Pod Insights John Kiriakou's Dead Drop S2E9 Killing Fascism About this episode IN THIS EPISODE: How do you fight corruption when most of the corrupt deck is stacked against you? In John's case, he used his words - and the fact that becoming a federal prisoner does not mean you surrender your rights - like the one to free speech. The prison authorities genuinely feared John's power to expose them and their corruption and plotted endlessly to find ways to silence John and cut him off from the outside world and cut the outside world's access to him.
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0:00 Speaker 00 This podcast, it's a Coster and Touchstone production.
0:04 John Kiriakou? So on the issue of friends, what's important is not just your actual friends in prison. Another thing that's important is the number of people whom you meet and with whom you are friendly. I had this core of friends in prison, but there was another two dozen prisoners with whom I was friendly. Right before I left for prison, one of my lead attorneys, Mark McDougall, said something to me that was critically important. He pulled me aside and he said, "The CIA is very angry that you received such a light sentence.
0:44 John Kiriakou? They're gonna do something to set you up, so be aware at all times that you're being watched." I go to prison. I'm there for about six weeks. And one of the prisoners with whom I was friendly was an Afghan-American pharmacist, who unfortunately had an oxy problem. He was doing, I think it was seven years for trafficking in oxycontin. He came up to me one day and he said, "Hey, John, there's a new prisoner who wants to meet you. He's the spokesman for the Taliban." I said, "The spokesman for the Taliban?" He said, "Yeah."
1:28 John Kiriakou? I said, "Are you talking about that case in New Jersey, where this Afghan guy claimed to be the Taliban representative in the United States?" "Yeah, that's the case." I said, "Yeah, I followed that case." "No, I'm not interested in meeting this guy." And he said, "Oh, okay, I'll tell him." A few days later, I'm walking around the track like I did every day. A man is walking toward me with a beard down to his waist and his arm outstretched to shake my hand. I immediately knew this was the guy who professed to be the Taliban spokesman. And I put my hands up in the air like a person would be surrendering, just so my hands could be seen.
2:12 John Kiriakou? And I said, "Stop." And he says, "Come on, man. I just wanted to say hi and introduce myself." And I said, "Don't fucking touch me." And just as I said that, I looked just past him, and I saw one of the guards in the woods, outside the fence, with a camera with a long telephoto lens, going click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click. He wanted me to shake this guy's hand, maybe embrace him, so he could send the pictures to the FBI, and the FBI could then accuse me of colluding with the Taliban, or planning some attack, or something.
2:53 John Kiriakou? And I said again, "Don't fucking touch me. As God is my witness, I will kill you." "Come on, don't be like that." "I'm not gonna say it again. Get the fuck out of my face." And then he backed off. Well, guess what? He was only in our prison for five days. They specifically transferred him in there to set me up on another charge. It didn't work, and they transferred him out. Everybody in the administration objected to me writing letters from Loretto. The warden objected because I was embarrassing him, that he was running essentially an organized crime outfit from the prison. The CIA hated it, because remember, the whole point of prosecuting me was to silence me.
3:38 John Kiriakou? And instead, they made me famous and gave me a voice. I was a whistleblower. No one who is corrupt likes whistleblowers. Where they thought that this was gonna just silence me, instead it emboldened me.
4:00 John Kiriakou? I'm John Kiriakou. Welcome to Dead Drop: What Makes a Spy Tick. This is episode nine in our series, "Doing Time Like a Spy." We thank you, as always, for listening, and especially when you like, rate, review, or comment on the podcast on whatever platform you call home. Speaking for myself, I can't imagine anyone aspiring to become a whistleblower. It is not a shortcut to leading an easy life. But once you've made the choice, and it is a choice one makes, you can't imagine not seeing it through because if you, the whistleblower, don't, all that corruption on which you're blowing the whistle will steep and get exponentially worse. Hopefully, you've made this choice to blow the whistle because you can't abide corruption.
