and while lead been a dash who was considered to be outside of royalty a murder and a $911.00 co defendant. as a part of this top secret security clearance, tim had to promise that he would not reveal to any of these men. but he also happened to be gay. overtime tim built a report with k s, m, n y lead. they taught him about their lives and the group developed the level of mutual respect and trust. one day will lead gave him a warning saying this one day, all of you on this defense team will turn against one another. you americans devote your lives to prestige fame and money. you will turn against each other in the end just to get that for yourselves. in the end, that's actually what happened. the lead attorney and her assistant began plodding against the other defense attorneys in an attempt to make themselves indispensable . they began bullying gas lighting and scape coding the other attorney's on the team. this was all of course,

at the expense of the clients who would be on trial for their lives. when tim vocalized, his concerns about this misconduct, the attorneys turned on him and they told the title leaders that he was gay saying ridiculously, that he was lusting after them. the pentagon quickly fired him from the defense team. but then something unexpected happened. while lead been a tash, supposedly one of the most dangerous and murderous men in the world, left to tim's defence, he wrote a letter to the judge, exposing the other lawyers lies. the other defense attorneys protested and brought additional problems to the case that we'll discuss in a minute. but what is this new found and so called lavender scare that lives at depending on and how is it that i'll tell you to comes to the defense of a gay american man. when the american government tries to destroy him, i'd like to welcome dr. kim john sommerling attorney, mentally,

scholar and author. tim, thanks for being with us. thank you, john. it's a great opportunity to see you and the beyond yourself. i'd like to start with your background and qualifications to take on a position like one kind of a defense attorney. you're not just an attorney, but you're also a middle east experts. so tell us about your life, your education, and your progression to this important position. well, it actually all starts with me being a flight attendant for american airlines for 25 years. i was flying the flights between chicago and paris in dallas and paris. and i spend a lot of time going back and forth to egypt because i had fallen in love with it, particularly falling in love with the, with the silence and the smells of egypt and the people. and particularly the move was in the hall. i was really, really fascinated by that, so i started, um they decided go go to get a ph. d and in arabic and eric studies. and i wrote

a couple of books on the palestinian israeli conflict and put in political art in the conflict and a book about a serial typing of arabs and muslims in, in the american popular film. and then $911.00 happened. and the beginnings of the war on terror happens, and then i heard the news stories about i would raven, the discussions about torture with airbags and lessons. and um, i saw how my crew members and how passengers were treating arabs and muslims passengers and, and i, i wanted to go to law school to help stop this hatred and this discrimination. and so in law school for the next 3 years i, i focused on human rights studies and on death penalty. and then 6 months after i got out of law school, i found myself on the the fort hood case as the mitigation expert. i was hired by the i by the i'm and then over the next 14 years i am,

i serve as mitigation expert for over 40 cases for men, women and children who we were in jail and facing the death penalty or facing life imprisonment. how did you get involved, specifically in the defense of one condo defendants? was this something that you sought out, or was it something that found you? so to speak is a little both john, i, you know, in law school i, you know, that which is a 2006 to 2009. i was studying cases like how i'm done versus rumsfeld and i was study, you know, booming teen versus bush and i, i also, it was doing lectures on rendition we, we didn't know much about rendition at the time. and so i remember going to london in the school oriental napkins studies and, and giving a lecture and how we could build stories about rendition. and i want to ask them, you are that the same, the same lecture. and then i found myself working for care. the counselor evans

islamic relations trying to um and we were studying people who were arrested for the air of some listings who arrested during this time period for it supposed of terrorism. and it was my last school objective to get this case. but i certainly didn't know how to go about doing it. and then when i was on the fort hood case, my name started getting around for the fact that i was this knowledgeable person about them. you know, the middle east and i had experience with air. you know, i was speaking arabic and i had experience with, with death penalty cases. and i was making this progress with not houses. but when the board court was opening up in 2011, there was mad rush to get experts like mitigation experts like myself. and i got a call from this out of the blue. i got a call from the lead lawyer at the pen attached team. and it took over a year for me to get my um, security clearances and had the military commissions appointment yours. mr. bennett

cash was mitigation expert, so it was a just a little a bolt that, that'd be great that seeing what was it like at 1st being in the room with some of the most dangerous man in the world. how long did it take you to build a relationship of trust and how did that relationship develop? you know what i got big safe and what kind of the dive in right away. i was eager to do that. i wanted to get to work. you know, i had done all my academic research on the middle east, you know, and, and grad school. and i was, you know, i was really into topics and colonialism and resistance. and i had previous clients and i had developed an artful way of working with them. these men and these women with, you know, would done some awful or, or being charged for doing some very awful things. but these people were americans and despite our subcultures of race and you know, economics and stuff were all still americans. but during that year of waiting while

