Judging Freedom - [EXCLUSIVE SPECIAL] : John Kiriakou: The CIA’s Tortures and Crimes.

Episode Date: December 8, 2025

[EXCLUSIVE SPECIAL] : John Kiriakou: The CIA’s Tortures and Crimes.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Thank you. Hi, everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Monday, December 8th, 2025. John Kariako, former CIA officer, will be with us in just a moment on the CIA's tortures and on its crimes. But first, this. History tells us every market eventually falls. currencies collapse and look at where we are now 38 trillion in national debt

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Call 800511.4620 or go to Learjudgeonnap.com today. John Curiaco, welcome here, my dear friend. Thank you so much. So good to see you again. Well, thank you. It's nice to see you. We've known each other for a long time. You were an intelligence analyst and an operations officer for the CIA. You received numerous medals and citations commending your work. yet when you decided to

when you learned of CIA torture and decided to expose it for that you were prosecuted entered a guilty plea and spent 23 months in a federal prison to be clear you went to jail not for torturing but for exposing

the torture for revealing it yes in my opinion in an age of few heroes you are the genuine article. Oh, thank you so much. Thank you. It's really a great pleasure to see you again.

I'm happy to be here. Why did you, what did you observe and why did you decide to reveal it? What started in May of 2002, I had just returned from Pakistan to CIA headquarters. In Pakistan, I had been the chief of CIA counterterrorism operations, and I had led a series of successful,

very successful raids that resulted in the capture of Abu Zubeda and dozens upon dozens of other Al-Qaeda fighters at every level. I went back to headquarters to start my next assignment as the chief of counterintelligence in the Osama bin Laden unit called Alex Station. And a senior officer just casually approached me in the cafeteria and asked if I wanted to be, his words, certified in the use of enhanced interrogation techniques. I had never heard the term before. and I asked him what he was talking about.

And he said, excitedly, we're going to start getting rough with these guys. I said, well, what does that mean? And then he explained these 10 different techniques to me. I said, that sounds like a torture program. He said, no, it was not torture. The president had approved it and the Justice Department had approved it. I sought the counsel of a very senior CIA officer who confirmed my belief that this was a torture program and was likely illegal, besides being immoral and unethical.

And so I went back down to the CIA's Counterterrorism Center and I said, this is not for me. I think it's illegal and I want no part of it. That's when the CIA began to turn on me. I had a very dear friend also working in the Counterterrorism Center who happened to be a brigadier general in the Army Reserve and a psychiatrist. And he said to me, you know, they call you the human rights guy behind your back. I said, I don't care.

He said, you know, that's not a compliment. And I said, listen, I'm on the right side of this, and they are not. I ended up becoming the executive assistant to the CIA's deputy director. And in that position, I was able to see literally everything that the CIA was doing around the world. And I was seeing reporting coming back from the secret site where Abu Zubeda was being tortured. And I was heartened to know that I wasn't the. only one who would oppose this torture. I expected that somebody would go public with it, and nobody did. I ended up leaving the CIA two years later and went into the private sector.

Finally, in 2007, Brian Ross called me from ABC News and said that he had a source who said that I had tortured Abu Zabeda. I said that was absolutely untrue. I was the only person who was kind to Abu Zabeda. And he said, well, you're welcome to come on the show and defend yourself. I had never met a journalist before. I had never spoken to a journalist before, and I didn't know that was an old journalism trick. So I told him I'd think about it. Later that week, President Bush gave a press conference in which he looked right in the camera and said, we do not torture. I knew that was a lie. And then later in the week, as he was walking from the South Portico of the White House to the helicopter to go to Camp David,

A reporter shouted a question, and he turned and he said, well, if there is torture, it's the result of a rogue CIA officer. And I told my wife at the time, who was also a senior CIA officer, Brian Ross's sources at the White House, and they're going to pin this on me. And so I decided to give him his interview. And I decided that no matter what he asked me, I would tell the truth and just let the cards fall. And that's what I did. And did you tell them what was being done without getting too graphic to Abu Zabeda? And did you reveal the identity of the person or people who were doing it? I did reveal what the techniques were.

