Freed
CIA Whistleblower John Kiriakou Says
"I Would Do It All Again" to Expose Torture
Video By Democracy Now!
In a broadcast exclusive interview, we spend
the hour with John Kiriakou, a retired CIA
agent who has just been released from prison
after blowing the whistle on the George W.
Bush administration’s torture program. In
2007, Kiriakou became the first CIA official
to publicly confirm and detail the agency’s
use of waterboarding.
Posted February 09, 2015
MY
GOODMAN:
Today, a Democracy Now! radio and
television broadcast exclusive. We spend the
hour with John Kiriakou, the retired
CIA agent who blew
the whistle on torture. He’s just been
released from prison. He’ll join us from his
home in Virginia, where he remains under
house arrest while finishing his
two-and-a-half-year sentence. Shortly after
his release last week, John Kiriakou tweeted
a picture of himself at home with his
smiling children, along with a quote from
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: "Free at last.
Free at least. Thank God Almighty. I’m free
at last."
In January 2013, Kiriakou
was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in
prison. Under a plea deal, he admitted to a
single count of violating the Intelligence
Identities Protection Act by revealing the
identity of a covert officer involved in the
rendition, detention and interrogation
program to a freelance reporter, who didn’t
publish it. In return, prosecutors dropped
charges against Kiriakou brought under the
Espionage Act. In 2007, John Kiriakou became
the first CIA
official to publicly confirm and detail the
Bush administration’s use of waterboarding
when he spoke to ABC’s Brian Ross.
JOHN
KIRIAKOU:
At the time, I felt that waterboarding
was something that we needed to do. And
as time has passed, and as September
11th has—you know, has moved farther and
farther back into history, I think I’ve
changed my mind. And I think that
waterboarding is probably something that
we shouldn’t be in the business of
doing.
BRIAN
ROSS:
Why do you say that now?
JOHN
KIRIAKOU:
Because we’re Americans, and we’re
better than that.
AMY
GOODMAN:
John Kiriakou’s supporters say he was
unfairly targeted in the Obama
administration’s crackdown on government
whistleblowers. Shortly after his release
last week, the Government Accountability
Project’s Jesselyn Radack issued a
statement, saying, quote, "Kiriakou is a
dedicated public servant who became a
political prisoner because he brought to
light one of the darkest chapters in
American history: the CIA’s ineffective,
immoral and illegal torture program. ...
[I]t is a welcome development that Kiriakou
can serve the rest of his sentence at home
with his family," she wrote.
Meanwhile, the federal prosecutor in the
case, Neil MacBride, has defended the
government’s handling of the case. He spoke
after Kiriakou’s sentencing in January of
2013.
NEIL
MacBRIDE:
As the judge just said in court, today’s
sentence should be a reminder to every
individual who works for the government,
who comes into the possession of closely
held, sensitive information regarding
the national defense or the identity of
a covert agent, that it is critical that
that information remain secure and not
spill out into the public domain or be
shared with others who don’t have
authorized access to it.
AMY
GOODMAN:
For more, we go to Arlington, Virginia,
where we’re joined by John Kiriakou. Again,
he remains under house arrest as he
completes his sentence. He spent 14 years at
the CIA as an
analyst and case officer. In 2002, he led
the team that found Abu Zubaydah, a
high-ranking member of al-Qaeda. He is a
father of five. In 2010, Kiriakou published
a memoir titled Reluctant Spy: My Secret
Life in the CIA’s War on Terror.
John Kiriakou, welcome back to Democracy
Now! How does it feel to be out of
prison?
JOHN
KIRIAKOU:
Utterly liberating. I actually had trouble
falling asleep the first night home because
I had grown so used to my bare mattress on a
steel slab and the jingling of keys all
night long. But I’ve finally adapted.
AMY
GOODMAN:
You’re not quite free yet, though, right,
John? How long did you serve in jail?
JOHN
KIRIAKOU:
No.
AMY
GOODMAN:
And how long do you have under house arrest?
JOHN
KIRIAKOU:
I served 23 months in a low-security federal
prison in Pennsylvania. I have three months
of house arrest. And then, following house
arrest, I am under what’s called supervised
release, which is really probation, for
another three years.
AMY
GOODMAN:
Talk about why you believe you were jailed.
JOHN
KIRIAKOU:
Oh, I am absolutely convinced, Amy, that I
was jailed because of the torture debate.