i'm waiting there to do this case, you know i, i have to start working and i start studying, you know, things about um, you know, as long as the revival and i start studying, you know, the, the, the literature of islamic revival, and as long as you had during the rushing and basically back in the staff i'm looking at. so i clicked to, i'm looking at a go, i'd some and all their writings. and so as educating myself as well as best as i could on 911 with the literature that was available. so i had to listen to the distortions that i was getting from thomas friedman and from samuel huntington and from richard clark and the bush administration. oh, once, once i got into that room into that court room, i knew that i was as close to the center of knowledge about $911.00 and about what half of what happened in a box and islamic jihad that i was ever going to get. but it still was going to be

an unprecedented challenge with me for me because here i was now working with enemies of the united states. i was not working with americans like i had been working with before. um, so it took me about a year to gain mr. ben attached his trust. i saw him with someone who needed help. i see, and i both call each other as enemies. and i had to work really hard to show him that i was really there to help protect his life. i don't think it was. i think it was about a year later, but it was only when mr. uh, when can someone mr. muhammad actually gave me his um, approval, that mr. bennett gosh, then accept me on powerful. you've written a book about this whole experience called my enemy, my defender, which is being published by sky, worst publishing in new york. in the book. you talk about the backbiting and difficult relationships that the guantanamo defense attorneys have with each other . tell us about that dynamic and about why those relationships are so difficult. so

john, i was on a scene was a lead lawyer who's group on the case was tenuous at best because of their different quote relationship between that and the lawyer and mr. brand task. and that led to a lot of paranoia and panic, certainly lawyer. and the lead lawyer had this minion attorney who was a usa up united states air force captain. and they had convinced themselves that the best way for them to remain on the team was to make themselves indispensable to the government. and to mr. bennett to us and so they thought that they could remain as the most knowledgeable the most trusted, the most continuous members on the team for the length of time they could be there forever. and so therefore they had to have this continual purging, apparently that was underneath that men of anyone who gain more knowledge of the

case or that no, i have more trust or mr. ben, a task or anyone who might threaten the lead lawyers knowledge or outbreak. the dominion captain, and so there was always somebody on the chopping block and they would get helpers to help them get rid of people. and once a target was selected and bullied and then purge, they move on to the next verse. and so i'm getting rid of people include a gas lighting bullying, sending people up for failures and you know, buying on team members, family members, and then reporting that to each other. and then um and picking up reporting it to mr. bennett tosh. and some cases they did, and in my case it was this forced outing that they did to me about my sexuality in the trying to plan, but featured home a full. but the real question is like, why would they do something like that other than panic and other than then,

you know, paranoia, but there was the motivation is cuz panama was the bonanza. you know, as long as you can stay on that bucking bronco, you can, it was a pen handy. i mean, the salaries for lawyers, lawyers are up to $500000.00 per year and i'm just going to travel around the world in these top hotels and these world capital or a fee food towers in bottles of wine and thousands of travel miles that you get along with it. and then there's this idea that this is a historical case, and you'll get appearances on 60 minutes and you get your full patients for yourself on the new york of your opinions on new york times in their speed. go and mon documentaries. and as we see in the more tang and there's, there's movie potential as well. and, you know, it's how the fund to you meet these, these movers and shakers in the world of human rights. and um politicians and, and,

and it's funny that we laugh at it now, but you know, it was a chance to give you the, to people who are around charlie rose's table telling all the knowledge, but only you knew. thank you, tim for going to take a short break and when we come back, we're going to ask him similarly about how things change for him make one tunnel and about why the enormous pedagogy bureaucracy also turned against him. stay to. 2 take a fresh look around his life. kaleidoscopic isn't just a shifted reality distortion by tell us to do vision with no real opinions. fixtures designed to simplify will confuse really once a better wills, and is it just as a chosen few. fractured images presented is 1st. can you see through their illusion

going underground can or the can i just give us an update on the web study question like joe showed you where you're dividing. that song some of the by the list to look for. you still knew just this is i can then be able to do the demo that you're going to be at the most of those. so a great desk of desk, and by the way, stephanie, i see the desk, they book a 3 way. can you go to new hampshire?

