RS: Now, you've changed your position on that, I noticed.
JK: I have. You know, I tried, in 2007 when I went on ABC News, I tried to --
RS: First of all, put us there. You -- what happened before, how did you get to ABC --
JK: Well, Brian Ross called me. Brian Ross of ABC News called me and said that he had a source who said that I had tortured Abu Zubaydah. I said that was absolutely untrue.
RS: And at this point you were working for John Kerry?
JK: No, I was working for Deloitte and Touche, a Big Four accounting firm. I said that was absolutely untrue, I had never tortured Abu Zubaydah or any other prisoner; I was the only person who was kind to Abu Zubaydah. And he said, well, you're welcome to come on the show and defend yourself. So I said I'd think about it. In the meantime, President Bush gave a press conference in which he looked directly into the camera and said, "We do not torture." And I knew that that was a lie. And a couple of days later, he told another reporter --
RS: Can I just interrupt? How did you know it was a lie?
JK: Because I knew we were torturing prisoners. I was in headquarters -- I was the executive assistant to the deputy director for operations. I was seeing all the cable traffic coming back, not just saying we're torturing, but saying in very, very clear detail -- this is exactly what we're doing to torture these prisoners. So a couple of days later --
RS: So all of the high command in the CIA would have known that.
JK: It was their idea. They came up with it.
RS: What were the names of --
JK: Oh, we're talking about George Tenet, and John McLaughlin, and Jose Rodriguez; several who are still undercover. John Rizzo -- I mean, the fix was in --
RS: George Tenet, who wrote a whole book sort of justifying --
JK: Certainly. This is his legacy. He's going to spend the rest of his life trying to justify this. He'll never come clean.
RS: OK, so you're called to, you go on ABC.
JK: So I go on ABC, and I had decided in the days before the interview that no matter what he asked me, I was going to tell the truth. And so I said three things that night that utterly changed the course of my life. I said we were torturing prisoners; I said torture was official U.S. government policy; and I said the policy was approved by and signed by the president himself. And within 24 hours the FBI began investigating me. Now, interestingly enough, a year later at the very end of the Bush administration, the Justice Department decided that I had not committed a crime, and they closed the investigation. Three months later, the new attorney general Eric Holder ordered that the investigation be reopened. And so they reopened it, and they were able to manufacture five felony charges against me. So you know, I make a point about the Espionage Act all the time; between the time that the Espionage Act was written in 1917 until Barack Obama's election, three people in American history were charged with espionage for passing classified information to the press. Three people in American history. During the Obama administration, ten people have been charged with espionage for passing information to the press. It's an irrational obsession with leaks; it's an obsession with secrecy and with classification, and it shows a very disturbing willingness to use the Espionage Act, one of the gravest crimes an American can be charged with, using it as a political weapon.
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