People leak information in Washington all
the time, whether it’s on purpose or
inadvertent. We’ve seen—we’ve seen people
like former CIA
Director Leon Panetta, former
CIA Director
General Petraeus, leaking classified
information with impunity. And that has
convinced me that I’m right when I say that
my case was never about leaking. My case was
about blowing the whistle on torture.
AMY
GOODMAN:
I wanted to turn to former Virginia
Democratic Congressman Jim Moran, who took
to the floor of the House of Representatives
last year and called for President Obama to
pardon you. Moran called you an "American
hero" and a "whistleblower." He said, quote,
"Kiriakou deserves a presidential pardon so
his record can be cleared, just as this
country is trying to heal from a dark
chapter in its history." What is your
response to that? You didn’t get that
pardon, at least as of yet.
JOHN
KIRIAKOU:
No. No, I am deeply, deeply grateful for the
work that Congressman Moran did. My only
regret is that he’s retired now. He’s no
longer in Congress. But he’s a very
upstanding, very progressive and very decent
man. I really appreciated his help. I’ve not
formally asked for a pardon, and I probably
won’t this year. But there seems to be some
support growing for it. I’m always on the
lookout for congressional support. And I
hope that I can develop that through 2015
and then maybe go to the president sometime
next year and ask for a pardon.
AMY
GOODMAN:
We’re going to break, and then we’re going
to go back in time and talk about what you
did, talk about the fact that you’re the
only official related to the torture
program, you blowing the whistle on torture,
who has been jailed. We’re talking to John
Kiriakou, who spent 14 years at the
CIA as an analyst
and case officer, exposed the Bush-era
torture program, became the only official
jailed in connection with it. We’ll be back
with him at his home under house arrest in a
moment.
[break]
AMY
GOODMAN:
This is Democracy Now!,
democracynow.org, The War and Peace
Report. I’m Amy Goodman. We’re spending
the hour with John Kiriakou, under house
arrest right now at his home in Arlington,
Virginia, but he is out of jail. He spent 14
years at the CIA
as an analyst and a case officer, exposed
the Bush-era torture program, became the
only official jailed in connection with it.
In 2007, he became the first
CIA official to
publicly confirm the Bush administration’s
use of waterboarding; in January 2013,
sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison
after pleading guilty to confirming the
identity of a covert officer to a reporter,
who didn’t publish it. Let’s go back in time
to your experience with Abu Zubaydah, John
Kiriakou. How did you come to meet him?
JOHN
KIRIAKOU:
I was the leader of a CIA
group in Pakistan that conducted a series of
14 raids on suspected al-Qaeda safe houses
around the central part of the country. And
Abu Zubaydah happened to be in one of the
houses that we raided. And after something
of a gun battle, we captured him.
AMY
GOODMAN:
So, since your interview in 2007, it’s
become known that Zubaydah was waterboarded
at least 83 times and that he provided no
useful information as a result. He remains
imprisoned at Guantánamo without charge. His
name appears more than a thousand times in
the Senate report on torture that was
released in December. Talk about what you
know happened to him.
JOHN
KIRIAKOU:
Sure. Abu Zubaydah was shot three times
while being captured, shot by Pakistani
authorities—once in the thigh, once in the
groin and once in the stomach—with an AK-47.
He was very gravely wounded. And so, when he
was rendered, when he was taken away from
Pakistan, he was sent to a secret location,
and the CIA sent a
trauma surgeon from Johns Hopkins University
Medical Center to this secret location to
give him medical assistance. He underwent
surgery. For some reason, he even had an eye
removed. I’m not sure why that happened, but
we know that now to be the case. And over
the course of the next several months, he
recovered from his gunshot wounds.
AMY
GOODMAN:
And talk about how you met him.
JOHN
KIRIAKOU:
Sure. When we first captured him, we took
him to a hospital, a military hospital in
Pakistan. He had lost so much blood, we
needed to transfuse him. And he was
initially in a coma. He came out of the coma
a couple of times, and we were able, at
first, to just exchange an initial comment,
later on, in the next couple of days, to
have short conversations. For example, when
he first came out of his coma, he asked me
for a glass of red wine. He was delirious.
Later in the evening, he asked me if I would
take the pillow and smother him. And then,
the next day, we talked about poetry. We
talked about Islam. We talked about the fact
that he had never supported the attacks on
the United States. He wanted to attack
Israel.
