Hello, Republica. It's nice to be here. I think it's a rather fitting talk that we're

going to have today, being that this edition of Republica wants to reflect on freedom of speech, journalists, community leaders, and those who have been silenced. And there are a couple of people here on the stage that know a great deal about those who have been, yeah, they tried to silence them. This talk is going to be an

informal talk. It's supposed to be for a general audience, so we're not going to do any intelligence porn as far as if we can help it, I promise. Why Democracies Need Transparency and Accountability and the Global Consequences of the Obama

Administration's War on Whistleblowers in a Trump Administration. I'd like to present my guests a very, very special warm welcome. First time in Germany, here is Mr. John Kiriakou. He is a former CIA officer, a former senior

investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John blew the whistle on the CIA's torture program in 2007, telling ABC News that the CIA was going to torture prisoners and that torture was officially a U.S. government policy, and that the policy had been approved by the then-President George

W. Bush, and he became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act, a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in a prison as a result of this revelation. His latest book, Doing Time Like a Spy, is going to be released Wednesday, and we're

very excited, and he will be doing a keynote at the Grüner Salon this Friday for Prisoners of Descent, in case you want to attend that, and as

far as I know there will be a stream. Anyone here in the audience? Will there be? Yes. So he'll be talking about his book, so I'm sure it's going to be very, very interesting. In 2012, Kiriakou was honored with a Joe A. Calloway Award for Civic Courage, an award given to individuals who advance truth and

justice despite the personal risk it creates. He won the Penn Center's U.S. prestigious First Amendment Award in 2015 and the first Blueprint International Whistleblowing Prize for Bravery and Integrity in the Public Interest in 2016, as well as the Sam Adams Award for Integrity and

Intelligence, also in 2016. Kiriakou was the author of The Reluctant Spy, My Secret Life in the CIA's War on Terror, and The Convenient Terrorist, Abu Zubaydah, and The Weird Wonderland of America's Secret Wars. Welcome, John. Thank you. It's really great. I've been following your

odyssey for a long time, have written and reported about it, and I'm really honored to be also with my fellow panelists here. Exposed Facts Director, Norman Solomon. He's a journalist, a media critic, an author, an activist, who coordinates the Exposed Facts Program at the Institute for Public

Accuracy, where he is executive director. He co-funded the international activist group RootsAction.org, which has 1.5 million current supporters online. And Norman is also the author of a dozen books, including The War Made Easy, How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning

Us to Death. He is a long-time associate of the US-based media watch group FAIR, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. Please welcome Norman. Kathleen here is deputy director of the WHISPR program at Exposed Facts, and that is the whistleblower and source protection

program. And she serves as a national security and human rights deputy director at this program. And she supports national security, intelligence community whistleblowers, such as John and a very distinguished list of others that she can tell us about, journalists,

media sources and activists, where they focus on the issues of mass surveillance, excessive secrecy, torture and drone warfare. She has represented whistleblowers from the NSA, the CIA, the FBI, the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security. And, yeah,

she's working with national security and human rights director Justin Redick, and as they represented, for example, whistleblowers Thomas Drake and yourself and others. For our audience, Kathleen and John will also be an important event tomorrow evening, which I would recommend if you cannot be there in person, because I hear it's pretty much full. You can follow it via the stream here in

Berlin at the ECCHR, ECCHR.org, where we will be discussing Prasad Chatterjee's soft launch of his report, Never Before Published Data on the Drone Program, with outspoken critic of

the drone program Lisa Ling and John Kiriakou and Kathleen and other panelists. Please follow that. Very, very interesting. It will be held in English. All right. So this panel comes at an

interesting time. Just unusual. When I woke up this morning, Comey was fired, but that has nothing to do with our panel. But, anyway, interesting of all the upheaval going on in Washington, D.C. But when I have my guests here, when I see what Obama said in 2009, he would look forward, not back, and run

from the CIA torture program, for example, and the detention program and the NSA wiretapping program and the many abuses of power that the George W. Bush administration are architects of. Obama has looked forward, gave immunity to the CIA

officers, the architects of this program and the psychologists, for example, right? So I'm really, really keen to hear your experience and your views on this and the espionage act and doing time like a spy and coming out and

you survived that. So I think I'm just going to open up directly to him and then I'll try to keep this as much as possible so we have more time toward the end of the panel so you can ask your questions. So it's not easy when the entire weight of the U.S. government falls on your head, which is

what it felt like. I want to preface my comments by saying that I believed in Barack Obama. I not only worked on the Obama campaign but voted for him. I took my children to the inauguration to see this incredible historic event on most issues, the environment and climate change, gay marriage,

women, the economy. He was fantastic. On issues related to national security, to whistleblowing and transparency, he was a disaster that will take us generations to get past. People ask me frequently about

the Obama foreign policy. I'm not really sure that there was an Obama foreign policy. I think it was just an extension of the George W. Bush foreign policy except it was bloodier in that Obama killed far more people with the use of drones than George W. Bush ever did. So I turned on

