and the controlled mass media continues to (dutifully) ignore the disgusting facts. Read and learn the real reason America is hated everywhere.
Everything Was A LIE – Part I
Former CIA case officer John Kiriakou
John Kiriakou was the first – and probably only – CIA case officer to call President George W. Bush a liar. On October 5, 2007 President Bush stated emphatically: “This government does not torture people.” But as a longtime eyewitness, Kiriakou knew better.
Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6LtL9lCTRA
Thirteen months prior to President Bush’s false assurances, on Sept. 21, 2006, Brian Ross, an ABC news reporter, was interviewed on Fox News by Bill O’Reilly. During the segment Ross extolled the virtues of waterboarding claiming that according to his CIA sources captured prisoners started talking within less than a minute. He also claimed that crucial information was obtained that prevented more terrorist attacks.
Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Psoc08wBwig
John Kiriakou knew beyond any doubt that Bush’s bold declaration was an outright lie. John Kiriakou knew the truth and the truth did not make him free. Ultimately, the truth condemned him to prison. Before we delve into the twisted story behind the government’s ruthless attack on John Kiriakou for bringing the truth to the American people, let’s briefly review documented cases of what the United States government has euphemistically labeled “enhanced interrogation.”
- At a CIA secret prison in Afghanistan known as the Salt Pit, the CIA case officer in charge directed Afghan guards to strip a prisoner, Gul Rahman, naked from the waist down and chain him to the floor of his unheated cell; the guards complied and then left him until he froze to death. The next day he was hastily buried in an unmarked grave. His family and friends were not notified of his death.
- At least five detainees were subjected to “rectal rehydration.” A CIA officer claimed that the procedure helped to “clear a person’s head”. One of the detainees after having his anus ripped open during “rectal rehydration” later succumbed to rectal prolapse. This is when the rectum is externally squeezed out of the anus.
- Some detainees were made to stand in “stress positions” after incurring broken bones.
Reference: http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/dec/09/cia-torture-report-worst-findings-waterboard-rectal
Binyam Mohamed was arrested in April 2002, for allegedly traveling on a false passport.
The U.S. claimed that he was involved in a plot to make a low-grade nuclear bomb and he was held incommunicado in Pakistan, Morocco, and Afghanistan. While he was imprisoned in Morocco, his genitals were attacked with a razor blade. In 2004 he was flown to Guantánamo Bay. Five years later he was released after the U.S. dropped all charges against him, including claims that he was trying to make a “dirty bomb”.
Reference: http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2009/mar/27/binyam-mohamed-torture
Former Vice President Dick Cheney has characterized these reports as “a bunch of hooey.”
According to the Senate Intelligence Report, released in December 2014, despite all the public posturing:
- The CIA failed to extract actionable intelligence with its brutal techniques while pretending that they were essential to the nation’s security.
- In case after case studied by the Senate, no sense of urgency can be found. Prisoners were often locked up for weeks before they were even questioned; the techniques were used long after any time-sensitive information might reasonably have been secured.
In a recent interview CIA Whistleblower John Kiriakou repudiated Dick Cheney’s “hooey” hypothesis:
Everything the CIA has told us about this [“enhanced interrogation”] program from the very beginning has been a lie. The CIA said they weren’t torturing prisoners. That was a lie. The CIA said they were not sending people to third countries to undergo torture. That was a lie. The CIA said they were not sending people to secret prisons around the world. That was a lie.
John Brennan [CIA director]… said he did not have his employees spy on Senate investigators. That was a lie. My question is why should we believe anything John Brennan says when everything that he has told the American people has been a lie?
Reference: https://www.rt.com/usa/343380-john-kiriakou-cia-torture/
In another interview Kiriakou declared:
They knew about it [the savage interrogations] all the way up to the top. I remember sitting at a meeting with one of the top three officials at the CIA when the program was approved. And throughout the conversation, he kept on saying, “I can’t believe the president signed off on that program. I can’t believe it.” He kept saying it. Because it was so radical and violent that even internally we didn’t think there would be permission forthcoming. And there was. And it got out of hand, and it was a slippery slope and the ball kept rolling down the hill. And the next thing you know, we’re killing people.
Reference: https://theintercept.com/2015/01/19/cia-agent-jailed-john-kiriakous-long-road-era-torture/
CIA Torture-Murder Victim Manadel al-Jamadi
Photo Credits: docudharma.com & examiner.com
Why and when did Kiriakou decide to reveal what the CIA – with full backing of the White House – was doing? On December 10, 2007 Kiriakou was interviewed by Brian Ross on ABC News.
