CIA Coups Coverups and Torture: CIA Whistleblower Former Intelligence Officer John KiriaKau

The CIA accused me of revealing classified information and the FBI investigated me for a year but found no wrongdoing. However, when Barack Obama became president, the case was reopened secretly and I was under surveillance for three years. I was arrested and charged with five felonies, including espionage, which were later dropped after I went bankrupt from legal fees. The whole process cost taxpayers over $6 million, which seems like a misuse of resources and more like revenge.
The text discusses a man’s experience with the CIA, his prosecution, and his unsuccessful attempts to get a pardon. It also explores the political landscape, criticizing the two-party system in the U.S. and suggesting that it suppresses freedom of speech. The man shares his observations about voting systems in other countries and expresses his frustration with the current state of American politics.
Dr. Lakey has developed a simple, at-home anti-aging solution that has gained popularity online, with many users reporting positive results. Meanwhile, there’s a debate about the usefulness of the debt ceiling, with some suggesting it should be abolished as it doesn’t benefit the American public. In the political sphere, there’s a discussion about the role of the CIA in global affairs, with some criticizing its involvement in coups and wars. The article also mentions the complexities of political decision-making and the potential for unintended consequences.
The text discusses the alleged misuse of USAID, a U.S. government agency providing foreign aid, by the CIA for covert operations. It suggests that the CIA has been using USAID to fund secret projects and operations for many years, with little to no repercussions. The text also mentions the CIA’s ability to maintain its budget by creating threats or “boogeymen” to justify its existence and funding. Lastly, it discusses the CIA’s strategy of waiting out presidents who are not in their favor, as they have a longer tenure.
The speaker suggests that the U.S. needs to reassess its spending priorities, focusing less on defense and more on infrastructure and development. They also argue that the U.S. should accept that it’s no longer the sole global power and should prepare for the rise of the BRICS countries. The speaker criticizes the U.S. for having too many intelligence agencies and suggests that this is a waste of resources. They also discuss how China is gaining influence globally through development projects and suggest that the U.S. needs to adopt a similar long-term strategy.
John Kiriakou discusses various historical events and shares new documents about them weekly on Unified and Substack. His work is highly recommended and worth watching.

The CIA immediately filed what’s called a crimes report against me with the FBI, saying that I had disclosed classified information in the media. The FBI investigated me from December of 07 until December of 08 and then sent my attorneys something called a declination letter, declining to prosecute me. They said that I hadn’t violated the law and they just moved on. Three weeks later, Barack Obama becomes president. Do you want glowing skin, healthy joints and nails without breaking the bank? Meet native path collagen. It’s a secret to your best self. Packed with grass fed hydrolyzed collagen peptides, native path works from the inside to boost your skin’s elasticity, strengthen your hair and keep your joints feeling great for all your adventures.

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People really like it because they feel the difference and customers keep coming back. You can see why native path is america’s number one trusted collagen and you can try it today. There’s a special bundle offer where you get 45% off. It’s not available with their regular website. You can go to lovenativepath.com Sarah and save 45%. That’s love. Native path.com Sarah and save 45% on their exclusive bundle today. Welcome to business game changers. I’m sarah westall. I have john kiriakou joining the program. I’ve been wanting this guy to come on for a long time. He’s a former CIA whistleblower.

Well, he’s not a former CIA. He’s still a whistleblower. But he’s a former CIA officer who became a whistleblower. He ended up spending two years in prison because he got on their bad side. He’s going to explain the situation. I don’t think he really did anything wrong and he explains what happened and they were just going after him and. But he’s a good guy and we talk about the CIA. What? Oh, you know, what their role is throughout the world and how they’ve been undermining countries and creating a backlash everywhere they go, you know, it backfires.

And all these problems that the CIA is creating, I’m sure they’re doing some good stuff. But they have a trail of devastation that follows them and we’re going to be talking about that and, and then I give them a challenge at the end on what needs to occur with technology. You know, the technology we have is over the charts. I mean the wars that, that are going on are different than they used to be because the technology is so advanced. Our ability to control people’s minds just with low tech stuff like social media is ext strong.

So what really needs to go forward? I ask them this. What do we really need to do to create a safer, more peaceful worldwide environment that’s more pro human? And I give them that really challenging question because at the end of the day that’s really what we all should be moving towards with again, with technology being so much more advanced and us moving towards a transhumanist, more modern world, how do we maintain our humanity and do it in a way that’s more peaceful and pro human where people can be happier and healthier? And I know that’s something that a lot of people talk about and think about, but we’re entering into a different world where the technology is so different than the past that you have to think about it differently.