4:45 John Kiriakou? The thought of corruption or corrupt politics makes you physically ill. In the outside world, there's plenty of corruption, but most of it is pretty well-hidden or it's been normalized. In the prison world, by contrast, most of it's right out in the open. You don't need anything more than functioning eyes and ears to see it, hear it, and know that it's real. If Loretto had been the one corrupt prison run by the Bureau of Prisons, that still would have been cause for concern. But much of Loretto's corruption flowed from top to bottom. The corruption at Loretto was working in concert with the corruption at other prisons and within the BOP itself. Sure, plenty of people cry corruption from within the prison system about the prison
5:30 John Kiriakou? system. I had receipts, and plenty of them, courtesy of the BOP. By sending this Afghan to set me up, it just proved my position that they were a criminal organization. Whether it's the CIA, or the FBI, or the BOP, or the DOJ, they're all criminals. I tell people all the time, the FBI doesn't get promoted by not arresting you. Justice Department prosecutors don't get promoted by not prosecuting you. They all see themselves someday as the US Attorney, or a member of Congress, or running for governor, or sitting in the big corner office in some A-list law firm.
6:14 John Kiriakou? They don't get there by not prosecuting you.
6:20 John Kiriakou? My distributor for letters from Loretto was, at first, my attorney, Jesselyn Radak, and Jesselyn would send them to Jane Hampshire at a news website called Fire Dog Lake. Fire Dog Lake was progressive, and Jane was friendly with Arianna Huffington, the founder and owner at the time of The Huffington Post. Jane would publish the letters from Loretto first, and they would be immediately, like within an hour, picked up by The Huffington Post. They would spread like wildfire, first among the independent media or the progressive media, and then the mainstream media. The progressive media
7:00 John Kiriakou? was funny, meaning it sort of depends on how progressive we're talking. The real progressive media, the transparency proponents, the anti-espionage act proponents, they were all in. But the pretend fake progressive media, like MSNBC, and that awful horrible Rachel Maddow, as one example, they saw me as a troublemaker. Remember, it was the Obama administration that prosecuted me. It was John Brennan that insisted that I be sent to prison. The funny thing, too, is I've always considered myself to be a progressive, although I believe
7:43 John Kiriakou? very strongly that the ideological spectrum is not a straight line from left to right. It's a circle. And at some point, on every issue, it meets. I'm a regular on Fox News. I count some of the most important conservative commentators as close friends. There's a lot we disagree on, but there's a lot we agree on, too. And I am very, very happy to work with people with whom I can agree, and I don't care what their political beliefs are. You know, unless they're like lunatics or, you know, Holocaust deniers or something. I'm very happy to work across lines and that's why I consider myself to be an independent, independent.
8:28 John Kiriakou? I'm not at all tied to either of the two parties. If anything, I consider myself to be a libertarian. Ronald Reagan once said, "Government is the problem. It's not the solution to the problem." And on so many issues, that's right. Now, I want there to be a strong social security system. I want there to be universal healthcare. Healthcare is a human right. Everybody should have healthcare equally. But at the same time, I want the government out of my business. We have too much regulation. We are over legislated. When we have 5% of the world's population and 25% of the world's prison population, we have a very serious problem.
9:11 John Kiriakou? We incarcerate more people than China and they have three times more people than we do. That's not right. I was determined to get those ideas out there, into the mainstream. I wanted Americans to be debating them and discussing them and lo and behold, that's exactly what happened. The unit manager, who was one of the very few people that I didn't hate, decent guy, I don't remember his name. Oddly enough, I don't remember any of their names. It must be some kind of psychological defense mechanism, but I don't remember any of their names. He came up to me and he said, "Hey, I want to warn you, they're gunning for you."
9:55 John Kiriakou? I said, "Who is?" And he said, "The warden, the assistant warden, a couple of the other unit managers." I said, "I'm not afraid of them." And he said, "I'm just telling you because you might want to take measures to protect yourself."
10:12 John Kiriakou? And so that's what I did. When I would write a letter from Loretto, I wouldn't leave it in my locker. I would immediately put it in an envelope, address the envelope to Jocelyn, put legal mail on the front and the back, and walk down to the mailroom. So that it was out and they could not intercept it. When my cousin Kip came in and gave me that intelligence that the reason I wasn't in solitary was because I hadn't mentioned anybody's name, I knew then that I could say anything I wanted, and there was nothing they could do about it. They asked me to stop repeatedly, and finally I said, again, to the unit manager, I said, "You know what? I'm willing to stop, but you need to do something for me.