– And they tortured some folks. Yeah, they tortured some folks. So it's not an easy decision when you blow the whistle on wrongdoing, especially in national security. In the United States we have a law called the Whistleblower Protection Act that Kathleen

can tell you everything about. Unfortunately, national security whistleblowers are not covered by the protections afforded in that law. So if you work at the CIA, at NSA, at FBI, Department of Defense, any of the other intelligence services, you're on your own if you decide to report on

waste, fraud, abuse or illegality. I was aware of the CIA torture program at its inception in May of 2002. I had been the chief of CIA counter-terrorism operations in Pakistan after the September 11th attacks. And I led a

series of raids in which we captured Abu Zubaydah, who the CIA believed at the time was the number three in al-Qaeda. That was not true. When I got home from Pakistan, I went back to CIA headquarters and a senior officer asked me if I wanted to be certified in the use of enhanced interrogation

techniques. I had never heard that term before. And when he explained it to me, it was clear that this was a torture program. And we have very specific, very clear laws in the United States banning torture. We have the Federal Torture Act. We're signatories to the International Convention Against Torture. And indeed, after

the Second World War, we executed Japanese soldiers who waterboarded American prisoners of war. The law didn't change. We changed. I declined to be trained in the use of enhanced interrogation techniques, but I kept my mouth shut for five and a half years. And then finally, I had

to say something. And I said something in an interview on ABC News in the United States. Within 24 hours of my interview, the FBI began investigating me. And they investigated me for a year. And then in December 2008,

the FBI determined that I had not committed a crime and they closed the case. What I didn't know was that three weeks later, when President Obama was inaugurated, the CIA asked him to secretly reopen the case against me. I had no idea I was under investigation. They

investigated me for three more years and then charged me with five felonies, including three counts of espionage. Espionage is one of the gravest crimes with which an American can be charged. And sometimes it carries with it the death penalty. This was for talking to ABC News and the New York Times. So I was

facing 45 years in prison. I sought out the help of Kathleen McClellan and Jessalynn Radack, then of the Government Accountability Project, now of Whisper. And we fought as long as we could. But it

becomes an economic decision. If you're facing 45 years in prison and the government offers you two and a half years and you have five children at home, what do you do? Knowing that the government wins 98.2 percent of its cases, you take a plea. And that's what happens to most to most whistleblowers. You end up

taking a plea. Whether you believe you're innocent or not makes no difference. You try to cut your losses. So I served two years in prison. I got out a little more than two years ago. And I'm more determined now to

fight than I was even back then. I think the reason for that is I know in my heart that I'm right and that they're wrong and that history's on my side. And also because I've been introduced to this wonderful community of people that I never really even knew existed. I mean

when you're working at the CIA, you don't come into contact with Exposed Facts or with Code Pink, you know, or Amnesty International. And then you realize what wonderful people these are and that you're like-minded. They really are. Really wonderful. So the fight's just

begun. I'm very proud to be here in Germany and very proud to be on the stage with these wonderful people. Thanks for coming. This will be a good event. So John, let me just ask you, you were convicted, two counts of this, John? One count of violating the

Intelligence Identities Protection Act. So what does that mean for you? You've not been rehabilitated. What does that mean? You're like a felon. Yes, I'm a convicted felon. I'm a criminal. I cannot vote. I cannot vote. I lost my federal pension. So I'll have to work until the day I die. I'm not allowed to travel without the

permission of the court for, well, technically for another year, but I've asked them for relief. I can never work in government again. I'm not even allowed to work for a company that has contracts with the government because I'm apparently too dangerous. I'm also banned from the UK, Canada, Australia and New

Zealand because the US shares criminal data with those countries. And so I'm banned from the UK for life, which is funny because I'm actually decorated by MI6, one of those things. Now I'm too dangerous to be exposed to the British people. I have to

wait until 2028 to be able to go to these other countries. But yeah, there's a lot of fallout. You know, when I was arrested before I was even convicted, I lost my job, of course, because big case, national security crime. And so I had to go on

welfare, on government assistance, and I couldn't find a job anywhere, literally anywhere. Even Starbucks told me I was too controversial to make coffee for them. So I wasn't even allowed. I went to Target and Starbucks. I finally got a job at an arts

and crafts supply store making seven dollars and twenty five cents an hour, which is as much money as I've been able to make since I since I started this whole process. Is there official blacklist? It's not official, but it's there. But you know, when you fill out a government or when you fill out a job application, it says, have you ever been convicted of a crime? And you say you

have to say yes. And then they ask, was it a felony? And you say yes. And they say, OK, thanks for coming in. We'll keep your application in the file. And of course, it goes straight into the trash. And that's the Justice Department's goal. The goal is not just to convict you of a crime and