Yes, I did not reveal the identity, but then later on, not realizing that John Brennan had asked the FBI to reopen the case against me secretly. I didn't know that my emails were being intercepted, my phone calls were being intercepted, there were teams of FBI agents following me everywhere. This went on for three years. And in the summer of 2008, a journalist emailed me and said, do you know where I could find John, who's mentioned on page 165 of your first book? And I said, and this was the crime i said oh i think you're talking about john smith i said i don't know what happened him he's probably retired and living somewhere in virginia and they got me because i confirmed the name of a former colleague the name was never made public but uh they got me

they charged me with violating the intelligence identities protection act of nineteen eighty one And they charged me with three counts of espionage. Now, you know as well as I do, espionage can be a death penalty charge. They offered me, they made their first offer in a proffer meeting of 45 years in prison. And one of the Obama assistant U.S. attorneys said to me in this meeting, take the deal, Mr. Kariaku, and you may live to meet your grandchildren. So I knew I was in for a fight. And what happened from there?

How did it get down from 45 years, the 23 months? Well, I was fortunate in that this was enough of a public issue that I attracted A-list criminal defense attorneys. My lead attorney was to use the Washington Post's words, a legal giant, a titan. His name was Plato Cacheras. Oh, I know. I don't know if Plato's around anymore, but I know Plato. He passed away a couple of years ago, but he really was a giant.

And then Plato's partner, Bob Trout, at Trout Kacharis, as well as Anken Gumpin-Upen-Strauss's director of white-collar defense. Wait a minute, did you pick Plato because he's Greek? Yes. When I was in college, my godfather, who owned a restaurant here in Alexandria, Virginia, told me, he introduced me to Plato, who was having lunch there one day. And he said, God forbid, I was a teenager. He said, God forbid, you should be in trouble someday. But if you ever are, you have to hire this man, Plato Cacierrez. And I said, okay, and I kind of put it in the

back of my mind. And then 30 years later, I find myself in trouble. And so I called Plato Cicharis. And he obviously negotiated a plea deal. I think you were sentenced to three years and you served 23 months if i have that correctly that's exactly right it was sentenced to two and a half and i served 23 months right right right and those heavier absurd charges all the charges were absurd but the heavy ones the ones that carried 45 years those were all dropped they were all dropped and you know that's that's kind of the thing we're hearing a lot these days about weaponization the weaponization of intelligence and this is what weaponization looks like they knew i hadn't committed espionage but But in discovery, we were given a series of letters.

There was a letter from John Brennan to then Attorney General Eric Holder saying, charge him with espionage. And Holder wrote back and said, my people don't think he committed espionage. And then Brennan wrote back and said, charge him anyway and make him defend himself. And that's what they did. And then as soon as I went bankrupt, they dropped the espionage charges. Wow. Does the CIA regularly torture?

Well, this is one of those things where they tell us, no, we don't torture anymore. We can't prove it. You're going to have to take our word for it. I want to believe that they don't torture anymore. I was very, very proud to play a role in passage of the McCain-Feingstein Amendment. You know, six weeks before I was released from prison, I called my wife. I was allowed to speak to her every other day for 15 minutes. And so I called her and I said, how was your day?

She said, it was great. I said, really? Why was it so great? And she said, because the Senate Torture Report was released today and it proved that everything you said was true. And John McCain got up on the floor of the Senate and said that had it not been for me and my revelations, the American people would never have known what the government was doing in their name.

I want to believe that the CIA is not torturing. Torture is against the law. It's unequivocal, but it's one of those cases where we're just going to have to take their word for it. Was the torture of which you're aware or which you reported the only torture of which you were aware? Or was it rampant in those days? I mean, the subsequent head of the CIA, a woman named Gina Haspel, her nickname given to her by your former colleagues was bloody Gina. Why would they have given her a nickname like that?

Yeah, it was bloody Gina. It was because when she was a senior officer in the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, she flew out to the secret site just so that she could sit in and watch a torture session. What normal person would do something like that? To answer your question more directly, Your Honor, torture was rampant.

And it wasn't just torture at the head. hands of CIA officers. It was CIA officers training officers of other intelligence services in the use of torture. For example, Craig Murray, the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, had a meeting while he was ambassador, had a meeting at the Uzbek intelligence service. He could hear a man screaming while he was carrying on this meeting. And he got up and against the admonitions of his of his Uzbek partners went into a room where a man was being boiled in oil and he said that he saw the man's skin come off of it come off of his body like like removing a glove he reported that to his foreign ministry and they told him to take the

cable down and be promoted to ambassador to Denmark or go to the press and be under arrest. And he went to the press. His life was ruined, his career was ruined, but he's a champion of human rights. Wow. He's been on the program a number of times, and I did not know of that horrific event that he observed and of his act of courage. You said that the CIA was following you and monitoring you. I mean, you formed. formerly followed and monitored people, how could they, how could they elude your awareness of what they were doing? And I have to tell you, too, I'm embarrassed to say I was a CIA surveillance instructor and I never noticed it. I never noticed it because it was right here in northern Virginia