AMY
GOODMAN:
And talk about what you learned happened to
him from there.
JOHN
KIRIAKOU:
Well, he was sent from Pakistan to this
secret location. And once he was healthy
enough to withstand interrogation, a group
of CIA
interrogators—I’m sorry, a group of
FBI interrogators
interviewed him, appeared to have been
successful in gathering some information,
but then were replaced by
CIA interrogators, that we’ve now
learned were untrained, unprepared, and was
subjected to waterboarding in addition to
other torture techniques, placed into a
cage. He had a fear of bugs, so they put him
in a small box and put bugs in the box with
him. He was subject to a cold cell, to
lights on 24 hours a day, booming music so
that he couldn’t sleep. There were several
different things that the
CIA did to him.
AMY
GOODMAN:
And your response to that?
JOHN
KIRIAKOU:
Torture is wrong under any circumstances.
You know, we know from the Second World War,
when the Justice Department was
interrogating Nazi war criminals, we know
that the establishment of a rapport, the
establishment of a relationship with
someone, results in actionable information,
if that prisoner has actionable information
which he’s willing to give. That wasn’t the
case with Abu Zubaydah. He was beaten. He
was waterboarded. He was subject to sleep
deprivation. He had ice water poured on him
in a 50-degree cell every several hours. The
man just simply didn’t have any information
to give.
AMY
GOODMAN:
When did you learn that? And when, John, did
you decide to go public with this, to reveal
this information?
JOHN
KIRIAKOU:
I learned initially that he had been
waterboarded in the summer of 2002, at the
end of the summer of 2002. And as I said in
the 2007 interview with Brian Ross, I
believed what the CIA
was telling us, that he was being
waterboarded, it was working, and we were
gathering important, actionable intelligence
that was saving American lives. It wasn’t
until something like 2005 or 2006 that we
realized that that just simply wasn’t
true—he wasn’t producing any information—and
that these techniques were horrific.
It
was in 2007, Amy, that I decided to go
public. President Bush said at the time,
categorically, "We do not torture prisoners.
We are not waterboarding." And I knew that
that was a lie. And he made it seem as
though this was a rogue
CIA officer who decided to pour water
on people’s faces. And that simply wasn’t
true. Torture—the entire torture program was
approved by the president himself, and it
was a very carefully planned-out program. So
to say that it was rogue, it was just a
bald-faced lie to the American people.
AMY
GOODMAN:
Late last year, graphic new details of the
post-9/11 U.S. torture program came to light
when the Senate Intelligence Committee
released the 500-page summary of its
investigation into the
CIA. The report concluded the
intelligence agency failed to disrupt a
single plot despite torturing al-Qaeda and
other captives in secret prisons worldwide
from 2002 and 2006. Maybe you watched this
from prison, John Kiriakou—
JOHN
KIRIAKOU:
I did, indeed.
AMY
GOODMAN:
—but this is Senator Dianne Feinstein, chair
of the Senate Intelligence Committee,
outlining the report’s key findings.
SEN.
DIANNE
FEINSTEIN:
First, the CIA’s enhanced interrogation
techniques were not an effective way to
gather intelligence information. Second,
the CIA
provided extensive amounts of inaccurate
information about the operation of the
program and its effectiveness to the
White House, the Department of Justice,
Congress, the CIA
inspector general, the media and the
American public. Third, CIA’s management
of the program was inadequate and deeply
flawed. And fourth, the
CIA program
was far more brutal than people were led
to believe.
AMY
GOODMAN:
Do you remember, when you heard this report
in jail, where you were? I assume you
watched Dianne Feinstein on the prison TV.
And your thoughts about it?
JOHN
KIRIAKOU:
I did, indeed. I was sitting in the Central
One Unit TV room watching it with bated
breath. Let me say that Senator Feinstein is
one of the CIA’s leading supporters on
Capitol Hill. So for Dianne Feinstein to
come out with a report as critical as this
report was just shows you how wrongheaded
the CIA torture
program was.
