Waterboarding
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Waterboarding is a technique John Kiriakou described as invented by the Chinese approximately in the 15th century, though he has elsewhere dated the first documented use of the technique to the 14th century, when it was known variously as water torture, the water cure, or tormenta de toca, a term referring to the thin cloth placed over the victim's mouth. The procedure involves strapping a prisoner to a board or gurney with his feet elevated above his head, placing cloth or burlap over his mouth, and pouring water onto his face; most people, Kiriakou said, don't last more than twenty or thirty seconds on the board. The sensation is of drowning; in many cases, Kiriakou said, the prisoner actually does take in water: "In the case of Abu Zubaydah, we drowned him. His heart stopped beating and he had to be revived so that he could be tortured more." In one telling Kiriakou says Zubaydah took in so much water that his heart stopped twice and he had to be revived twice; in another he says Zubaydah's heart stopped and he was revived by a doctor on-site so the interrogation could continue, "something that Dr. Mengele would have done." Kiriakou has stated as a black-and-white position that torture is wrong under any circumstances: "it's not legal, it's not Christian, and it has no place in American policy."

Citing historian Henry Charles Lea's A History of the Inquisition of Spain, Kiriakou said Spanish Inquisitors measured waterboarding's severity by the number of water jars used on a victim, sometimes as many as six to eight, and that, per historian Ed Peters of the University of Pennsylvania, a doctor's presence was required during the sessions. He traced American exposure to the technique to the Korean War, which led to the U.S. Air Force's SERE program (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape), in which pilots are subjected to simulated waterboarding to prepare them for capture, a training use Kiriakou stressed is fundamentally different from its use as a CIA interrogation technique meant to induce genuine, unending learned helplessness.

Legal history before 2002

Kiriakou has cited the same three data points establishing waterboarding's decades-long criminal status under U.S. law across several interviews. First, the Federal Torture Act of 1946 explicitly prohibited it. Second, following the Second World War, the United States executed Japanese soldiers who had waterboarded American POWs, waterboarding was at that time a capital offense.

Third, on January 11, 1968, the Washington Post published a front-page photograph of a U.S. soldier waterboarding a North Vietnamese prisoner. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara ordered an investigation the day the photograph appeared. The soldier was arrested, convicted of torture, and sentenced to twenty years of hard labor at Leavenworth.

Kiriakou's recurring framing of the 2002 reauthorization: "The law never changed. We changed." In 2002, he said, "like magic, it's all legal." The CIA's justification, as he characterized it: "We can do it because we're the good guys", or, in a variant phrasing, "we just decided because we're the good guys."

Escalation ladder

Waterboarding sat atop a CIA-designated escalation ladder of enhanced interrogation techniques. Lower rungs included the facial hold and the insult slap, a strike meant to shock and humiliate rather than inflict lasting pain, and "cramped confinement," holding a detainee in a dark, cramped container for up to 18 hours depending on its size, and "wall standing," forcing a detainee to stand with feet shoulder-width from a wall and arms extended so only his fingertips touched it, exploiting muscle fatigue. A standing rule required that the detainee's head and neck "be supported with a rolled hood or towel that provides a collar to help prevent whiplash."

On August 1, 2002, CIA lawyer Jay Bybee sent a classified legal opinion titled "Interrogation of Al Qaeda Operative" to CIA general counsel John Rizzo; the very next day, the CIA began torturing Abu Zubaydah nearly around the clock using the full range of approved techniques.

Learned-helplessness doctrine

The CIA's stated goal for waterboarding was not intelligence extraction per se but the induction of learned helplessness, a psychological state of total subjugation in which the prisoner becomes so terrified of the interrogator that he will confess to anything on demand: "The prisoner is so terrified of you, so terrified of what you can do to him, that he'll whimper as soon as you walk into the room and just confess everything that you want him to confess to."

Kiriakou described the result: because torture produces confessions the prisoner believes the interrogator wants to hear, not accurate information, the intelligence generated is unreliable. He cited American POWs held in North Vietnam who, when asked to name crew members, recited the Pittsburgh Steelers offensive line or invented childhood friends' names to make the questioning stop.

Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times, Kiriakou says the repeated "virtual drowning" caused his heart to stop, and left him with seizures and convulsions. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 187 times. Under the accumulated pressure, KSM confessed to the murder of journalist Daniel Pearl, a confession Kiriakou said was demonstrably false, as KSM was not even in Pakistan when Pearl was killed. When shown video evidence disproving his claim, KSM argued that the arm visible in the video was hairy enough to be his.

McCain-Feinstein amendment, December 2014

The McCain-Feinstein anti-torture amendment passed into law in December 2014, formally ending the program. Senator John McCain credited Kiriakou on the Senate floor, stating that without his public disclosures, the American people would never have known the CIA was torturing prisoners.

The 2008 Hitchens demonstration

John Kiriakou has invoked the 2008 filmed self-experiment of Christopher Hitchens as the canonical rebuttal to those who describe waterboarding as "not a big deal." Hitchens, he says, was placed on his back with a towel across his face, insisted he would be able to breathe, and tapped out after "seventeen seconds." More telling, in Kiriakou's account, was the aftermath: "for the rest of his life, every time he couldn't breathe for a second, he would have panic attacks." Kiriakou uses the anecdote to close the argument with a single line: "Believe me, it's torture."

Officers waterboarded each other in training

Kiriakou's knowledge of the technique includes having undergone it. CIA officers, he says, "waterboarded each other in practice, in training", an experience he characterised in four words: "it was not pleasant."

That training shows in the corrections he offered when a 2026 interviewer improvised a mock waterboarding on set and got it wrong in every particular. Kiriakou's objections were mechanical rather than moral. The subject was upright when he needed to be lying almost flat, and his feet had to be higher than his head, "that's why they call it the water board." The cloth being used was the wrong material: an ordinary towel "is too thick. It holds too much liquid," where the technique calls for something that lets water through, such as a pillowcase or burlap. And the pouring vessel was too small; the point at which the subject begins coughing is the point at which the pour must continue, so the water has to be delivered from something closer to a gallon jug.

The detail is consistent with the learned-helplessness rationale he describes elsewhere: the technique's coercive power depends on the drowning sensation being unbroken, which is why each of the errors he identified, head too high, cloth too absorbent, vessel too small, would have interrupted it.

A confession that had already been made by someone else

Kiriakou uses the Daniel Pearl murder as a case in which the technique produced an answer the record could not accommodate. Pakistani authorities had already arrested and convicted a man who confessed to the beheading and was sentenced to a thousand years. Then, "after waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 187 times, he confessed to killing Daniel Pearl and sawing his head off", offering as proof the hair on his own arm against the arm visible in the video.

His point is not that Mohammed was innocent of it but that the method produces claims which cannot be tested: "sure, it could have been this guy... we have no idea."

See also

- Enhanced interrogation techniques
- Learned Helplessness
- Abu Zubaydah
- Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
- Federal Torture Act
- Central Intelligence Agency
- Guantanamo Bay
- Cold cell
- Sleep deprivation