10:54 John Kiriakou? I'm eligible for six months of halfway house time. Six months. Technically, I was eligible to get out of prison at something like seventeen months. Actually, it was exactly seventeen months. And I said, "I will stop writing if you put me in for the maximum amount of time in the halfway house." The halfway house, because I'm educated, because I had a support system, because I could easily get a job, I would have been in the halfway house a day or two, and then they would have sent me home and converted the halfway house time to home confinement. So that was the plan. And he said, "Okay." I said, "I'm trusting you here." And he said, "Okay, I'll do it." And so I stopped writing. For a period of months, I just stopped writing.
11:39 John Kiriakou? And then I went to the cafeteria one day for lunch, and the unit manager was standing there. Something that they called call-out line, for some reason that I never understood. He said to me, "Hey, that thing you and I agreed to," he said, "It's not gonna happen." I said, "It's not gonna happen. You promised me." He said, "I asked for it. They said, 'No, it's not gonna happen.'" I ate as fast as I could and went straight to the phone and called my wife and told her. In fact, I said on the phone, "These degenerate liars," and that's the term that I used, "these degenerate liars reneged on the deal." She was devastated. So was I.
12:21 John Kiriakou? And immediately, the unit manager called me in. Like I say, he was a decent guy. He was a reasonable guy. And he said, "I knew you would be upset, so I was listening to your call to your wife. You called me a degenerate liar." And I said, "You are. You looked me in the eye and you lied to me. You knew that they wouldn't approve it, but you didn't want me to write. You're a degenerate liar, just like all the rest of them." And he said, "I could put you in solitary for that." And I said, "When are you guys gonna understand? I'm not afraid of your solitary. I don't care. Go ahead, put me in solitary. Believe me, it's gonna be a lot worse for you than it is for me." And he backed off.
13:04 John Kiriakou? I decided that day, I was gonna write Letters from Loretto regularly, and I was gonna point out all of the corruption, all of the official thievery that I possibly could. And that's when I really started rolling. That afternoon, I went back to my cell to write my next Letter from Loretto, which I intended as a thank you note to those who had helped me. I also intended this to be a direct challenge to the warden. I'm gonna skip the thank yous. I thank a lot of people in this Letter from Loretto. Here's the rest of it. January 20th, 2014. Hello, everybody. I'm sorry I've been out of touch so long.
13:48 John Kiriakou? After my last letter, I thought I had come to an understanding with the prison administration. Stop writing Letters from Loretto and be put in for nine months of halfway house. Nine months would have seen me leave here on August 1st, 2014. So I stopped writing. I withdrew two formal complaints against staff, and I turned down all press interviews. In the end, I was put in for six months of halfway house, not nine, and I was warned that the six months could be reduced to three or to nothing. Rather than twiddle my thumbs and hope for the best, I decided to start writing again. God bless the Constitution and its First Amendment. Just as an aside, I ended up getting no halfway house time at all, not a single day.
14:35 John Kiriakou? I thought that when I was denied the nine months, that the easiest thing to do was to roll over and accept it. Maybe I would be released on November 1st, 2014, maybe February 1st, 2015. But as more time passed, I realized that the situation is political in nature. And I realized further that if I just gave up, I would never forgive myself.
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15:35 John Kiriakou? If you're enjoying Dead Drop, and of course, we hope you are, then while you're waiting for new episodes, I'd like to suggest another great granular story podcast from the Costard and Touchstone family. Just the Photographer with David Swanson does for photojournalism what Dead Drop does for spies. Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist David Swanson tells you stories his amazing news photos just can't. What it felt like being in all those dangerous places, like war zones and natural disasters, doing his job, taking pictures. Having been to a few war zones myself, I can tell you this. Just the Photographer will put you right there, on the ground, right next to David. Inside his head, in fact. It's a hell of a podcast,
16:20 John Kiriakou? and you can find it wherever you find your favorite podcasts or at costardandtouchstone.com. There's a link in this episode's show notes. In fact, you'll find lots of great story podcasts at Costard and Touchstone, like The Donor, a DNA horror story, The Hall Closet, Sage Wellness Within, and the How Not to Make a Movie podcast. Who knows? Your next favorite podcast might be just a click away. Now, back to Dead Drop.
