In line with this, with Kariakou's recommendation of 20 other Democratic
candidates for President, the Intercept Deconstructed podcast had a special
episode, a panel of people who are supposedly left-wing Democrats in front
of an audience with Madi Hassen as moderator. I'm not sure how to spell his
name. Anyway, yes, they're good people. But God!, they are so cautious, so
political in their answers. No one wanted to disavow nancy Pelosi. No one
wanted to admit that the Democrats handled the Kavenaugh situation badly. No
one wanted to say that they need a new Democratic leader in the Senate.
Miriam
My Former Boss, John Kerry, Wants to Be President. No Thanks.
By John Kiriakou, Reader Supported News
11 October 18
Former Secretary of State and Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman
John Kerry told Politico this week that he is considering a run for
president in 2020. Kerry didn't come out and declare himself a candidate,
but he did say that he wants to be "a part of the future of the Democratic
Party and of the country." I say, "No thanks." Kerry is exactly the kind of
failed neoliberal politician who pushed the Democratic Party to the right,
tried to out-Republican the Republicans on foreign policy and, in the end,
gave us Donald Trump.
I worked for John Kerry for two-and-a-half years during 2009-2011. Kerry was
the senior senator from Massachusetts and chairman of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee (SFRC). I was the committee's senior investigator. Kerry
had told me in early 2009, just after Barack Obama was elected president,
but before the inauguration, that he wanted to recreate the SFRC's
investigative function, which had been phased out in the late 1970s. He said
that he wanted deep, hard-hitting investigations that would expose waste,
fraud, abuse, and illegality. He had followed my whistleblowing on the CIA's
torture program, and he thought I was the person for the job. I gladly
accepted.
My first investigation was a gimme. I learned that all US passports were
being made in Thailand using security chips that had been manufactured in
China. Crazy, right? It stood to reason that the Chinese, if they had wanted
to, could easily have hacked into a US passport and done with it what they
wished. I wrote the report, sent it to the media, and the State Department
announced that it would seek US vendors for future passports.
For the next two years, though, nothing was as easy as that. Shortly after
joining the SFRC, I got a call from a noted human rights activist. He told
me that he had spoken with a young man who had been a 12-year-old boy in
2001. The boy happened to be in Mazar e-Sharif, a city in northern
Afghanistan, on the day the city fell to the US-backed Northern Alliance. On
October 31 and November 1, 2001, more than 2000 Taliban fighters had given
themselves up en masse to the Northern Alliance, which in turn asked US
officials what to do. There certainly wasn't a prison in Afghanistan big
enough to hold all these prisoners at once. A decision was made to put them
in containers and truck them out into the desert, where they would be held
until they could be divided up and sent to small prisons and jails around
the country. The problem was that the containers had no air holes, no
ventilation, no food, and no water. The trip to the desert took more than
eight hours. And when the trucks finished the trip, nearly every prisoner
was dead. One of the 16 survivors told me that the bodies had fallen out of
the trucks "like sardines out of a can" when the doors were finally opened.
It became known as the Dasht e-Leili Massacre. More importantly, the boy
said that he had seen two men at the site of the "box up" who were wearing
jeans and black tee shirts, speaking English, and issuing orders. Only the
CIA was in Dasht e-Leili at the time, and I wanted to get to the bottom of
the story.
When I told Kerry, and I reminded him that candidate Barack Obama had
promised an investigation, he told me to hold it. He wanted the White House
to take the lead. I waited a year and the White House did nothing. When I
said again that I wanted to take up the investigation, Kerry killed it. He
didn't want to embarrass the president, he said. My entreaties that we were
talking about crimes against humanity fell on deaf ears. The investigation
was over and my report was never published.
