John Kiriakou

President Bill Clinton, who was really no fan of the CIA, cut the CIA's budget.

And that was the first time that the CIA had had a budget cut since the Carter administration in the late 1970s.

On the day after 9-11, the CIA got a budget supplement of 10 figures.

The amount is still classified, but I actually went up to the counterterrorism center chief, Kofor Black at the time.

This was about five, six days after 9-11.

And I said, Kofor, I have an idea for an operation that I wanna put past you.

And he put up his hands and he said, whatever it is, just do it.

I have so much money, I can't possibly spend it all.

So we all began flying business class all over the world.

There are famous stories of CIA officers throwing sacks of money out of the side of helicopters, which gave rise to a joke at the agency that you can't buy an Afghan warlord, but you can certainly rent one.

And that's what we were doing.

The United States knows that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction.

Before 9-11,

Silicon Valley had the highest concentration of millionaires anywhere in America.

But post 9-11, Washington DC has the highest concentration of millionaires anywhere in America.

And it's because Congress

put so many billions upon billions of dollars in counterterrorism and in intelligence, including in literally thousands of federal contractors called Beltway bandits, that everybody got rich.

I am not only not a conspiracy theorist, I'm about as far away from being a conspiracy theorist as a person can be.

But I'm also a realist, and I made the first half of my career at the CIA as an analyst.

And to come to an analytic judgment, you have to look at the evidence.