Transcript generated with AI. So there may be errors.

Ted Rall and John Kiriakou discuss critical issues on the Wednesday, July 24, 2025 episode of Deprogram.

Watch/listen here.

Kiriakou shares Congressman Thomas Massie’s efforts to release Jeffrey Epstein files via a discharge petition, facing resistance from House Speaker Mike Johnson, who altered rules to curb subpoenas. They speculate on Trump’s involvement in the Epstein case, doubting direct culpability but suspecting he’s protecting someone close. In Gaza, they condemn ongoing violence as genocide, citing starvation and IDF tactics. They address Kilmar Albrego Garcia’s wrongful deportation and unfair labeling by officials. In Ukraine, Zelensky’s unpopularity and potential CIA-backed coup are highlighted. They also touch on Iranian arson fires, possibly Israeli-orchestrated, and Greek protests against Israeli tourists. The show’s name changes to Deprogram with Ted Rall and John Kiriakou for clarity.

Ted Rall: Hey, everyone. Thanks for joining us. You’re watching Deprogram with me, Ted Rall, and John Kiriakou. Lots to talk about. John and I are having quite a day, but, hey, so is the country. John, you were just on the phone with a guy who’s been in the news lately. Maybe you want to tell us about it.

John Kiriakou: I was asked at the last minute to appear on a show called Redacted on the Unified Television Network, not realizing that I was going to be asked to appear alongside Congressman Thomas Massie. So I got on, and as soon as I got on, Massie got on, and he was absolutely fascinating. The whole thing was about Jeffrey Epstein. I’ve been trying to talk a lot about Jeffrey Epstein because these political developments surrounding the Epstein situation are complicated. He made them more complicated with what he said. He used to be on the Rules Committee. The Rules Committee is the single most important committee on Capitol Hill because the members of the Rules Committee decide what bills go to the floor for a vote and what bills are just killed. Because he’s an independent thinker, he was removed from the Rules Committee and is no longer a member. But he says he’s a smart guy.

My time on the Rules Committee taught me how to write a discharge petition. A discharge petition is a very rarely used parliamentary trick in the House of Representatives. I remember it being used once when I was in college in 1986. What a discharge petition is, is this: Let’s say there is a bill to make Ted Rall Day. Okay? And most—well, that would be unopposed. You’d think.

Most people want a Ted Rall Day. Right? But there’s this one asshole on the Rules Committee who says, you know what? I don’t like Ted Rall. He made fun of me in a cartoon one time, and I’m not going to allow this thing to go to the floor for a vote. So Congressman Kiriakou then writes up what’s called the discharge petition. A discharge petition, if it gets a majority, that’s 218 votes, forces the bill out of the Rules Committee, whether they like it or not, to the floor for a vote. Until 1933, you needed 25% of members of Congress to vote yes on the discharge. They changed the rules in 1933, so now you need 218 votes to force a bill to the floor. Thomas Massie just now said that he has a bill to force the administration to release every scrap of paper that exists related to Jeffrey Epstein to the public, including videos, hard drives, black books, files, emails, and everything they have. And Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, said, oh, no. No. We can’t do that. That’s going to embarrass the administration. And the president has already said that there are no files. We can’t contradict the president. So Massie went to Hakeem Jeffries, and Hakeem Jeffries says, you know what? I can guarantee you every single Democrat in the House of Representatives. Meaning that Massie has to come up with five Republicans. He’s one. That’s four more. Marjorie Taylor Greene said yes. That makes three more. So he’s in talks with the Freedom Caucus. That could be as many as six more, which would give him enough to discharge the bill from the Rules Committee.

Ted Rall: So what did Mike Johnson tell him today?

John Kiriakou: Mike Johnson said, if you persist with this, I’m going to change the rules, which haven’t changed since 1933. And I’m going to make it so that you need two-thirds of the members of the House of Representatives, not 50% plus one. He can do anything he wants because he’s the Speaker of the House. Another thing Massie said, which was so interesting to me, is that he wants to subpoena people in the Jeffrey Epstein orbit. When I was a senior staff member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I had subpoena power. It’s not something you want to do every day. It pisses people off to receive a subpoena. But if you have somebody that just refuses to testify, you have to issue the subpoena and force them to come and testify before your committee. So Massie issued a whole bunch of subpoenas for all these different people to come before the House and testify as to their role in facilitating Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes or in not helping to end Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes. So what happened? Mike Johnson changed the rules. And so now the only people who can issue subpoenas in the House of Representatives are Mike Johnson’s attorneys. No member of Congress can issue a subpoena as of today. Only Mike Johnson’s attorneys. So the fix is in, man. We were saying the day before yesterday when Johnson announced that he didn’t want any votes on Epstein, so he’s just going to shut down the House of Representatives until September so that there won’t be any votes. Now you can’t even issue a subpoena, let alone have a vote. One other thing Massie said that was very interesting: despite this announcement that the House will shut down, it actually won’t shut down because Johnson doesn’t trust Trump to not make recess appointments. They’re all the same party. They’re all Republicans. It’s shocking to me. So Johnson came to an agreement this week, and folks, this is not reported in the media. This is breaking news from Thomas Massie’s mouth. Johnson came to an agreement with John Thune, the Majority Leader in the Senate, that every eight days, they will gavel the House and the Senate into session and then immediately gavel it out of session. The whole process takes five seconds. So this is like the guy in the bottom of the hatch on Lost who has to keep pushing the button. That’s exactly what it is. So that way, they’re in recess, but they’re really not in recess. That way, they can’t vote on Epstein, but Trump can’t make any federal appointments. Shocking.