We’re in a more global environment as well. And you know, maybe Cliff, Cliff High is going to be is right that what he said. This is a promising thing. As the alien agenda becomes exposed, humans will fight less. And that’s his prediction. I hope he’s right. He’s a friend of mine. I love Cliff High and his and I love this prediction that humans will be fighting less because it’ll be focused on other things. That would be fantastic, wouldn’t it? Well, anyways, before we get into this, I want to pitch my substack to you. If you go to sarah westall.substack.com you will find find stories I post about every other day.

I write stories and I publish notices of new shows and then I also do some exclusives as well. For example, I just posted up there a show that I did with John Mark Dugan from 2018, I believe, where he talks about having all the Epstein files and because the Times of London tipped off, actually I think the FBI tipped off MI6 or MI6, but regardless, MI6 tipped off the Times of London that John Mark Dugan had the Epstein files and tapes and that he was keeping them because he was a. He was in Florida in palm beach county, and the investigators that were working on the Epstein case had him keep the files because they didn’t trust that the files wouldn’t be destroyed.

So he has them. And he came on my show. He was the first interview that he did coming on my show, talking about what was in these files. So I have that as an exclusive for my substack. You can go to Sarah Westall, that’s substack.com and see that. And I also want to say for John, he has a new show all about the CIA and the classified operations that go. That happens. And it’s on unified tv. And we’ll have the link below and also under his name during the show, and you can go check that out.

He also has a substack as well. And I’ll have a link below to that. Okay, let’s get into this really interesting conversation that I have with John Kiriakou. Hi, John. Welcome to the program. Thank you, Sarah. I appreciate you having me. I’ve been wanting you on my program for a long time now. You are a legend in the whistleblowing CIA world. You are. And you came to prominence during what, 2014, 2013, when you blew your whistle. 2007 was when I blew the whistle, but then 20. Well, the Obama administration arrested me. That’s when you really. I mean, you were blowing a whistle on torture that was going on, and then they arrested you, and then they ultimately put you in prison.

Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, sure. So I blew the whistle on the CIA’s torture program in a. In an interview on abc news in December of 2007. As you might imagine, the CIA immediately filed what’s called a crimes report against me with the FBI, saying that I had disclosed classified information in the media. So the FBI investigated me from December of 07 until December of 08 and then sent my attorneys something called a declination letter, declining to prosecute me. They said that I hadn’t violated the law and they just moved on. Huh.

Interesting. Yeah. Three weeks later, Barack Obama becomes president and he names John Brennan as the deputy national security advisor for counterterrorism. John and I always hated each other, and I had no idea that John asked Eric Holder, the attorney general, to secretly reopen the case against me. So over the next three years, my phones were tapped, my emails were being intercepted, teams of FBI agents were conducting surveillance on me. And then In January of 2012, four years after I blew the whistle, they arrested me and they charged me with five felonies, including three counts of espionage coming out of that ABC news interview.

Yeah, I hadn’t committed espionage. And they dropped the charges eventually. But what happened was. And we got this in discovery, Brennan wrote a. A letter to Holder and said, charge him with espionage. And Holder wrote back and said, my people don’t think he committed espionage. And then Brennan wrote back to Holder and said, charge him anyway and make him defend himself. Oh, gee. So they did. And then they waited until I went bankrupt from attorneys fees and then they dropped the charges. That’s. That’s what they do. They bankrupt people. But they do. But. What a waste of resources to watch you for three years.

Oh, it cost millions of dollars. We. We did a FOIA request during the course of the trial asking what it cost to. To prosecute me, and it was over $6 million. And it’s like, you know, was that really an appropriate use of the taxpayers money? Is society safer and better off because you spent $6 million to put me in a low security prison for 23 months? Really? Or was that just revenge? And it was revenge. Yeah, it was obvious now. But what. What was weird is that there were leaks all over the place saying that torture was going on.

They just decided to nail you. You know, nobody brings that up, but you are exactly right. One of the reasons why the FBI elected to not refer me for prosecution in 2008 was that amnesty international had already written a report saying the CIA was torturing its prisoners. Human rights watch had written a report saying the CIA was torturing its prisoners. And the international committee, the red Cross issued a report saying that the CIA was torturing its prisoners. So then John comes out and says, CIA is torturing its prisoners. And they say, oh my God. Top secret leak.

We have to charge him with espionage. And their first offer to me, I ended up with 23 months, but their first offer was 45 years. Wow. And one of the. The assistant US attorneys said to me, oh, boy, it was awful. She said, take the deal, Mr. Kiriakou, and you might live to meet your grandchildren. How awful is that? And that was just because they didn’t like you. I mean, that’s. That’s it. Do you think it all came from John Brennan? All of it? What do you think that reflects more of. I mean, you know, now that you can take a bird’s eye view, you’ve been away from it for a while.