16:49 John Kiriakou? I followed that up, less than two weeks later, with another letter from Loretto.
16:55 John Kiriakou? February 2nd, 2014. Hi again from the Federal Correctional Institution at Loretto, Pennsylvania. The term "Federal Correctional Institution" implies that the government is in some way correcting the behavior of prisoners here. In truth, that's just a bad joke. Nothing is corrected at Loretto. There's no therapy to help anybody with problems, except if you're a drug addict nearing the end of your sentence. More on that in a minute. Pedophiles get no psychological therapy whatsoever. And the only classes offered by staff are GED prep courses and English as a second language classes for the 400 or so illegal aliens serving drug sentences. After completion of their sentences, then deportation, knowing English will make it
17:39 John Kiriakou? easier for them to then re-enter the US to restart their criminal enterprises. If you already have a high school diploma, tough luck. Here's how things work. We all get good conduct time, a maximum of 47 days off our sentences for every year of incarceration. Congress actually mandated 52 days a year, but the Bureau of Prisons told Congress to go screw itself. The only incentive to behave properly is a negative one, so you don't lose your good time. You get no tangible benefit from taking any classes taught by prisoners: creative writing, introduction to Spanish, and history of Western film, to name a few. The only way to actually collect your good time is to either get your GED, to be working
18:23 John Kiriakou? on it, or to not get into trouble. Everybody with a drug case wants to get into the drug program. If you're accepted, and you had no violence or firearms in your case, you're sent to the nearest prison that hosts the program, and you must complete 500 hours of classroom work. If you complete the coursework, you can get up to one year off your sentence. The pre-course drug class is supposed to be 40 hours. It's actually about 10 hours, and is comprised only of watching episodes of the A and E show Intervention.
18:55 John Kiriakou? If you're a drug addict and you come to prison, you have to get off drugs cold turkey. Then wait until you near the end of your sentence to finally get into the drug program. That means you could wait five, 10, even as long as 30 years before you get any drug counseling at all. Loretto's so-called "education department" scheduled a prisoner-led class last fall called "quantum physics." Nobody bothered to check whether the prisoner teacher was qualified to teach a course on quantum physics, nor did anyone request a lesson plan. As it turned out, the gay prisoner teacher's only degree was from Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Clown College. The course had nothing to do with quantum physics. It was a self-help pity party for pedophiles,
19:39 John Kiriakou? and it sought to help them expand their rationale of denial with the theme from Rocky playing in the background all the while. The teacher began the course by chanting, "We're homos and we're chomos. We're homos and we're chomos." "Chomo," of course, being short for "child molester." One African-American prisoner, who expected to actually learn something about quantum physics, got up, shouted, "This is fucked up," and walked out. Otherwise, it was a very popular class among a certain demographic. I'm not kidding. Even more worrisome is the situation with pedophiles in general. Despite a recent Congressional Research Service report to the contrary, there is no treatment whatsoever for pedophiles and child molesters.
20:24 John Kiriakou? Nothing. Indeed, these perverts find a welcoming community of like-minded offenders in prison, like we saw in the quantum physics class. They also trade pictures of children that they cut out of the Toys R Us catalog or Parenting Magazine, photos of young-looking 18-year-olds in G-strings that they buy from mail-order houses that cater to sex offenders in prison, and even pictures of other inmates' children. Stolen, of course. Pedophiles move in packs in prison. They sit together in the cafeteria. They take prisoner-led classes together. They watch movies together, and they congregate in large groups in the library and the chapel, all protesting their innocence and complaining that they're misunderstood.
