Federal Torture Act
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The Federal Torture Act, as John Kiriakou described it, was in force well before the September 11 attacks and had concrete enforcement history. Following World War II, the United States executed Japanese soldiers who had waterboarded American POWs, establishing waterboarding as a death-penalty offense under U.S. law.

In January 1968, when a Washington Post photograph showed a U.S. soldier waterboarding a North Vietnamese prisoner, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara ordered an immediate investigation. The soldier was arrested, convicted of torture, and sentenced to twenty years at Leavenworth.

Kiriakou juxtaposed this enforcement history with the post-9/11 CIA program: "But then in 2002, like magic, it's all legal." He stresses the statute itself was never touched: Congress never voted on any change to the Federal Torture Act of 1946, and the text was never amended. What changed was only the Justice Department's own interpretation of it, Office of Legal Counsel opinions reclassified specific techniques as not constituting torture, making the practice legal in the executive branch's own reading without any actual legislative act. He traces the statute's roots to Nuremberg: passed in 1946, the same year the U.S. executed the Japanese soldiers, it sits alongside the United Nations Convention Against Torture, a convention Kiriakou says the United States itself authored and is a signatory to, as the two legal bases on which he concluded the CIA's post-9/11 program was a crime.

'The lawyers stood on their heads' (The Inquiry)

John Kiriakou says torture is illegal "by any measure" under the Federal Torture Act of 1946 and the United Nations Convention Against Torture, and that Justice Department lawyers "stood on their heads to somehow make it not illegal" after 9/11.

The line he says he drew in 2002

Kiriakou distinguishes sharply between the lawbreaking his job consisted of and the lawbreaking he refused. "When you''re a CIA officer, your job is to break the law. It''s to break the laws of other countries. I was thrilled to get on a plane, go overseas and commit espionage. That''s what I was paid to do, and it was fun and it was rewarding. But I drew the line where it came to breaking US law."

The objection he says he made to his superiors in the middle of 2002 rested on two instruments: a domestic statute "which specifically prohibits us from doing exactly the things that you''re telling me we''re going to start doing," and the international convention, "not only were we signatories to the United Nations Convention Against Torture, we wrote the United Nations Convention Against Torture." In this telling he dates the domestic statute to 1946; the Federal Torture Act was enacted in 1994, and the discrepancy is preserved here as spoken.

Why the case against the psychologists was only civil

Discussing the Salim lawsuit in 2017, Kiriakou treats the choice of forum as the defendants' good fortune rather than a judgement on the conduct. "I think frankly that Mitchell and Jessen are very, very fortunate in that this is not a criminal trial, because this is a violation, their actions are a violation of the federal torture act and a violation of the United Nations Convention Against Torture. So they're lucky, I think, that this is only a civil suit." The year he gives for the statute, 1946, is preserved as spoken.

See also

- Waterboarding
- Enhanced interrogation techniques
- Senate Torture Report