to send you to prison. The goal is to ruin you personally, professionally, socially, financially, and to separate you from the people who otherwise would be your natural sources of support. The second thing that they try to do is to use you

as an example. So they say to other CIA officers and they actually did this in an email on the day of my conviction. The director of the CIA, who since has been convicted of his own crime, sent around an email to all CIA employees saying, this is what we did to Kiriakou today with the

message, really the underlying message being, if you see something you don't like, keep your big mouth shut because we ruined him and we'll ruin you too. And the New York Times actually even did an article about it saying that their national security sources completely dried up when I was

arrested. Everybody was afraid that it would happen to them. You know, also the case of Jeffrey Sterling. Jeffrey Sterling is a great example. Jeffrey Sterling was a colleague of mine at the CIA. He's an African-American case officer and he was discriminated against because he's black. He was finally forced out of the CIA and

he filed a racial discrimination suit against the CIA. The suit had merits, but the CIA went to court and said, we ask that you dismiss this case because if we were to defend ourselves, we would have to expose classified information. The judge said done, dismissed. She

threw it out. Right. They never said, oh, we didn't discriminate against him. They just said, well, you know, national security. So they threw it out and then they went on the attack against him. Somebody had leaked information to the New York Times. They decided it was him with

nothing more than metadata. No evidence, no emails, no phone calls, no recordings, no testimony, no nothing. They just said, we think it's him. And there's a belief in the court where we were both tried, the Eastern District of Virginia, that a jury there would convict a salami

sandwich of a crime if the prosecutors asked them to. Because who's the jury in Northern Virginia? CIA, FBI, Homeland Security, Department of Defense, intelligence contractors. You don't stand a chance in the Eastern District of Virginia. But Jeffrey was adamant that he had not done anything wrong and they kept offering him,

please do say you're guilty. Do this much time. Do this much time. He said, I didn't do anything wrong. So he went to trial. He was convicted on seven counts of espionage for allegedly talking to the FBI. I'm sorry to the New York Times. It was only because the director of the

CIA was sentenced the day before Jeffrey was sentenced and got a sweetheart deal. Eighteen months of unsupervised probation with no jail time. It was only because of that sweetheart deal that Jeffrey got a relatively light sentence. His attorney told him the government asked for

24 years in prison. And Jeffrey has a heart condition. He wouldn't survive 24 years. His attorney told him to expect as much as 40 years. And then the judge gave him three and a half. So he'll be released by the end of the year. But it's taken a severe toll on his

health, both physically and mentally. And he's not going to be the same by the time he gets out. But again, that's the Justice Department's goal. The goal is to ruin you. And if that includes killing you in prison, tough luck. That's what we're up against. So that is a very, very disheartening. And I have him in

my thoughts and his family as well all the time. Thank you also to Roots Action and Exposed Facts for supporting his family. And your family were also supported. So I'm just like my family literally could not have gotten through this without Roots Action and Norman Solomon. Literally, we could and code pink like

angels who introduced themselves to our lives. So just to bring this up, there's so many topics on the table here. Espionage Act. Chelsea Manning, who was the longest someone who served the longest whistleblower also with under Espionage Act. And we also have the

WikiLeaks case. But we'll get into all that little one after the other. So Kathleen, can you tell us a bit more about your program and what it's like to defend all these extraordinary people speaking truth to power, actually speaking truth to us. The power knows the truth. But yeah, what's it like? So it's an absolute honor to represent national

security whistleblowers, obviously, especially people like John. They're almost universally brilliant and courageous. They make tremendous sacrifices for everybody, for all of us, for us to know the truth about what's going on at the Whistleblower and Source Protection Program. We represent whistleblowers, sources,

hacktivists and support investigative journalism. You know, we take the truth from the shadows into the light. We work with whistleblowers at every stage of the process and advise them as they go public or as they don't go public and then suffer the consequences. And what those consequences are

varies greatly from the very, very severe, like criminal prosecution to the less severe, yet still devastating, complete sacrifice of your career, ostracization, blacklisting, being bankrupted, being fired and publicly smeared by the government. And we confront all of that

regularly with Exposed Facts, which is a journalism organization. We are the first ever legal protection for sources built into a journalism organization. Other journalism organizations have legal protection for the reporters, but Whisper actually protects the

sources and the whistleblowers. And that's an integral part of investigative journalism, because without the sources, we would not know. We would not know about torture. We would not know about mass surveillance. We would not know about Angela Merkel's phone being tapped. We would not know. We would not know about rendition and we would not know about the drone program. And so this work, I

think, is very important, not just for the incredibly courageous individuals that we represent, but for journalism as a whole and for the public. Thanks. But it's let me ask you a question, please. Because most of them

are bankrupt before it even goes to trial. And we're talking in like six figure. Oh, I still owe my attorneys eight hundred and eighty thousand dollars, which they'll never see. An Espionage Act prosecution costs at least a million dollars. Yeah. I mean, and you pled before trial. I mean, the real hours come in