took a look at a latham bell. i'm sure it's that a question. the, the stuff you wish i city. good . the the welcome back to the best of learners. i'm john curiosity, who were speaking with tim john separately? he's an attorney, middle east expert, former guantanamo defense attorney, and the author of the new book, my enemy, my defender. thanks again for being with us. tim. thank you john. tim,

there are several issues that i'd like to raise with you 1st. i want to talk about the possibility of these guantanamo defense attorneys that you've written and spoken about. you're right, that the hostility and jealousy are systemic. it's not just the attorneys you say in the book that, that this still the, extends to the judges. and indeed, it's throughout the entire system. can you tell us about that? you know, the defense organization was, was led by a general. and he had this monitor and his monitor was, i choose the people who's on the defense team, lead lawyers, they run their defense teams. i give them the tools and the jewelers, they get what they get. and then they get the who they get. and so she had basically built this like cement feeling where we're all of us below. if we had real problems, we couldn't go to him and say there's real problems here. and i had always spoken with him twice, but the lead lawyer in the cabinet somehow convinced this guy that i wasn't

a team player. it was my turn on the chopping block, that i was not some team player. and that i was actually dangerous to the team when the captain and i had a disagreement about whether i could talk to mr. bri natasha or i could not talk to him at this particular point. um mr. ben attached wanted me to go to the, to the, to the general and say, you know, tell them the truth. what's going on. um, i contacted the general for a meeting. and if you contact me back with a number of e mails that said, you know, let's set this up, here's the time and here's the place. but when i got to the meeting all with, with, with my preparations all in the hands of the general wasn't there. and i realized that i had been brought into an ambush situation and in the workplace, mobbing that the general himself, it setup legal out of your and the captain had set up that with him the night before. right? so at that meeting, what they do is they fire me and the lead lawyer says,

the general asked us to do this. um, so they just forwarded me off the island and handed me a letter and then the letter is past the pages the day before the meeting was supposed to play place and it says that i was fired. so this is all pre planned by him and it's traumatic is that was i 5000 that story because it matches up with the way that things are done at the dio, dns to kind of guy and, and that the military commissions, because 2 years after i was released harvey wish the cost was the, the, the reading a story, the man who the general reports to. and then richard cops, lieutenant colonel gary brown, who was 2nd in charge. they were negotiating a lead deal with it, with the defense teams to, to, to try to get these stall trials moving. and so they were trying to get a pre deal to take the death copy off the table. and brown, later complained on

n p r. he said that he embraced the call were ambushed, they were called in to um, under false pretences. they were called into a meeting at the pentagon and then handed letters with no explanations. that they were fired, that our credentials were fees and they were sorted out of the building. so on n p r brown was complaining of how they were treated. but when it happened to people like me or other people, i got this, these 2 who were in charge secure less. but when it happened to them, they were calling it a dirty trick. so another example is when i made my complaints to my attorney military board, i have a current registration board about how it was forced out of by the captain and by the, by the lead lawyer. and the general jumped in and sent a letter to my attorney registration board and says that i was the one who caused serious damage to defend cease. and he includes 2 letters. i'm

a government stationary by to new lawyers would come onto the team. one of the letters said that i was like a logically unstable, and the other one says that i should be barred from ever being on a death penalty case. again, because i have some and garlic influence over terrorist. those are the ones that are there now. as for the judge has another story about the judge and the transcript. it shows that mr. bennett wants to get rid of the lead. busy carrier and the captain after i left any one of the representatives, so because he couldn't trust them anymore. and then the transfer b says i can't work with somebody who cheats me and causes me psychological harm. and so he wrote these letters, judge paul, stating that the, the judge stating that the, the lawyers, the lawyers are putting lies about me into motions. and he wanted to just know that he was making decisions based upon lice. but the judge wouldn't accept been a task his letters because they had be written by

a lawyer and in the motion form. and bene, tasha saying these lawyers aren't going to write a letter to this. it's going to mean that they're going to get fired. i'm going to do nothing, right. the motion of it means it's going to get fun. they're going to get fired. so the judge s one of the new lawyers on the team, if they will help. well, mr. going to pass a he refuses to do it. and the judge has to the court and say to everybody in the court a basic law principle. and he says to everyone that the ultimate loyalty of the court of the attorney is to the client, not to the other attorneys. and so he points his independent counselor to help mister bin attached rights. most of the general den steps in and says there's no need for any special counsel. this is where he makes that i give them the tools speech and the judge canceled the independent counsel and the planes, mr. bennett trash for all the problems that he's having with his lawyers. and now

the letters that were showing the truth were never made into motions. a very interesting point that you make is that what this behavior, what the systemic attitude amounts to is a continuation of something known as the lavender scare. and there are several parts to this point. you say, depending on scape codes, l g, b, t, q, americans to preserve its own power, that it weaponized is sexuality. that it makes it assumption that l g b t q employees are somehow a higher security risk risk, which of course, they are not. and that the policy forces people to out themselves give us some more detail. here is the situation really that malignant. well, let me start by saying that despite what mr. buying this thing the last year about the lavender sir, be a half and despite what some of the baldwin and sen kane are now doing, trying to get a resolution for an apology for the lavender. here, they're only taking it up to 2011 to and the only thing is for government employees

