The Grenier counterinsurgency op-ed
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The Grenier counterinsurgency op-ed is the New York Times piece in which Robert Grenier, former CIA station chief in Islamabad, argued that the events of 6 January 2021 should be understood as an insurgency. John Kiriakou answered it in print and then defended the answer on air, and the objection he presses is to the word itself.

> "What he talked about in an op-ed in the New York Times two weeks ago today was the fact that we need to treat events, insurrections, like we saw on January the 6th here in Washington as insurgencies. And with insurgencies come counterinsurgencies. And I said in my piece that I've known Grenier for a very long time, and what he means is we need to be killing people."

The scale, as Kiriakou states it

He does not defend the day. "I was as sick as everybody else was on January 6th. I was as angry as everybody else was." What he disputes is the proportion. "We had a demonstration of some 15 or 20,000 people. And we had, what, 500 to 800 that actually went inside the Capitol and were violent. And most of them were unarmed. I think that there are accounts of three people who we know definitively were armed. And you're in the New York Times saying that we need to treat this as a counterinsurgency."

What the word describes

The force of his objection is that counterinsurgency is not a metaphor but a procedure he has watched being run.

> "What happens in counterinsurgencies is you go door to door and you bust down the door. Sometimes you breach the door with explosives. You grab everybody inside. You zip tie them or cuff them. You take them to some sort of an interrogation center and then you just sort it all out later. Well, we've got this thing called a Constitution and you can't do stuff like that."

His stated purpose in replying was to put something on the record: "in whatever little way that I could, I wanted to lay down a marker and say this is wrong. This is anti-American. This is a violation of our constitutional rights. And we've got to put a stop to it. I was disgusted that the New York Times gave him a platform to even spout this nonsense."

The line about Trump

On Grenier's argument that the movement had a charismatic leader whose "veneer of invincibility must similarly be crushed," Kiriakou reads a second meaning under the first: "to me, that means to take him out. Take him out however you want to, politically, legally, judicially, whatever. But some people are going to read that as just taking him out, if you know what I mean."

He treats the vocabulary as professional rather than rhetorical. Asked about the list of organisations named in the piece, he wants the evidence, "who says that they were committed to violent extremism? I'd like to see what his sources are for that", and then names the register: "this is CIA code words for using violence, extrajudicial violence against Americans."

See also

- Bob Grenier
- John Brennan
- Deep state
- John Kiriakou
