"Most other countries are more moral than the CIA"
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"Most other countries are more moral than the CIA" is John Kiriakou's reply to a viewer who asked, given his history with the agency, whether he believed the United States had the most moral intelligence service in the world or whether some other country acted more morally.

The answer

Kiriakou did not qualify it. "Most other countries are more moral than the CIA," he said, and then closed off the softer readings of the question in turn: "I know I do not believe that the CIA is one of the most moral or one of the more moral or moral in any way."

The reason given

The practice he names as disqualifying is targeted killing, and the qualifier he attaches to it is what carries the argument. It is "not when you just wantonly fly around the world and murder people whose politics you don't don't like, but who pose no threat to the United States."

The objection is therefore not to lethal action as such but to lethal action detached from any threat, the same distinction that runs through his other work on drone strikes and on the legal findings required before the CIA's paramilitary arm can kill, where the standard he describes is that the President must assert the target to be a clear and present danger.

Who is excluded from the comparison

Kiriakou makes one structural exception, and makes it for a reason of complicity rather than of quality. "You know, the the Five Eyes aside because the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, we do a lot of things together." Partners in the same operations cannot serve as a moral control group.

Who is included

The countries he then lists are deliberately unglamorous, small and middle-sized states with limited reach. "But look at like, you know, Belgium, the Netherlands, Greece, Italy, uh the Nordic countries, you know, the Bahamas, uh I mean, you can come up with a hundred countries whose whose intelligence services act more morally than the CIA does."

The list is doing an argumentative job. Several of the services on it, the Italians in particular, whom Kiriakou elsewhere calls "very, very good", are competent as well as restrained, which removes the defence that better behaviour is merely the consequence of lesser capability.

See also

- Five Eyes
- Italian intelligence services
- Greek Intelligence Service
- The Clear And Present Danger Finding