and I wouldn't have any reason to be under surveillance. There was one incident. My mother's sister died in western pennsylvania and her funeral coincided with a uh a hearing a legal hearing that i had on custody i was getting divorced and i drove up to pennsylvania i went to the funeral and then i thought i have a free day i'm going to go look at my grandparents old house and then i'm going to go to the cemetery and put some flowers on their graves so i went up there and i parked my car in front of the house and I was just sitting there looking at it and there was a car behind me. So I rolled my window down and I waved for him to go around me. And he didn't go around me. And so I went up to the next intersection, made an illegal U-turn to go toward the cemetery

and he made the illegal U-turn. And I thought, oh, that's not normal. Something's up. So I went to the cemetery. He followed me into the cemetery. I parked the car near my grandparents' graves and I walked up to his car and I said, what's up? And he took off. So I called my wife, who was also a CIA surveillance instructor. And I said, I'm under surveillance up here. I'm sure of it. And she said, it has to be a, it has to be a private investigator hired by your first wife. Maybe they're just looking to see whatever they can find. And I said, yeah, it has to be. It turned out what it was was the FBI, they didn't know my aunt had died, and they thought I was running to Canada. They thought that I had spotted them, and I was running to Canada, which was ludicrous. I have five children.

But that was the only time I noticed them, and it was because they were so obvious. Does the CIA commit crimes besides torture? Oh, every day. Every day. You know, I say this a lot, but it bears repeating. A CIA psychiatrist once told me that the CIA actively seeks to hire people who have sociopathic tendencies. That is, not sociopaths. Sociopaths have no conscience.

And as a result, they blow right through a polygraph exam. They're impossible to control because they're unable to feel guilt or remorse. People who have sociopathic tendencies do feel guilt or remorse. They do react during polygraph exams but they're happy to break the law because we're the good guys. I'll give you an example.

In the application process, the instructor said to us, if you were a CIA officer in the field and you were tasked with collecting clandestinely the new Indonesian economic figures. Let's say you approach the Indonesian Second Secretary for Economic Affairs, you invite him to dinner, you invite him to lunch, you strike up a friendship, your wives become friends, you spend weekends together, but you realize that he's not recruitable. There's no hook that you can latch on to to recruit him and get the documents. What do you do? And one of the other applicants raised his hand and he said, you double down and you take him. take him to more dinners and you, you know, buy him gifts.

And a woman raised her hand and she said, maybe you can work it through the wives. Maybe if the wives become even closer. And I raised my hand and I said, you break into the Indonesian embassy and you steal it. And the instructor said, that's exactly what you do. You break into the embassy and you steal it. Well, a normal person isn't going to break into a foreign embassy to steal documents. But a person with sociopathic tendencies would.

And so when you've got an organization that is full of people with sociopathic tendencies, but led by those handful of sociopaths who slip through the process and rise to the top by climbing on the backs of their coworkers, then you're going to have an organization that commits crimes all the time. And I fear that that's what it is. Does the CIA participate in the distribution of drugs, controlled dangerous substances. I believe that the answer is yes. And I pause because I'm sorry to even have to say those words out loud.

After I left the CIA and when I decided to return to government, I was the senior investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. It was chaired at the time by John Kerry. And I did a study on the Afghan heroin poppy crop. Afghanistan at the time produced 93% of the world's heroin. Now, when the Taliban were in power, they produced 0% of the world's heroin. So I went to Bagram Air Base and flew from there to, well, first to Kandahar and then to Lashgarga, which is the capital of Helmand province, the center of the heroin poppy

cultivation area. And I went to speak, I just went out into the fields with a, security team and a translator. And I happened upon a poppy farmer. And I asked him what, in retrospect, was a silly question. I said, instead of all this poppy, why don't you, why don't you grow things that have two growing seasons like tomatoes or onions or pomegranates? And he got a little angry. And he said, the Americans told me in 2001 that if I told them where the Arabs were, I could grow all the poppy I wanted. And I said, what Americans told you you could grow poppy? And as soon as the words came out of my mouth, my military minder said that it was too dangerous to remain here. And he

physically pulled me back to the Jeep. And we went back to the base to fly back to Bagram. Well, I wrote this up and I sent the paper before I gave it to Senator Kerry. I sent it to a friend of mine in the DEA. And I said, tell me if you think I'm crazy with this paper. So a few days later, he called me back and he said, buddy, you know you're never going to get this published, right? And I said, why? Everything I said it is true. And he said, Afghanistan produces 93% of the world's heroin. But all of that heroin goes to Russia and Iran. And we want them to be addicted to heroin. It weakens their societies, just like the Chinese want us to be addicted to fentanyl. You're never going to get it published. And sure enough, a few days later, Senator Kerry comes to my office.

