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Ted Rall: Good afternoon. Thanks for joining us. You’re watching DeProgram with me, Ted Rall, editorial cartoonist, and CIA whistleblower, John Kiriakou over there. I’m pointing the wrong way because on my screen, you’re right.
John Kiriakou: That was right. He’s backwards.
Ted Rall: Nice to see you, John.
John Kiriakou: Ted, kudos on that music.
Ted Rall: I wish I could take credit for it. I picked it from YouTube’s officially sanctioned copyright-free music, so we shouldn’t have any copyright problems. As someone who makes a living on intellectual property, I’m always very respectful of other people’s copyright. John, we have a lot to talk about, so we should probably dive right in. France, as we anticipated, has decided to formally recognize Palestine as an independent state, exchange ambassadors, and the whole thing. We’re going to get into that and all the political ramifications. We’ve got to talk about the Democrats who are raising the alarm about masked ICE agents and their unmarked vehicles. They’re going to try to conduct some oversight from the minority side of the aisle. I’m not sure if they’re going to get anywhere with that. Ghislaine Maxwell’s lawyer says she didn’t take the fifth on anything, that she answered every question fulsomely, wholly, and honestly. She seems to be jonesing for a pardon, but like the cartoon of the fat lady raiding the refrigerator, she might be looking for love in all the wrong places here. Trump wants to sign an executive order making it illegal to be homeless. I’m already working on a cartoon about this. He can do an executive order for everything. We will talk about the ramifications of that. So let’s get into it. French President Emmanuel Macron had a conference scheduled that was supposed to concern the Israel-Palestine crisis, but it fell apart. It looks like he decided to turn a lemon into lemonade and pull the trigger on something he’s been toying with for a long time, which is to join the ranks of many countries like Spain, Ireland, Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, and most of the world that have already formally recognized the Republic of Palestine. I’ve been arguing, John, with my friends that this is a big deal. We’re going to look back and say this was a turning point for Palestine that’s hard to overstate. This comes down to the fact that France, until very recently, was the most important diplomatic country. All diplomats had to be fluent in French, no matter what country they were from. Until maybe the 1920s or 1930s, you weren’t considered an educated American if you weren’t fluent in French. My friend Scott Stantis says, “was” is the keyword. It’s true that maybe France’s influence has waned, but I don’t think France can be ignored. I think much of the world, when it comes to diplomacy, is going to be looking to France.
John Kiriakou: I think so too. Among European countries, especially European Union countries, France is a major leader along with Germany. The Germans have thrown their lot in with the Israelis. The French are showing real leadership here. I think you’re right, Ted, that we’re going to look back on this decision as a turning point. It’s one thing for the Irish to recognize Palestine, which they did back in February. All that did was piss off the Israelis, but it threw a bone to the Palestinians that was worth its weight in gold. We expected that to happen because the Irish have been oppressed throughout their history. France, though, is one of the historic colonial powers in the Middle East. That’s why they speak French in Syria and Lebanon, for example. For the French to go out on a limb like this and say, “Enough is enough. We’re recognizing the state of Palestine,” which includes an exchange of ambassadors and presumably French diplomatic support at the United Nations, is huge. France has a Security Council veto. I wish they could veto the American vetoes.
Ted Rall: I wish they could too. This is huge. The question now is, who’s next? Luxembourg, Italy, and Portugal seem to be lining up. There will be others. France is a G7 country and a permanent member of the Security Council. France is a colossus here and a major power in the Middle East. I don’t think you can overstate this. It’s probably the most important move of Macron’s presidency. That and his recent lawsuit against Candace Owens, although we can talk about that later. Not surprisingly, Benjamin Netanyahu was displeased by this move. The way he expressed his displeasure on X was particularly interesting. He deplored the fact that France was recognizing a Palestinian state right next to Tel Aviv. Well, the Palestinian state was always going to be right next to Tel Aviv, unless he knows something about the laws of physics or he’s engaged in ethnic cleansing, because they want this state to be either on an Indonesian island or in a piece of Albania that would be lopped off. He doesn’t want it there. If he were a temperate person leading a normal government instead of a gangster regime in Israel, he would have said something like, “Of course, we would be the first to recognize a lawful, duly elected Democratic Republic of Palestine, and we would be proud to work hand in hand to help rebuild as neighbors and friends. We just can’t possibly work with Hamas, who’ve attacked us without provocation.” That’s what you would hope he would have said, but there’s no pretense here. He didn’t say “recognize a terrorist state” or “recognize a Hamas state.” He said, “recognize a Palestinian state right next to Tel Aviv.”
John Kiriakou: I remember when I was a kid watching an episode of 60 Minutes in which Yitzhak Shamir, who was defense minister at the time, showed the 60 Minutes crew from a helicopter historical Israel, without the West Bank. At the narrowest point, it’s nine miles across from the West Bank to the Mediterranean Sea. He said, “We can’t live with that. They can cut off the nine miles and choke us, and it would be the end of Israel. So we have to have the West Bank.” Even as a teenager, I was like, “Are you guys out of your minds?”
Ted Rall: They want Lebensraum. It’s amazing how much they sound like the Germans. I’ve had pro-Zionist friends criticize me for that comparison. I’m like, “Well, if the jackboot fits, wear it.”
John Kiriakou: Hans Eli makes a good comment here, Ted. We should probably address it, especially the last sentence. The world isn’t always going to prop up Israel. I think that’s what we’re seeing the beginning of right now. These are the first cracks in global or at least Western support for Israel. The United States will try. The United States is going to be the last country to support an independent Palestine. This is the beginning of it. Like Ted said at the very beginning of the show, I don’t think we can overestimate the importance here.