Ted Rall: Well, just in case you were bored, John, this has broken in the New York Times while you were talking to Thomas. AG Pam Bondi informed Trump in the spring that his name appeared in the Epstein files, according to three people with knowledge of the exchange. The disclosure came as part of a broader briefing on the case by the FBI and prosecutors. It was made by Bondi during a meeting that also included the Deputy AG, Todd Blanch, and covered a variety of topics. She meets regularly with Trump, officials said. They informed Trump that his name, as well as those of other high-profile figures, came up during their reexamination of the Epstein files that had not previously been made public. Trump has already appeared in documents related to the investigation. Steve Chung wouldn’t answer any questions about this briefing and basically reminded everyone that this was supposedly fake news. This has all previously been reported by the Wall Street Journal. But this is a bona fide scandal, John.

John Kiriakou: It is. It is. Wow. Well, I mean, it’s like what we thought it was. The only answers here were that it had to be either the president himself who was somehow implicated to some extent. I have to admit that doesn’t really pass the smell test that the president is a pedophile. No. I don’t believe that. There’s no evidence of that. Of course, anything’s possible, but I just don’t think so. Most things are usually the way they seem. Although every now and then, you’re like, what? So this could be one of those times. But it’s got to be someone close to him. It’s got to be someone he cares about. Interference for.

It has to be. And I’ll tell you what, it has to be Dan Bongino that leaked this to the New York Times. For sure. There is no other possibility.

Ted Rall: So Elon Musk told the truth, which then makes me think, how in the world did Elon Musk know that Donald Trump was in the Epstein files when Musk should not have had access to law enforcement information? That’s a good question. Although, apparently, Doge and Musk had their noses in all sorts of holes that they weren’t supposed to be.

So, I thought we were going to be just talking about sending Congress home early and what a bad look that was. Massie was quoted in this morning’s media, probably from stuff he said yesterday to reporters, saying that MAGA World isn’t going to forget about this just because six weeks go by. This really does remind me of Watergate summer when things dragged out. It was no air conditioning in that Senate hearing. Everyone’s hot and sweaty. It was boring. And this low-level functionary named Paul Butterfield comes in and says, and then the tape recorder in the Oval Office. And people are like, what? There’s a tape recorder in the Oval Office? Reporters go scrambling out the door. I remember that. And I always thought that if Nixon hadn’t dragged his ass on this whole thing, we would have never gotten to that point. The more Trump does this, the more it’s staying in the news. I know he’s hoping there’s going to be an asteroid hit or Jesus is going to finally come back and say hi or something’s going to happen that’s going to wipe this off the headlines, but I don’t see it.

John Kiriakou: No. I don’t either. And I’ll tell you what, Massie said some other things that made me want to yelp out loud. He said that this discharge petition, he wrote it, but it’s co-sponsored by Ro Khanna. He said that he and Ro Khanna have a lot of respect for each other. They work together on a lot of legislation, and they are of one mind on this issue. Frankly, I was enjoying listening to him. I’ve been to a couple of baseball games with Thomas Massie. He is a lovely man. You don’t have to agree with everything he says. He’s very constitutionalist, but that’s cool. He is such a patriot. He said a couple of things that were fascinating. The lesser one first: he said that there is a kind of phony 501(c)(3) nonprofit that all of a sudden started broadcasting TV commercials against him in his district. It took his staff all of fifteen minutes to trace the registration of this 501(c)(3) back to the White House. Just like that. It’s like, no. You can’t do that. You’re not supposed to do that. But this organization, called something like the Make America Great Again Patriots, has already spent $1,800,000. So he’s in serious trouble. He’s being primaried in Kentucky. I went back on Friday and looked at the polls. There’s not a whole lot of polling in these individual congressional races so far. But his constituents love him, and they want him to stand up like this. The more interesting thing he said was in response to the last question of the panel. The host said, so Congressman Massie, you find yourself at odds with the administration a lot, like, all the time. And he laughed and said, yes. And remember, I was the only Republican who voted against Mike Johnson for Speaker. So everybody’s mad at Massie. He’s the Barbara Lee of the right. Or maybe Rand Paul. But Rand Paul is kind of a phony, though. Massie is a true believer. He’s really doing it. So she says, is there any chance that you might consider running for president under Elon Musk’s new America Party? Maybe you and Ro Khanna could do something together. Unity ticket. He says, never say never. That’s always the right answer. And I was like, oh my god. Any other politician would say, I’m a Republican. I’m a lifelong Republican. I stand with the Republican Party. I’m going to work to change the Republican Party from within. That’s not what he said. He said, never say never. My mouth dropped open. It’s an honest answer.