What does that reflect about the agency? Oh, the agency. The Agency should be considered to be a person, a living entity with feelings, feelings of anger and revenge. And, you know, this, this isn’t specific to a political party. This is a point that I, that I tried to stress. It was George W. Bush that authorized the torture program and implemented the torture program, but George W. Bush didn’t prosecute me. It was St. Barack Obama that prosecuted me and doubled down. Yep. No. John Brennan was one of the fathers of the torture program, yet he was a Democrat and served a Democratic president.

So I don’t know, people are still, it’s, to me, it’s not a shock that people are still learning that the Democrats aren’t what people think they are. Right. I mean, like I’ve been. But how can so many people be fooled for such a long. Just a mystery to me. I don’t know. They think all the bad stuff happens on the Republican side and now they’re waking up. People are waking up to it. I think they are waking up. It’s easier to get away with doing bad things on a side or with a group who you don’t think is going to do it.

That’s right. That’s right. That’s right. And, you know, one of my attorneys, my lead attorney said to me, someday you’re going to get a pardon. It may not be with this president, it may not even be with the next president, but someday you’re going to get a pardon. Well, I applied for a pardon at the very tail end of the Obama administration and didn’t get it. There’s actually a story there. I applied under Trump and, and was told specifically that Mitch McConnell killed my pardon. And then I applied for a pardon with Biden and had the support of, of, well, Hunter Biden’s godfather, who, you know, has this close and abiding personal connection to Joe Biden and didn’t get it.

And then finally somebody said, no Democrat is ever going to pardon you because then it’s pointing the finger at Barack Obama and nobody would ever have the guts to do something like that. It’s going to have to come from a Republican. It has to come from a Republican. And, you know, this is an important point. I’m glad you just said that because I’ve come around to the notion that the ideological spectrum is not a straight line from left to right. It’s a circle. And at one point it meets. And so, so many Americans fool themselves when they think, well, you know, one party’s good, the other party’s bad.

No, there are a lot of issues on which we can agree. We just choose to fight instead. And that’s why I’m. I’m not just independent. I’m an independent. Independent. And, you know, on my own, somebody. Somebody sent me an angry email. They unsubscribed and sent me a very angry email. When did you become a Trumper? And I said, I. I’m not a Trumper. I mean, I guess I can be on individual issues, and I side with the Democrats on individual issues. But to just decide that one party is better than the other, one candidate is better than the other, that’s just foolishness.

That’s not the America we live in today. Well, and the thing that all people can be put into two camps. Yeah. All of these issues, it’s like, really? Oh, my God. All the way into the first half of the 20th century, we had multiple viable parties. I just finished reading one of many Abraham Lincoln biographies, and one of the things that struck me was into the 1880s, there were, like, six viable political parties. Six different political parties represented in Congress. We had cabinet members like. Like Solomon P. Chase, who was the Secretary of the treasury, the Governor of Ohio.

He was a member of four different political parties just in the 1860s. Every time he had a falling out over some issue, he would just move to a different political party. And you could do that back then. And it was like, oh, yeah, okay, well, that’s normal. Well, I’m not a supporter of the Chinese Communist Party, but when I was in China, somebody made an argument, and I’m like, oh, that kind of makes sense that everybody has to belong to this one party. And then once you belong, then it’s like a free for all on all the issues.

And then there’s. You’re not, like, beholden to anything. And I’m like, well, that kind of makes sense. You know what I mean? In an odd way, it does make sense. I got my Greek citizenship in 2000, whatever it was. And in 2019, I decided to fly back to vote, and I voted in my grandfather’s middle school. It was so much fun. And a very odd way of voting there. They give you a stack of. Of three by five cards, and each card has the name and logo of a political party. And so you go into the voting booth, you pull out the.

The one party that you want, and then you leave the voting booth, you put the card that you chose in a box and throw the others into a big trash bag. It’s odd, as I said, but it works for them. Anyway, I went in there like, what are these Cards. I go in there, 36 different political parties, six communist parties, two fascist parties, a crazy Greek Orthodox extremist party, and then everybody else in between. It was craziest thing. Well, and that’s more reality though, isn’t it? It is, yes it is. Jumping around on different issues. Yeah.