Ted Rall: I think Hans Eli is right. I agree with Hans’ question. The first part of it as well: isn’t the Israelis’ unwillingness to go along with the two-state solution and trying to go for the whole schmear what’s causing this? They’re unwilling to have any kind of state solution. They like the current state of affairs. It will lead to a one-state Palestinian solution. Israel, I’ve often thought, was an outdated, obsolete solution to a nonexistent problem now. Maybe it made sense in 1948. I actually don’t think it made sense in 1948. In 1948, the Brits were withdrawing from the Raj in India, their most important colony. Within twenty years, pretty much every major European power was out of Africa or on their way out. The colonial experiment that this really was goes back to 1920 and the Balfour Declaration, which was a British colonial adventure at the peak of colonialism. By the time it was done, colonialism was out of fashion and done. Here we are. It’s the last settler-colonialist experiment. You could argue that Puerto Rico is a colony or Guam, but Puerto Rico is not a settler-colonial experiment. It’s the locals who live there. We just govern them. That’s not saying it’s right or wrong.
John Kiriakou: Even the Puerto Ricans are split. A third want to be a state, a third want to be an independent country, and a third want to leave things just the way they are. Lulu brought this up, which I was about to mention: Israel was the last country to support apartheid-era South Africa. They know how to pick them. It’s like, “Apartheid-era South Africa, and we’re going to be their last friends.” We are going to be their last friends. It’s going to be sooner rather than later. It’s going to be really hard for each European country to sustain the domestic unpopularity of the state of Israel.
Ted Rall: John, I have to ask you about these horrific photos that have surfaced of tiny children who have become tinier due to famine, reduced to skeletons. It reminded me of the famous footage from Ethiopia during the famine half a century ago, Somalia, places like that. You could argue that all famines are man-made—Irish potato famine, etcetera. This is the most man-made famine outside of the Warsaw Ghetto that we’ve seen in a long time. Five miles away from where these people are, where surgeons are collapsing because they themselves are starving to death, and BBC journalists are starving to death and dying, people are eating couscous and hummus and drinking sweet red wine. There’s plenty of food. There’s no shortage of food.
John Kiriakou: I said that earlier today in an interview. There’s plenty of food. We see these pictures of children starving to death. We’re seeing reports of surgeons in the middle of performing surgery, passing out and fainting from a lack of food. There’s plenty of food. The Israelis just won’t allow the food in. When they do allow the food in and people mob the distribution centers, the Israelis then open fire on the crowds, which they’ve done at least three times in the last two or three weeks.
Ted Rall: It’s almost every day, John. It’s sickening. Here’s a good point.
John Kiriakou: I was talking about this with a friend of mine, Brouillard. What about the Egyptians? The Egyptians are under real pressure today to open the border. They have said they’re not opening the border under any circumstances. They open the border, they will be complicit with the ethnic cleansing. They’re between a rock and a hard place. Do you just let people starve, or do you jump in on the side of the Israelis and cleanse Gaza? Those fucking Israelis. They did this on purpose.
John Kiriakou: The Egyptians aren’t stupid.
Ted Rall: That’s why they built that berm over a year ago, because they’re worried that the Israelis will throw open the border, and they won’t be able to resist. Their troops aren’t going to want to and will not shoot 2 million people.
John Kiriakou: For the last couple of years, I’ve donated money to a Palestinian medical relief organization—not a lot of money. If I have an extra $50, I send it in. I got an automated email from them telling people to stop donating because there are no hospitals in Gaza now. There’s nothing to donate to.
Ted Rall: This reminds me of 1996 to 2001, when the Taliban were running Afghanistan the first time. There were Clinton administration trade sanctions against the Taliban, but they always said, “No, no, no. It’s not medical supplies or food. We don’t prohibit that at all.” When I was there in 2000 and visited a hospital, the doctors—and I found this to be true at other hospitals too—said, “We haven’t seen a Band-Aid since the early ‘90s.” It’s field medicine, like you’re outside a MASH unit, but you’re inside. You have a roof that may or may not leak. It’s a nice tent, basically.
John Kiriakou: That’s what you’ve got.
Ted Rall: These pictures landed hard with me in a surprising way. Pictures are worth a thousand words. I get the impression this is going to change things. It makes a difference. I think Macron saw those photos and was like, “This is it. Done.” He was already on the way, and I think that’s it. No one cares anymore about October 7 or the Holocaust. It’s like, “You’re out of excuses. You have to stop.”
John Kiriakou: Ted, I have a friend. We’ve been friends for twenty years, and he’s not just a Zionist; he’s a dual U.S.-Israeli national. He posted on Facebook yesterday about incidents in the last twenty-four hours: Rhodes, Greece, Israelis blocked from coming off a cruise ship; Sidos, Greece, Israelis targeted by angry Greeks; Cyprus, Israelis had tomatoes thrown at them. It was like ten things. Gazans would love to have some tomatoes thrown at them. I took a picture of a child starving to death in her mother’s arms, nothing but skin and bone, and he blocked me. That’s what we’re up against here.
Ted Rall: They don’t care if children are starving to death. I’m still haunted by that Bret Stephens column from a couple of days ago. He talked about how some people point to the genocidal comments made by high-ranking Israeli officials in the days after October 7, but they were just being intemperate, spicy, angry about October 7. If that were true and that was not the official policy of the Israeli government—which we know it is because all the journalists have reported that it is—those people would have been fired. If President Kiriakou of Israel didn’t let those people stay on, it would be like, “What are you doing? That’s not who we are. Please leave your ID at the door.” They left them in. We’re talking about Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, who were successfully prosecuted for felony hate crimes against Palestinians years before becoming ministers in the Netanyahu government. These are very bad people.
Ted Rall: They should be in prison. People went to prison at Nuremberg for less. Julius Streicher just ran a newspaper—a nasty piece of work, but it was just a newspaper.
John Kiriakou: That’s absolutely right. I’m worried about where this is going. A whole lot of people are going to starve to death—women, children, the elderly, all civilians. They are not right now. The U.S. is not going to put pressure on Netanyahu. We know what our government is like, and I’m not saying this is specific to Donald Trump. The Democrats are exactly the same way. It’s not going to get better in the near term.