Ted Rall: Deanna Montoya is asking, so neither of us, we’ve said this already, think that it’s likely that Trump could have sexually assaulted a young girl. Let me tell you why I don’t think that’s true. Thousands of pages of biographies of Donald Trump. I wrote a biography of Donald Trump. I don’t recommend that you buy it. It’s really not one of my best books. I have better books if you want to buy one of my books. But I learned a lot about him. He’s led such a public life that it’s really hard to believe that if he had these predilections or if he was really particularly interested in unusual sex, we wouldn’t have heard about it by now. It just doesn’t seem likely. Think about Matt Gaetz; he was only a congressman, and everything came out. Larry Craig, Mr. Wide Stance at the St. Paul Airport, just a senator from Idaho, and we found out everything. So with Donald Trump, who’s the most public person in the United States and has been for decades, I think we would just know. We know he likes to sleep with porn stars now and then and other random women besides his wife, or sometimes the random woman becomes his wife. But that’s not really unusual for dudes in general and for dudes at that level. They have their wives and families and love them, and they also have sex on the side sometimes, but they do it with adults. That’s my take. I’m not saying I have a crystal ball here. If I did, I’d be buying more stocks.

John Kiriakou: I agree with you. I think if he had done something like that, it would have come out by now, even just as a rumor. We also have the statement from Stormy Daniels that he was 100% vanilla, that there was nothing special or out of the ordinary. He was the missionary man, totally ordinary. And he made that comment when he was still friendly with Epstein. He said, Jeff’s a good guy. He’s a fun guy. He loves women just like I do. He loves them young, but he loves women. I think there was a lot behind that statement.

Ted Rall: Here’s the thing too. We do live in a world where perhaps it would be nice if you knew about sexual assault and pedophilia, you might step up and try to stop it or even report it to the authorities, but I suppose that’s too much to hope for in this case.

John Kiriakou: So now we have this speculation game. I’m not going to throw out names here, but we’re all going to be wondering, who is Trump covering for? Is it one person? Are there multiple? There has to be. Because otherwise, this doesn’t make any sense. If he had nothing to hide, he would have ordered the release of the information. He campaigned on ordering the release of the information. He released most of the JFK documents. He released the MLK documents. He’s in the process of releasing the RFK documents. But then all of a sudden, like magic, there are no Epstein documents. There were no files until there were files, and then there’s no files again. I love Speaker Johnson’s comment that only the best files, the proper files, the reliable files should be released.

Ted Rall: And who’s going to get to decide that? Is it going to be you, John, or is it going to be me, Ted? I don’t think so. It’s going to be them, and the truth will out. This is going to come out. Sometimes it takes years, decades even, but the truth always comes out. Always.

John Kiriakou: I remember six weeks before my release from prison, I called my wife. I was allowed to call her every other day for fifteen minutes. So I said, how was your day? She said it was great. And I said, really? It was great? Why was it so great? And she said, because the Senate torture report came out today, and it proved that everything you said was true. So I had to wait from 2007 to December 2014, but my truth came out. This Epstein truth is going to come out, especially when you have people on the inside of the system who hate that it hasn’t come out yet. Bongino’s furious to the point where he’s talking about quitting. Kash Patel is in a real situation right now where his reputation’s on the line, and Donald Trump’s only going to be president for three and a half more years. And then what does Patel do? You have to be on the side of righteousness here. Otherwise, you’re going to ruin yourself.

Ted Rall: Shall we switch over to Gaza? Things in Gaza. It’s hard to know where to start. I could start with Bret Stephens’ rancid column in today’s New York Times, where, again, he’s turning cartwheels to redefine what’s going on there as a non-genocide. In a way, it doesn’t really matter what it’s called, but it is a genocide. He quotes the UN definition of genocide and carefully analyzes it, ignoring the whole “in whole or in part” part of that phrase. You don’t need to kill every Jew like the Nazis wanted to for it to be genocide. They were trying to get most of them to leave, actually. And they herded them into ghettos. The point is, if you go after a significant part of a population and your purpose is to kill them or just get them to leave, that’s still genocide. Even if you don’t kill anyone, you can still be committing cultural genocide by driving a population out of their homeland. But what blew me away is the starvation reports are escalating now to the point where the doctors, who are exhausted beyond belief treating the endless flow of casualties into what’s left of these hospitals in Gaza, are now themselves succumbing to starvation and are literally fainting and passing out while they’re operating on people. That’s because they don’t have enough food or water. Were you the one telling me yesterday or the day before about these games that the IDF play?