I remained silent from 2002 until 2007. I decided finally to blow the whistle in December 2007 after President George W. Bush twice lied to the American people. He said first that the United States did not torture anybody. A few days later he told the press that if there was torture, it was the result of a rogue CIA officer. This also was a lie. I knew that the CIA was torturing its prisoners, that torture was official CIA policy, and that the President personally approved of the torture.
Reference: http://www.pravdareport.com/world/americas/05-06-2016/134626-cia_torture-0/#sthash.EiH8TrVR.dpuf
We now know that the CIA rendition torture project was the brain trust of two psychologists, John “Bruce” Jessen and James Mitchell, who were paid $81 million for their services by the CIA.
John Rizzo, the CIA acting general counsel – who Kiriakou says is no angel – after meeting with the contractors, described them as “sadistic and terrifying.”
A lot of people didn’t like what Kiriakou had to say but his credentials were impeccable.
I will not speak to you in God’s language!
In February 2002 Kiriakou was assigned to Pakistan as head of counter-terrorism. In a daring raid coordinated with Pakistani agents, Kiriakou’s field officers captured Abu Zubaydah once believed to be a high-ranking member of Al-Qaeda.
He resisted. There was a shootout. The Pakistanis were the first– inside the door. And he stabbed a Pakistani policeman in the neck. We feared at the time that he– that he had died. Things were happening so quickly, it was confusing. And– the Pakistani authorities told us initially that the man had died. He turned out to just have been wounded. But then Abu Zubaydah– went up to the roof of his house and tried to jump to the roof of the neighboring house. He exchanged in a– in a gun battle with the Pakistani police down below, and he was shot three times. And then dropped from the roof of the house onto the ground. He was almost killed. And later that night one of the doctors, the Pakistani doctors who was treating him, told me that he had never seen wounds so severe where the patient had lived.
Abu Zubaydah immediately after capture
The safe house where Zubaydah was captured
Photo: PBS
Zubaydah was shot with an AK-47 in the thigh, groin, and stomach.
“One of the things that sticks in my mind– from those– those days and nights was how much blood he lost. There was blood everywhere. It was all over him. It was all over the bed. It pooled underneath the bed. It was all over us every time we had to move him. It was really an incredible amount of blood that he lost.”
When Zubaydah regained consciousness Kiriakou asked, in Arabic, for Zubaydah to give his name. In perfect English Zubaydah replied: “I will not speak to you in God’s language!”
The hospital was more like a charnel house than a place for wounds to heal. Stray cats and dogs roamed the hallways; needles were recycled after “sterilizing” them by sticking used needles into a bar of soap.
Meanwhile CIA Director George Tenet arranged for a top flight trauma surgeon from John Hopkins to fly directly to a military hospital in Lahore, Pakistan where Zubaydah was transferred to provide first class medical treatment. Kiriakou helped load the stretcher onto the helicopter. It was the last time he saw him.
Mr. Zubaydah was first questioned by FBI agents. One of the agents, Ali Soufan, who spoke Arabic and was knowledgeable in the history of Al Qaeda, later wrote that Mr. Zubaydah willingly provided valuable information, identifying Khalid Shaikh Mohammed as the main planner of the Sept. 11 attacks and naming Jose Padilla, an American recruited by Al Qaeda.
But because they believed Mr. Zubaydah was the number three leader of Al Qaeda, CIA officials insisted he was holding not revealing all that he know about the 9/11 attacks.
Reference: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/24/us/abu-zubaydah-torture-guantanamo-bay.html?_r=0
After returning to CIA headquarters Kiriakou was later informed that Abu Zubaydah had stopped resisting his CIA interrogators after just 30 or 35 seconds of waterboarding and told interrogators all he knew.
Not true.
It’s hard to imagine that anyone could make you feel sorry for Abu Zubaydah, but his CIA interrogators demonstrated a combination of brutality and incompetence that actually manages to achieve this. Even though Abu Zubaydah surrendered plenty of information to FBI interrogators without coercion, and even though it wasn’t clear how much more he knew—it turns out that he wasn’t even a member of Al Qaeda—the C.I.A., convinced that he was harboring knowledge of future attacks, subjected him to twenty days of torture. (The FBI refused to take part.) They stripped him, deprived him of sleep, slammed him into the prison wall, and played music at deafening volumes. They waterboarded him eighty-three times, driving him into fits of hysteria and involuntary spasms; at one point, they feared they might have killed him.
Reference: http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-did-abu-zubaydah-lose-his-eye
It wasn’t until the CIA’s Inspector General report was issued in 2009 that Kiriakou learned the truth.