21:05 John Kiriakou? My friend, cellmate, and former colleague Dave and I took a prisoner-led introductory Spanish class a few months ago. We quit after three sessions because the class was nothing more than a coffee klatch for pedophiles. After one asked, “How do you say in Spanish, ‘Do you want some candy?’” we walked out and never went back. The Bureau of Prisons doesn’t do anything to dissuade pedophiles. Indeed, in an event right out of the Twilight Zone, the warden sent a memo to all inmates, “Please join FCI Loretto and the Bureau of Prisons as we celebrate the United Nations Universal Children’s Day.” The memo, announcing “Happy Children’s Day,” said, “Our Children’s Day celebration
21:50 John Kiriakou? will be held on the weekend of November 30th to December 1st, 2013. Materials will be available for each family with visiting children ages 3 to 10.” So we have a facility where pedophiles and pederasts are warehoused, where they get no therapy or medication for their perversion, where they spend all their time together exchanging tricks of the trade, and where the warden gives them advance warning of a children’s event so they can schedule their own visits and be in the presence of young children from 8:30 a.m. to 2:15 p.m. over two days. You may recall from my third letter from Loretto that a prison guard had to move my entire family during a visit because that pederast schaefer from Philadelphia was leering
22:35 John Kiriakou? at my nine-year-old son. I’ll say it again: If pedophiles must stay more than 1,000 feet from a school on the outside, why are they allowed within 5 feet of my children in the visitors’ room? Even though I haven’t been able to take, or at least complete, any classes since I got to prison, I have learned a lot. Among the things one can learn are: how to cook methamphetamine; how to smuggle drugs across international borders without getting caught; how to steal food from the cafeteria and then cook an entire meal using only a live electrical wire and a garbage can full of water; how to make contraband cigarettes using chewing tobacco spat out by the prison guards, dried, and rolled with toilet paper; how to self-medicate using home remedies
23:19 John Kiriakou? and over-the-counter concoctions in lieu of real medical care; how to set up a Ponzi scheme; and how to defraud mortgage companies and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which was another prisoner-led class. So at the end of the day, I guess I have been educated in prison. Maybe I have been corrected. I'm confident now that I'm ready to re-enter civilized society. Seriously, though, this lack of counseling, rehabilitation, and educational and training opportunities for prisoners is a long-term problem for society. The country is already home to an increasingly large population of uneducated, untrained, unreformed, pissed-off ex-felons who are not going to just sit around hoping to win the lottery.
24:02 John Kiriakou? Lacking prospects for employment, they'll do what they do best: commit crimes. For the pedophiles, they will leave prison emboldened by the fact that they spent their entire sentence among like-minded sickos without once being challenged about their perversions. The BOP needs to get on the ball. Yours, John.
24:23 John Kiriakou? Yeah, I was surprised that I got as much negative feedback on that letter as I did. There were a lot of people who told me that, as a progressive, I should be ashamed of myself that I don't support pedophiles re-entering society. And I just doubled down, like, nope, that's not gonna happen. Eight days later, I decided to write yet another letter from Loretto. I was on a roll. Hello again from the Federal Correctional Institution at Loretto, Pennsylvania. On February 7th, I gave my first press interview since the prison administration reneged on our halfway house deal. They would put me in for nine months halfway house, and I would stop writing letters from
25:04 John Kiriakou? Loretto, decline all media interviews, and withdraw two formal complaints against staff. As you know from my previous letters, that agreement is no longer in effect. And so, on the 7th, I spoke at length with Dean Sirigos and Dimitrios Tsakas of the National Herald, the oldest, largest, and most highly respected Greek-American newspaper in the country. We spent more than two hours together, and we discussed issues ranging from halfway house time to terrorism, drones, and Afghanistan. The journalists had gone through the formal approval process weeks in advance, were approved, and arrived during normal business hours as instructed. Three hours after the interview ended, I was sitting in the TV room with my friend,
25:47 John Kiriakou? former colleague and cellmate Dave, when another prisoner approached us and said, “Guys, the cops are tearing up your room.” We walked back to our room and sure enough, two corrections officers were going through all of our possessions. I thought it was an odd coincidence, but I just shrugged. I didn’t have any contraband, so I lost nothing. The very next night, Dave and I went for a walk around the outdoor basketball court. When we walked back into the housing unit, another prisoner approached us and said, “Hey, the cops are tearing you guys up again.” We couldn’t get to our cubicle because the gate at the head of the hall was locked. A half hour later, the COs opened it and allowed us back in. This shakedown was different than the previous days, and I should note that in the previous
26:28 John Kiriakou? year, I had been shaken down a total of three times until the interview. My locker door was left wide open, my cellmates’ lockers were all closed and locked, photos of my children were thrown all over the floor, my mail was strewn all over my bed, and my books were tossed on a nearby chair. I approached the CO and complained. “Retaliation is one thing, but this was just plain disrespectful.” “Sorry,” was the response. We were just following orders. My cellmates were also disrespected. This shakedown was very thorough, and they had all lost property. One of my cellmates, a forty-ish African-American whom I like, respect, and consider a friend, made an important point.
