full year from December of 2007 until December of 2008. They determined in 2008 that I had not committed a crime and they closed the case. Not only did they close the case, they sent my attorneys what's called a declination letter saying that they were declining to prosecute me. Three weeks later, Barack Obama's inaugurated as president and styles himself the most transparent president in history. He secretly ordered that the case against me be reopened. I had no idea. I was under investigation again. I was investigated for three more years and then finally arrested in January of 2012 and charged with those five felonies. Don't forget that espionage is one of the gravest crimes with which an American can be charged and it sometimes carries with it the death penalty. So this was a serious policy decision that the Obama people made. Beyond that, this isn't just because they didn't like John Kiriakou. Beyond that, Obama prosecuted eight national security whistleblowers. In the entire previous history of the United States, only three whistleblowers were prosecuted under the espionage act. So Obama was almost three times the number of all previous presidents combined. Really Barack Obama was the enemy of transparency. He was the enemy of whistleblowing. Really, in my view, the enemy of human rights. The question that I have been wondering about for years, and I'll let you have it, is who was ordering Barack Obama to do this? Because my brain tells me that Obama couldn't have cared less, but that somehow he was being pressured to do this. And when I follow that logic, and I have often in the past as a journalist, it turns out to be someone like Jamie Dimon, someone connected with the central banks, someone connected with something to gain. And we found that because of Assange, we discovered that. But go ahead. Well, I can tell you with 100% certainty it was John Brennan. John Brennan on national security called all the shots. And I'll tell you why. It's actually an important lesson, I think, for future presidents. And that is that the CIA loves inexperienced presidents. They love them because when a president is elected and he has little or no foreign policy or national security policy experience, that gives the CIA an opportunity to recruit that president. And what I mean by that is, if you've just been elected president, you don't know anything about national security or intelligence. The day after the election, when you're on your first day as president-elect, you're entitled to a CIA briefing, a president's daily briefing. That's PDB. That's at levels, multiple levels, above top secret. Well, as soon as the CIA gets in front of you and they say, Mr. President-elect, we want to tell you about all the cool things we're doing. And they show you your first blue border report, your black border report, multiple levels over top secret, human intelligence, penetrations of foreign intelligence services, access agents next to world leaders. You know, that stuff's fascinating and it's fun and it's cool. It's exciting. And they're able to suck that president right in and make him one of the boys. And that's exactly what they did with Barack Obama. Barack Obama had, he was a senator for what, four years. He wasn't even one full term as a senator. And he was only on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for two years and even then had no access to classified information. And then all of a sudden, he's the most important man in the world. So it's, it's heady stuff and president-elect really love it. On top of that, he had an alpha dog in the form of John Brennan whispering in his ear all day long. And John Brennan certainly had his own agenda. Besides that, I want to make a third point. In the book, Double Down, by Mark Halpert and John Heileman. It was about the 2012 presidential election. Obama sat for an interview. And in that interview, he said two things that I think were really telling. First, he said, very matter of factly, I never said I was a liberal. And that was true. He actually never did say he was a liberal. We said he was a liberal, but he wasn't. And then talking about the drone program. He said, kind of wistfully, I never had any idea that I would be so good at killing people. Well, it's because he never said he was opposed to the drone program. He never said he was opposed to long distance, you know, cruise missile launches. We, we sort of placed that on him because that's what we wanted to believe. That's the, the anti-Hillary that we wanted to be elected president. And there was no well prize. Nothing progressive about him at all on foreign policy, military policy and intelligence. Well, then two questions come to mind. One is that he was clearly Wall Street's pick. And he was practically appointed to his Senate position. Absolutely. It was a coronation. He slid in. Yeah, he was coronated into the Senate. And the city bank appointed his entire staff, essentially the upper levels of staff. And when I looked at who they were, I wrote an article. Goldman Sachs as well. Goldman Sachs was very heavily, heavily represented in the Obama administration. Yeah. And Jamie Dimon at all were the ones who did that picking. And I remember I wrote an article and I said, this is not small as beautiful. Yeah. We're going for centralization here with all the big players who have been central, central players right from the beginning. And so I told that to people on my radio program that, you know, if you're voting for Obama, I want you to know this. And this is when