Guantanamo Bay
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Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, on the southeastern coast of Cuba, was a principal locus of the Central Intelligence Agency's detention and interrogation operations during the post-September 11 enhanced interrogation program. The base contains a secret CIA black-site annex known as Strawberry Fields, first publicly disclosed in the December 2014 Senate Torture Report.

Kiriakou's interim posting

John Kiriakou served at Guantanamo Bay during the summer of 2002 as the CIA station's interim Chief, between permanent Chiefs of station. The assignment came shortly after the capture of Abu Zubaydah in March 2002 in Pakistan, an operation Kiriakou led; he had become "a big star after Abu Zubaydah" and was approached by a senior agency official with the offer.

Kiriakou had never previously been to Cuba and accepted on that basis. The summer was "hot."

Inter-agency culture on the base

A distinctive feature of Guantanamo culture, in contrast with overseas U.S. embassies where agency personnel routinely greet and socialize with FBI, DEA, and ATF colleagues, is that personnel from different agencies avoid one another. "You're walking past somebody, you put your head down, like, 'Who's he?' 'I don't know. And I'm not telling him who I am.'"

The CIA's presence on the base is referred to even by other U.S. government personnel using the euphemism OGA, "Other Government Agency", "they don't even like to say the letters CIA, they just say OGA." All other personnel on the base know which buildings are CIA and are told only that they are not to enter.

CIA interrogations on the base, which for detainees including Abu Zubaydah included waterboarding, were audible to personnel of other agencies: "You can hear people screaming over there."

Population and permanent limbo

Kiriakou says Guantanamo once held almost 800 people at its peak, nearly all of them, in his account, innocent of any crime, a population reduced by 2023 to 35, of whom only three to five were considered the "worst of the worst." Detainees cleared for release have often had nowhere to go: six Uyghur prisoners found innocent of any crime could not be repatriated to China for fear of persecution, so two were resettled to Switzerland, two to Albania, and two to what Kiriakou calls "Tahiti" (Palau). He says one detainee had been cleared for release for seven years and, as of 2023, was still being held. By late 2024, Kiriakou put the remaining population at roughly 17, down from about 900, and said nearly all who had been released were innocent of any crime.

Kiriakou states Fidel Castro, while in power in Cuba, never cashed the rent checks the U.S. government sent for the base. He gives three reasons the U.S. keeps Guantanamo open: because it can, and to needle Cuba; because Congress passed a law early in the Obama administration barring the transfer of any Guantanamo prisoner to a U.S. prison; and because prisoners held there have no legal rights. He nonetheless says the only way to change the CIA is from the inside, and encourages young people to join the agency for that reason.

Kiriakou has drawn a comparison between Guantanamo and the "Alligator Alcatraz" migrant-detention facility opened in the Florida Everglades, noting it already has its own road signs. He also recounts telling a detainee during an interrogation that he was "the good cop" and threatening to send him somewhere worse than Guantanamo, specifically Jerusalem, which broke the detainee and got him talking before he was ultimately sent to Guantanamo.

Deaths at Guantanamo

Kiriakou says three additional prisoners were killed by the CIA at Guantanamo in 2006, as reported by his co-author Joe Hickman. He says Larry Wilkerson's estimate of roughly 108 deaths in military custody due to torture was later confirmed by the Associated Press, though he notes that figure covers only military custody and excludes deaths he attributes to the CIA, including the two he personally briefed on in 2002 and the three Hickman reported at Guantanamo.

Kiriakou attributes part of this permanent limbo to a law, signed by George W. Bush and re-signed by Barack Obama, barring any Guantanamo prisoner from ever entering the United States for any reason. He cites the case of an Iraqi detainee with a deteriorating spinal condition who could not be flown to Miami for surgery once medical equipment shipped to Guantanamo for the operation was damaged in transit; the detainee, per Kiriakou, was left permanently paralyzed.

A JAG officer's role, per Kiriakou

Kiriakou has argued that Ron DeSantis, who served in the Judge Advocate General's office at Guantanamo in 2005 and sat in on torture sessions there, should be disqualified from public office on that basis.

Who is left, and why they were there

Kiriakou puts the remaining population at around thirty-four, about half of them awaiting resettlement in a country willing to take them, and about seventeen who will never be released. At the maximum there were more than seven hundred, and his assessment is that almost every one of them was innocent of any crime. The mechanism he describes is a bounty economy in which a man who owed money could simply telephone the Americans, denounce his creditor as al-Qaeda, and never repay the loan.

Release talks for Abu Zubaydah were well advanced at the end of the Biden administration, an acknowledgement, after twenty-three years, that he was the wrong man, and foundered only on finding a country to accept him before the change of administration closed the window for another four years. There is no torture at Guantánamo now, Kiriakou says; it is simply Groundhog Day.

The severity of the restrictions on Abu Zubaydah is set out in a footnote to the Senate torture report, which Kiriakou paraphrases as providing that he shall never be released, shall never be able to speak to the media, and on death shall be cremated with his ashes thrown into the Caribbean. His own drawings of himself being tortured were classified top secret.

See also

- Strawberry Fields
- John Kiriakou
- Senate Torture Report
- Enhanced interrogation techniques
- Abu Zubaydah
- Waterboarding
- Central Intelligence Agency