AMY
GOODMAN:
So, the report comes out, and it details a
list of torture methods used on
prisoners—waterboarding, sexual abuse with
broomsticks, what they call rectal feeding
or rectal hydration. Prisoners were
threatened with buzzing power drills. Some
captives were deprived of sleep for up to
180 hours, at times with their hands
shackled above their heads. The torture
carried out at black sites in Afghanistan,
Lithuania, Romania, Poland, Thailand, secret
site at Guantánamo Naval Base known as
Strawberry Fields. As this unveiled, it’s
only you who went to jail around these
issues. Your thoughts on this?
JOHN
KIRIAKOU:
I feel like I live in the Twilight Zone
sometimes. When the report came out, like
most other Americans, I was absolutely
shocked and appalled at some of the details.
Even inside the CIA,
we didn’t know anything about rectal
hydration—with hummus, no less—with sexual
abuse or sexual assault using broomsticks. I
mean, people didn’t even talk about those
kinds of things in the hallway, so I was
absolutely shocked hearing it.
This goes back to a point I made in 2013 on
this wonderful program: We need to prosecute
some of these cases. I understand that
reasonable people can agree to disagree on
whether or not case officers who really
believed they were carrying out a legal
activity should be prosecuted. I understand
that. But what about case officers who took
the law into their own hands or who flouted
the law and raped prisoners with broomsticks
or carried out rectal hydration with hummus?
Those were not approved interrogation
techniques. Why aren’t those officers being
prosecuted? I think, at the very least,
that’s where we should start the
prosecutions.
AMY
GOODMAN:
I want to play for you comments President
Obama made in 2009 about whether
CIA officials
involved in torture should be prosecuted. He
appeared on the ABC
News program This Week.
PRESIDENT
BARACK
OBAMA:
I don’t believe that anybody is above
the law. On the other hand, I also have
a belief that we need to look forward as
opposed to looking backwards. And part
of my job is to make sure that—for
example, at the CIA,
you’ve got extraordinarily talented
people who are working very hard to keep
Americans safe. I don’t want them to
suddenly feel like they’ve got to spend
all their time looking over their
shoulders and lawyering.
GEORGE
STEPHANOPOULOS:
So, no 9/11 Commission with independent
subpoena power?
PRESIDENT
BARACK
OBAMA:
You know, we have not made final
decisions, but my instinct is for us to
focus on how do we make sure that,
moving forward, we are doing the right
thing.
AMY
GOODMAN:
That was President Obama right after he
became president in 2009. Right after, he
signed, well, what? One of his first
executive orders, to close Guantánamo. Your
thoughts on what he just said—
JOHN
KIRIAKOU:
Right.
AMY
GOODMAN:
—to George Stephanopoulos?
JOHN
KIRIAKOU:
Sure. I understand that President Obama is
not going to seek the prosecution of the
CIA leaders who
carried out the torture, the case officers
involved in the day-to-day torture program.
I understand that. The lawyers at the Office
of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department,
I understand. No problem. But what about the
CIA officers who
directly violated the law, who carried out
interrogations that resulted in death? What
about the torturers of Hassan Ghul? Hassan
Ghul was killed during an interrogation
session.
AMY
GOODMAN:
In Afghanistan.
JOHN
KIRIAKOU:
Those people should not be above the law.
Correct, in Afghanistan. Those people should
not be above the law. They committed crimes,
whether in the United States or overseas.
And those people should be prosecuted.
AMY
GOODMAN:
Instead, you were the only one who went to
prison. Would you do what you did again,
John?
JOHN
KIRIAKOU:
As crazy as it sounds, yes, I would. I would
do it all over again. What has happened
since that 2007 ABC
News interview is that torture has been
banned in the United States. It is no longer
a part of U.S. government policy. And I’m
proud to have played a role in that. If that
cost me 23 months of my life, well, you know
what? It was worth it.
AMY
GOODMAN:
Speaking to NBC’s Meet the Press in
December, after the Senate torture report
was released, former Vice President Dick
Cheney said he would do it all again.
DICK
CHENEY:
I’m more concerned with bad guys who got
out and were released than I am with a
few that in fact were innocent.
CHUCK
TODD:
Twenty-five percent of the detainees,
though. Twenty-five percent turned out
not to have—turned out to be innocent.
They were—
DICK
CHENEY:
So, where are you going to draw the
line, Chuck? How are you going to know?
CHUCK
TODD:
Well, I’m asking you.
DICK
CHENEY:
I’m saying—
CHUCK
TODD:
Is that too high? Is that—you’re OK with
that margin for error?