Ted Rall: Yep. Absolutely sick. The doctors report that the IDF, literally, for fun, the snipers will be like, today is shoulder day. Let’s shoot everyone in the shoulder. Today is knee day. Let’s shoot everyone in the knee. And then everybody comes in with the same identical injury—abdominal wound, buttock, head wound, all on the same day. It was on the BBC, reaffirmed in the New York Times. The Israelis are taking the piss. They’re having fun.

John Kiriakou: They are. You’ve read the genocide statutes. I’ve read the genocide statutes. I don’t care what people’s political positions are. This meets all of the legal definitions of genocide. It is a genocide. Period.

Ted Rall: There’s no question. It’s sort of like how people with borderline personality disorder will justify anything they do because you triggered them. If you hadn’t said this or done that or remembered to take out the trash, I wouldn’t have burned the house down. Israel is basically a borderline country. They’re saying, well, look at what happened on October 7. Therefore, everything that follows by definition is not our fault. That’s completely absurd and ridiculous. That’s a mental illness.

The only good news, I suppose, is that belatedly, not just two years late but decades late, the world is starting to see it, and people aren’t afraid of Israel anymore. People are willing to speak up. I don’t know that AIPAC is going to keep its power even with all the money they have.

John Kiriakou: I was disappointed in these recent votes in the House of Representatives over military aid to Israel. A friend of mine in Code Pink posted something on Facebook from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez explaining why she voted against a bill that would’ve allocated $500,000,000 for Iron Dome. It’s okay to allocate money for guns to shoot the Palestinians, but your objection is that the money was going to be spent for the Iron Dome. That’s so typical of the Democratic Party, and both parties, these pro-Israel lefties. The ideology just doesn’t make any sense to me.

Ted Rall: Part of it stems from this ridiculous idea that governments and companies have where they’ll say, the money is in a separate pot. So the Iron Dome defense money is in this pot, and the genocide money is in another pot. That’s just fiction because money is fungible by definition. If you pay my cable bill, it’s easier for me to pay my phone bill. It’s like SS guards at a death camp killing people, and we say, we don’t want to finance that because that’s bad. But we don’t want them to fall off the watchtower, so we’ll pay for a little bumper to shore things up. We don’t want them to get shot by the resistance, so we’ll buy them some body armor. If you provide defense for a belligerent, you are assisting that belligerent. Legally, you become a belligerent. Bruce Fein explained this to me. For example, the government of Belarus allowed Russian troops to invade Ukraine through Belarus. That makes Belarus a belligerent, and so it would be subject to war crimes charges after the war. It won’t be, but that’s just an example.

With the doctors falling down, it’s just going to get worse and worse. Another thing that was funny about that stupid column in the Times today was he said, if they were really committing genocide, it would be hundreds of thousands, not tens of thousands. First of all, it is hundreds of thousands. They just haven’t found the bodies, but it’s arithmetic. There were 2,300,000 Palestinians there before October 6, 2023. We’re down to about two million now. 2.3 minus 2 is 300,000.

John Kiriakou: You’re right about the bodies. Most of Gaza has been leveled. It’s rubble. You can see it in the overhead photography. Nobody has any idea how many tens of thousands of bodies are underneath those buildings. Hundreds of thousands of bodies. The bodies aren’t counted by the Gaza Health Ministry unless they’re recovered and identified. So you have to know, like, that’s John Smith, his birth date is such and such, his occupation was whatever. You’ve been to wars, I’ve been to wars. It takes a long time to find out. When a body—I’m speaking to you inside a nine-story building right now. If someone dropped a bomb on this building, there’s probably fifty, sixty people here now. I think it would take weeks even for the NYPD to find everyone.

They just found a body in Pacific Palisades yesterday, in the LA Times. They’re going through these houses that turned to ash. They just got around to this one block, and sure enough, there was a burned body in the ruins yesterday. This was months ago. I guess we’ll just keep an eye on this story, obviously. It’s an ongoing catastrophe.