Oh yeah. And then six or seven of them ended up getting parliamentary representation. And what they do is whatever party comes in first gets an extra 50 seats. So there’s always a majority party. You’re not paralyzed by coalition governments. It works. And people feel free to speak their minds. Well, that’s the important thing that, I mean we, our freedom of speech has been considerably suppressed because of this two party system, hasn’t it? I agree completely. You know, we’ve, we’ve adopted in certain respects the British parliamentary or any parliamentary system in that you are not free to vote your conscience anymore.

When I first came to Washington, I’m embarrassed to say how long ago was I came here 40, 42 years ago to go to college. And there were liberal Republicans and I mean liberal Republicans like with 100% liberal ratings and conservative Democrats with 100% conservative ratings and they were free to just vote any way they wanted. Now some of the conservative Democrats wanted to be Democrats because the Democrats controlled the House of Representatives. And that way you could rise through the, through the, the system of, what do you call it, the hierarchy, the ranking and become a committee or subcommittee chairman.

Yeah. And the liberals were generally these kind of old Yankee families from New England. They had been liberals for, you know, a 150 years and no sense in changing now. And that’s all gone, all of it. There are no liberal Republicans, there are no conservative Democrats. And when you go to vote on a measure, you are told by your party whip which way you’re voting, whether you like. Not even. Yeah, it’s not even like you are anything anymore. It’s just the party and, and these Democrats now Republicans, you’ll see some that will vote differently. Yes, but, But Democrats, almost 100%.

Not a chance. That’s, you’re not even a person. You could just vote anybody at that point. That’s it. They’re just robots. They just do as they’re told. Yeah. I mean, what’s the point? Yeah, I’ll give you an example. This is something that bothers me very much. It’s, it’s the vote on, on the debt ceiling. So when there’s a Democratic president, almost all Republicans vote against increasing the debt ceiling. We’ve been told our whole lives that Wrinkle cream is the best way to look younger. But according to Dr. John Lakey, the world renowned Beverly Hills beauty expert, most wrinkle fixtures are nothing but glorified moisturizers.

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That’s BHMD1. So why not, when you, when a party controls the White House and both houses of Congress, why not just do away with the debt ceiling? Because on the flip side, when the Democrats are in the White House. I’m sorry, when the Republicans are in the White House and the, and the Democrats control one or both houses of Congress, they want a vote on the debt ceiling so they can vote against it. So, I mean, I mean, they don’t want to. They, they want to keep it so they can show that they’re against it. Yes.

Yeah, it’s just a, it’s just an exercise of raw power. It does nothing to, to help the American people in any way. Shutting down the government doesn’t help the American people. So just do away with this stupid. I mean, we’ve only been doing this for 20 or 30 years anyway, so why not just go back to the way it used to be? Get rid of these stupid votes every year on raising the debt ceiling and, and just be done with it. You know, I, I worked on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff for a couple of years.

I was the senior investigator. And John Kerry came into our office one day and he said, you know, guys, I’ve been thinking we should probably do an authorization bill. And I chuckled because I thought he was joking. And he looks at me and he said, what? And I said, well, of course we should do an authorization bill. An authorization bill is when the Appropriations Committee votes for an appropriation and then the Oversight Committee authorizes the State Department to spend the money. He said, we haven’t, we haven’t passed an authorization bill in five years. And I said, how does the State Department run? Yeah, well, yeah, it’s all theater.

It’s incredible that this is, you know, that, that, you know, I’ve also heard that the polarizing figures in the different parties, that the opposite party wants them there because that helps them raise money. That’s right. And so they won’t fight really hard to get rid of them. That’s right. Like Thomas Massie. The Democrats love Thomas Massie. You know, I’ve been to a couple of baseball games with him. He is a. My. We have a friend in common, and we’re all baseball fans, so we’ve been to half a dozen games. He is an absolutely lovely human being.

And he’s one of those very rare people. Like he was picked right out of the 1980s and put down in today’s Congress. He’s one of those people who votes one way or another on legislation because imagine this, because he thinks it’s the right thing to do. I know he’s very rare. Very rare. And I cannot name a Democrat who does that. I can’t name another Republican besides Ms. Massey. Well, Rand Paul will do it a little bit, but. Yeah, yeah, a little bit. I’m glad you said that. On the big issues. No, I’ll tell you another thing.

When. When Donald Trump chose Gina Haspel to be the CIA director, the Washington Post called me and asked me if I would write an op ed for the Sunday paper in opposition to Gina Haspel’s nomination. I said, of course. So I wrote this piece, it ran in the Sunday Post, and I get a call around 10 in the morning from Rand Paul, and he says, can you come to the office and help us strategize as to how we defeat this woman? I said, I’ll be there in 20 minutes. So I jump in the car, I speed up to Capitol Hill, go to Rand Paul’s office.

