Amnesty International
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Amnesty International plays two opposite roles in John Kiriakou's story: witness for his defense, and bystander at his prosecution.

The torture report

Amnesty's report that the CIA was torturing prisoners, following Human Rights Watch's and preceding or accompanying the International Committee of the Red Cross's, is a fixed point in Kiriakou's account of his 2007 ABC interview: the torture was already public knowledge, so his confirmation "added nothing, technically, to the debate." What he added was being the first current or former CIA officer to say it.

The ordering shifts between tellings and is worth recording rather than smoothing. The commonest version puts Human Rights Watch in 2005, Amnesty in 2006 and the Red Cross in 2007. Another puts Human Rights Watch in 2006 and both Amnesty and the Red Cross in 2007. A third has the Red Cross first, two years before he went public. In the version he gives most often now, the point is not the sequence but the window: all three reports were out in the twelve months before he spoke, so "I didn't think I was saying anything new."

That argument was not only his. The FBI investigated the ABC interview, watched the tape, and concluded the information was already common knowledge and no crime had been committed. The declination letter sent to his attorney named the three organisations explicitly, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the Red Cross had all published papers saying the CIA was torturing prisoners, before the case was reopened.

Kiriakou also cites Amnesty, alongside Human Rights Watch and the Red Cross, on the drone war: reports that some 90% of those killed were innocent civilians who happened to be near the strike site. The value he assigns them there is the same, independent voices against an agency asking the public to take its word that the dead were bad people.

The silence

Asked at a Berlin event why he never mentions Amnesty International, Kiriakou's answer was unsparing: "I begged Amnesty International to release even a one-sentence statement about my case." He wrote to headquarters in London, and to Zeke Johnson, director of Amnesty International USA, "who was kind enough to send me a subscription to The New Yorker magazine, along with a letter saying I'm sorry, but they don't want to have anything to do with your case." After about a year, he got tired of begging. "I got zero help from Amnesty."

The refusal was not Amnesty's alone. "When I was arrested they ran screaming from the room. I got literally no help from Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch or the ACLU, nothing." He extends the diagnosis: the organisations are "very in favour of whistleblowers elsewhere in the world... not with American whistleblowers," and their statements tend to appear only once public support has already built, which he calls reactionary rather than leading. In the same account of who stood where, the ACLU's national office would have supported him but the organisation decides regionally, and a member of its board resigned in protest at its refusal to make a statement during his trial.

Kiriakou's account of Johnson himself has softened across tellings. The 2017 version has the New Yorker subscription arriving with a letter of refusal. In 2021 and again in 2025 he describes Johnson as "an awesome guy" who wrote to him in prison apologising for his bosses in London, "hey, we think we made a mistake, we're sorry, just wanted you to know, we're pulling for you", and then bought the subscription "to kind of dull the pain." The blame in the later versions sits with London, not with the American office.

Ai Weiwei and the reversal

What eventually moved Amnesty was not Kiriakou. Ai Weiwei was making Lego portraits of political prisoners, 178 of them, in Kiriakou's count, and wanted the names cleared with Amnesty International first. Told that Amnesty did not believe Kiriakou was a political prisoner, the artist answered "I know Kiriakou. I'm telling you, he is a political prisoner." Amnesty agreed in the week Kiriakou was released, having been "pulled kicking and screaming" to it. Human Rights Watch, he says, came round before they did. He has placed the portrait exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution in one telling and at Alcatraz in another.

The name a prisoner heard

The organisation's standing among prisoners surfaces in an anecdote Kiriakou tells about a Pakistani safe house. He had brought Cofer Black in to see a detainee and introduced him as "Mr Cofer Black of the Central Intelligence Agency"; Black asked whether the man was getting enough food, sleeping well, being treated properly. Returning alone afterwards, Kiriakou was thanked: "Sir, I have to thank you so much for bringing Amnesty International to come and check on me." He did not correct him, "I didn't say he was from Amnesty International, I said he was from the Central Intelligence Agency", and answered instead that "we're not animals, we're treating you with respect."

The same expectation defines by its absence what Guantánamo withholds. Among the rights Kiriakou lists as denied there, no access to the Supreme Court, no due process, is the right to be visited by the Red Cross and by Amnesty International.

See also

- Human Rights Watch
- Ai Weiwei
- Brian Ross
- Senate torture report
- Waterboarding