DICK
CHENEY:
I have no problem as long as we achieve
our objective.
AMY
GOODMAN:
That was Dick Cheney on Meet the Press
with Chuck Todd. John Kiriakou, your
thoughts? Should Vice President Cheney be
tried?
JOHN
KIRIAKOU:
My own personal belief is, yes, sure, he
should. But I think there’s another point to
be made here. We’ve seen Vice President
Cheney, we’ve seen former
CIA directors, several of them,
former senior CIA
officers go on the network news programs and
defend, defend, defend their actions during
the torture regime. The reason that they’re
doing that is because torture is their
legacy. When their obituaries are written,
those obituaries are going to say that they
were instrumental in the torture program.
And the only thing they can do at this point
to save their reputations is to keep
repeating this lie that torture worked and
hope that the American people eventually
believe it.
AMY
GOODMAN:
What are your thoughts today on
NSA whistleblower
Edward Snowden? What would you advise him?
JOHN
KIRIAKOU:
I think Ed Snowden is a national hero. I
think Ed Snowden gave us information on
government illegality that we otherwise
would never have had. I regret that the
federal government has revoked his passport
and has caused him to be stuck in Russia,
but I think that he did a very courageous
thing. I’m not sure I would have released
all of the information that he released,
because, in some cases, I want
NSA to be spying
on foreign governments and foreign leaders.
That’s what NSA
does; that’s what they’re supposed to do. I
want the U.S. government to have a leg up,
for example, in trade negotiations or
defense contracting or whatever it is. But
in terms of the illegality that Ed Snowden
revealed, I think he did a great national
service.
AMY
GOODMAN:
In 2013, Edward Snowden commented on the
Obama administration’s treatment of
whistleblowers who preceded him. He said,
quote, "Binney, Drake, Kiriakou, and Manning
are all examples of how overly-harsh
responses to public-interest whistle-blowing
only escalate the scale, scope, and skill
involved in future disclosures. Citizens
with a conscience are not going to ignore
wrong-doing simply because they’ll be
destroyed for it: the conscience forbids it.
Instead, these draconian responses simply
build better whistleblowers. If the Obama
administration responds with an even harsher
hand against me, they can be assured that
they’ll soon find themselves facing an
equally harsh public response." Again, those
the words of Ed Snowden. Do you think Edward
Snowden should come back to the United
States, John Kiriakou?
JOHN
KIRIAKOU:
I do not, not under any circumstances. And
I’ve said that both publicly and privately
to him in a letter. I do not believe that he
will get a fair trial in the United States,
especially in the Eastern District of
Virginia, where he’s being charged or where
he has been charged. I think the deck is
stacked against him, as it is against any
whistleblower, and if the government has its
way, Ed Snowden will never see the light of
day.
AMY
GOODMAN:
I wanted to read a comment made by the judge
at your sentencing hearing, John. Judge
Leonie Brinkema sentenced you to 30 months
in prison back in January 2013, saying,
quote, "This case is not a case about a
whistleblower. It’s a case about a man who
betrayed a very solemn trust, and that is a
trust to keep the integrity of his agency
intact and specifically to protect the
identity of co-workers. ... I think 30
months is, frankly, way too light, because
the message has to be sent to every covert
agent that when you leave the agency you
can’t just start all of a sudden revealing
the names of the people with whom you
worked," Judge Brinkema said. Your response?
JOHN
KIRIAKOU:
Yes. Three months earlier, in the hearing in
which I accepted the plea, Judge Brinkema
said that 30 months was, quote, "fair"—what
did she say? Now I’m forgetting it. She said
it was "fair and appropriate." And she
compared my case to that of Scooter Libby,
even though Scooter Libby never leaked the
identity of Valerie Plame. When the
courtroom was full of reporters three months
later, that’s when she decided to get tough
and say that 30 months wasn’t enough. Judge
Brinkema had ample opportunity to sentence
me to as much as 10 years, and she didn’t.
She sentenced me to 30 months.
Now, with that said, we had trouble with
Judge Brinkema’s rulings from the very
beginning. Anytime we tried to introduce
evidence of whistleblowing, it was denied;
of government wrongdoing, denied; my own
personal history in the
CIA, where I won 12 exceptional
performance awards, the Meritorious Honor
Award, the Counterterrorism Service Medal,
not admissible. And that’s what has led me
to believe that there’s no way Ed Snowden is
going to get a fair trial, and he shouldn’t
come back to Virginia.