27:11 John Kiriakou? He said, “Don’t you see what they’re doing? They’re trying to make us mad with these shakedowns, so that we’ll turn on you.” He imagined a conversation. “Let’s piss off the big black guy.” So he pressures Kiriakou to stop writing and doing interviews. My cellmate urged me to keep up the fight. He said, “Keep telling people what it’s like in here.” I promised to do that. The issue here is not the bother and inconvenience of shakedowns. The COs are within their rights to shake us down whenever they want. The issue is retaliation and censorship, which are illegal.
27:45 Speaker 02 Hey, it's Adam Grant from TED's Rethinking Podcast. As businesses scale, success depends on how well knowledge is captured, shared, and kept up to date. Camtasia Pro turns teams' expertise into engaging training, onboarding, and documentation. No professional editing experience required. With the industry's best screen recording, video editing, and AI-powered workflows, you can train faster and boost operational efficiency. Get over $100 off your first year at camtasia pro.com and start building a smarter way to educate customers, onboard employees, and ensure valuable expertise is shared across teams.
28:22 John Kiriakou? A senior prison official told me months ago that there have been active discussions about putting me in "diesel therapy" for the rest of my sentence. Diesel therapy is when a prisoner is transferred from one prison to another all across the country via prison van, bus, or con airplane, never staying in any one prison long enough to receive telephone, email, mailing, or visitation privileges. I could move to a different prison every week for the rest of my sentence and still not hit them all. In the meantime, my family and attorneys wouldn't even know what time zone I was in. This would obviously be retaliation for letters from Loretto and my press interviews, but the BOP could easily make up a lie that it was related to a bed space issue,
29:07 John Kiriakou? or perhaps for my own safety. Still, it would stink of retaliation for the exercise of my constitutional right to freedom of speech. I'm fortunate that my attorneys, among Washington's best, are willing to sue individual BOP employees, as well as the BOP as an organization, to ensure that such an assault on my rights doesn't take place. BOP officials should keep in mind what the Supreme Court said about diesel therapy in the case of Frazier versus Dubois. Section 1210, Transfers. Although prisoners enjoy no constitutional right to remain in a particular institution, prison officials do not have discretion to punish an inmate for exercising his First Amendment rights by transferring him to a different institution.
29:52 John Kiriakou? Frazier versus Dubois, 1990. Similarly, I have a constitutional right against retaliation, as the Supreme Court set forth in Block versus Rybar and in Scoog versus County of Clackamas. Section 460, Retaliation. Plaintiff had a First Amendment right to criticize a public official's performance of his duties and in action alleging retaliation by official against plaintiffs due to their exercise of their First Amendment rights. It was insufficient for them to allege injury in form of embarrassment, humiliation, and emotional distress. Right exists to be free of police action, for which retaliation is but for cause, even if probable cause exists for that action.
30:35 John Kiriakou? These cases are freely available in the prison law library. Perhaps prison officials should acquaint themselves with them. Maybe they could also look up Largent versus Texas, which prohibits censorship. Section 306, Censorship. Any regulation which makes dissemination of ideas depend upon approval of distributor by official constitutes administrative censorship in extreme form and subject to certain exceptions. Any regulation which subjects communications to license infringes right of free speech. Largent versus Texas. Where do we go from here? First, understand that any monolithic bureaucracy will tend toward corruption without proper oversight.