trial. I pled before trial. I my my bill was a million fifty thousand dollars. I gave them everything I had. I still owe them eight hundred and eighty thousand dollars. And they told me if I wanted to go to trial, it would be an extra two to three million. So I I mean, what do you do? It's prohibitive. You have to take a plea. Right. So you can't

really even seek redress to all of this. You just have like take a plea and do time and hope for the best and hope you survive. And that your losses as best you get your losses and hope that your kids still have a house and a roof over their head. So be that as it may, that said, how are these cases like these are supported by donations or people by

donations. We have no credible privilege of being a five oh one C three nonprofit. So we're supported by foundation and individual donors and therefore we don't usually charge our clients. There are some occasions where we can take a litigation case on contingency, which means that we get to recover money from the government if we win. Unfortunately, those cases

are very hard to bring because, as John mentioned, most national security and intelligence employees are exempted from the typical whistleblower protection laws. So there is no lawsuit to bring. We represented NSA whistleblowers Thomas Drake, Bill Benny, Kirk Wiebe and Edward Loomis. And their story is

similar to John's in that they exposed mass surveillance by the NSA and had their houses raided by the FBI. Thomas Drake was prosecuted under the Espionage Act and eventually pled to I think it was a misdemeanor of misuse for a government computer. The government's case

against him completely collapsed when it turned out that none of the information he was accused of revealing was properly classified. But he was so he won. He now works at an Apple store and has lost his pension and his career and intelligence is over and that's winning. Bill and Kirk, Bill Benny and Kirk

Wiebe also won in that they were not prosecuted for espionage. However, they still had their careers in intelligence ruined. All of their attempts to get government contracts were blackballed by the National Security Agency. And so that's what happened to them.

And there is no lawsuit that they can really bring. There's no remedy in law for that kind of that kind of abuse from the U.S. government. And that's quite unfortunate, but it also makes it very difficult because how do you recoup all of the costs of the personal and

the professional costs of that kind of attack? And the point is not really so much about them, although it does get very personal sometimes on the part of some officials. But the point is to send a message to everybody else who's working there. And they did the same thing that they had done in John's case. The NSA sent an email when Thomas Drake was

convicted saying that he was convicted of misuse of a government computer. This is the equivalent of going on Facebook or something at your job. This is not some sort of high crime and misdemeanor. This is not espionage. Yet it still sends a very chilling message, which is if you talk to the press, if you go public about any of this, then we are going to hammer you until you no longer have any sort of

ability to work in the intelligence community. Yeah. And you don't have public interest. So the Espionage Act, this is the first person. The Espionage Act is a very, very broad law. It

was passed in 1917, and it was meant to go after spies. And it actually doesn't say classified information because there was no such thing. In 1917, it talks about national defense information, and it's been traditionally used to prosecute spies, and that was its intent. It was first used against somebody for disclosure of information in the Pentagon Papers case against Daniel Ellsberg. And the New York Times published

the Pentagon Papers, and Daniel Ellsberg was accused of leaking them, and they tried to bring an Espionage Act case against him. That was ultimately unsuccessful because the government got caught breaking into his therapist's office, and the case ended up falling apart. Since then, there were two other cases. And then when

Obama took office, he brought, I believe, a total of nine. Thomas Drake was the flagship case that collapsed under the weight of the truth. And then John Kiriakou and Jeffrey Sterling, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden has been charged, I believe, already. And so this idea of using the Espionage Act to punish

disclosure or retention or misuse of classified information is handling, right, is a precedent that the Obama administration has set. And it's very damaging. And even though in his later years, he seemed to back off from it. He commuted

Chelsea Manning's sentence, which was a commendable thing to do. He did not bring additional prosecutions in the last few years of his presidency. However, the precedent is there, and now the president of the United States is Donald Trump. So what he's holding is all of this groundwork to prosecute people. And there's

no public interest defense to the Espionage Act. When it comes to government employees, courts have held in John's case and thanks to Obama who brought John's case, that motive is irrelevant. And more significantly, for all of you in this room, the Espionage Act does not distinguish between government employees and you or me or activists like Norman or Deani or

journalists like The New York Times or WikiLeaks. And President Trump has already moved to bring criminal charges against WikiLeaks for disclosing information. And that's an incredibly dangerous attack on press freedom. And the Obama

administration is not without responsibility for that either, because they kept that grand jury investigation open for years and they could have closed it since, what, 2010? And they could have closed it before they left office and they did not. And now I believe the attorney general has said it's now a priority to prosecute WikiLeaks. And as goes WikiLeaks, so

goes The New York Times or Der Spiegel. Just the handling of your, you know, via metadata, because they not only kill with metadata, you can be convicted via metadata, circumstantially. So it is very, very hairy, very tricky. And everybody could be caught in this dragnet. And being that they are also not only doing this mass surveillance,

wiretapping and trolling and storing of information and about collection and all these horrible things, you could be caught up in that dragnet. And it's very hard not, when you see some of these films that are made about whistleblowers, it's literally impossible not to leave some sort of metadata trail. And so your source, you will always leave metadata

about your sources. You can never protect them, no matter. Encryption will save you from that. So let's not always think encryption is the key or solutionism is the key. You will always potentially jeopardize someone who wants to be a source or bring, shed light on malfeasance, corruption and so forth.