Ted Rall: So let’s talk about Kilmar Albrego Garcia. I’m glad to see this. His lawyers are aggressive. This is, of course, the guy who, by all accounts, is a green card holder deported to El Salvador. There was a specific court order preventing that from happening, which ICE and the Trump administration either willfully or accidentally ignored, deported him anyway. Then they found out, and they made all sorts of ridiculous maneuvers to try to prevent that. When they did bring him back, they came up with some charges that may or may not be valid to say that he’d been involved in smuggling illegal immigrants and possibly working for MS-13, which, apparently, the truth is that he left El Salvador originally because he was afraid of MS-13. The Salvadoran authorities even said he doesn’t fit the profile, nothing they believe. They don’t believe he’s a member. He doesn’t have the right tattoos. Nothing fits. He’s kind of just a mild-mannered dude who may not have been the best husband. Anyway, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem went on Twitter to call him a monster. Now his lawyers are in court, and they’re asking the judge to issue an order telling the Trump administration to stifle it so that they stop prejudicing Kilmar’s ability to get a fair trial in an American court of law. This is long overdue. I don’t even understand why district attorneys go on the air and give a press conference and say, we just indicted this real son of a bitch for committing horrible crimes. At most, they should just say, we’ve arrested this person. These are the charges. We’ll keep you posted. They editorialize. They queer the jury. They queer the judges. When it’s the cabinet secretary using the power of the US government to say that you’re a monster, how the hell are you supposed to get a fair trial?

John Kiriakou: Even in the Bureau of Prisons, if you are a member of a gang, the last two digits of your prisoner ID number are going to be -47. You see these guys in the Crips, in the Bloods, and MS-13, and they all have -47. I was sitting with one guy one day, and I noticed his badge said -47. I said, how are you a -47? He’s just a typical white guy. He said, they accuse me of being in the mafia. I said, the mafia? You’re not even from a town that has the mafia. And he’s like, I know. And when I complained, they just said, so sue me. But if you have a badge that ends in -47, you can’t go to a minimum-security camp. You’re not allowed to have compassionate release. You can’t do anything. You’re stuck in prison. But they don’t have to actually show anybody any proof that you’re in a gang. Once they say you’re in a gang, that’s it. It’s done. You’re in the gang whether you like it or not. And that’s what Kristi Noem is doing in this case. You just keep repeating the lie over and over, and now all of a sudden, he’s MS-13, whether it’s true or not.

Ted Rall: He’s got great lawyers. The tricky part here is that the Trump administration, as usual, is playing it cute, trying to have everything two or three or four ways at the same time. They want to prosecute him, but they said, well, we won’t prosecute him. We might not prosecute him. In which case, we’ll send him back to El Salvador or maybe South Sudan. Then they’re like, well, but maybe we will prosecute him, but as soon as we convict him, we’ll send him to South Sudan or Libya or El Salvador. Or maybe we won’t prosecute him at all. It reminds me of the shell game guys in Times Square back in the eighties: watch the hand, watch the ball, and you can never watch the ball. When the state declares you an enemy, the amount of chicanery and bullshit they will subject you to is just incomprehensible for someone who hasn’t been through it. It’s not well reported. You find all these things out when you show up, and there you are in the jaws of the state.

There’s no let-up here. These people are relentless. The Kristi Noems of the world and these Justice Department prosecutors, oh my god. They’re just relentless. There’s no getting away. I’m very curious as to how this is going to play out. It’s a fucking embarrassment. I don’t know if they think their base likes this. Do you think their base does like it?

John Kiriakou: I think elements of the base probably do, but the thing is that they’re going to vote for you anyway. They’re going to support you anyway. So why keep pandering to them like this? Either lead or allow them to tell you on what issues they want you to lead. To me, that’s not leadership.

Ted Rall: It’s definitely leadership. It’s just leadership down the shitter. How about Ukraine? America’s favorite democratic leader, who leads the most streamlined democracy in the world that doesn’t have any opposition party and is very not corrupt in any way, shape, or form. We don’t have to have any elections because that just gets in the way of democracy. Anyway, there’s a scandal now in Ukraine, and the bloom is off the rose. I suppose it’s taken a lot longer than I would have expected it to. Zelensky was wildly unpopular before the war, and that was all suppressed, and maybe there was genuine rallying around the flag in Ukraine. You would expect that. But now, the opposition is getting brave. It’s not easy to oppose the state in Ukraine. You may end up under house arrest or worse. It’s a time of war, and they have martial law. They can literally just shoot you at a demonstration if they don’t like you. There have been large mass demonstrations opposing the regime because Zelensky basically put the kibosh on an anti-corruption campaign that was wildly popular and that people were really hoping to see happen. It reminds me a little bit of the kind of stuff that we’ve been seeing with the Epstein files here. It’s just like, yeah, we’re not going to do that.