AMY
GOODMAN:
John Kiriakou, did you know the now
notorious psychologists James Mitchell and
Bruce Jessen, who designed the government
torture program at places like Guantánamo?
JOHN
KIRIAKOU:
No, I had never met them. When I was working
in the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center, it was
a very large room. We called it a cubicle
farm. There were hundreds of people in this
room. And I remember them arriving and
taking offices, private offices, at the very
back of the room, but I never had any
personal contact with either Mitchell or
Jessen.
AMY
GOODMAN:
Do you think they should be prosecuted?
Apparently, the government has decided not
to?
JOHN
KIRIAKOU:
Absolutely. The government has decided not
to prosecute them, but I think if there are
going to be prosecutions, those prosecutions
should begin with Mitchell and Jessen. They
were wholly unqualified for the bill of
goods they sold the CIA,
and they simply committed crimes overseas in
the name of the U.S. government. I think
they should be prosecuted for those crimes.
AMY
GOODMAN:
The issue of revealing the name of a covert
agent, why did you think that was critical
in telling the story of waterboarding?
JOHN
KIRIAKOU:
Well, interestingly enough, the agent whose
name I was convicted of releasing—and I did
release it. I did tell this reporter this
gentleman’s name. I didn’t actually
volunteer it, I confirmed it. He had already
had it. But the reporter was going to write
an article saying that this man was
instrumental in the torture program, and
that wasn’t true. He was a good man. He had
nothing to do with torture. He happened to
be working in the rendition program. And I
was trying to correct the record. This
reporter wanted someone to interview about
the program, asked if I could make an
introduction. I said, "I don’t think he’ll
talk to you. I think he’s probably retired
by now. But he was not a part of the torture
program."
AMY
GOODMAN:
Did CIA officials
or your co-workers, people in intelligence
services, reach out to you either expressing
their support for you or their condemnation?
JOHN
KIRIAKOU:
Oh, yes, dozens and dozens of former
colleagues have reached out to me over the
last three years. The support has been
really overwhelming from my former
CIA colleagues. I
can honestly tell you that I can count on
one hand the number of
CIA officers who have walked away
from me, who have ended our friendships. And
every single one of those, those five
individuals, was instrumental in the torture
program.
AMY
GOODMAN:
John Kiriakou, we’re going to break. When we
come back, you wrote letters from Loretto,
from the prison, and I want to talk about
your time in the prison, your concerns about
prisons, and how you were treated, how other
prisoners were treated. We’re talking to
John Kiriakou, who spent 14 years at the
CIA as an analyst
and case officer. He exposed the Bush-era
torture program, became the only official
jailed in connection with it. In 2007, he
was the first CIA
official to publicly confirm the Bush
administration’s use of waterboarding; in
January 2013, sentenced to two-and-a-half
years in jail after pleading guilty to
confirming the identity of a covert officer
to a reporter, who ended up not publishing
it. John Kiriakou has also written his
memoir; it’s called Reluctant Spy: My
Secret Life in the CIA’s War on Terror.
He was released from prison last week but
remains under house arrest for three months.
That’s where we’re talking to him, at his
home in Arlington, Virginia. Stay with us.
[break]
AMY
GOODMAN:
"P.H.A.T.W.A." by The Narcicyst, here on
Democracy Now!, democracynow.org,
The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy
Goodman, with this exclusive
radio/television/web broadcast with John
Kiriakou, who is at home under house arrest
in Arlington, Virginia. He was a
CIA analyst and
case officer for 14 years. He exposed the
Bush-era torture program, became the only
official jailed in connection with it,
exposed waterboarding in 2007. In January
2013, he was sentenced to two-and-a-half
years in prison. John, you were held at
FCI Loretto in
Pennsylvania, the federal correctional
institution there. Can you talk about the
letters you decided to write from there and
what your life was like behind bars?
JOHN
KIRIAKOU:
Sure. Before I went to prison, several
friends of mine—Jesselyn Radack from the
Government Accountability Project, Jane
Hamsher from Firedoglake.com, Tom Drake
formerly of the NSA,
Dan Ellsberg—they mentioned that they
thought I should write an open letter to my
supporters once I got situated in prison,
just to let them know how I was doing. And I
thought that was a good idea. So, when I got
to Loretto, February 28th, 2013, I allowed
myself about six weeks to get situated. And
I should add, I’ve always been a big fan of
Martin Luther King’s Letter from Birmingham
Jail. And I had a copy with me in prison. I
read it and reread it and reread it again.