So in terms of classic whistleblowing issues, not just leaking to the press, because there is a difference between whistleblowing and just leaking. And we should understand the motives behind that, although they're not recognized in prosecutions, unfortunately. So there's also about, now I'm going to go to Norman. What is,

how do we determine what's the public interest and the public's right to know as a journalist? How would you define that? Well, I think it's important to say that whether you live in the United States or Germany or anywhere else on this planet virtually, there's been a profound inversion of what should be basic democratic realities. What has happened

is that our governments, our corporate government power structures have normalized turning upside down what is a basic democratic principle, which is that the citizen, the individual has privacy rights and the government

is subjected to the informed, not the uninformed, but the informed consent of the governed. And what has happened is that normalized now is that it is the government that is able to maintain secrecy and prosecute, as we've heard, any

breach of its own secrecy, even though we're, as people, supposed to democratically determine the policies of our government. And the individuals who are supposed to have individual privacy rights, the right of free association and so forth, as Edward Snowden has documented very clearly with the release

of material from the NSA, we get the transparency. Government officials get the privacy, we get the transparency. So that's, I think, a very crucial point. Last year I spent four weeks around Kaiser's Lawton and the Ramstein base. And one of the things I learned

there was the intersection between surveillance and the warfare state, the intersection between the gathering of data, such as cell phone numbers and contacts and metadata and conversations and real-time communications via

cell phones, and the use of drones. Because really, people are not being targeted by drones. Cell phones are being targeted. Mobile phones are being targeted by drones. And so what has been obscured in the mass media, and usually by politicians, you know, there's surveillance issues, and perhaps there's the

matter of drones. In fact, those are part of a larger warfare state policy, which brings me to the relationship between the U.S. and German governments. Now, Angela Merkel has said that she doesn't know very much about what's going on at the Ramstein base. And that is a willing lack

of knowledge, whatever credibility you can give to that statement. The reality is that the signals for the U.S. drone war, where you have pilots in Nevada and now in upstate New York, who are firing missiles in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, in

the Middle East, in Africa, from drones, that signal goes through Germany, through Ramstein. And so the crimes of the U.S. government are also the crimes now of the German government. But that is-

Our sins are your sins and your sins are our sins. Well, and so the reality is that that is very rarely spoken aloud, because to speak aloud is to shatter the silence. And the silence is essential to the warfare state, to the violation of rights. It is essential to the destruction of democracy

wherever we live. And if you look at, historically, those who have warned us and understood this, it's valuable, for instance, to consider what Aldous Huxley wrote in the introduction to the book Brave New World. He said,

Lies are powerful, but even more powerful is silence about truth. And during the 1980s, when some very visionary and brave activists with Act Up and so forth, insisted on shattering the silence about AIDS, they developed the motto, silence

equals death. And so the silence among the U.S. public equals the death of perpetual war and the warfare state. The silence of the German public equals the same, perpetual war and the warfare

state. And we are encouraged, not only through the drone war, but other ways in which these governments, which ostensibly represent us, function in secrecy, to define much of the world as a free-fire zone for their own battlefields. It is our silence that is essential. So it really

doesn't matter what you think. Doesn't really matter what you say to people you know. It matters that you stay silent. If you break the silence, then you are beginning to challenge the warfare state, which relies on mass surveillance,

which relies on the inversion that I mentioned, and insists that all of us are subject to the arbitrary actions of those who ostensibly represent us. Inversion is so great because the

intelligence agencies are now the arbiters of what we should know and not know and what is proper journalism, what's not journalism. And this is really getting out of hand. Again, but let this be very, very clear. These are all mechanisms.

This is an architecture that was well put in place by the Obama administration. This did just not happen overnight. This is a carryover from the George W. Bush administration to the Obama administration and was literally delivered on a silver platter, this corporate surveillance state. Yes, and a lot of the ways that it's made palatable or ostensibly palatable is, well, I'm