he was running for president. And anyway, in Vermont he was a shoe in because, you know, people don't care how many Palestinians you kill as long as you get your, anyway. Yeah. So what is your opinion as to the relationship between, this is a tricky question, between Brennan and Wall Street, meaning Goldman Sachs at all. And then I'll throw in another villain, which is Mueller, Robert Mueller. Right. I've done two, I've done two exposés about Robert Mueller over the years, going back to 1984, and he is one piece of work. He is, my opinion, the number one fixer for the deep state. So go ahead and see what you can do with those questions. Yeah. I don't disagree with any of that. I will say John Brennan, you know, John Brennan intellectually was in over his head. John Brennan rose far beyond what his intellect should have allowed. And it was because he became a close friend and protege of George 10. Most retired directors of central intelligence or directors of the CIA, they became known later on, end up on Wall Street in some capacity. George has become a principal in a vulture fund in New York City that has made him rich beyond his wildest dreams. Steve Campus, who was the number two at the CIA, is doing the same thing right now for a vulture fund based here in Washington, D.C. So this is a normal thing where they go to Wall Street and they make tens of millions of dollars and they live happily ever after. John's not done that. My own opinion is that John's not smart enough to do it. So what John has ended up doing is he is teaching a class at Fordham, which is his alma mater. And he's a talking head on MSNBC. And he's on the board of a couple of smallish defense contractors. He's actually having to work for a living. He's not making anywhere near the money that his predecessors have made. So he really doesn't have those deep Wall Street ties, not because he doesn't want them, but because he's just not smart enough to do it. Robert Mueller. I have a personal beef with Robert Mueller. I would think so. Robert Mueller was the CIA director when I was arrested. Not only was he the CIA director. You mean FBI director? I'm sorry. I'm sorry. The FBI director. But not only was he that, but he created the John Kiriakum task force inside the FBI. He appointed 12 FBI agents who tapped my phones, intercepted my emails, had groups of two agents in cars following me to work, to church, to the grocery store, out with my family, 24-7 coverage, trying to catch me committing a crime. And I wasn't committing any crimes. That went on for three years they did that. In addition, it was John Brennan who, when Obama became president, sent a memo to Eric Holder at the Justice Department saying, charge him with espionage. And then Eric Holder came back and said, my people don't think he committed espionage, meaning the Mueller John Kiriakum task force. And then Brennan responded charge him anyway and make him defend himself. And then on January the 12th, 2012, a fellow by the name of Peter Struck, put himself behind my back and took me to a holding cell underneath the federal courthouse in Alexandria, Virginia. So these same people who are going after Donald Trump at all are the ones who, after me, it is a deep state. And you don't have to call it a deep state. You can call it whatever you want. You can call it the state. You can call it the federal bureaucracy, whatever it is. The deep state actually exists. And these are the guys who run it. Okay. Then that leads me into the next question, which is, well, I'll preface it by saying that I realized as Trump went through the candidacy and the RNC was trying to cut him off at the knees and of course the Democrats just laughed him off, didn't get it. And, well, I won't go into it. But the way through, until today as we speak, there are elements of what I will call the deep state. They're right out in the open now. So I feel silly saying the deep state because you've got Mueller and Brennan and then the entire DNC. You've got Pelosi, the whole gang, and the New York Times and the rest of the mainstream media who seem to be able, and the CIA, who seem to be able to have a way of turning Trump from somebody who was out of the loop, who was trying to demilitarize and pull our troops back, turn him into some kind of a madman. What is your take on what, if anything, happened to Trump and how are they getting him to do this? I think I know the answer, but I really want to hear from you. I think he was more or less forced into it because there were so many Republicans, important Republicans who joined that so-called Never Trump movement. So when Trump finally became president, I mean, look at it this way. Hillary Clinton had 175 people on her Middle East transition team. Right? Donald Trump had 25 people on his entire transition team. And it's because Donald Trump never thought he was going to be elected president. So he wasn't prepared for it. That, coupled with the fact that there are all these Never Trumpers, he just simply didn't have enough people to fill senior level positions at the State Department, the Defense Department, and the White House. And so little by little, he had to start bringing these Never Trumpers into the administration. Well, the Never Trumpers, by and large, were neocons who made their bones in the Bush administration. And so little by little, and it was really incremental, they came to the White House, they became assistant secretaries of state, assistant secretaries of defense. The next thing you know, they're running foreign