In fact, they were so worried about being found out that they told their superiors that if Abu Zubaydah were to die during his interrogation, he would have to be cremated. In the event that he lived, they asked, in a cable, for “reasonable assurances that [Abu Zubaydah] will remain in isolation and incommunicado for the remainder of his life.” They did, indeed, receive such assurance.
Reference: http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-did-abu-zubaydah-lose-his-eye
The CIA torturers were so concerned that Zubaydah was going to die under torture; they wanted permission to cremate his remains.
The CIA videotaped the interrogation sessions. When ordered to preserve the tapes as part of an official investigation the CIA instead destroyed the evidence.
A former head of the CIA’s clandestine service, Jose Rodriguez Jr., suffered no penalty for destroying numerous videotapes of torture interrogations by the agency.
Reference: https://exposefacts.org/why-the-cia-is-so-eager-to-demolish-whistleblower-jeffrey-sterling/
Today Zubaydah is imprisoned at Guantanamo. He still has not been charged with any crime.
The Tortured Lie Behind the Iraq Invasion
According to the Senate Intelligence Report one of the very first victims of the CIA was Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi. The CIA turned him over to Egyptian intelligence, then, according to CIA cables, while under extreme torture al-Libi claimed that Saddam Hussein was in cahoots with Al Qaeda. He would later recant these claims, the moment he was transferred to CIA custody — but even before then, CIA officials were aware of his dubious credibility.
Al-Libi’s false and coerced statements constituted the “evidence” that Colin Powell presented to the United Nations Security Council to justify the United States invasion of Iraq.
Dateline June 11, 2008
Spies, Lies and the White House
Buried in a Senate report, new revelations about pre-war deception
By Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball
But the questions about al-Libi may be the most significant–and embarrassing–new disclosure in the Senate panel’s report, both for the White House and the CIA. The Senate report found that al-Libi was “the principal intelligence source” for assertions by Bush, CIA director George Tenet, national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice and [Secretary of State] Powell that Iraq had provided chemical and biological weapons training to Al Qaeda operatives.
“I can trace the story of a senior terrorist operative telling how Iraq provided training in these weapons to Al Qaeda,” Powell said during one dramatic flourish. “Fortunately, this operative is now detained, and he has told his story. I will relate to you now as he himself described it.”
Reference: http://www.webcitation.org/5YYJXt7YG
There is also this account of Vice President Cheney’s involvement:
Colin Powell’s chief of staff at the time of the Security Council address, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, said he has since discovered that Bush’s vice-president, Dick Cheney, ordered the Egyptian torturers to step up their techniques on al-Libi to obtain “a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qaeda”.
After the CIA was finished with al-Libi they turned him over to Libyan intelligence where he died under their custody.
Dateline May 21, 2009
Mystery surrounds prison death of terrorist whose testimony was key to Iraq invasion
INTERNATIONAL INVESTIGATION: Islamist dies in Tripoli shortly after human rights group visit
Hafed Al-Ghwell, a Libya expert and director of communications at the Dubai campus of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, scoffed at the notion that people in Libyan jails “simply commit suicide”.
This is a regime with a long history of killing people in jail and then claiming it was suicide. My guess is Libya has seen the winds of change in America and wanted to bury this man before international organizations start demanding access to him.
Tom Malinowski, the head of Human Rights Watch’s Washington office, said that al-Libi was “Exhibit A in the narrative that tortured confessions contributed to the massive intelligence failure that preceded the Iraq war”.
Dick Cheney relied on barbaric Egyptian torturers to deliver from the dungeons of hell a false confession that Saddam Hussein was collaborating with our avowed enemy, Al- Qaeda. By 2009, when many Americans were starting to suspect that Bush and Cheney lied to the country to justify the invasion of Iraq, al-Libi conveniently committed suicide just after the international organization, Human Rights Watch, took an interest in his plight.
Everything Was A LIE – Part Two: A Patriot Goes To Prison
John Kiriakou joined the CIA in 1990, less than two years after completing graduate school. Although hired as an analyst, he wound up spending much of his career in the Directorate of Operations—the clandestine spy service—running foreign agents, tracking down bad guys, risking his life in the service of CIA. His commitment to the CIA was simply based on his belief that his service made the country a safer place.
Former CIA case officer John Kiriakou
Eventually he transitioned into a whistle-blower activist and as a consequence became a condemned prisoner. In March 2004, Kiriakou left the CIA. Several years later Sen. Kerry asked him to work for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
War Crimes USA? “The dead bodies spilled out like fish.”
While working as the lead investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Kiriakou attempted to investigate a horrible war crimes incident in Afghanistan known as the Dasht e-Leili Massacre.