It’s him and four senior staffers. He’s got a whiteboard in the office and he’s writing these notes and lines and arrows and, and he’s writing names of senators who might be willing to vote no. And then a week later, he voted yes. Oh, Mitch McConnell told him to. Did he negotiate some deal behind the scenes if I vote yes here, or did he do it because he was told to? Yeah, he was told to do it. Wow. See that. It’s a shame because then what’s the point? Yeah, you have no, you know, you’re not anything at that point.

Well, let’s get back to your greatest knowledge. I know you probably have knowledge all over the place based on working, you know, on, in Washington D.C. in so many different areas. But working for the CIA for so long. What do you think about the way the CIA now is being exposed where people are starting to figure out that the CIA are involved in, you know, coups all over the world and creating wars and it just fiasco after fiasco. Yeah. And this is not a new development. The CIA’s very first covert action operation was in 1949, only a year and a half after the CIA was created, in which they essentially stole the Italian election.

What they did, and it was kind of, you know, school kid stuff, is they were really, really afraid that the communists were going to win. The communists were ahead in the polls. So the CIA sent the Christian Democratic Party, the Conservative Party, $150,000 in cash, which in those days was, you know, two or three million dollars. Yeah. And they use that money to pay off journalists to write anti communist articles. And then the conservatives won the election. That’s kind of cute in today’s vernacular. Yeah, that’s, that’s not a big deal in comparison to. Although it’s, it’s still, it’s still corrupt.

It is coming from the government. And we saw them infiltrate en masse in the media, but they didn’t put a bullet in the back of somebody’s head like they did only seven years later. And, you know, we’ve all heard stories, for example, about Iran in 53, Guatemala in 56, the Dominican Republic in 58, any number of African countries through the 1960s and into the 1970s. Chile in 73, Greece from 67 to 74, Iran again in 79. And they’ve never gotten it right. There’s just not a way to overthrow a government and not have bloodshed. And what the CIA claims to fear most, which is blowback, Blowback means unintended consequences.

And it’s unintended consequences pretty much every time. Every single time. And it’s like, this is a lesson that they don’t. That they don’t get. And I’ll tell you something else. The day before we invaded Iraq in 2003, I was. My job at the time, I was the executive assistant to the CIA’s deputy director for operations, and I was intimately involved in the planning for the Iraq war. So the day before the invasion, we have what’s called a Principals Committee meeting. The. The Principals Committee is. Normally, it’s chaired by the President, but the President was unavailable that day.

So that day it was chaired by Dick Cheney, and it includes the National Security Advisor, who was Condi Rice. The Secretary of State was Colin Powell. The Secretary of Defense was Donald Rumsfeld, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the commander of CENTCOM Central Command in Tampa, which had jurisdiction over the Middle East. And there were a couple of other people from the NSC and all their note takers. So the principals are all sitting at their tables. The note takers are just behind them, just behind their shoulders against the wall. So George was at the table.

George Tenet was the CIA director, and I was sitting behind George. So Cheney starts off the meeting by asking General Tommy Franks for an order of battle briefing. I always hated order of battle briefings because they’re so freaking boring and I don’t really understand them. And. And they have this map, and they say, well, the elements of the 1st Army Corps are here and they’re moving over there. And we’ve got this unit of the 10th Cavalry Division, and it’s okay. I don’t care. Just. Just tell him to start fighting, you know, at midnight or whatever the order is going to be.

I don’t care where they’re. They happen to be standing when they launch the war. So he’s given the briefing, and then at the very end of it, he says, and these were his exact words, he says, if all goes as planned, we can be in Tehran by August. And very discreetly, George turns off his microphone and he turns back to me like this, and he says, did he say Baghdad or did he say Tehran? And I said, he said, tehran. And George said, have these people lost their minds? And then he turns the microphone back on and just sits there.

And then the last briefing was given by the senior director at the National Security Council for the Middle East. I’ll never forget it. He said, the moment we cross that border, they’re going to throw flowers at us. And I said to George, do These people know nothing about the Middle East. Do they know nothing about history? And he said, yeah, they know nothing. So did they throw flowers? No. They threw IEDs and hand grenades. And, you know, of course. Yeah, that’s. That’s what happens. That’s incredible. Now, what do you think about. Well, I gotta ask you, how intertwined is USAID and some of these other NGOs with the CIA? Yeah.

