Show Details for the week of April 3rd, 2017

Thank you everyone who helped us beat our goal last week! Just two more shows remain in this KPFT Pledge Drive and it is only with your help that we can beat the goal again this week.

The week’s show has a goal of $805 for the hour. Please call 713.526.5738 during the show to pledge your support. You can also donate securely online at https://pledge.kpft.org/  – Just select The Monitor from the list of shows and enter your details. Thank you!

KPFT has all the usual thank you gifts available at various pledge levels but this week’s show highlights a very special premium exclusive to The Monitor: Signed copies of Doing Time Like A Spy, a brand new book by John Kiriakou. A signed copy of this book is yours for a donation of $120. The book is not available until May but you will get your own signed copy in the mail as soon as copies are available for distribution.

More about this week’s guest:

 John Kiriakou became an anti-torture whistleblower and activist when he told ABC News in December 2007 that the CIA was torturing prisoners, that torture was official U.S. government policy, and that the policy was approved by the President.  John was driven to ruin by the Justice Department because of these revelations.

Immediately after John’s interview, the Justice Department initiated a years-long investigation, determined to find something–anything–to charge him with.  This was his payback for blowing the whistle on the torture program.

John eventually was charged with three counts of espionage, one count of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act and one count of making a false statement as a result of the 2007 ABC News interview.  Finally, in order to avoid the risk of spending 45 years in prison, John accepted a plea to violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act.  All other charges were dropped.  Even though he had no criminal intent, and there was no harm to the national security, accepting the plea resulted in a sentence of 30 months in prison.

From 1990 until March 2004, first as an analyst, and later as a counterterrorism operations officer,  John Kiriakou served in the Central Intelligence Agency. He became chief of counterterrorist operations in Pakistan following the September 11 attacks acting as a senior operations officer. His tour culminated in the March 2002 with the capture of Abu Zubaydah, al-Qa’ida’s third-ranking official.

When he returned from Pakistan, John was named Executive Assistant to the CIA’s Deputy Director for Operations. In that capacity, John was the principal Iraq briefer for the Director of Central Intelligence.

John then became senior investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee after a brief time in the private sector, where he focused on international terrorism, piracy, and counternarcotics.  Additionally, John served as senior intelligence advisor to the Committee’s chairman, Senator John Kerry.

Following his service on the Hill, John became an intelligence and counterterrorism consultant and author.

About the book:

Doing Time Like A Spy is Kiriakou’s memoir of his twenty-three months in prison. Using twenty life skills he learned in CIA operational training, he was able to keep himself safe and at the top of the prison social heap. Including his award-winning blog series “Letters from Loretto,” Doing Time Like a Spy is at once a searing journal of daily prison life and an alternately funny and heartbreaking commentary on the federal prison system.

 

Please support The Monitor during this drive and do so by showing your support for John Kiriakou at the same time. Get your signed copy of Doing Time Like A Spy by calling 713.526.5738 during the show and pledging $120 for your copy.