Ted Rall: Even AOC can’t be counted upon to resist sending war funding to Israel. From a fiscal conservative standpoint, you should be able to say, “Little birds, we’ve been feeding you since 1948. Time to fly the nest.”
Trump says this is interfering with peace efforts. There are no peace efforts. There’s been two delegations in Qatar. We should talk about that.
John Kiriakou: The U.S. walked out yesterday, saying that Hamas is not serious about hostage releases. Seriously? That’s what the talks are about, hostage releases. Why is it that we call Israelis held by Hamas hostages and Palestinians held by Israel prisoners? When they haven’t been charged with any crime, they were just scooped up because they happen to be Palestinian. Israel is a nation-state, and we love them. It’s like why, if it’s Iran, it’s the regime, but if it’s France, it’s the government—all this loaded language. There are no peace talks right now. They’re on hiatus, and they weren’t accomplishing anything anyway.
Ted Rall: There’s a piece in the Times today about Russia and Ukraine, and it brought up a good point: peace negotiations haven’t really begun in earnest. That’s true about Israel and Palestine. Back during the Henry Kissinger era, shuttle diplomacy was arduous. Whatever bad things you want to say about Henry Kissinger, he was a hardworking dude. He went back and forth all the time.
John Kiriakou: Philip Habib in the ‘80s, same thing. It was a prolonged process to end a complicated war between nation-states. Hamas was really a government—a real government. The Israelis use the Hamas Ministry of Health numbers. They accept Hamas numbers on people killed or wounded. It’s only the Zionists in the United States who pretend they’re not true. They’re an undercount.
Ted Rall: The Israelis are sitting on thousands of uncharged political prisoners, subjected to all sorts of humiliating treatment. In any lopsided military conflict, most of the burden of making peace falls on the superior military force. They’re going to have to make most of the concessions if you want a ceasefire. People will say, “End of World War II, unconditional surrender.” I would have never agreed with the policy of unconditional surrender. I think it dragged World War II on much longer than it needed to.
John Kiriakou: Those days are gone. That’s not how conflicts end anymore.
Ted Rall: Now, like Saddam Hussein, you go hide in your spider hole, leave weapons behind, and an insurgency pops up. Nobody ever admits they were defeated. Hell, Trump didn’t admit he was defeated.
John Kiriakou:: Tom Ford. Good eye. How in the world did Robin Hood know that these were Tom Ford glasses? I never heard of Tom Ford till I bought these glasses. I was like, “Okay, what’s the big deal about Tom Ford?” I don’t know, but I like them.
Ted Rall: Are they pricey?
John Kiriakou:: They kind of were.
Ted Rall: Glasses cost ridiculously. These were $1,200.
John Kiriakou: They don’t look like much. These were only $700. To me, that’s a lot.
Ted Rall: It’s absurd. Let’s talk about the ICE thing. Democratic House Representatives Robert Garcia and Summer Lee wrote a letter to Kristi Noem at the Department of Homeland Security, demanding that she provide all internal DHS memos and policies concerning how ICE is supposed to comport themselves, how they’re supposed to dress, whether there’s a certain color of mask they’re supposed to wear—white in the winter, pink for the gay ICE members, I don’t know. They’re trying to get all that info. Does DHS have to reply?
John Kiriakou: No, it’s an executive branch function. They don’t have to reply. One of the things I learned when I was on Capitol Hill at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is that most of the time, cabinet members just ignore us. We would write letters to the secretary of whatever, assistant secretary, FBI director, or CIA director. They would just ignore us. What are you going to do? Is it worth going to the mat over the fact that they ignored the letter from your staff member? No. I don’t think they’re going to get any satisfaction here. I’m still laughing, though, Ted, at the reporting in the LA Times that tow truck operators are following these ICE officers and towing their cars because they always park illegally, thinking they can do whatever they want because they’re ICE. As soon as they get out to do their raids, the tow trucks tow their cars and impound them. They can’t extend any professional courtesy to these random, unidentified people. How are we supposed to know they’re federal law enforcement officers?
Ted Rall: Are ICE officers really law enforcement officers?
John Kiriakou: That’s a good question. They’re not really law enforcement officers, just like Bureau of Prisons guards are not really law enforcement officers. They’re either series 1810 or 1811. In this case, they’re both 1810s, which means they’re allowed to be armed, but they’re not going to pull someone over for speeding or disrupt a shoplifter at Walmart if they happen to be there. Could they? I’m not even sure.
Ted Rall: There was a strange experience at the University of Cincinnati where a campus policeman pulled over someone on a city street for running a stop sign, and it led to a violent incident where the dude shot the motorist—one of those shootings of Black motorists by a white cop. I was like, “Can the University of Cincinnati rent-a-cop really play real cop? Aren’t you like Paul Blart, Mall Cop?” If they want to be treated like real law enforcement officers, they’ve got to wear uniforms, show their faces, and show ID. As far as I’m concerned, they’re just random thugs.
John Kiriakou: I have to agree. They went to FLETC. Houdini, they’ve gone through FLETC, which is the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center. I went through FLETC before my CIA days. I was an 1810, so we did the handgun training, but I was 100% not considered law enforcement. Coming through FLETC does not necessarily make you law enforcement. I had a beautiful, shiny gold badge that I kept in a leather case. I regretted having to turn it in when I went to the agency, and it got me out of a couple of speeding tickets. I didn’t consider myself law enforcement, and I would not have tried to stop a shoplifter at Walmart. I would have said, “It’s not my job. Let the next guy do it.”
Ted Rall: ICE people want our sympathy too.
John Kiriakou: I told you on the morning of January 6, I had to go up to Capitol Hill to meet with Bruce Fine. We knew all hell was going to break loose later in the day, so I wanted to get into Bruce’s office, sign this document, and get the hell out. When I parked my car, there were all these guys taking off their Bureau of Prisons logo polos and putting on black shirts. I was like, “Shame, shame, shame. You clowns aren’t law enforcement.”
Ted Rall: Not as soon as you do that. It’s gross.