Barack Obama. You know me. I have good judgment. So you can trust me with the power, but the whole idea, of course, is that under the rule of law, you're not dependent on the judgment of one individual. The whole concept is rule of law, right? And so we encounter this all the

time. And now we have somebody who doesn't speak in complete sentences who's president of the United States. Did you want to add to that? Absolutely. I just wanted to add to that. When you talk about this precedent that has been set, a lot of it has been set in secret. And when the Obama

administration said, let's look forward after torture. Now, all of these horrible things that President Trump has said he will do and is doing, he can proceed with the comfort of knowing that he will not be prosecuted for them, because the precedent has been set is that we don't prosecute for torture. We don't

prosecute for war crimes. We don't do that to our own citizens anymore. And that is a precedent that Obama said by not holding the Bush administration officials who tortured prisoners accountable, then he hands the next president that precedent. Also, the Obama

administration's Justice Department wrote a memo that gave the president exclusive executive authority to kill target and kill terrorist suspects anywhere outside of war zones. That is a tremendous power in a country that is supposed to have due process. That's a tremendous power to target and kill someone without charge,

without trial because they're a terrorist suspect. Obama's Justice Department said that that was legal and the president did it repeatedly, even to American citizens. That president, that power is now in the hands of President Trump. And the precedent is just sitting there. And now the attorney general is Jeff Sessions and the president is President

Trump. And they can do what they want with that executive power. And we probably trusted President Obama not to start using that power in places that are Western, I suppose, not to start using it arbitrarily. I don't have that

same trust in the current president. And I don't think we should actually have that trust in any president. And for example, if this very scary, if he would bring back waterboarding, this is all positively. You know, during during the campaign, Donald Trump said that he would bring back waterboarding if elected president

and his exact words were and a hell of a lot worse. I've been a political animal all my life. This was the first time in my life that I ever heard a presidential candidate promise that he would commit an impeachable offense, an illegal act if he were to be elected president. Now, I think that there are a couple of adults

in the room. General Mattis, who's the secretary of defense now, we have like a military junta that leads our country. So General Mattis is secretary of defense and General Kelly is the secretary of Homeland Security. And they both had a conversation with Trump and they said torture doesn't work. And

so he backed off. But then his CIA director said, well, no, I like torture. Maybe we'll we'll do it after all. I want to add a point to this important discussion about looking forward and not backward. It's worse than you think. President Obama said we're going to look forward, not backward. That means no prosecutions for the torturers. But it goes

beyond just the torturers. If you're a CIA officer who is not an attorney and you were told that the Justice Department ruled that this torture program was legal and it's your patriotic duty to torture these prisoners and you torture them. I disagree with it, but I

can understand why the president doesn't want to prosecute you. But what about the CIA officers who murdered prisoners during interrogations, which we know happened between five and 18 times? Why aren't they being prosecuted? Because nobody said that a CIA officer could murder somebody, could beat them

to death or freeze them to death during an interrogation. And it happened. They got off scot free. So not only did the torturers not go to prison, but the CIA leaders who came up with a torture program got off scot free. The

attorneys who justified the torture program were not prosecuted. The people who went overboard and killed the prisoners were not prosecuted. Nobody was prosecuted. Well, actually one person was prosecuted and they're sitting on the stage. The only person who's gone to jail having anything to do with the torture program is John Kiriakou for talking about it. So I

have a question. As ridiculous as that sounds. Yeah. Barack Obama's America. Lest it be said, the silence that you were discussing before, it wasn't, it was because a lot of people around the world spoke up and exerted a great amount of pressure at the last days of the Obama

administration to get her sentence commuted. You have a Chelsea Manning. Yes, Chelsea Manning, which that's why it's important if accountability is difficult. But staying silent is really something we should not do, nor can we afford. This was intrinsic to having her sentence commuted. And also her appeal of

this Espionage Act is very, very important. And I invite you to support her defense fund in this appeal. It's very, very important. I think, you know, a crucial takeaway, of course, is that as bleak as the picture is, it would be more bleak if people had not been organizing and absolutely insisting that these

crimes against humanity, these human rights violations that have been systematized, are unacceptable and we're not going to be passive. There's nothing, though, to overly celebrate because we have a huge task ahead. And so often I'm asked, well, what is the one

thing we should all be doing? And my answer is there is no one thing that we should all be doing. We all have different talents, interests, capacities, vantage points, walks of life, but we all need to be active and more active. And I fear that there's such a corporate military set of messages to lull us

into passivity and become consumers rather than active people, citizens or not, of a particular country. The activism is absolutely crucial. Everything you have to be proud of in your country or I have to be proud of in my country is because people were active, they

did not accept what was handed down, and they wanted to create the future instead of have it be imposed on them. And more than ever, I think that's crucial now because the wave of authoritarianism that has swept over the United States and that threatens Europe and elsewhere, it is in tandem with corporate power, with

domination of the internet by corporations. It is in tandem with, in some ways, globally unprecedented militarism. And whether you live in Germany or the United States or anywhere else, to simply believe that those in power are to be trusted with that power is to sign the

death warrant of the planet in terms of climate change and to sign it into perpetual war. And obviously, we must not accept any of that. A brief question to Kathleen or the rest of the panelists. What does accountability look

like under these conditions or circumstances? Well, that's, you know, it's a long road, but we've already seen some accountability. After Edward Snowden's disclosures, everybody in this room cares more about their privacy than they did beforehand, including myself. We're seeing journalists starting to use encryption. We're