Isn’t that a sad story? John F. Kennedy, when he created USAID along with the Peace Corps and vista, I’m sure, never fathomed that it would be essentially taken over by the CIA or as. As Senator William Proxmire, a former senator from Wisconsin, said, The CIA’s beachhead in the State Department. The CIA. The CIA has been for many years all over USAID. In fact, in doing research for a piece I wrote a couple of weeks ago on usaid, I found a declassified memo. Two memos, as a matter of fact, they were identical. But Senator Ted Kennedy wrote to the CIA in 1972 and said that he had a source who said that the CIA was funneling money through USAID to Laotian mercenaries.

Was this true? And the CIA writes back to Kennedy and there’s an identical letter comes back from State Department under which USAID fell. And it was signed by Henry Kissinger, and it said, yeah, we’re using USAID to send money to the Laotian mercenaries. And we did it in 69, 70 and 71, in addition to 72. Wow. Like, what are you gonna do about it? Yeah. Uncleared Senator Ted Kennedy. And then what happened? Literally nothing happened. And that’s really the. The scary part of this. Literally nothing happened. They continue to use USAID for the Laotians, for the Cambodians, later on, for the Iranians, later on for the Cubans and the Ecuadorians.

And it just continued up until at least two years ago. Them. Wow. And so now do you think that the push back on usaid, is it a. Who’s funding this. This attack against the. You know what I mean, it. Because Elon Musk and Doge, and they’re really doing a good effort of, you know, ferreting it out who’s funding the attack against it because it’s not organic or doesn’t feel organic. Yeah. Listen, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it was coming from the CIA for a very easy reason. I mentioned Senator William Proxmire a minute ago.

There’s actually some important background related to Proxmire on this issue. Specifically, Proxmire was a Democrat, a liberal Democrat. But he hated, hated, hated government waste. And so he would go like, line by line with a ruler through the federal budget looking for waste. And every month he would have a press conference and he would give this fake award that he made up called the Golden Fleece Award. So it was a spray painted gold sheep, and he would give it to, you know, the Golden Fleece Award this month goes to the Defense Department’s, you know, Bureau of whatever for spending $6 million on trying to figure out if monkeys had a preferred color, you know? Yeah, yeah, right.

Well, they hated that at the CIA because most of the, the Golden Fleece Awards that he gave were for programs that didn’t really exist. They were, they were covered black projects the CIA was doing. Exactly. And a lot of those came from usaid. Oh, when you hear these, when you hear these goofball projects, you know that they, those are usually cover. Right. I mean, because we’re not. Are we really doing a transgender comic book in some country or is that a CIA cover story? It’s a CIA cover story. That makes sense because it’s too stupid. And now at the CIA, I could just imagine them in their staff meetings like, oh, crap, there’s this doge going on now, and they’re outing all of our, our, you know, line items.

Now what are we going to do? We should probably push back on this. Why didn’t they just use line items that weren’t stupid? I know, right? I mean, you could do something that just seems legit. Yeah. And it wouldn’t. They might still cut it, but they’re not going to make headline news or just have a classified budget and be honest about it and just pass it, you know, in closed session. Have a copy of it locked up in the, in the House and Senate for House and Senate Intelligence Committee vaults, and a copy locked up in the CIA vault and everybody’s happy.

Yeah, we’ll do it legit. I’m like, I’m giving the criminals some advice on how to be better criminals by saying, use better words. But the real thing is don’t be a criminal. Don’t be a criminal. Right? That’s right. Exactly. So this is, I mean, it’s, it’s funny, but it’s not right. Because once you dive into it, you realize how deep this network goes, and it goes back for decades. And I think the CIA’s position as well. Why change it now? We’ve had it like this since 1947. Why would we change it now? Do you think they’re going to win.

They’re going to win this fight because it is a. I mean, this is a big part of the war. Is the CIA fighting the establishment, fighting with the people who want to reign the government in? I mean, we have to, right? I mean, the dollar. We have to. It’s out of control. It’s out of control. I mean, we can’t. Go ahead. I’m sorry, Go ahead. No, go ahead. I, I, I felt very good when Donald Trump named Tulsa Gabbard the DNI and John Ratcliffe the CIA director. But there are a handful of problems. Number one, Ratcliffe, good guy, expert in what he does.

He’s not a visionary thinker. Problem number two, Donald Trump is already a lame duck. He can’t run for president again. And so, you know, what they do at the CIA, what they have done at the CIA for generations, is they just wait presidents out. They hated, for example, they hated Jimmy Carter, they hated Bill Clinton, and they hated Donald Trump. And you’re talking about CIA leaders who have been there for 25, 30, 35 years. Presidents come and go during that period, and they know that they can just wait out a President. Donald Trump is not calling, at least publicly, for huge cuts in the CIA budget.