Grizzly mass killings occurred in late November 2001 just days after the American-led invasion forced the ouster of the Taliban in Kabul. Afghan warlord General Abdul Rashid Dostum, who was on the CIA payroll, combined his Northern Alliance forces together with American forces to score the first victory in the war on terror.
Thousands of Taliban fighters surrendered to General Dostum’s forces. They were then transported to a prison near the town of Shibarghan. Unbelievable as it sounds, for three days 2,000 Taliban prisoners were crammed into sealed metal shipping containers. Each sealed container was stuffed with over two hundred people. During the long trip across the desert the vast majority died from suffocation and slow, inexorable dehydration. One survivor described how the condemned prisoners cravenly licked the sweat off the legs and clothing of fellow victims; anything for a drop of water.
John Kiriakou says that only eighteen prisoners out of two thousand survived the brutal trek across the desert. The bodies were buried in a mass grave in Dasht-i-Leili, a desolate tract of desert just outside Shibarghan. One of the survivors claimed that bodies spilled out like fish after a container was opened.
Afghan prisoners who were later transported to Guantanamo told the lead FBI agent, Dell Spry, similar stories of a mass killing. They also claimed that U.S. personnel were present during the massacre. Spry thought that the allegations should be investigated but had doubts about American personnel being present.
While working for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Kiriakou was contacted by a human rights activist who informed him that an Afghan boy who witnessed prisoners being stuffed into containers claimed that two white men dressed in blue jeans and black sweatshirts and who spoke English were also present.
Kiriakou wrote a letter to the CIA concerning allegations that Americans were present during the massacre. Days later he was instructed that there would be no investigation and that he was to “drop it.”
References: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/11/world/asia/11afghan.html
http://harpers.org/blog/2009/07/did-americans-watch-the-massacre-at-dasht-e-leili/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8147977.stm
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSl53qIE81I
“When I was at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I initiated an investigation into the Dasht e-Leili Massacre. I have no idea if CIA officers were present at the massacre. I believe they probably were. But I don’t think we’ll ever know the truth about what happened there.” – John Kiriakou
Reference: http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/27/a-conversation-with-cia-whistleblower-john-kiriakou/
Embassy Taliban Raid: Vital Clues to 9/11
In the spring of 2002 while serving as head of counterterrorism Kiriakou, together with New York Port Authority Detective Tommy McHale who was on loan to the FBI, orchestrated a raid on the Taliban compound in Peshawar, Pakistan.
A few days after the raid McHale called Kiriakou and told him the raid turned up a treasure trove of documents:
“You’re never going to believe what I found!” It was a file folder with telephone bills in it. And the telephone bills were written in English. … [T]hey documented 168 calls made, from the Taliban embassy to numbers inside the United States, and I mean all over the United States, Bethesda MD, Los Angeles, Buffalo, Kansas City, all over the country. And those calls stopped abruptly on September the 10th, 2001, and then started up again slowly, on September the 16th.
Reference: http://www.useriscontent.com/media/John-Kiriakou-The-Reluctant-Spy-Frederick-Hitz-Excerpt.mp3
Arrangements were quickly made to transport the extraordinary cache to FBI headquarters where they could be expeditiously examined. Several years later Kiriakou found out from an FBI agent that the phone record data was crated away and discarded.
References: http://www.c-span.org/video/?293438-1/words-john-kiriakou
http://www.useriscontent.com/blog/2010/08/12/why-did-the-fbi-stash-taliban-9-11-phone-records/
When the FBI was provided with crucial telephone data concerning Taliban contacts in the United States, contacts that were active right up to the deadly September 2001 attacks and reactivated five days later, they simply ignored the data.
FBI Director James Comey now claims that the United States will never be safe unless the FBI knows when every American goes online, to whom they are sending emails and from whom they are receiving emails, and knows every website visited by every American at all times.
Comey wants the unconstitutional power to demand from the providers of telephone and Internet services all records and information about you. These demands are not to be subject to oversight by courts, and the communication companies that serve you are prohibited from telling you that all of your information has been given to the FBI.
Reference: http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2016/07/13/gestapo-america-paul-craig-roberts/
Given the FBI’s track record a prudent person might ask what the real intent is.
The reason Washington wants to know everything about everyone is so that Washington can embarrass, blackmail, and frame on felony charges patriots who stand up in defense of the US Constitution and the rule of law, and dissidents who criticize Washington’s illegal wars, reckless foreign policies, and oppression of American citizens. – Paul Craig Roberts
Reference: http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2016/07/13/gestapo-america-paul-craig-roberts/
The Empire of Lies Strikes Back
After the 2006 ABC News interview, the Justice Department, in a desperate bid to find something–anything–to charge Kiriakou with, launched a five year investigation.
