The rebuttal book
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The rebuttal book is John Kiriakou's name for the volume with which a group of retired senior CIA officers answered the Senate torture report. He describes it as the agency leadership closing ranks in public after the report's release: "a big group of retired senior CIA leaders, George Tenet, Jim Pavitt, big important people, Jose Rodriguez and Cofer Black. They all attached their names to a rebuttal. A book that was published saying torture worked, torture saved lives, we would do it again if we could, we didn't make any mistakes."

His own verdict on it is one word, "outrageous", and the detail he fixes on is not the argument but the vocabulary. Asked whether the signatories at least conceded that the programme had been torture, he answers that they did not: "They called it enhanced interrogation techniques."

He sets the book alongside what its signatories were paid elsewhere. Tenet, he says, "got 6 million for his book" and Rodriguez "got 4 million for his book," and the group generally moved on to seats on the boards of American defence contractors and to work as television commentators, against which he sets the fact that "none of the other people involved with the torture program, none served any time."

The reaction at publication

Kiriakou gave a longer account in August 2015, as the book was appearing, when the interview was built around it. He identifies the publisher as the Naval Institute and the contributors as three former CIA directors together with a run of senior officials, naming George Tenet, Porter Goss, Michael Hayden, former deputy director John McLaughlin, Michael Morell, former Counterterrorist Center deputy Philip Mudd, former chief legal counsel John Rizzo and Jose Rodriguez.

The motive he assigns is reputational rather than evidentiary: "the reason that they've written this book is not necessarily to refute the Senate torture report, but to try to save their own reputation. The torture program is their legacy. It's what history will know them by." The method he assigns is repetition, that if they keep "repeating the lie that torture worked over and over and over again," the public will prove "either too gullible or too stupid to appreciate the truth."

Asked whether the exercise was really about legal exposure, he said it was not, and gave the reason: for many of the crimes set out in the report "the statutes of limitations have expired." What was left to contest was therefore "these men's place in history."

What the book does not answer

His sharpest objection is that the book answers a case the Senate never made. The Senate torture report, he argues, "did not dwell on the handful of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques that had been approved by the Justice Department", it focused on the instances where interrogators went "over and above what had been allowed," which is the part the rebuttal passes over. The examples he gives are rectal rehydration, "which I would call sexual assault"; obstruction of justice; and the unapproved cold cell in which prisoners died of exposure. His question is put to Tenet directly: "I'd like to know why that doesn't constitute torture to George Tenet, and I would like to know why the people who carried out these techniques have not been prosecuted."

He also sets the report's reliability against the book's. The Senate study rested "solely on primary source documentation, that is contemporaneous CIA reporting from the field ... information that came from the horse's mouth," and its findings matched those of the CIA Inspector General's own 2005 report, released in 2009, which likewise found that no actionable intelligence was collected, no attacks disrupted and no American lives saved.

Invited at the end of the programme to sum the book up, he gave the compressed version: "nothing more than an attempt for a group of discredited individuals to try to save their reputations. Torture does not work. It has never worked. It has never disrupted an attack. It has never saved an American life and it has no place in American policy."

See also

- Senate Torture Report
- George Tenet
- Jose Rodriguez
- Cofer Black
- Enhanced interrogation techniques