John Kiriakou:: Can I interrupt you? In all seriousness, what do you think about this Candace Owens situation? Candace Owens has been on this rant for the last three years, saying that Emmanuel Macron’s wife was born male. She even did a documentary about it, claiming there’s no childhood history, no documents, no photos. Of course, none of that’s true.
Ted Rall: That can’t be true. It’s just not true. I realized my son doesn’t even know where I was born. I’m like, “You don’t know shit about your family.” So I decided, as a gift, to create a giant family tree. I went down a rabbit hole through French and German government genealogy sites. You can go back four or five hundred years. In France, Germany, and most countries, we know where you were born, when you were born, when you got married, which church you got married at, who baptized you, where and when you were baptized. It happened in 1611. In France, I guarantee you that Mrs. Macron is not a dude-looks-like-a-lady situation.
John Kiriakou: She looks like a woman and was clearly born a woman.
Ted Rall: She was very cute when she was young and has a son.
John Kiriakou: Not to mention she met her husband when she was his teacher. The Macrons, through their attorneys, approached Candace Owens a year ago and said, “Stop doing this. It’s not true. We’re going to sue you.” She doubled down. Nobody knew this until a couple of days ago that she had been warned to back off. She said she doubled down because she converted to Catholicism, and her Catholic faith demands that she out this man masquerading as the First Lady of France. The Macrons filed the defamation suit now.
Ted Rall: Where?
John Kiriakou: That’s a good question. I’m not sure. Where would be better for them? England. That would be the best.
Ted Rall: I really wish I’d sued the LA Times in England. I could have because of the internet, even though it would have required me to go to England quite a bit. We have a couple of paid donations here with questions that we should answer. We’ll go in reverse order. Obscure Orca asks, “John, what’s your take on NATO bombing if you could stop it?”
John Kiriakou: I was stationed in Athens at the time, and it was absolutely miserable, not just to be an American diplomat in Greece, but to be an Orthodox Christian American diplomat while the United States government was bombing an Orthodox Christian country that the Greeks considered to be brothers. It was miserable to the point where one of my uncles attacked me verbally at a dinner, and I could barely respond to him. He was like, “Why the fuck did you blow up the Hugo factory? What the fuck were you thinking?” I said, “Theo, that wasn’t me.” I almost didn’t want to answer him. I said, “They converted it to manufacture tanks,” which was true. The bombing of Yugoslavia was wrong, wrong, wrong in the first place. We created this fake rump country called Kosovo that has never otherwise existed through the course of human history. It just so happens to be holy ground for the Serbian Orthodox Church, where most of the Serbian Orthodox monasteries are located. We’re like, “Yeah, tough luck. We’re going to take this land away from you. We’re going to give it to these Muslims that you’ve been feuding with for the last fifteen hundred years, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Oh, and by the way, we’re going to bomb you too just for the hell of it.”
Ted Rall: What about the argument that this was to stop the genocide in Kosovo?
John Kiriakou: Less so the genocide in Kosovo than what was happening. It was Kosovo by then. What we should have done was create a safety zone. Nobody ever said anything about it being an independent country five minutes later. I had access to the information at the time, but there was no information. Why did we not work with Boris Yeltsin to figure this out? Why were we at odds with the Russians over this? This is the nadir of our relationship with the Russians.
Ted Rall: We installed Yeltsin. The Russians will never forgive us.
John Kiriakou: Coming back to serving in Athens in ‘99 while we’re bombing Yugoslavia, every year we have to vacate the embassy on November 17 because it’s the date of the uprising against the military junta that we installed. There’s a massive demonstration that marches from the Polytechnic University, where the uprising began, to the American embassy. We evacuated the American embassy at least a dozen times that year because these demonstrations were gigantic. At the time, right before the Greeks converted to the euro, they had these 100-drachma coins about the size of an Eisenhower silver dollar. They would fling them, and they had some heft. They would smash all the windows on the front of the embassy. Then they would fill balloons with red paint and launch them with slingshots. The next day, the embassy is peppered with red paint splotches, and the windows are all broken from 100-drachma coins. It was awful. It was miserable.
Ted Rall: We’ve got to answer USC_er_21, who donated $5. Thank you, USC. I don’t want to put you in jeopardy, John, but what’s your take on South Park going after Trump?
John Kiriakou: I DVR’d it. It was freaking hilarious.
Ted Rall: I haven’t seen it yet. I’m going to watch it.
John Kiriakou: You’ve got to see it, Ted. I won’t spoil it for you, but the creators of South Park just signed a $1.5 billion streaming agreement. God bless them.
Ted Rall: It’s always for the high-quality animation.
John Kiriakou: I still watch South Park. I’ll admit to you, I watch Family Guy, The Simpsons, South Park, and Bob’s Burgers. I love all the animated shows. Thank you, Caleb, also. South Park is by far the most cutting-edge. When I watch Family Guy with one of my housemates, I always say, “Oh my god, how can they get away with a joke like that?” But South Park, it’s like, “Oh my god.” It’s shocking to me that they’re able to do what they’re doing. It’s all for a good laugh. It’s all comedy, but I love it. I think it’s great.
Ted Rall: My favorite thing those two guys did is still Team America: World Police. I’ve seen it more times than I can count. It’s one of the funniest movies I’ve ever seen in my life.
John Kiriakou: Absolutely hilarious. I wish I could be creative like that.
Ted Rall: I think I could. I wish I was in the writers’ room.
John Kiriakou: You deal in sharp comedy. You’re a political cartoonist. You have to have that kind of biting sense of humor.
Ted Rall: So many of your colleagues are just wussies because they worked at daily papers and were scared.