And he says, listen, that paper that you're doing on heroin, yeah, we're not going to publish that paper. And so it died a very quiet death. My bottom line being, we should have learned a lesson in the 1980s with cocaine coming from Nicaragua out of the Iran-Contra War. We didn't learn the lesson. And then we ended up supporting the heroin crop, the heroin poppy crop in Afghanistan. 20 years later. It was wrong then and it's wrong now. Here's one of your former colleagues, the very well-known Jack Devine, on this very subject, Chris. Didn't the CIA itself once facilitate the movement of drugs into the United States for some CIA designated better purpose?

Let me not equivocate. That is absolutely 100% nonsense. The CIA never, ever transported drugs into the United States or had anything to do with. I spent all my career beating a little living. But the CIA then looked at the way while this happened so that the kingpins behind the delivery of the drugs would cooperate with the CIA. We all know that, Jack. Do we? I have no, I have no supporting evidence, and I would like to see your and your team supporting evidence. We don't work with drug traffickers. Who told me this nonsense? Did he forget that Manuel Noriega, one of the most notorious drug traffickers in the Western Hemisphere, was a paid CIA source for decades? Listen, that's a dark time in the CIA's history. But it needs to address the issue truthfully. The truth is that there were two different groups of contra rebels in Nicaragua at the time.

One, the CIA was working directly with. The other, the CIA was working tangentially with. It was that second group that was sending cocaine to the United States in exchange for cash and for arms. Even if it was indirectly from the CIA. Listen, there was no such thing as crack cocaine in the United States until the CIA allowed cocaine into the country in the mid-1980s that was turned into crack cocaine in a chemical refining process. They should just come clean with it and be done with it.

It's historical at this point. Just be honest about it. Does the CIA trust the Israeli Mossad? Yes and no, on a person-to-person basis, no. It doesn't trust the Israeli Mossad because the CIA, every CIA officer knows that the Mossad is spying on the United States. And so we have a very large and very active counterintelligence center in the CIA whose job it is to make sure that everything is on the up and up inside the building and among its officers, one of the gravest threats that we face is the threat of Israeli spying. On the other hand, when it comes to operational issues, for example, standing up against terrorist

groups, sure, the Mossad is brutal, it's well trained, it's well funded, it's willing to jump into the fight with both feet. So on that one hand, sure, the relationship is very close. On the other hand, we always have to be wary of the Mossad because we are their targets as well as others. Does the Mossad spy on the President of the United States on the White House? I would have to assume that it does. You know, just like in the Ed to Snowden revelations, people were appalled that we were intercepting Angela Merkel's cell phone. uncle was at the time the chancellor of germany well you know that's that's what we do we we intercept

the communications of foreign leaders there's no reason to think that the israelis aren't doing exactly the same thing tell me about the uh part of the cia that has become almost a private army for the president of the united states yeah this is a decidedly post nine 11 uh development where The CIA makes such broad and wide use of contractors that I would guess there are probably more contractors today than there are CIA officials, CIA officers. And so, you know, when you're using these contractors, things like whatever Blackwater is calling itself these days, the president can use these groups or the CIA can use these groups and give the president an extra level of denial.

liability. And so, you know, we see, for example, news reports of a boatload of idiots washing up on shore in Venezuela and being immediately arrested. Well, none of them were CIA officers. Many of them claimed to be on the CIA's payroll. I think they probably were. And that's what happens when you carry out ill-conceived operations using ill-prepared people for policy goals that have not been fully thought out, and then you have to start worrying about a prisoner exchange. Wow. What would you do if you could reform the CIA just like that?

Wow, there's a lot that I would do. But what I would do at the very beginning would be to absolutely forbid CIA officers from becoming media personalities until after a cooling off period. You know, if you are a senior government official, you cannot become a lobbyist until after an 18-month cooling off period. I hate that somebody can be the CIA director or the director of national intelligence leave on a Friday. And then on Monday, they're on MSNBC or on CNN as a paid contributor. That doesn't make any sense. And at the very least, when you leave the CIA,

If you're not working on a classified contract, you should not have a security clearance. How is it that it's permissible for senior intelligence service retirees to then go on as paid consultants at these cable news outlets? And they still have their security clearances. They still have access to classified information. And we're supposed to just trust that they don't mix classified information in with their punditry. Another thing that I would do is we have to address this issue of weaponization immediately. I'm not exactly sure how to do that yet. I'm actually thinking of something to put down on paper.