seeing the companies starting to challenge the government's request from information. When the government first started mass surveillance, the companies just rolled right over and handed over customer information. Now we're seeing that as bad business for those companies, and they are required to buy their customers to be better at

privacy. And I think that in terms of the torture program, there is there was a huge objection to that. It's been roundly recognized as a failure. It did not work. And it was just an ongoing political liability for the President Obama as he tried to cope with it. And I think that's why

the adults in the room in the Trump administration are saying we don't go back to that. However, I think there's also the new outgrowth of that program, which is the drone program. And that program is highly secretive, and it's being used and it was used increasingly throughout the Obama administration. And in the

later years, after realizing that it was ineffective and facing lots of public criticism, the Obama administration started putting controls on it, but they were all internal to the executive branch. And President Trump has already said that he's going to loosen the standards for civilian casualties, allowing more civilians to be killed. He's already said he's going to give he's

already given strike authority back to the CIA, which is even more secretive than the Defense Department. And so what he inherited was this program that had been restricted but internal to the presidency. And he can remove those restrictions. And I think we I hope that we will

see a lot of resistance to the to those kinds of actions and that we will see if we can find more information about the drone program. And we represent several whistleblowers from within the program. And we can't rely on whistleblowers. It's not fair to say everybody working there needs to abandon their careers and risk espionage

to tell us the truth. We all have to support the whistleblowers, support real independent investigative journalism and make a lot of noise so that they are not alone because it's not fair to rely on people to sacrifice their livelihoods or their freedom in order for us to

know the truth. We should be entitled to it as citizens of democratic states. Just because we have 15 minutes left, I just like to draw attention to a film that is premiering on Monday here in Germany. John Kiriak was in it. Free

speech for free. There will be at the talk and a premier. Please follow that. This is also I mean, it's very interesting. A whole series of films about these whistleblowers is in the public domain. It's a very interesting

way of being able to convey these narratives of sometimes very dense topics and how they're all really related, if you will. So from James Risen and press freedoms and alleged sources and metadata and it's quite an interesting larger

fabric of things. Les, you have any other comments I'd like to open up? I just want to very briefly say that the Council on Foreign Relations had a staffer who did a study released a few weeks ago. The Trump administration has had a fivefold increase in drone attacks compared to the Obama administration. So this is the wave of

the future and not to beat the drum overly. But that is a German program de facto because of Ramstein and what's involved there and AFRICOM is in Stuttgart. And so this is what is happening and it will continue to escalate unless we can organize effectively at the

grassroots to stop it. Here in Germany as well, yeah. And there of course this NSA inquiry report will be published in June where it was extensively treated, this topic, and the coalition government pretty much said we don't know too much about it and we're waiting for a response. But they acknowledged last December that yes, indeed,

the signals do go through and that it is playing a vital role in it, but nothing happened. So it is up to us to say it is unacceptable and those elected officials that have pretty much signed off on these programs. So you've got your work cut out for you. I'll take some questions from the

audience. Please be brief so we can have more questions. Who are you? Hi, I'm Mike Aguirre and I'm a filmmaker. And with the news this morning, of course, of what happened with Comey, now Trump

controls all branches of government and the FBI. And a lot of people are thinking this is now the time for whistleblowers. And I'm wondering, you know, your opinion, is there really any hope, you know, from coming on the inside knowing how difficult it is of us seeing some of this

information being leaked, particularly about Trump's potential connections with Russia or anything else that the FBI was investigating, which might now be shut down? Thank you. That's a great question. I think there is hope and probably not for the reason that most people in the room assume. Before I realized I

was in any trouble, before I realized I was under investigation, a journalist repeatedly invited me to lunch. I was working on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at the time and I wasn't supposed to have unauthorized contact with journalists. So my boss said, go ahead and have lunch with him, see what he

wants. And he told me that an FBI agent told him that I was under investigation. It was a warning. In the course of this conversation, well, I should say, I told him he was crazy. I dismissed it. I wish I had listened. I would never have gone to prison. But during the course of the conversation, he told me that he

had at least three FBI sources. These were active FBI agents who were reporting back to him on issues that were coming up in the course of investigations. And so it's made me optimistic that there still are people not yet

ready to come out publicly, at least not to expose their own identities, but who are still willing to talk to the media and to alert them to instances of waste, fraud, abuse and illegality. We've also seen unprecedented leaks coming from the Trump White House. It's

things like he had a conversation with the Australian prime minister and hung up on him. Right. It's embarrassing. It's unprofessional. It's undiplomatic. It's pretty funny. It's not whistleblowing. But that makes me think that people at least have the guts to pick up

the telephone in this administration and call a reporter. So I think that there are whistleblowers out there. I think that we will get to the truth on a lot of these issues. I would like to know what your