31:18 John Kiriakou? There is an internal administrative remedy process that's a joke. You write a complaint, and they tell you to go screw yourself. Calling for an inspector general investigation is also a joke. An inspector general could make an entire career investigating where the money from the inmate trust fund goes. Where did that new flatscreen TV in the CO medical lounge, especially during federal budget sequestration, come from? The only alternative is to go to the top: BOP Director Charles Samuels. Director Samuels worked his way up after starting as a line CO, moving up through the ranks to Warden, and then on to Washington to lead the BOP. Certainly, he knows the difference between right and wrong.
32:01 John Kiriakou? Certainly, he wouldn't want his employees to violate the law, as I've documented in these letters. Certainly, he wouldn't want his people's actions highlighted in a press investigation. So join me in writing Director Samuels and in demanding an end to these illegal and unconstitutional actions by his staff. We have to put our foot down and say enough. I'll let you know how things develop. Best regards, John. I added a postscript to this letter from Loretto. It says this: I wanted to thank Representative Jim Moran, Democrat of Virginia, who sent a second letter to Director Samuels last week saying, quote, “As you will recall, I sent a letter last September requesting that the Department of Justice grant my constituent, John Kiriakou,
32:45 John Kiriakou? at least nine months of halfway house time. Despite the fact that 12 months of halfway house time is well within BOP guidelines, I am disappointed to learn that John's return to society may be unnecessarily delayed. Thus, I am writing to reiterate the importance of John's release to a halfway house as soon as possible, so that he can be a father to his five children and resume productive contributions to society.” Representative Moran is a 12-term congressman and a member of the House Appropriations Committee, which controls the BOP budget.
33:21 John Kiriakou? Addendum. About 12 hours after I wrote this letter from Loretto, I was called to the Special Investigative Service office. The CO there handed me an envelope containing the first 20,000 words of this book. I hadn't even realized it was missing since the shakedown. The SISC CO said that the CIO who had shaken me down had determined that the manuscript had “made threats against staff.” He said he too had read it and believed that it did not contain any threats to staff. The allegation was patently absurd, in any event. He returned it to me in its entirety, although he almost certainly made a copy.
34:02 John Kiriakou? In one last swipe at my civil rights and my constitutional right to freedom of speech, the shakedown CO tried to remove my desk from the wall and to confiscate it. After all, if I have no desk, I can't write letters from Loretto, right? After a while, he gave up. The bolts were stripped and wouldn't budge. I had stripped them on purpose as a preemptive measure. It was a temporary respite, though. The CO issued a work order to “chip it off the wall.” I had to go to the unit manager, who promised me that the desk would not be removed. It wasn't. These crude amateurish attempts to deprive me of my rights don't originate with a low-level CO. They come from higher up, from officials who should know better.
34:47 John Kiriakou? But I have the Constitution in my corner, and I won't stop fighting. After my letter was published, I taped a page from a legal pad on the desk and I wrote on it, “This desk kills fascism.” This was a play on “This Machine Kills Fascism,” which folk singer Woody Guthrie had famously written on his guitar in the 1930s. The sign hung up on the desk for only a couple of hours before a CO tore it down, crumpled it into a ball, and threw it on the floor. I picked it up and mailed it home to myself. I keep it as a reminder that I was not alone as I went through this experience. Outside Loretto, America was beginning to more fully reckon with the terrible things that had been done on our collective behalf. The Senate is notoriously deliberative and slow.
35:32 John Kiriakou? But as I fought the corruption inherent in my punishment, the US Senate was about to address the corruption that punished me. Remember that famous Nietzsche quote I referenced a few episodes back about staring into the abyss and becoming the monster? Well, the good news was I could almost begin to see the light at the end of this godforsaken tunnel, and for a change, it wasn't an oncoming train. But what had survival cost me inside my head, inside my soul? We've got so much more story to tell in the episodes ahead. We will get into the Senate's report on torture. It doesn't turn out well for the CIA. But in the next two episodes, we're going to talk about rules and about food.
36:15 John Kiriakou? Breaking the rules in prison and strangest part of all, enjoying some of the food there, all while doing time like a spy. Until next time, I'm John Kiriakou. Dead Drop is written by John Kiriakou and Alan Katz. Costar and Touchstone Productions produces the podcast, and John Kiriakou, Alan Katz, and Nick Mechanic are its executive producers.
36:48 Speaker 00 This podcast, it's a Costar and Touchstone production.
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