Danny Jones recently hosted former CIA officers John Kiriakou and Andrew Bustamente for a wide-ranging discussion that touched on torture, 9/11 & terrorism, domestic politics, foreign policy and what it’s like to work within the world’s premiere intelligence agency. It’s worth a listen. And don’t be intimidated by its 3-hour running time. There are plenty of laughs and it’s a great way to avoid listening to your spouse while you cook dinner or walk the dog.
Here are some fun takeaways:
1: Kiriakou and Bustamente are both charming, intelligent, knowledgeable, passionate and likeable people. Which is fascinating, because CIA is a monster. CIA has killed hundreds of thousands of people and helped the Pentagon kill millions of people. And no, they weren’t all bad. How many people exactly? Who knows!? That’s classified. But there’s a lot of cool people who work at CIA and have worked there.
That does not appear to be the case with Mexican Drug Cartels. They also kill a lot of people (although, they’re not putting up CIA numbers), but their ranks are filled with raving psychopaths. Not the kind of guys you’d feel as comfortable interviewing.
2: Kiriakou and Bustamente have different perspectives on the fallout from the Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) guilty plea deal and subsequent DoD nixing of said deal. KSM is the man our government has accused of masterminding the 9/11 attacks. He was captured in Pakistan in 2003. According to Judge Andrew P. Napolitano:
“Mohammed and four other alleged conspirators have been awaiting trial since their arrivals at Gitmo in 2006. Since then, numerous government military and civilian prosecutors, as well as numerous military judges, have rotated into and out of the case. Two weeks ago, the government and the defendants agreed to a guilty plea in return for life in prison at Gitmo. When, last week, the Department of Defense abruptly changed its mind and rescinded its approval of the guilty pleas.”
KSM was tortured in violation of U.S. law and international law (which was created by the U.S.) and so putting him on trial is problematic. But, apparently no one in the Biden Administration wants to let a plea deal with the mastermind who brought down our towers. No one wants that headline during an election year.
Anyway, Kiriakou and Bustamente disagreed on the merits of torture. Kiriakou is famously the only person to go to jail over the CIA torture program. Not because he tortured anyone, but because he blew the whistle on it. He believes it was morally wrong, illegal and unconstitutional:
“You know in in 1945, 1946 we executed Japanese soldiers who had waterboarded American POWs. In, in 1968…on January the 11th, 1968 The Washington Post ran a front page…photograph of an American soldier waterboarding a North Vietnamese prisoner. That, that Soldier was arrested, convicted of torture and sent to…prison for…20 years, for torture. And then all of a sudden in 2002 torture is legal because John Yoo and Jay Bybee say it is. But the law never changed. The law was never amended. Congress never voted on any change in the Federal Torture Act of 1946. So, you know, we changed.”
Bustamente believes the government shouldn’t be restrained by the rule of law. In fact, rule of law can lead to a totalitarian system. Kiriakou acknowledged his point but believes Congress should change the law. Bustamente seems to think CIA should change the law based on what is expedient to “the mission.” In fact, Bustamente seems to embrace a CIA supremacist view:
“You can’t…you can’t possibly, actually believe that we are the system that we tell the average American we are?” He asked, with incredulousness in his voice and his eyes.
3) Kiriakou and Bustamente both have an incisive understanding of the CIA as a corporate agent. The corporate agent is a material object comprised of its individual human members:
“The corporate agent exists when a group of people effectively subordinate themselves to the imperatives of a Rational Point of View (RPV) not possessed by any individual.”
Our species lacked corporate agency for more than 200,000 years. Our hunter gatherer ancestors had collective action and intergroup violence, but no standing armies and nothing like sustained, strategic warfare. With the agricultural revolution, we saw the rise of corporate agents. The most monstrous corporate agent is the state, with its military and intelligence services. The state is a corporate agent comprised of corporate agents (The Interagency).
CIA is a particularly lethal corporate agent. Kiriakou and Bustamente touch upon its structure when they refer to the “GS-15” and the “PDB” and the “COS.”
Nothing says corporate agent more than the “Org Chart” and the “Compensation System.” Hunter gatherers had collective action, but they didn’t have a position called Deputy Director of Border Raids, Killing and Rape. The men just got together and got shit done.
Other aspects of CIA’s corporate agent status touched on by the conversation (explicitly & implicitly) were:
- CIA must continue to exist
- CIA must always have a new mission
- CIA culture gaslights its individual members into believing they are only qualified to work at CIA
- The job of a CIA employee is to follow orders and make his or her boss happy
- The real enemy of CIA (and the Interagency) is the American People
Kiriakou and Bustamente put on a good show. One can only hope men like this have enough influence within the CIA to prevent it from going full NKVD. Because that would be unpleasant.