By this time Kiriakou was sought after by legions of reporters. At one point he provided a reporter with the name of a CIA officer – whom Kiriakou thought was retired – so the reporter could obtain background information for a book he was writing. For this the government wanted to fine Kiriakou a million dollars and put him in prison for 45 years.
Kiriakou eventually was charged with three counts of espionage, one count of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act and one count of making a false statement as a result of the 2007 ABC News interview.
And why are they targeting Kiriakou? That part’s simple. His remarks are having some predictable repercussions in Congress, where inquiries into the use of waterboarding and similar torture devices are now being discussed. Kiriakou revealed a number of Justice Department brush-off answers to be lies, and his comments provide reason to suspect that a number of senior Bush Administration officials made false statements to Congressional inquiries.
Reference: http://harpers.org/blog/2007/12/when-does-an-fbi-investigation-look-like-omerta/
With help from the Government Accountability Project Kiriakou fought the outrageous charges but eventually, after being crushed with almost a million dollars in legal fees, he pled guilty to a plea agreement. Kiriakou accepted a plea to violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. All other charges were dropped. Even though he had no criminal intent, and there was no harm to the national security, accepting the plea resulted in a sentence of 30 months in prison.
Bruce Riedel, a retired veteran CIA officer who turned down an offer to be considered for CIA director in 2009, said Mr. Kiriakou was “an exceptionally good intelligence officer” who did not deserve to go to prison.
A Stab in the Back
On January 25, 2013, the day Kiriakou was sentenced, CIA Director General David Petraeus trotted out to the microphones and declared that the prosecution of Kiriakou was, “an important victory for our agency, for our intelligence community, and for our country.”
Three weeks later the country would discover that Patraeus was a conniving, back-stabbing hypocrite who lied to the FBI and, two years later, the American system of justice was revealed to be anything but just.
Petraeus pled guilty in 2015 to a misdemeanor charge of mishandling confidential materials after he gave Paula Broadwell, his biographer and paramour, carte blanche access to top-secret classified information. Specifically, Petraeus turned over eight binders of classified material that contained the names of covert operatives and other highly sensitive material.
The binders were seized in April 2013 by the FBI while searching Patraeus’ home. After resigning from the CIA in November 2012, Petraeus had signed a form falsely attesting that he did not retain classified material. He also lied to FBI agents by denying he supplied the information to Broadwell.
Petraeus got a sweetheart deal of two years probation. In June 2013 he joined the international investment firm KKR where he serves as Chairman of the KKR Global Institute.
Reference: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/david-petraeus-sentenced/
Petraeus the backstabber gets a sweetheart deal
Photo: Wikipedia
Michael Vickers & Leon Panetta
Dateline 22, 2012
Acting C.I.A. Chief Critical of Film ‘Zero Dark Thirty’
The acting director of the C.I.A., Michael J. Morell, has criticized a new movie about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, saying it exaggerates the role of coercive interrogations in producing clues to the whereabouts of the leader of Al Qaeda.
In a message sent Friday to agency employees about the film, “Zero Dark Thirty,” Mr. Morell said it “creates the strong impression that the enhanced interrogation techniques that were part of our former detention and interrogation program were the key to finding Bin Laden. That impression is false.”
Leon Panetta then-Director of the CIA and Michael Vickers then-Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence provided classified material to the screenwriters of Zero Dark Thirty including the name of the Navy Seal Team 6 leader.
In May 2012 Rep. Peter King, then chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, wrote to Vickers that documents obtained by Judicial Watch “raise serious questions regarding your central role in providing classified and sensitive information to individuals without appropriate security clearances.”
Reference: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/article24741766.html
Another news account sheds light on former CIA Director Leon Panetta.
Not only did the CIA provide privileged information to [screenwriter] Boal, but Leon Panetta, the Director of the CIA under President Obama from 2009 to 2011, personally offered to help Boal with obtaining information from the CIA while writing a screenplay and gave him classified information about the bin Laden raid, according to new documents obtained by Vice.
Reference: http://www.businessinsider.com/cia-helped-produce-zero-dark-thirty
Eventually, the inspector general’s office for the Department of Defense IG issued a report that exonerated Panetta.
Charles Grassley (R-IA)—then-Ranking Member and now-Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee—called Halbrooks’ publicly released account of the matter “highly-sanitized” and “not worth the paper on which it was written.”
Reference: http://www.pogo.org/our-work/articles/2015/new-documents-in-zero-dark-thirty-affair-raise-questions.html?referrer=https://www.google.com/ 4/16/2015
Once again the corrupt establishment protects itself.
Mark Adams, Government Reform Project
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