John Kiriakou: As long as—doesn’t really seem to have a good narrative here. I was asked by a reporter this morning if I thought it was possible that we may be seeing the early stages of a coup, even maybe a CIA-backed coup. I said, if this were a year ago, I would say no. But today, I would say, sure. This could be the start of a CIA coup. It’s not 1963 where the CIA puts a bullet into the back of the head of South Vietnam’s president, but it could be the kind of coup where the US ambassador and the station chief go to see Zelensky and say, alright, it’s time for you to go. Pack your shit, get on the plane, and go to London. Could it be a kidnapping thing like we did to Jean-Bertrand Aristide from Haiti to the Central African Republic? Sure. Just like that. Something’s afoot in Ukraine, and it’s not good if you are a supporter of the Ukrainian government or of US policy. I don’t know what that means.

Ted Rall: You’re the one trained in code, John.

John Kiriakou: I never did well with code. I preferred the disappearing ink. That was much easier for me. Seriously, they do use it. You write a letter in regular ink, and then in between the lines, you write your secret letter in the disappearing ink. You send the letter, they put it into the solution—I forget what it was, maybe hydrogen peroxide. The ink disappears, and the hidden ink comes up. It’s kinda cool. Not at all complicated. It’s like stuff you can see at the Spy Museum in DC. A fun visit.

Ted Rall: Houdini is asking if there’s a Russia-Ukraine ceasefire. The pressure is on Zelensky. He’s agreed to get serious, and they’re talking in the next couple of days. The US isn’t invited, but Ukraine and Russia are going to talk.

John Kiriakou: It’s my understanding that Zelensky actually owns real estate because he stole so much money as president of Ukraine. He would likely go to London. J Rock makes a good point here too: I thought the CIA already did his coup. So this is the double coup. They didn’t like the first coup, so they may try a different coup.

Ted Rall: It’s not the first time in CIA history that there was buyer’s remorse on the front of the agency. The coup and the counter-coup. If it doesn’t go well, you just do it again. No big deal.

For people who are wondering what we’re talking about, of course, we’re talking about the 2014 coup. Some people would say it’s not, but it really does fit all the requirements for a coup. Do you think that Russia and Ukraine are able to make any progress? The fighting seems to be—there’s really just not a lot of movement. What movement has been taking place has been to the benefit of Russia, but the facts on the ground haven’t really altered a hell of a lot.

John Kiriakou: This is the prime fighting season. The weather’s good. The spring rains are over, so your tanks don’t get bogged down in mud. This is where the two sides are supposed to be fighting the most so they can dig in in time for winter, and it’s just not happening.

John Kiriakou: Both sides are tired. Both sides are running short on supplies, especially fuel. Who wants this more? The Ukrainians or the Russians? I don’t know.

Ted Rall: I think you and I probably would have agreed that Russia didn’t really want this war. I’ve never seen many belligerents wait eight years to attack. That shows a certain degree of patience unless we have the big procrastinator. But now, if I were Putin, I would feel like I was in a good place to negotiate. Why not say, okay, let’s talk, let’s do this? Russia hasn’t changed their demands at all. I think they’re all achievable, perhaps, except for some random stuff like denazification, which is impossible for the Ukrainians to do and also impossible to define. Demilitarization also has to be a throwaway because that’s ridiculous. But in terms of the territorial concessions, that should not be that hard for Ukraine. I’ve always said to my friends who are pro-Ukrainian, in a way, this war fixed a problem that should never have existed in the first place. These borders were poorly drawn after 1991. If you’re Ukraine, do you want a hostile, restive population of ethnic Russians in Crimea that you basically have to suppress?

John Kiriakou: People in Crimea and in the Donbass are ethnic Russians. They speak Russian at home. Their faith is tied to the Russian Orthodox Church, not the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. They aren’t Catholics in those areas. The Catholics are in the West. So what would Ukraine really be losing? They wouldn’t really be losing anything. And if part of the deal is this fast track to membership in the European Union, what’s the downside? I don’t see the downside. Just sign the deal. Let it go.

Ted Rall: Somebody made a comment about the corruption. There are so many ways to do it. You could have a foreign company serve as a cutout. You could have the money diverted directly into your Swiss bank account. When I served overseas, we saw it nine ways from Sunday. It’s not at all hard.

John Kiriakou: Switzerland’s not as good as it used to be. The Swiss will rat you out now. Now it’s more like the Isle of Man, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, Guernsey, the Cook Islands. And old-fashioned cash. We know that skids of $100 bills left Afghanistan by plane. If you travel on a diplomatic passport, they don’t search you. You can bring vast amounts of whatever—drugs, money, anything you want in your diplomatic pouch.

I got arrested once with the diplomatic pouch. I was going to Yemen to see some friends of mine in the spring of 1991. I was kind of tired from the war and wanted to go to that vacation spot that is Yemen to decompress for a little while. Friends of mine invited me. I want one of those big pointy hats that the women wear. I collect weird hats.