But to weaponize an organization like the CIA or the FBI against a person whose politics you don't like or whose position on on some issue you don't like is un-American and should be impermissible. The charter of the CIA prohibits it from engaging in domestic law enforcement or domestic surveillance to former governors. I won't tell you what states they're not contiguous to each other told me a similar story that in the early. days of their governorship in their respective state houses, an assistant came and said, so-and-so wants to see you. Who is he? Well, we don't know, but he works in the building. All right, let me see him. And so-and-so basically said, I work for the CIA. And both these governors said, get the hell out. And the guy said, well, I'll go, but I'll be replaced by

somebody who won't introduce himself to you. Does that surprise you? Does that strike it was likely true. I know both of these former governors. They've repeated the story to me several times. I believe that. The CIA has a very, very long reach. Look at Hollywood movies. Not only is there an office within the CIA's office of public affairs,

whose job it is to work with Hollywood film studios so that every TV series that mentions the CIA, every movie. that mentions the CIA delivers a pro-CIA message. The FBI's been doing it since the 50s. The CIA was a little bit late to the game. Look at universities. When CIA officers were not allowed to sort of infiltrate American universities anymore and recruit young people to join the CIA,

they just started doing it overtly. It's called the Scholar and Residence Program. And so if you are a CIA officer, you've done your 30 years, you're going to retire and go back home to, let's say, Indiana, they offer you a position. How about if you go to Indiana University, you teach some meaningless class like espionage in Soviet literature, but really you're there to be a spotter looking for people who might be good CIA officers. So instead of hiding it, they just do it out in the open.

We also know, thanks to the Twitter revelations, that Matt Taibi exposed, that there were active duty CIA and FBI officers in place at Twitter, at Facebook, all over the social media platforms. Why? For what reason? And why would they be undercover in positions like that? And why would active duty officers be in those positions? because they're spying on Americans. That's why. So last subject, the CIA was created by the National Security Act of 1947, which was signed into law by then-president Harry Truman. Truman insisted on the two restrictions that I told you about no law enforcement, no domestic spying. 16 years later in 1963, he published an op-ed.

This is the former president of the United States. You probably know this story in the Washington Post. In those days, newspapers had two editions, a morning edition and an afternoon edition. And in the morning edition of this particular day, his piece said, was a damn full mistake that I made, and if I had known what the CIA was going to do, I never would have signed into law, and it should be disbanded. In the evening edition, that op-ed by the former president of the United States did not appear. Does that surprise you?

No. No, it sickens me, certainly, but it doesn't surprise me. President Truman was one of those rare straight talkers in modern American history. And he watched the CIA became the monster that it became. Truman believed at the time that it was involved in the Kennedy assassination. Truman knew there was no such thing at the time as an oversight committee on Capitol Hill. The oversight committees didn't come until 1976. Eisenhower believed the CIA was out of control also, and he was one of the CIA's greatest

supporters through the 1950s. But even he recognized what the CIA had become. That's why I really believe, and I think President Trump also believes that it needs to be torn down to its studs and rebuilt. And as difficult as it might be, it needs to be a law-abiding organization. Deep down, I personally believe, Judge, that we don't need to have a CIA. We already have analysis being done by the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. We have a group at the Pentagon called Defense Human Services, recruiting spies to steal secrets. We have DARPA and NSA and others working on advanced technologies. Why have a CIA if you can't control it?

Or why have a CIA if the overseers on Capitol Hill who are supposed to be overseeing it and making sure that it operates within the confines of the law are really little more than cheerleaders for the CIA? Right. It's totally changed. Regulatory capture when the entity being regulated has captured its regulators. John, why don't you put this in a book or are you working on a book on all this? Well, I'm proud to say that I am. I'm writing a paper about it right now.

A dear friend of mine, Bruce Fine, and I have been talking about this book for 10 years. We're finally going to start putting pen to paper in the coming couple of weeks. Bruce is a lawyer and one of the greatest defenders of the Bill of Rights in the country today. Indeed, he is. Yes. John Curiacchio, you're a great man, a genuine American hero. Thank you for all this. Thank you, Your Honor.

I hope you'll come and visit with us again. Oh, Judge, I'm a fan boy of yours. So that answers yes. All right. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Coming up tomorrow, Tuesday, at 8 in the morning, Ambassador Charles Chaz Freeman, at 11 in the morning, Colonel Douglas McGregor, at 1 in the afternoon, Professor John Mearsheimer, at 2 in the afternoon, Matt Ho.

At 3 in the afternoon, Karen Kutkowski, Judge Napolitano for judging freedom. Thank you.