George W. Bush
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George W. Bush was the 43rd President of the United States. In John Kiriakou's account, Bush personally authorized the CIA torture program, denied its existence for years, and, at the moment Kiriakou went public, deflected responsibility onto "a rogue CIA officer."

Authorizing the torture program

Kiriakou places the program's start on August 1, 2002, the day Bush signed the executive order allowing it to be implemented, with contract psychologists Mitchell and Jessen already in position. He is blunt that the president knew what he was approving: "George W. Bush signed off on this program. He knew exactly what he was doing." Even if Bush did not follow the day-to-day, Kiriakou says, the program was signed off from the president down, with Gina Haspel, his own second-line boss, intimately involved in the planning and execution.

In Kiriakou's firsthand telling, Dick Cheney brought Bush the interrogation guidance, and Bush asked the appropriate question, "Has Justice approved this? Has this been cleared with the Department of Justice?", was told yes, and said okay.

When George Tenet later admitted that Abu Zubaydah was not the senior al-Qaeda figure the White House had claimed, Kiriakou, citing Ron Suskind's reporting, says Bush answered: "I said he was important. You're not going to make me lose face on this, are you?"

At Tenet's request, Bush also removed the FBI, and with it Ali Soufan, from the country where Abu Zubaydah was held, handing the CIA primacy over the interrogation.

"We don't torture"

Bush said "we don't torture" in 2002, Kiriakou notes, and said it again in 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, and 2007, part of why he argues that everything the government has told the public about torture since 2002 has been a lie. Watching one such statement on television, Kiriakou told his wife: "He is a bald-faced liar. He's looking the American people in the eye and he's lying to us."

The South Portico moment

Days after Kiriakou's December 2007 ABC interview with Brian Ross, on a Friday, Bush was walking from the South Portico of the White House to the helicopter for Camp David when a reporter shouted a question about torture. Bush stopped, turned, and said that if there was torture, it was the result of "a rogue CIA officer." Kiriakou's reaction to his wife was immediate: "Brian Ross's sources are at the White House, and they're going to try to pin this on me."

The next day, per Kiriakou, Bush said of him: "I don't know this man. I don't know this man's motivation. I don't know why this man threw me under the bus." Kiriakou's answer: because you approved a torture program.

After 9/11

Kiriakou recounts that in the days after September 11, with all aircraft grounded, the only flight allowed in American skies was the one Bush ordered for the bin Laden family, roughly a hundred relatives gathered in Orlando and left on a Saudi jet, the reasoning being that they would otherwise become targets.

When Cofer Black briefed the president on the CIA's plan to invade Afghanistan and Bush asked how long it would take, Black famously replied that within weeks "flies will be walking on the eyeballs of your enemies, Mr. President." But the moment Bush said the words "nation building," Kiriakou says, "we knew we were in trouble", al-Qaeda in Afghanistan had already effectively ceased to exist.

Bush also signed an executive order altering Executive Order 12333's longstanding ban on CIA assassinations.

Iraq

Kiriakou frames the Iraq confrontation as "a pissing match between Saddam Hussein and a series of American presidents", the first Bush, Clinton, and the second Bush all demanding Saddam fall in line, at a cost of untold tens of thousands of lives. His position on accountability is categorical: "George Bush lied us into war. He has to be fired... he must be held accountable for lying us into war."

The president in the room

Asked to compare the two men he briefed, Kiriakou's assessment of Bush is warm and unflattering at once: "Bush was warm and friendly. Not terribly bright, but the nicest guy in the world", and "nothing at all like" Cheney.

The instance he gives is a briefing at which the president opened with a joke about a colleague's handlebar moustache and got a better one back, about William Howard Taft and the bathtub. "W laughed to the point where I thought water was going to squirt out of his nose or something."

See also

- Dick Cheney
- George Tenet
- Abu Zubaydah
- Brian Ross
- Gina Haspel
- Mitchell and Jessen
- Executive Order 12333
- Cofer Black
