McCain-Feinstein Amendment
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The McCain-Feinstein Amendment, sponsored by Senator John McCain and passed in 2015, formally and permanently banned torture by U.S. government personnel, making it illegal under any circumstances. Per John Kiriakou, the amendment was not a new prohibition so much as a restoration: the Federal Torture Act of 1946 had never been amended by Congress, but U.S. policy strayed from it after 2002 when Justice Department lawyers reinterpreted, rather than changed, the underlying statute to permit specific techniques. McCain-Feinstein codified the Army Field Manual as the single standard all interrogators must follow, restoring, in Kiriakou's words, "the original" law.

Kiriakou credits his own December 2007 whistleblowing with helping bring the amendment about. He points to the same enforcement history he cites elsewhere for the Federal Torture Act, the 1946 U.S. execution of Japanese soldiers for waterboarding American POWs, and the 20-year hard-labor sentence given to an American soldier convicted of waterboarding a prisoner in 1968, as proof that "the law never changed" between the 1940s and the post-9/11 program; the 2002,2005 CIA program was, in his account, illegal under the statute all along, and McCain-Feinstein simply reasserted that fact into permanent, formal law. He gives the same account of the amendment's mechanism elsewhere: it restricted all interrogators, including civilian agencies, to techniques already approved in the Army Field Manual, a real legal change, he notes, but one built on an executive-branch document rather than statute, meaning a future pro-torture administration could revert it without any congressional vote.

Drafting a bill for the Minnesota delegation

Kiriakou says his own advocacy fed directly into the amendment's drafting. He wrote an anti-torture bill and brought it to the Minnesota congressional delegation, working through Senator Amy Klobuchar's staff, who put him in contact with the Senate Intelligence Committee as it was drafting its own legislation; that process became the McCain-Feinstein amendment to the 2016 National Defense Authorization Act.

A role from prison

Kiriakou says he was "very proud" to play a role in the amendment's passage, and recalls learning from prison, six weeks before his release, around mid-December 2014, that the Senate torture report had been released and that Senator John McCain had stood up on the Senate floor and said the country owed Kiriakou "a debt of gratitude," crediting him as the impetus for the amendment's passage, without his whistleblowing, McCain said, the American people would never have known what the CIA was doing in their name. Kiriakou more modestly says he likes to "claim some responsibility" for spurring the congressional debate that led to the amendment's passage.

'On paper'

Asked in 2025 whether torture had simply become openly permissible again, Kiriakou answered by conceding the limits of his own achievement. "I'm sorry to tell you that my revelations had a great impact on paper. My revelations were what led to passage of the McCain-Feinstein amendment that banned torture in the United States. But it did nothing to put pressure on our allies like Israel to stop torture, or to dial back the torture."

He also expects the American ban itself to have been engineered around, and describes in advance the disclosure he anticipates: "I wouldn't be surprised at all if another whistleblower were to come out and say, well yeah, we don't torture, but we still render prisoners to countries that do torture. And then we pay subsidies to those countries' intelligence services to provide us with the information that the prisoner finally gives."

See also

- Federal Torture Act
- Senate Torture Report
- John Kiriakou
- CIA Torture Program Whistleblowing