and for military personnel. my story, 2015. as a contractor that works with the government. my story show that the lavender scare tactics are not extinguished, they are not extinguish with the passing of time. so i want to make sure that i'd say to these, to, to the, to the, to the, to the, to the politicians that, that the, the, let's not take wash this very, very serious problem that you have there. and the government so looked up when they fired me leave the lawyer demanded that i give them my resignation. otherwise they were going to fire me. and when i refused to give a resignation, they had back themselves into a corner to fire me. and now she's threatening me and she said exactly what she said, i will frame the type of mitigation expert you are. i will say what i believe which could negatively affect your future as

a mitigation expert. don't you dare do anything about this. all of this has been documented and reviewed by experts. that's what i was told when they went to mr. bennett tosh, they had to explain to him why they fired me. and that's when they let the secret out of me being gay. and when he didn't react the way they wanted him to react, they had up the anti. and they told him that i had less full interest in him. and that they had to protect him for me. they went to the rest of the team and then they glowed at about it about what they said and i still for the life. and we can understand how in the world could my, my sexuality could have anything to do with saving this man's life. but mind you, while they told everyone else they didn't want me to know about what they had done and it wasn't until 6 months later that a i have

a dentist sergeant on the team who is having a very big moral dilemma with what was going on and was very traumatized. that was what's going on. asked to come see me, came out here from one, came out to chicago from washington and actually told him what they did. and i had the choice to make. if i fight this, i'm gonna owe myself further for do i let them do it and get away with it? and um, what i think about as all the security analysts, all of the officers of both discharge and all the lawyers who are on the team that, that are all held to a higher standard. none of them had the courage or the forwarded to the step up, and the report is only about small lowest level and lowest ranking person on the team. good. and once i found out and i started asking more questions of other people then that people started going little more church and they stepped up and they started providing the problem, writing evidence about what was going on. and so when, like i said,

when i started filing things, i had to help myself further. and there were internal investigations that these people have to run now because that they were getting complaints me and but them, they were being run by the mob or some self in general and the lead lawyer. and they weren't interested in finding out whether it was the truth of the matter. what they were interested in finding out was for the moles on there and who were telling me the truth. so when i file a complaint with a balance of, i want to say there's just, there weren't just 2 people involved. this went through the whole d o. d that went through, i was assured that i went to the office of inspector general, up at the old year went to the under secretary of defense for readiness and personnel. and it went to the visit deities, ethic boards. but my case was closed with a month and i heard nothing back from any of these people. but i did,

you know that the lead lawyer and the captain were aided and abetted and that they were condoned and they were rewarded and they were protected and defended. and when i went to the court to seek justice, the d o j joint in and help them keep this i secret and hide the truth. so even today, 9 years later, 9 years later, despite all the evidence that we have, they still want to sign with me. we are now standing you letters of, of the many that i don't, i tell my story that i don't tell the truth and they have threatened me with my attorney license and the livelihood and, and they want to silence the victim to protect the perpetrators. well, i've read the book and i can tell you that it is absolutely true. terrific interview. thank you for your insights. tim carl heinrich will. ricks is known as the very 1st game man to publicly announce his sexual identity. born in germany,

in 18. 25 is coming out, was a historic watershed event. he said, quote, i am proud that i have found the courage to view of the initial blow to the hydra of public contempt and quote, those are powerful words. and yet, here we are 200 years later, and the hydra of discrimination, hatred, and contempt still has not been slain. indeed, it's alive and well, and it's living in the pentagon. i'd like to thank our guest, tim john, some really for being with us today. and thank you to our viewers for joining us for another episode of the whistle blowers. i'm john kerry. aku, please follow me on subject at john curiosity. and we'll see you next time. 2 the, the

for them means legit do when it comes to getting more when defend donasia that a just to counter russian. and i think these installation countries are very well aware of the fact and they tried to use that uh, notion for data on the position. i would suggest we fell great. i was suggesting that we send americans

and, and uh, the bridges on the drain and put on your bill is us. an obama move dining probably now, and they'll talk soon, but it's done. or when you see it, all the owners will tell you that it will save you from us of classes in the middle city. so what i need to file a past closeness, most of our thoughts in this one is not as a guide on a source or sit emotional around noon. it may be, you know, a lot less radioactive than that. something is active uranium, but still it's radioactive. it has toxic, killed the laptop. you want me to kind of see. so these of us here. again, let's see the echo seats. the boeing good. i don't, you know, those huge a mold. were suggesting we pharma fell great for bill cause what they were just

the a uh yeah, that'd be okay. but you to pursue. so do you have to deal with, if it is a new i can ship that i'm not and i don't know how much is emily does? that's the one the new mostly of do you have 10 kilometers from done? that's the city had been under keeps occupation for 10 years. ukrainian forces transformed of the of got into a formidable stronghold which they shall peaceful neighborhoods in done. that's a gift in the us and.