policy, not Trump, not the White House, and not the people he brought with him from the campaign. And that's how they did it. Yeah, another thing too. You know, I've spent most of my adult life dealing with senior intelligence officials, senior diplomats, generals at the Pentagon, and they can all be very convincing. You know, when you're getting a briefing on, let's say, the situation in Afghanistan or the situation in Syria, the situation in Libya, they can make it sound like we're winning it. We're on the cusp of finishing this thing off. And if you pull out now, it's going to be a disaster, we're going to lose our international prestige, people are going to die. So give us six more months, give us 12 more months. And then six or four months later, they repeat the same thing. And they do every year, year after year after year. And the next thing, you know, you're bogged down in some kind of foreign entanglement. And the Democrats are right with that opinion, and the brain dead ones are even worse. Yeah, there's no real difference between the Democrats and the Republicans on these foreign policy issues. There are some minor tweaks around the edges. But they're both neocons and neoliberals. They all believe in exactly the same thing. And that is that we really do need to have a military presence in 110 countries around the world. We need to have military bases in 86 countries around the world. We need to have the newest nuclear weapons and the biggest ships and the best airplanes and the biggest bombs. They all believe this stuff. Isn't it 700 countries? There are 144 countries in the world, and we have 110. We have a presence in 110 of them. Oh, I don't know why I thought it was 700. I had that number stuck in my head. All right. Well, that's a relief. So, okay, and getting back to people like Jamie Dimon and the central banks who owned Obama, it struck me that they were panicking as they began to realize. You can see the expressions on the talking heads' faces. They were struck dumb in a kind of paralyzed mode because they were talking gibberish as Trump's numbers went up. So, here we have a guy entering the presidency who was out of the loop. And I think you've explained how they put him in the loop and how he would be behaving gradually. And I was so disappointed in him when he appointed some of the people he appointed. It was godawful. And then he goes back to Reagan. He drags up the bottom of the barrel, an embarrassment to the U.S. I mean, who's been more embarrassing to the U.S. than Bolton, except maybe Abrams? You took the words right out of my mouth. I was going to say Elliott Abrams is at least as offensive and horrible a human being as John Bolton is. Yeah. I remember Ms. Neal there. Both legitimate war criminals, legitimate war criminals, people who have blood of innocence on their hands. Yeah. So, why did Trump do that? Well, like I said, there was just nobody to take these jobs. At one point, almost a year into the administration, there were 13 vacant assistant secretaries of state positions. So, you can't have a foreign policy if you have no assistant secretary of state to run that foreign policy. The only thing that he could do was to start drawing from either previous administrations or conservative think tanks, and those were the neocons. They're the ones that have all the money and staff the think tanks in Washington. He really had no choice. Well, our friend Ray McGovern, I think was one of the ones railing against this. And there were a lot of good people like Paul Craig Roberts who were saying, what are you doing? You have a chance, Mr. President, of at least appointing decent human beings to these positions. And you're going to the bottom of the barrel to pull up war criminals to be in these positions. And I said that Trump can't be that ignorant. But maybe it's a combination of his ignorance and maybe he's evil like they are. I don't know. What do you think about that? I think that's a possibility. You know, if Andrew McCabe is to be believed and his passage in his book, he recounts a meeting at the White House where they're talking about foreign policy. And then Trump says, what about Venezuela? That's the country we should be at war with. And they have all that oil. Yeah, I know that quote. If that's how you determine your foreign policy, then you need help from somewhere. Unfortunately, he looked at the wrong place for that help. Yeah. Oh, we only have a minute and 30 seconds left. So, ladies and gentlemen, I'm sorry I haven't said his name 100 times. John Kiriakou, a whistleblower who brought out the Bush torture program and has been in the thick of what's happening today ever since. And as I said, one of my heroes, along with Bill Binney. And we will do another interview with John Kiriakou when he is free. Very busy. And hopefully, you and I will be fortunate enough to continue this. I think we've hit an awful lot of key points that, of course, the mainstream media and the alternative media doesn't even know enough to hit if they were allowed to do it. So, closing words. Well, my pleasure. You know, I think we ought to be talking about these issues because they're important and nobody else is talking about them. So, thanks for having me. I look forward to seeing you again soon. Okay. Well, thanks again. Oh, sorry, we lost sound. Okay. Well, ladies and gentlemen, we will be back with more from John Kiriakou and maybe even some more whistleblowers as time goes by. Thanks a lot for listening to The House at Pooh Corner with Jim Hoag.