Those are awesome. I actually bought little ones for my boys. They were young at the time. So I was traveling from Riyadh through Jeddah to Sana, and one of the State Department communications officers asked me if I would take a diplomatic pouch with me. It had some radios in it and some mail. Just mail. So I said, sure, I’ll take the pouch. When I arrived in Yemen, they insisted on X-raying it. I said, no, this is a diplomatic pouch. I’m a diplomat. I have my diplomatic credentials. I had the paperwork with the wax seal on it and all this stuff. And they were like, fuck that. One of them pulled out his jambiya, that curved dagger they carry. He hacked the lead seal off the pouch. I kept saying, I protest. You can’t do this. I’m 26 years old. What am I going to say? I didn’t speak Arabic yet. I had taken six weeks of Arabic familiarization. So they open up the pouch, he reaches in, pulls out this radio, an old-fashioned CB radio, and says, jasus, one of the few Arabic words I understood at the time. It means spy. And then they were on me. So they put me in this cell in the airport, and I was with a Filipino nurse and a couple of Indian guys that had hashish on them. I was in there for about four hours, and finally, the American ambassador came and said, wow, you really threw a wrench into my day. I said, I’m sorry. They should have never opened that pouch. He said, nah, forget it. Let’s just go. So we got in the car, and that was my first experience in a jail cell. It’s always funny when people just don’t follow the rules, and that happens a lot.

Ted Rall: I read the Greek papers this morning, and they were talking a lot about this new wave of refugees. Is that what you’re talking about, Nick?

John Kiriakou: I just figured since you’re Greek, you know all things Greek. Somebody asked me a question today about why Greeks hate the royal family so much. I’d love to answer that question.

Ted Rall: Israeli tourists blocked by locals from disembarking. Spicy. I like it. I’m going to check that out right now. Top story: Greece crowned champion of women’s water polo after victory over Hungary. Greek police have dismissed reports in the Israeli media alleging that a mob carried out a knife attack against a group of Israeli tourists on the island of Rhodes. That’s my ancestral island. Interesting. I’m going to text my cousin and ask him what’s going on there with Israelis.

Question from Adam Feider: When are we going to cover China? There’s a really interesting piece in the Washington Post today about deflation. China’s been in a deflationary environment for eight consecutive quarters, over two years, because of excessive competition. So the authorities are stepping in, and they’re going to start to regulate this so that there are fewer companies in the same sector. I guess the right-wingers would say they’re picking winners in the free markets. Doesn’t seem like a bad idea to me. If you have excessive competition and prices are getting so low that in the aggregate, sectors are wildly profitable, but no individual company can stay afloat, you’ve got a problem.

Ted Rall: Thanks for the suggestion, Adam. We’ll do it soon. I can’t promise it’ll be Friday, but it might be. Pretty crazy. Prince Philip was Greek. Prince Philip was the son of a very minor Greek princess. The Greek royal family, they’re not ethnically Greek. They’re half British and half Danish. That’s why we hated them so much. They were imposed on us by Queen Victoria. Philip was born on the island of Corfu, Kerkyra in Greek, and his mother suffered from severe mental illness. She ended up resigning from her royal duties and became a Greek Orthodox nun and moved to a convent where she spent the rest of her life. Prince Philip left Greece as a child and never returned to Greece ever. It was because he hated Greece and didn’t like the Greeks, and they hated him. There was no love lost between them. He was an asshole.

John Kiriakou: Charles is different. Charles goes to Greece every year or two, and he always goes to Mount Athos, which is called the Holy Mountain. He’s not Greek Orthodox, being the head of the Church of England, but he’s as close to Greek Orthodox as a British royal is going to be. They like Charles. They hated their own royal family, and we threw them out on a rail in 1967, told them never to come back. The first Greek king was King Otto the First. He was Bavarian, German. The guy was king for thirty-two years and never learned to speak Greek.

Ted Rall: That’s how those royals are. There’s a category of dudes whose job is they parachute in to run a cereal company even if they don’t eat cereal. Then they’re off to run a software company. After that, maybe they manage a ball team. These royals are the same way. Poor Marie Antoinette never could have said, let them eat cake, nor would she have because she was actually a kindhearted person. But she never could have said it in court and been quoted because she didn’t speak French. She was Austrian. She only spoke German.

John Kiriakou: We had a king of Greece who was taking a tour of some neighborhood in Thessaloniki, and he was bitten in the leg by a monkey. He pretended it didn’t hurt, and it was no big deal. It got infected, sepsis set in, and he died three weeks later. His brother became king, and his brother didn’t want to be king. He didn’t know what the hell he was doing. He’s like, we should invade Turkey and overthrow Atatürk. He led this army into Turkey, which is now called the catastrophe of 1921.