Ted Rall: I’ll never forget. I got a job interview at the Asbury Park Press. He’s dead now, so I’ll name him. Executive editor Ray Ollwerther brings me into his office. It’s going well. I’m there for a good hour, feeling like I’m going to get this. I’d been drawing local cartoons for Central New Jersey for a year, so it wasn’t like I was blowing in off the street. We’d been dating; now are you going to put a ring on it or not? Everything’s going great, and then Ray leans back, points out the window, and says, “There’s just one more thing. Am I ever going to look outside that window and see people protesting because of one of the cartoons you drew?” I was flummoxed. I said, “I hope so.” I was honest. I said, “It’s not my intent when I sit down to make that happen, but I don’t care if it does. People are going to do what they’re going to do. People get mad at stuff I never see coming, and other stuff I think is going to blow up the world gets no reaction. Don’t you have security?” I thought, “You think that’s the wrong answer?” I never got the job. I had another interview like that at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, same thing. At the Sacramento Bee, Howard Weaver said, “What I have to figure out is if we’re going to let the good burghers of Sacramento wake up to ground glass every morning on their opinion page.” In other words, if he hires me. I’m like, “I hope so. That’s what it’s for.”
John Kiriakou: I purchased their South Park Mormons episode that people are talking about in the chat, and the lice episode. So funny. I still laugh out loud every time I watch it.
Ted Rall: If the animation were better, I would have seen every episode. The animation’s a little rough.
John Kiriakou: I think that’s part of the charm.
Ted Rall: It’s their twenty-seventh season. They kind of got it figured out.
John Kiriakou: It’s crazy.
Ted Rall: Let’s see what else we’ve got to talk about here. Ghislaine Maxwell. I can never pronounce her name. She’s still hot in her prison photos. I’m a little confused by this, John. I know the heat is on the Trump administration over Epstein. I get it. Is this just window dressing? Are they pretending to look into it? It looks like she requested the interview with the DOJ, and they complied and had a wide-ranging conversation with her about anything and everything. She answered everything. If she committed perjury, she would have to face prosecution, which could extend her sentence. That indicates someone who’s probably telling the truth. When you take a risk, it’s like suing for defamation; you subject yourself to discovery. What is this about? Why did this interview take place, what was the desired outcome from both sides, and what’s the actual outcome?
John Kiriakou: This has to be speculation because we really don’t know. Do you remember last week, Ted, when we talked about the comment the Attorney General made about the videos being just child porn and that they’ll never see the light of day? Pam Bondi said, “We will never release.” I said, “We don’t want to see the child porn. We want to know the names of the men committing crimes against children.” It could be that she’s naming people who would be on those hard drives. Apparently, that happened, according to the counsel. Much of the reporting has been on these allegations—and they’re not a stretch by any means—that she wants some sort of commutation, even a pardon. Trump, being Trump, wouldn’t rule it out.
Ted Rall: Why would he give it to her? Doesn’t he want her to shut up?
John Kiriakou: My brain can’t wrap itself around what would possess Donald Trump to throw her a bone. Wouldn’t he pardon her for being quiet, not blabbing everything? It turns out we were right about it depending on what your definition of a list is. Some of the names popping up are Bill Clinton, John Kerry, and a handful of others well-known to every American. The question remains: who were the guys committing crimes against children?
Ted Rall: This reminds me of the Mayflower Madam case in the ‘80s. Her famous little black book made its way into the public eye. She had her johns in there, her girls in there, but also her dry cleaner and her Chinese food place. That’s what people do. If you’re looking for a spreadsheet that says “My Child Sex Clients.xlsx,” it’s not in there.
John Kiriakou: That’s not really the issue. Like all administrations, they’re playing it too cute.
Ted Rall: Was Maxwell railroaded?
John Kiriakou: I don’t think so. I think she was guilty. There were a whole bunch of people who were guilty. They shouldn’t have gone after just her and Epstein. I think she got what she deserved.
Ted Rall: She procured for Epstein. We know that. What this looks like to me is they partied a lot. They had lots of young girls around. They passed them around. It’s not necessarily about a honeypot operation or Mossad. It’s probably just gross dudes drinking, doing drugs, and having a good time, doing shit that’s illegal and immoral sometimes—not all, some of them. It’s like you’re at a party, and there’s something going on in another room. Maybe you don’t go into that room, or maybe you do. I think that’s what it was like.
John Kiriakou: I think you’ve hit it on the head. There’s another thing too, a minor point I’ve often wondered about. Pedophiles are almost always locked up in low-security prisons. They’re not eligible for minimums because they’re pedophiles, which means they’re dangerous to society, but they don’t go to mediums or maximums because they’ll be attacked, killed, beaten, or tortured. She’s at a minimum-security work camp. How the heck did that happen? Why were the rules waived for her? Why is she getting special treatment?
Ted Rall: I don’t know. That’s the whole thing. If there may not be a conspiracy, when things don’t make sense, people fill in the blanks. In all fairness, weird shit happens in the real world. How the Concorde crashed is strange—not a conspiracy, just a piece of metal fell off a plane in front of it, went into the engine, and blew it up. Now we can’t fly supersonic transport anymore.
John Kiriakou: Michael Gardner says rich people get different rules even in prison. Absolutely true. There was a guy in the next row of cells over from me, a quarterback for the New York Giants in the early 1970s. He was in for twenty-five years for running a massive Ponzi scheme. Let’s say he made $100 million and paid $50 million in restitution. He still had $50 million left over. This guy was a real scumbag. He paid off all the Mexican and Black gangs to ensure his safety—$500 a month to the MS-13 shot caller, $500 to the Crips, $500 to the Bloods, $500 to the Mexican Mafia. He hated the food in the cafeteria. Everybody did. He hired one of the Hispanics to be his personal chef. Other guys’ side hustle in prison is stealing food out of the cafeteria, and the guards look the other way. He would spend his $500 a month in the commissary and buy the rest on the black market stolen from the cafeteria. He had this personal chef make him three meals a day. Rich people are different. There are different rules, even in prison.
Ted Rall: I wonder how it was for Martha Stewart?
John Kiriakou: Everybody loved Martha Stewart. She taught them how to make soap and little handicrafts. I think Martha Stewart’s experience in prison was kind of like mine. I’m still in touch with a lot of the Italians. I spoke to two of them last night on a Zoom call to say hi. There was a crooked congressman from Ohio who went to prison a couple of years before I did. He was in my prison.
