The Americans Who Tell the Truth portrait
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On February 7, 2013, the Government Accountability Project gathered at Busboys and Poets in Washington to unveil a portrait of John Kiriakou, painted by the Maine artist Robert Shetterly for his series Americans Who Tell the Truth. 

The series

Shetterly told the room that the project was something he had never expected to be doing and had not wanted to do. Eleven years earlier he had been a surrealist supporting a family and making a very different kind of painting, when, as he saw it, the country was being led into a war by an administration using fear, propaganda, racism and fundamentalism, with the media doing nothing much except in its alternative corners.  His first instinct had been to leave the country out of shame; instead he decided that rather than obsessing about the people who were lying, he would surround himself with the people he admired, Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Alice Paul, Howard Zinn, and paint fifty portraits, inscribing into each the subject's own words.  By the night of Kiriakou's unveiling there were 187, and Shetterly said he had no intention of stopping.  The portraits travel to schools, colleges, museums, libraries and community centres across the United States, and Shetterly noted that having Kiriakou in the collection meant that wherever the painting went, and wherever Kiriakou himself was, he could be used to teach these values. 

The inscription

Shetterly read only the first line before the unveiling and asked Kiriakou to read the rest himself. The full text runs: even if torture works it cannot be tolerated, not in one case or a thousand or a million; if their efficacy becomes the measure of abhorrent acts, all sorts of unspeakable crimes somehow become acceptable. I may have found myself on the wrong side of the government on torture, but I'm on the right side of history. There are things we should not do even in the name of national security, and one of them, I now firmly believe, is torture. 

Shetterly defended the first clause at length, anticipating the objection that everyone knows torture does not work and that the concession is therefore unnecessary. It is very important to say, he argued: to say that even if it works it is something that so defines our species as something we do not want to be, that it cannot be tolerated.  The quote was later set to music: the jazz pianist Marian Driscoll, who had spent a year working with Shetterly on a new American songbook built from the inscriptions on the portraits, sang Kiriakou's at the unveiling. 

The evening

Proceeds from the posters and from Kiriakou's book The Reluctant Spy, both on sale that night, went to Teaching for Change, Americans Who Tell the Truth and Kiriakou's defence fund.  Kiriakou opened his own remarks by asking forgiveness for reading from prepared text, explaining that he had to pass everything through his attorneys, who said he had a tendency to slander. 

See also

- Government Accountability Project
- The Reluctant Spy
- Jesselyn Radack
- FCI Loretto
- Enhanced interrogation techniques
- Ralph Nader
- Heather Kiriakou