Ted Rall: Film adventures around that time, like when the Marines invaded post-revolutionary Russia. Disastrous, stupid, forgotten.

John Kiriakou: I don’t know what Houdini is talking about with Pine Gap. I’ll look it up. Pine Gap is a highly secretive jointly operated Australian-US intelligence facility located near Alice Springs. It’s a ground control station for signals intelligence satellites and a key relay station for satellite communications. The base plays a crucial role in global surveillance, particularly for missile launches and battlefield intelligence. We never called it Pine Gap. We always called it Alice Springs. But that was from Grok, and that’s even more than I knew about Pine Gap.

Ted Rall: Personal question for you here. How do you rate the Turkish intelligence?

John Kiriakou: Good in some ways and not good in others. Good in that they are on the Kurds like white on rice. And I don’t mean just their own Kurds. I mean Syria, Iran, Iraq, and all the Kurds. They’re not so good on Greece. Greek intelligence is better against the Turks than Turkish intelligence is against the Greeks. Greek intelligence officers are much more likely to speak Turkish and pass for Turks than Turkish intelligence officers are at speaking Greek. Did I work with them? Yes, I worked with them years ago.

Ted Rall: Not going back to prison. We’ll need two pardons for you.

John Kiriakou: The cruise ship incident on Sidos. I was in Sidos last summer. It’s an amazing place. Protest against Gaza war prevents Israeli visitors from touring Greek island, from the Associated Press this morning. Greek island residents stop Israeli cruise ship from docking. Travel advisory for Greece by Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs as ship is blocked in Sidos. If you’re not a scientist, you have nothing to worry about.

Ted Rall: We would be remiss not to talk about Iran. There’s this really weird situation going on in Iran now where there are arson fires all over the place. My first thought goes to a country that starts with I and ends with L and sounds like Israel. This is a problem in Greece every summer.

John Kiriakou: The Turks come and light fires, and we have these catastrophic forest fires, wildfires. They’ll send operatives into the islands and just light the forest on fire in the middle of the night. You know that the Israelis are watching the same media weather reports that everybody else is watching, that it’s 120 degrees Fahrenheit in Iran, and it’s a tinderbox because it’s so hot and dry. Of course, the Israelis are out there setting wildfires.

Ted Rall: There are no Israeli tourists in Iran, but they have lots of operatives. We know that the Iranians are infested with turncoats who are collecting money from the Israelis. A lot of Afghan refugees have taken Israeli money. Iran deserves some gratitude for the fact that they’ve taken in more refugees than any other country on the planet. They’ve always been very open that way. They allude to it in that movie Three Kings. It’s done without comment, but it’s a very sly, politically accurate thing. I’ve crossed that border from Afghanistan to Iran, and you can tell what a border feels like. Afghans like Iran. The cultural ties go back thousands of years.

So we have these arson fires. It’s psychological warfare. Why doesn’t the Mukhabarat get to the bottom of it and find out what’s going on and stop all this?

John Kiriakou: They are incompetent, underfunded, and focused on domestic political rivals, not counterintelligence. How you can have thousands of people essentially acting as sleeper agents in your country in a time of war is a mystery to me. There was an Israeli announcement yesterday saying that they were able to identify a thousand Israeli citizens passing information to Iran, and most of them were Iranian Jews living in Israel. I think it is ideological in that respect. They’re so upset about what’s going on in Gaza. They catch a lot of discriminatory bullshit on a day-to-day basis from the security forces.

Ted Rall: Are we sufficiently deprogrammed?

John Kiriakou: Do you want to tell our friends here that we’re very slightly changing our name?

Ted Rall: Right now, we had a—I don’t know if you guys have noticed this, but when you go to search for us on YouTube, there’s another thing called The Deprogram that comes up, and it’s in the UK. It’s a different show entirely, and sometimes it’s hard to find us. It’s very frustrating. So I did what we all do in this day and age when we’re trying to solve impenetrable problems. I asked AI what to do. AI said that we should do what we’re doing, which is we have officially changed the name to Deprogram with Ted Rall and John Kiriakou. I graciously suggested that John’s name go first, also alphabetical order. But John pointed out that because of the spelling issue, nobody can spell my name. So that’s why my name is first.

Ted Rall: Thank you, Houdini. I would have been happy to have you go first. My pleasure. Please, please, please, please like, follow, and share the show. It really makes a difference to us. We are trying to make some money here. If we get the search terms right, I think it’s going to make a difference, but we count on you guys the most. We’re here again Monday, Wednesday, Friday, 5 PM. We’re going to probably step it up to five days very soon, maybe in a week or two. But right now, it’s Monday, Wednesday, Friday, so we’ll see you Friday at five Eastern in the afternoon. Thank you so much for your support. Really appreciate you, and take care. Bye-bye.