Ted Rall: I remember that guy. Not Jim Traficant, but the district immediately south of him.
John Kiriakou: Clyde Hall. How in the world did you pull that up? Must be an Ohioan. I haven’t thought of that name in a decade. He got out of prison and said, “They say you don’t go to prison to make friends, but I came out having made some of the best friends of my life.” I remember thinking at the time, before I was ever in trouble, that he was nuts. He’s not nuts, and I understand it now.
Ted Rall: Is it trauma bonding?
John Kiriakou: In part, it could be, but the people you trauma bond with, you tend to walk away from. These guys were genuinely good guys. Some of them did very bad things. I remember one saying, “The cops found a body in a barrel in my storage unit. I don’t know how that body got in there.” I said, “I’m not judging you. Seriously? It could happen to anybody.” He goes, “A hundred people had access to that storage unit.” I said, “Don’t worry.” We’re still in touch. It’s a strange place.
Ted Rall: How do people get so jacked like bodybuilders?
John Kiriakou: There’s literally nothing to do but work out. I saw three guys who were the most perfect human specimens I’ve ever seen. I made sure to walk five miles a day around the track. When it snows, they close the track, and you’re only allowed to walk around the basketball court, so you walk around 500 times. When I first arrived, I was walking around with a captain from the Bonanno family, a very senior guy. It was the first really great advice anybody gave me in prison. I’d been there about two or three weeks. It’s pouring snow, 10 degrees, and we’re walking around the outside basketball court. He said, “How much time do you get?” I said, “Thirty months, feels like thirty years.” He said, “Let me give you some advice. If somebody asks you how much time you have, say five years.” I said, “Why?” He said, “There are guys in here with twenty, twenty-five, thirty years. If they hear you have thirty months and you’re pissed off about it, they’re going to kick your ass. Tell them five years.” Does anybody ever ask to see your paperwork to find out if you’re a child molester? Only when you first arrive. I had to give my paperwork to the shot caller for the Aryans. He read it and said, “Intelligence Identities Protection Act. What the fuck is that?” I said, “It’s like a conspiracy charge.” He goes, “Okay.” I sat with the Aryans for a while until the Italians took me at meals. Some guys will sit with the Aryans, and the shot caller will say, “Who the fuck are you? Give me your paperwork.” The smart ones will go sit with the pedophiles without saying anything. Some will claim they can’t find their paperwork or have their lawyer write a letter. It’s like, “No. If you know what’s good for you, you’re going to move to the pedophile table right now.” They always do.
Ted Rall: How bad are the showers? We’ve all seen the movies.
John Kiriakou: That was one of the very few questions I asked my attorneys. They scheduled a lunch a couple of weeks before I left for prison with a former professor from George Washington University who played fast and loose with a National Science Foundation credit card and got two years. The first question I asked him was, “What’s the situation with the showers?” He said, “Don’t worry about that. It’s nothing like what you see on TV. You’re going to a low or minimum, and they’re all individual showers, completely enclosed with shower curtains, same with the toilets. Don’t worry about it at all.” He was exactly right. I never saw a guy naked in prison—well, that’s not true. We had one strip search once. You do not walk around exposing yourself unless you want every bone in your face broken. There was an Afghan child molester who came into my cell just before I left. I have an entire chapter about him in my second book. He went out to play soccer one day, came back, and his clothes were dripping sweat. It was disgusting. He goes up to the four-foot-tall fan, airing out his balls. I walked past and said, “Sheer, you’re going to get your ass kicked. This isn’t a fucking country club. You’re in prison.” He’s like, “Fuck you. I don’t answer to you.” Four guys were on him like white on rice. They left him in a bloody pulp on the floor. Not surprised at all. Told you. Moron. Lifting up his balls and airing them out. We’re like, “What are you doing? Are you out of your mind?” It’s always weird to me when people are in situations like this and don’t know how to act.
Ted Rall: I like this question: where are criminals actually respected, with child molesters at the bottom? Who’s on top, or does it work that way?
John Kiriakou: It very much works that way. The chomos are at the very bottom. The rats are barely above them. The Italians were at the very top.
Ted Rall: Of all the gangs—and they’re considered a gang—are they mafiosas or Italians, or is there a differentiation?
John Kiriakou: There’s a difference. You have to be connected in some way. The Italian network is very strong. They’ll know weeks in advance that you’re coming to the prison.
Ted Rall: That’s a good question: how did things change during and after your imprisonment? I assume your prison was like the California system I’ve read about, where everything is racially segregated.
John Kiriakou: Absolutely everything. At higher levels, you cannot have contact with other races because you’re branded a race traitor and treated accordingly. You can’t be friends with a Latino or play cards. I made a conscious decision when I first arrived to ignore those racial divisions. At the end of my sentence, the Black shot caller, a guy named Ali from Newark, at the tail end of a twenty-five-year drug charge, came over to hug me and tell me how much he respected me. I wrote his resume for him. I helped him because I refused to respect those racial divisions.
Ted Rall: Did you get any shit for that from whites?
John Kiriakou: No. I got shit from the Hispanics. I was like, “You guys all hate each other. The Mexicans hate the Puerto Ricans, the Puerto Ricans hate the Dominicans, the Dominicans hate the Costa Ricans. It’s ridiculous. You all look exactly the same to me, and you all hate each other.” I never understood it. The Italians were by far the most respected. Of all the gangs—MS-13, Bloods, Crips, Mexican Mafia, Burachos, Norteños—your prisoner number ends with a dash-47, which means organized gang. The Italians were also 47s, by far the smallest and most highly respected. Was there a charge that was most respected in the hierarchy of robbery, murder, rape? RICO. RICO usually had murder attached to it, usually conspiracy to commit murder, because a guy will murder somebody, and twenty people get charged for it as part of the conspiracy. They didn’t like these big rich white-collar criminals. They were viewed as soft. “You thought you were going to get away with it? Poor you. You got caught. Now you’re in prison. Oh my god.”