And I thought, "Well, I’ll structure it in
the same way, and I’ll write it person to
person. So, that’s what I did.
Much to my surprise—this was only supposed
to go to about 600 people. Much to my
surprise, it was picked up by The
Huffington Post, and then, from
Huffington Post, it went crazy—all the
broadcast networks, half a dozen
magazines—and it got about a million hits.
And I realized that Americans really do want
to know what it’s like inside prison. I
should add, too, that FCI
Loretto is no Club Fed. This is a real
prison with rows and rows of concertina wire
atop and astride large—or, I should say,
high fences. This is a serious prison.
There’s no golf course. There’s no movie
theater. It’s like what you see on TV. So, I
wanted to convey that. And the letters
became so popular that I made them into a
series. I think I did probably 17 or 18 of
them by the time I left to come home.
AMY
GOODMAN:
John Kiriakou, you wrote, "People under the
care of the medical unit at Loretto die with
terrifying frequency." Can you explain what
would happen?
JOHN
KIRIAKOU:
Sure. I’ll give you a couple of examples. A
couple of days before I left to come home, I
was in the medical unit giving blood for
some blood tests, and another prisoner
wheeled a third prisoner in in a wheelchair.
This man was about 70 years old. He was
obviously having a heart attack. He was
crying. He was clutching his chest. And he
said, "I’m having a heart attack." Well, the
woman who was helping me, who was drawing my
blood, looked up at him and said, "Well,
you’re just going to have to wait, because
I’m the only person here, and you have to
wait until somebody else comes in to work."
And that poor old man sat in that wheelchair
in the midst of a heart attack until
somebody else came to work, diagnosed him
with a heart attack, and called an ambulance
to take him to a local hospital. That kind
of behavior is typical.
I’ll give you another example. There was a
man who lived across the hall from the
chapel. I worked in the chapel as an
orderly. And this man complained routinely
of back pain, severe back pain. Sometimes he
would be hunched over. As the weeks passed,
he had a cane, then he had a walker, then
he’s in a wheelchair. I said, "My goodness,
what is wrong with you?" He said, "My back
is killing me, and they won’t take me to a
hospital for a test." So, finally, the
chaplain intervened and said, "This guy’s
condition is obviously deteriorating
quickly. Please take him to a hospital for a
test." They finally took him to the local
hospital. Stage IV cancer of the spine. He
was dead in two weeks. And that’s really
typical of the medical care in prison, not
just in Loretto, but all over the Bureau of
Prisons.
AMY
GOODMAN:
You wanted to be a—
JOHN
KIRIAKOU:
You have to—
AMY
GOODMAN:
—a GED instructor,
John, in the prison?
JOHN
KIRIAKOU:
I’m sorry.
AMY
GOODMAN:
You wanted to be a GED
instructor, but were told you had to be a
janitor at the chapel?
JOHN
KIRIAKOU:
I did. Right. I have a master’s degree in
legislative affairs, a bachelor’s degree in
Middle Eastern studies, and I did my Ph.D.
coursework at the University of Virginia in
international relations. So I thought,
"Well, I’ll make some good use of my time,
and I’ll teach a GED
class." But when I volunteered, they told
me, in not very nice language, "If we want
you to teach an effing class, we’ll ask you
to teach an effing class." And so, I spent
the next two years as a janitor in the
chapel.
AMY
GOODMAN:
John Kiriakou, you write at the end of one
of your letters [from] Loretto, "By the time
you read this"—this was your last
letter—"I’ll be home. Now the real work can
begin—the struggle for human rights, civil
liberties and prison reform. I can guarantee
you that I am unbowed, unbroken,
uninstitutionalized and ready to fight."
What does "uninstitutionalized" mean?
JOHN
KIRIAKOU:
Well, uninstitutionalized means that I never
allowed the prison officials in Loretto to
cow me. I got into a dispute with a
lieutenant who had a reputation as being a
bully, really a bully and a provocateur. And
he shouted at me one day, "You need to start
acting more like an inmate!" And I said,
"And what is that supposed to mean? Should I
get a tattoo on my face? Should I steal food
from the cafeteria to sell to people? If it
means going like this and saying, 'Yes, sir.