Several months later, a journalist called me to say that he had a source who
said that the CIA was violating a certain agreement that it had with the
State Department. The CIA won't let me say what the agreement was, but I can
tell you that the point was to protect the identities of CIA officers who
were complicit in the torture program. The agreement helped to ensure that
no CIA officer would ever be brought to justice, either in the United States
or abroad, for torturing prisoners. I wrote a letter to the CIA under
Kerry's signature asking for clarification. Six weeks passed. Finally, a
colleague walked into my office and said, "The Agency sent a response to
your letter." I told him that I hadn't seen any response and that I had just
checked my mail a few minutes earlier. "They classified it Top Secret," he
said. My clearance at the time was only at the Secret level, so I asked what
it said. "It said 'Go fuck yourself'" was the response. I appealed to Kerry.
We couldn't let the CIA bully us, I told him. We were an oversight
committee! He told me to drop the investigation. Embarrassing the CIA, he
said, was the last thing he wanted to do.
I finally decided, against my better judgment, to self-censor. I would
initiate an investigation that wasn't controversial and that wouldn't
embarrass the White House. (More importantly, I couldn't risk embarrassing
Kerry, who wanted desperately to be Secretary of State. He talked about it
constantly.) I decided to do an investigation of US policy toward Haiti.
Most Haitians live in abject poverty. The country is the poorest in the
western hemisphere and a long line of presidents have promised to help
develop the Haitian economy, only to fail, one after the other.
I learned that there are seven families that control the Haitian economy.
Interestingly, all seven of those families are white, while almost everybody
else in the country is black. The white families are largely involved in the
production of textiles that are then exported to the US. They pay their
employees pennies an hour, sell the clothing for market rates, and get rich
on the backs of Haiti's poor. How controversial a subject could that
possibly be?
But again, Kerry killed the investigation. This time I was incredulous.
"Why?" I asked. As it turned out, those seven white families were
represented by Washington power lawyer and lobbyist Greg Craig. And Greg
Craig is John Kerry's best friend.
I remember also my first week on the job at SFRC. My wife asked me how it
had gone and what I thought of Kerry. I remember telling her that "the
American people would be shocked at how conservative he is." I certainly
was. Kerry was a supporter of the Iraq war and the subsequent US troop
presence there. He supported the war in Afghanistan and the continued US
troop presence there. He supported US military interventions in Syria,
Libya, and elsewhere. He supported sanctions on North Korea, Russia, and
China. What kind of progressive is that? Sure, he was good on Iran, Cuba,
and climate change, but I'm hard-pressed to differentiate the Obama/Kerry
foreign policy from any mainstream Republican foreign policy.
I will add one personal note. I was arrested in January 2012 after blowing
the whistle on the CIA's torture program. By February 2013, I had taken a
plea to a lesser charge. I was more than $1 million in debt to my attorneys,
my family was wrecked, and I simply couldn't risk 45 years in prison after
the government offered me 30 months to make the whole thing go away. By then
Kerry was Secretary of State. I decided to send him a heartfelt appeal. I
sent an email to his personal account and I begged him to weigh in with the
president to commute my sentence. The conviction would still stand, I said,
but I could remain home to work and support my family. Kerry sent me a
response a few days later: "Please do not ever attempt to contact me again."
Sure, I have a personal beef with John Kerry. But my political problems with
him vastly outweigh the personal. John Kerry couldn't beat George W. Bush.
He'll be 76 years old at the time of the 2020 election. He's a neoliberal
interventionist who has long partnered with the military-industrial complex.
It's time for a change. There are at least 20 Democrats currently
considering a run for president. A lot of them are attractive candidates and
I think would be great presidents. John Kerry isn't one of them. It's time
for him to go back to his house in Boston (or Georgetown or Ketchum, Idaho,
or Fox Chapel, Pennsylvania, or Martha's Vineyard) and let the next
generation of Democratic leaders have a shot. He had his chance. It's time
for him to go.
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John Kiriakou is a former CIA counterterrorism officer and a former senior
investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John became the
sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage
Act - a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a
result of his attempts to oppose the Bush administration's torture program.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission
to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader
Supported News.
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