If he were, they would fend him off. But I think they’re actually counting their blessings. They’re getting off easy. They’re looking at what’s happening at the Department of Education or at the EPA or at USAID or the Institute for Peace that are probably going to be wiped out or almost wiped out. And they say, hey, things are actually pretty good for us. We can wait this guy out for four years. And I think he’s, he’s going to leave them alone for the most part. I do. You know, the CIA is very good at something that the FBI perfected in the 1950s.

The FBI, get this. The FBI has been around since 1922. It has never had a budget cut. We’re talking about 103 years. It has never had a budget cut because year after year after year, J. Edgar Hoover, who was the director of the FBI for 48, eight years, would go before the, the Congressional Appropriations Committee, and he would say communism. And they’d be like, oh, my God, we have to raise the budget. Okay. All the CIA does is go and say, 9, 11, China, terrorism. Well, and that’s. They create those, though, right? They have to create the boogeyman so that they can keep their.

You bet they do. To keep their budget. Mm. They’re good at it. You know, one of the things that they were really good at. And I actually had begrudging admiration for it. The CIA loves it when a president is elected and he has no intelligence background. Now, Donald Trump’s different because Donald Trump is Donald Trump and he thinks for himself. But look at Barack Obama. I think he, he’s the clearest example of what I’m going to explain. Barack Obama was a senator for two years. That’s it. That was a little experience. Yeah, two years and he did not sit on the Intelligence Committee.

Well, when a new president is elected the very next day on the, the day after the election, he is entitled to receive his first PDB briefing. That’s President’s Daily Brief. So usually when it’s the President elect, the Deputy Director for Intelligence goes to the President elect with the PDB and they say, Mr. President elect, this is the most sensitive document that is produced by the American government. Just wait until you see the cool things that we are doing all around the world. And then they show them a blue border report or a black border report, and it’s classified six levels over, top secret.

Well, they’ve, they’ve hooked him. They brought him in. Now he’s one of the guys, he’s one of only a dozen and a half people that have access to that book outside of the CIA. They’ve hooked him. And so then you get a guy who doesn’t know any better and doesn’t know to challenge the CIA, and instead he just, just jumps in with both feet. That’s what Barack Obama did. So what do you think? I’m going to give you a real big challenge here. What do you think needs to be eliminated or restructured or new thing or whatever to create a more peaceful, pro human world as we have these more sophisticated weapons, control of our culture? I mean, you know, with the online, with the technology we have, how do we move to a better way of managing such an important question and such a big question? You know, I think we, I think we need to reassess our priorities, primarily our budgetary and foreign policy priorities.

Our defense budget is more than the next eight, six largest countries combined. More than Russia, China, Germany, Japan, England, France. I mean, come Brazil combined, does it really need to be. Why do the Chinese and the Japanese have bullet trains that go 350 miles an hour? Why do they have beautiful brand new interstate highway systems and brand new bridges that aren’t falling into the rivers beneath them like we have here? You know, I’m sure you’ve flown into dozens of American airports over the years. We should Be ashamed of the condition of our airports. If anybody’s traveled overseas and they’ve seen some of these foreign airports, I, I’m, I’ve been to 72 countries.

I marvel when I arrive in some of these countries and I look at the airport, I say, my God, why can’t we have airports like this? Because we spend our money on weapons. So I think we need to reassess our spending priorities, number one. Number two, I think we have to accept the fact that we are living in a multipolar world. As much as we might want to be the big boys on the block in a unipolar world, that’s just not reality anymore. And I think we grossly underestimated the importance of the creation of bricks. Right.

The BRICS countries, what is it? Brazil, Russia, India, China, and then they’ve added four or five more since. If they end up implementing a unified currency, we’re screwed. And I think it’s coming, that’s coming. And we should use the time between now and then to reorganize our, our goals around the world and then, you know, domestically for our own purposes. We don’t need 18 different intelligence agencies in the US government. We have 18 separate standalone intelligence agencies. Why. Why are we spending that money? If the, if the Defense Department has Defense Human Services that recruits spies to steal secrets, why is the CIA recruiting spies to steal secrets? If the, if the State Department has the Bureau of Intelligence and Research that writes for the President’s Daily Brief, why does the CIA have a directorate of Intelligence that writes for the daily brief? If DARPA at DoD and NSA, also at DoD are, you know, coming up with cutting edge futuristic technology and intercepting our enemies, why does the CIA have a directorate of Science and Technology that’s developing the same technology and intercepting our enemies? I just think this is billions of dollars down the drain.