contacts to the German government are concerning all we were talking about, about Rammstein, et cetera, and what is the response if you talk to them, if you talk to them? And what's your contact to German media? Because the whole thing, everything you talked about, people in the room might know something about it, but the general public is not very aware of our

implication to it, towards it. So what can you do? Well, I was writing an article that was published by The Nation magazine of the United States, and net politics here translated in German. It's online. I did talk at length and quote in the article, Konstantin von Nats, the German Green Party representative

on the committee of inquiry of the Bundestag. And I know that there are a number of MPs who are being very outspoken and very perceptive, I think, but clearly a minority of the Bundestag. So, as always, it's about political pressure that needs to be exerted

much more strongly. And the news media have a very short half-life of attention. It might be very big, and then it might just dissipate. That's why I'm also very happy that we could bring people like Fred and John Kiriakou to discuss these topics and look at some of this data and explain it to the journalists so they might do the reporting on it. So, as you see, we need the whistleblowers

to bring us the data, we need the investigators and the journalists to report on it. I mean, it's a whole circle that we have to complete, and the activists and public pressure in order to get something done. I'll take a last question, perhaps. Oh, yeah, okay, we've got two more questions.

Yes, hello, my name is Emilia Gere. I work as a corporate manager for a company. My main client here in Germany is the Ministry of Defense. And just as a general comment, I think that the German public or historically, we are not as outspoken and transparent about how Germany is actually

implied in a lot of wars and conflicts around the world. We sell weapons, obviously. Vamstein and all that, you know. But it's not a topic that is very popular in Germany. So, just that being said, I have a question. The drone strikes, as far as I can remember, Obama, when he was elected, wanted to close Guantanamo,

he wanted to get out of Afghanistan. Obviously, when he was briefed, he changed his mind. Things have gone up. You, as insiders, what is actually a solution? How can we really end the conflicts? The drone strikes are just getting worse. It's not, you know, but the fact is,

the States is not winning, still not. The Western community is not winning over there. So, if drone strikes are not the answer, what, how can we end this? Thank you. That's a tough one. Well, there's no easy answer.

I'll give you an example of something that I saw in the States that would never have occurred to me that has been successful. There's a small group in the U.S. state of North Carolina, made up of retirees, people who are in their 60s, 70s, 80s, and they became aware that a small local airport

in their town was being used as a staging area for CIA rendition flights, kidnappings. And so, they very politely went to the owner of the airport and said, please stop cooperating with the CIA and stop allowing the CIA

to use your airport to do these rendition flights. He told them to go jump in the lake. So, they began marching with signs and protesting out in front. And he called the police and the police told them they're on private property, they have to move out. Then they began laying down in the middle of the road

to block traffic. And then they began with bolt cutters cutting holes in the fence to make it an unsecure airfield. They became so much of a pain in the ass for this guy that he gave up his contract. And the CIA is not allowed to use that airport anymore.

You know, it's just one little example of social resistance that is not easy and it's not fast. But when you stick with it, it actually works. We need to force our elected officials to listen to us

is another thing. How do we get out of the fence? Yeah. If I could address that. Yeah, please. First, John is talking about a very important grassroots approach, which I totally agree with. Remember, Martin Luther King Jr. talked about the madness of militarism. He wasn't just talking about a dream.

He said we've got to, through nonviolent action, challenge what he called that madness of militarism. If you wanna go to the macro in terms of how do you solve the problems in Afghanistan? As John said, there are no easy answers, but let's be as clear as we can about what has occurred when the United States

has led military interventions, mass air attacks, long-term military campaigns in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, elsewhere. What has been the result? Things have gotten worse and worse. So this whole nostrum that you have to do something,

and that something must be to go in and kill a lot of people, it's been disproved by history, and we need to recognize that and implement policies that respond to that reality. Just to add that, I don't think anyone on this stage,

and certainly not any of my clients who've worked in these programs, think that the majority of people working at these agencies are evil warmongers. That's not the case. They're patriotic people trying to help the country. There's no easy answer. I mean, this is what you can do to achieve peace

or to get out of Afghanistan. However, like Norman said, what we're doing is not working, and I think part of that is the motivation. There were a lot of millionaires made after 9-11 by implementing mass surveillance. Solutions that were cheap and effective

and protected privacy were rejected in favor of multi-billion dollar cash cows. There's a constant revolving door between contractors in the drone program, intelligence community, all over, between them and the government employees. So there's a lot of money being made off of this.

machine, and when a company's goal is to make money, it seems that that's a very ineffective way at achieving some sort of piece and some sort of lasting solution. Because if there is a lasting solution, then the money will dry up. Thank you. I think we have a question over here.

That's it. That's it. My name is Dionne Barreto. I forgot to mention that at the beginning. I work also with Exposed Facts and the Courage Foundation. We'll be glad to take your questions. Or you can approach us outside. Thank you very much for your time. And thank you for coming.