Ted Rall: It’s a class thing.
John Kiriakou: The only guys where nobody gave a shit were like arsonists. I knew three arsonists. People were like, “Arson. Did you kill anybody? No. Okay, nobody cares.” Insurance fraud, mortgage fraud. One guy was in for property fraud, which I’d never heard of before. He forged papers transferring ownership of a golf course to himself and tried to charge people. He’s like one of those squatters with fake deeds. It’s a big deal, like how car theft is akin to horse theft, stealing a man’s livelihood. Stealing a man’s home is the same way.
Ted Rall: What are your thoughts about all the recent trade deals?
John Kiriakou: I told my sister the other day, I can’t believe Trump is actually getting away with it. People are saying, “Oh my god, he’s nuts. The tariffs, 100%, 50%.” He’s coming to deals with all these countries, and they’re deals that favor the United States.
Ted Rall I can’t believe I’m saying it. I don’t have anything to add to that. That’s very true.
Ted Rall: Donald Trump issued an executive order stating that he’s very upset about the explosion of homelessness. The executive order understates the problem. It says there are 250,000 homeless people in the United States. There are actually 770,000, by a factor of three or four. That number was 550,000 for years, then shot up over the last four years since COVID, as prices shot up and people got priced out of housing. That’s not counting the millions who are couch-surfing, the hidden homeless. He doesn’t care about that. He said it’s a bad look in DC for foreign dignitaries to see tent cities as they drive in from Reagan Airport. He’s right. He says it’s disturbing and dangerous for law-abiding citizens to see people pissing and shitting outside.
John Kiriakou: Nobody wants to see that, but that’s capitalism for you. You can’t keep cutting the budget and starting with services.
Ted Rall: Donald Trump is really good at diagnosing problems. For example, factories in the Midwest have closed, we haven’t retrained anyone, and everybody’s depressed, poor, and addicted to opiates. That sucks. He’s right. That’s not a small thing. Being able to diagnose the problem is very important. I didn’t see Joe Biden or Kamala Harris doing that. Good for you. But Trump’s very bad at coming up with the cure and the treatment. Here, his thesis is that the vast majority of public homeless people are mentally ill, emotionally disturbed, drug addicts, or some combination thereof. That’s probably true. If they aren’t before they get on the street, they rapidly deteriorate. I’ve seen that happen in my neighborhood here in New York. The question is, what do we do about it? His answer seems to be forcible commitment. I’m not the kind of liberal who’s going to say someone has a moral and legal right to sleep outside in Manhattan when it’s five below zero. I want them picked up, dragged off, and taken somewhere safe, nice, and warm. I don’t want them abused, treated like shit, humiliated, attacked, or raped. The problem is there are no facilities here. We’ve got drug addicts and mentally ill people. He’s like, “Reopen the insane asylums,” like the old Creedmoor scandal from the ‘70s, where people were chained to their beds. The point is, Mr. President, there are no facilities. Where are you going to put them? This reminds me of the mass deportations. There are no facilities to handle mass deportations or the mass removal of the homeless from American city streets. Where are you going to put them? That goes double for drug addiction. There’s no treatment available. If you want to create a massive infrastructure, a massive safety net to deal with these people, God bless you. I will help you, support you, and scream to the heavens what a great president you are. I don’t see that happening.
John Kiriakou: I don’t see it happening either. Our viewers are making really good points. There’s a tent right behind the Executive Office Building and another one now at Union Station, same idea. My guess is he’ll find some pretext to move them out. Reagan—well, it started under Carter—when the Supreme Court ruled that people could not be held against their will if they were not a danger to themselves or others. But a lot of them are a danger to themselves or others and are deserving of mental health care. What do we do? Do we make it easier to force people into mental health care?
Ted Rall: Then there’s lots of abuse. When I was a little kid, my neighbor decided it was easier and cheaper than paying alimony to have his wife, who was perfectly wonderful and sane, forcibly committed. She spent six months at the local insane asylum in Dayton before she managed to get out. That kind of shit used to happen all the time.
You don’t want to make it too easy, but you don’t want to make it too hard either. California suffered with that for many years.
John Kiriakou: In the 1970s, they changed the law so the police couldn’t forcibly commit you. Can you imagine the cops ringing your doorbell and by force taking you to a mental institution with nothing you can do about it?
Ted Rall: In a sense, that does happen now. I don’t know if you’ve seen the Netflix movie I Care a Lot. It’s a real phenomenon. Nursing homes conspire to get power of attorney over people who are perfectly fine, targeting them because they’re rich to take their money.
John Kiriakou: They do. We spend scandalously little money on mental health.
Ted Rall: Even though mental health parity is in the Affordable Care Act, it’s completely unenforced.
John Kiriakou: In most counties in America, there are more mentally ill people in the county jail than in mental hospitals. There just aren’t many mental hospitals, and the ones that are there suck ass.
Ted Rall: I had a friend who discovered her ex-husband had committed suicide. She walked in on him. He had almost hacked his own head off with a butcher knife in his kitchen. Unsurprisingly, she freaks out, runs into the streets of Brooklyn screaming, “I want to die.” NYPD shows up, understandably thinking they have a mentally distraught woman on their hands, which they did. They dragged her off to Bellevue and put her in a padded room. She saw her phone, called her sister, who came to visit and said, “Honey, I know you’re really upset, but listen. They’re going to keep you here unless you can pretend you’re okay. They’re going to keep you here indefinitely, maybe forever. You have to get it together, stop crying, stop sobbing, and be like, ‘I’m good now. I can go home.’ Keep it together so they’ll let you go.” She did, then fell apart later. That’s how it works. There was an episode of Lou Grant on Hulu years ago where an investigative journalist got himself committed to a mental hospital to write an article from the inside.
Ted Rall: That’s what happened with the Creedmoor documentary. He couldn’t get out. They drug you. They drug seniors in old folks’ homes too to make them compliant. They weren’t great before they showed up, and they’re definitely not great after.