And I just regret that our politicians don’t seem to. Don’t seem to care. Well, do you think they’ll be forced to care as this worldwide currency? I mean, things are changing. Yeah, things are changing quickly. I think you’re right. And, you know, there are friendly, friendly countries like Brazil and South Africa and Argentina and South Korea that are either now in brics or very eager to be in brics. It has nothing with whether you love the United States or hate the United States. They see an economic opportunity here, and it’s one that we’re not appreciating. And so once we realize, oh, this is actually a real thing, this bricks, and it’s actually got Some international authority in trade.

It might be too late for us. Yeah, the whole world is shaking up. And I think I dislike and distrust the Chinese as, as much as the next American. But by God, the Chinese have really done it right. This Belt and Road initiative. Oh my God. You go to any African country and the Chinese are all over the place building roads and schools and hospitals and ports and airports and universities. And a Congolese diplomat once once told me, you know, the difference between you and the Chinese? He said, you promise us democracy and the Chinese promise us development.

Well, and that’s the difference. They’re getting them hooked and these countries hooked by giving them actual prosperity or a shot at it. We aren’t doing that. The central bankers are going in, taking their resources and then putting them in debt. So it’s a different philosophy. And they’re going to have more power than us by doing it like that. Yeah. And they know they’re not, they’re not done. Oh no. And they’re very patient. They have a long term view and we don’t. We have a short to medium term view. You know, in 2008, the, the Greek government, the Greek economy rather collapsed, like literally collapsed.

And it was their own fault. It was years and years and years of just wasting money. And so the World bank, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central bank went in and said, okay, here’s what you’re going to do. We’re going to give you these giant loans and then you’re going to be essentially our prisoner. And so they did. At first they accepted these onerous terms. They ended up missing a payment to the imf. And then the IMF withdrew. And so the Greeks, rather than to be angry at their own government for wasting money for so many years, they were angry at the World bank, the IMF and the European Central Bank.

But then the Chinese stepped in and said, listen, you guys need money, we have lots of money. So how about if we buy the port of Piraeus, which is the largest cargo port in the world, we’ll buy the port of Thessaloniki and the port of Chania in Crete and we’ll pay cash. And so they did. Well, now the Greek economy is going gangbusters. It’s the fastest growing economy in Western Europe. But the Chinese own all the ports. And now they’re apoplectic. Like, well, now what do we do? The Chinese own all our ports. We’re slaves to the Chinese.

It’s like you are. And that was exactly what the Chinese plan was from the very beginning. That’s Right. And that’s why you have to be smarter in how we’re doing this. I do see Trump surrounding himself with financial people that are way better than Biden had. I mean, Biden was almost like he was trying to destroy the country. Yeah. It was a four year malaise. It was like literally there was nothing to look forward to under Biden. It was terrible. So Trump, at least it. To me, it looks like he is on point with trying to figure out the financial stuff.

I don’t know who’s he’s aligned with or what he’s going to do, but it’s clear that he’s focused on it. Oh, Sarah, listen, I was. I was unsure until he announced two, three weeks ago now an 8% per year budget cut to the Pentagon. So over the course of five years, that comes out to a 45% cut. 45%. No Democrat has ever. Has ever even considered, you know, a half of 1% cut, let alone a 45% cut. I’ll tell you, if there were any doubts about Donald Trump, that sold me. If he’s serious about this and he appears to be serious, this is going to revolutionize our country.

It’s really good. I think it’s amazing. Just incredible. Well, thank you. I know. I’m just. I. It’s incredible. Well, hopefully it’s not a trojan horse. Hopefully it’s going in the direction. I mean, I. You have to look at actions and I just keep seeing good action. I agree. Yeah. Okay. So where can people follow you? Because you’re a must follow. Oh, thank you so much. I’ve. I’ve got this fun show on a platform called unified television. It’s u n I f y d. It’s. It’s a platform for independent journalists to do documentary style shows. I’ve got one called CIA declassified.

And what we do is we tell these historical stories but using CIA documents that have been declassified and sent either to the national archives or to the national security archives or to presidential libraries. So we answer questions like, did the CIA overthrow the Allende government? The answer is yes. Did the CIA overthrow the Iranian government? And Mohammed Mosaddeq? Unfortunately, again, yes. Who killed Kennedy is another one. And boy, we’re flush with new documents about that. So we do a different one of these every week. I think they’re released on Thursdays and it’s at unified. U n I f y d.

And I’m also at substack. Everything I do, I put on substack. It’s John kiriakou.substack.com Thank you so much, John. And that’s a much a must, a must watch because it’s fabulous. So thank you so much. Thank you so much. It’s great to see you.
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