No, sir. Sorry, sir,' that’s never going to
happen. Never." I said, "Respect is two
ways. You get respect when you give respect.
And I don’t respect you." And that’s the
attitude that I maintained throughout my two
years in prison.
AMY
GOODMAN:
What most surprised you there, John?
JOHN
KIRIAKOU:
I was really surprised how prisoners are
treated as—as not—not treated as human
beings. They’re treated as somehow subhuman,
people not to be respected, people about
whose health we should not be concerned,
people who don’t deserve a fair hearing.
It’s warehousing, and it’s warehousing being
overseen by flunkies and dropouts from the
local police academy or people who couldn’t
cut it in the military. They’re the people
running our lives in prison.
AMY
GOODMAN:
John Kiriakou, going back to the issue you
exposed, the issue of waterboarding and
torture, how did the Obama administration
continue these programs? Or did they?
JOHN
KIRIAKOU:
I don’t think they did. There is one thing
that the Obama administration has continued,
and really has perfected it, compared to
what the Bush administration did. And that’s
drone strikes. President Obama has killed
far more people with drone strikes than
President Bush ever did.
AMY
GOODMAN:
And the issue of Greece? You’re a Greek
American. In fact, you did some of your
CIA work in
Greece. Can you talk about what you did
there and how you feel about what’s happened
today with the rise of Syriza, the prime
minister being the head of Syriza?
JOHN
KIRIAKOU:
Sure. I served in Greece for a couple of
years, going back and forth, really, between
headquarters and Greece. I was working on
terrorism issues. But at the time—and this
kind of seems quaint now—it was
Euroterrorism, communist terrorism,
specifically the Revolutionary Organization
17 November. I had a great experience in
Greece. It’s a great country.
But
the Greeks have had a tough time for the
last—especially for the last seven years or
so. The recession has hit Greece probably
harder than any other country in western
Europe, certainly harder than in the United
States. And part of the problem was, you had
two governing parties—PASOK and Neo
Demokratia, New Democracy—that were really
corrupted by the system. And now, Syriza,
which is a young, new, populist party, has
won a sweeping victory in the recent
parliamentary elections, falling only two
seats short of an absolute majority, which
in Greece is really an incredible feat.
Like most Greek Americans, I’m very excited
about this. I think it was time for a
change. It was time for a populist regime in
Greece, a leftist populist regime. And I
think that under Alexis Tsipras’s
leadership, I think the country may come out
of its recession. Now, with that said,
there’s going to have to be some give from
the troika in terms of aid and assistance to
Greece. The Greek people have suffered
terribly. Suicides are up something like 300
percent. There’s a brain drain, where
doctors, lawyers, engineers are moving to
the United States or Europe or Australia.
And that has to come to an end. The Greeks
have to stay in Greece and try to rebuild
their country. But I think that can be done
under Syriza. I’m very excited about it.
AMY
GOODMAN:
Well, finally, as we come to an end of this
conversation, from your home, under house
arrest in Arlington, Virginia, your
family—what happened to your wife after you
were convicted and sentenced? She also
worked at the agency, is that right? And
also you have five children.
JOHN
KIRIAKOU:
Yes, that’s right, I have five children. My
wife was a highly decorated, highly
respected CIA
officer. She was really going places, and
far smarter and more accomplished than I
ever was. But she was fired the day that I
was arrested, only because she was related
to me. And she was out of work for 10 months
before finding work finally here inside the
Beltway at one of the government
contractors, where she’s really done
beautifully, and they love her. But she was
asked to leave just because she’s married to
me. It made raising five children very
difficult.
AMY
GOODMAN:
And how are your kids, now that you’ve come
home?
JOHN
KIRIAKOU:
Oh, great. It’s wonderful. Actually, my wife
and I haven’t had a night alone together
since I got home. It’s, you know,
three—there are three little children in the
bed with us all night long. And there’s lots
of hugging and storytelling and book
reading. And it’s been great. They’re happy
to see me home.
AMY
GOODMAN:
Well, John Kiriakou, I want to thank you for
being with us, again, spent 14 years as a
CIA analyst and
case officer, exposed the Bush-era torture
program, became the only official jailed in
connection with it, in 2007 first publicly
confirmed the use of waterboarding.