They did it to my mom. I watched them do it. I knew they were doing it. When they say you need an advocate when you’re in there, they’re not wrong. You need to be there all the time.
There’s a border conflict between Thailand and Cambodia going on right now. It’s not like war in Southeast Asia has ever been a problem for the United States, so maybe we don’t need to talk about it. In all seriousness, Thailand deployed an F-16 across the border into Cambodia and took out artillery positions. They claimed they were retaliating. This boils down to a treaty from 1907 by the French colonial power that set the border. As a graphic artist, this is fascinating. The text of the treaty says the border follows the natural flow of the river. But the drawing that went with it, that some Frenchman in 1907 drew, doesn’t really do that. It puts this temple on the Cambodian side of the border, and the Cambodians are like, “Thank you.” Everybody went with the drawing. As a graphic artist, I agree with that 100%. But under most treaties, you look at the words. The Thais are like, “We’re looking at the words. Fuck the drawing.” That’s what this is all about—art versus text. It’s about this temple. It seems like maybe not a big deal, but it’s not not a big deal either.
John Kiriakou: I didn’t even realize the Cambodians had a military.
Ted Rall: The Khmer Rouge got overrun by the Vietnamese. That was a long time ago.
John Kiriakou: It must not be much of a military. They still have all those mines all over the place. When I first saw this, I was like, “Wait, what?” They’re firing at each other across the border too. This happens between India and China every few years.
Ted Rall: There was a major war over it in 1962. A few years ago, drunken border guards got out of control. That’s why Putin never wanted a NATO country on his border. He knows about drunken border guards. The next thing you know, you’ve got French nukes headed your way with Article 5 of NATO.
John Kiriakou: We were asked earlier in the chat about Trump’s reversal on NATO. He used to hate it; now he loves it. Trump’s always flip-flopping like a fish on a dock. I think he really believes Vladimir Putin would do what he told him to do. He’s so angry that Putin won’t go to the negotiating table and settle this thing with Ukraine that now he’s got to embrace NATO. Otherwise, he’s out there all alone.
Ted Rall: This is what we were talking about earlier. Diplomacy takes fucking work. I know neither of us supported Bill Clinton’s actions against Serbia, but I have to hand it to him. The story about how the Dayton Peace Accord came to be is great. He cleverly brought the three leaders of Serbia, Croatia, and Kosovo to Wright Patterson Air Force Base. Having grown up there, I’m pretty sure Bill Clinton was aware that it was one of the most boring places in the United States. He’s like, “You guys work it out, then you get to go home.” He left them there. They were kind of kept prisoner. He gave them soccer balls. They were getting desperate. Finally, he said, “There’s a French restaurant called L’Auberge, just south of downtown Dayton. It’s the only French restaurant in Dayton. You fellas can go down there and have a good meal, but you’ve got to sign the agreement.” Slobodan Milošević and the rest were like, “Man, I’ve got to have a good meal. Dayton sucks.” They signed. I grew up a quarter of a mile from L’Auberge and walked by it every day from my mom’s house to school. They had a seating chart showing where all the diplomats sat, where Clinton was, what type of wine they had. I laughed at that. French food diplomacy. They were hungry and couldn’t eat the shitty base food anymore.
John Kiriakou: Totally true. 2 Toes says it’s a surprisingly excellent museum. It’s big. It’s not a pop-in for thirty minutes. It’s a half-day event, and it’s good. It’s got a strong aeronautics aspect and amazing space stuff.
Ted Rall: Someone lived in Dayton then. The story back then is that Milošević insisted something needed to be signed. I think it was Clinton, but who knows? All we know is people were hungry, and they ended up at L’Auberge.
John Kiriakou: Indeed. It was a boring place.
Ted Rall: Let’s talk a little before we wrap it up about the homeless executive order. This could be an opportunity for Democrats to say, “Mr. President, you’re right. Homelessness is a national shame for the world’s richest country. We shouldn’t have anybody sleeping outside. Let’s work together on this.” That can’t happen, right?
John Kiriakou: No. There was a piece in the Post today saying it’s all fine and good to sign an executive order, but this is a state issue. He might be able to fiddle with what little federal funding there is, but there’s nothing he could do to force tent cities to be removed or force people into mental institutions. If he wants to propose taking abandoned or mothballed military bases and turning them into housing for the homeless, where they can undergo job training or get mental health care and be reintroduced into society, that’s something else. I think this is mostly talk.
Ted Rall: I don’t think this is one of those things that can get done this way. Maybe we should answer this last question and then start our weekends. What do we think about Trump saying Obama could be arrested over the Russia election scandal? Thanks to Donald Trump going to the Supreme Court, a president can’t be arrested for anything. Issue done. Closed. All Obama would have to argue is that he did it in the exercise of his functions as President of the United States.
John Kiriakou: John Brennan is another issue. Just before we started this show, I interviewed Matt Taibbi for my other podcast, Deep Focus. I lamented that the Justice Department has referred misdemeanor charges against Brennan and Comey related to allegedly lying to Congress. He said that’s true, but he’s hearing now that they are actively pursuing felony conspiracy charges against at least Brennan and maybe Brennan and Comey. I’ll go to Brennan’s trial every single day with a big fat grin on my face. Karma is real, and she’s an evil bitch.
Ted Rall: That’s a perfect place to start our weekend. John Kiriakou, thank you so much. As always, it’s a pleasure to be here with you. That was so fun.
John Kiriakou: It’s always fun. We’re deprogrammed. We’ll be here again next week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, 5 PM Eastern. Maybe we should try for every day the week after.
Ted Rall: We could try that. Monday, Wednesday, Friday, 5 PM Eastern. Please like, follow, and share the show. Seriously, please share it. Find the link and pass it around. It’s a massive thing for us. The numbers are going the right direction, but anything you can do to make them go faster would be much appreciated. Thanks for your questions. It’s always fun to answer them. We have the best viewers. Love you guys. Take care.
John Kiriakou: Thanks, everybody.
