The hooding dispute
===================

The hooding dispute is John Kiriakou's account of an argument at a CIA safe house in Pakistan on the night of the Abu Zubaydah capture in March 2002, over the treatment of prisoners taken in the accompanying raids.

The incident

Kiriakou has said that so many al-Qaeda fighters were captured that night that they had to be brought to the safe house for interrogation in shifts, in a patrol wagon. The first group of ten emerged hooded.  He asked a colleague who was working for him why they were hooded, and was told that the officers did not want the prisoners to see their faces. 

By his account he became angry and asked whether the man was seriously telling him he had never read the Geneva Convention, adding that it is a war crime to put hoods on prisoners, and ordering the hoods removed. The colleague told him to stop. Kiriakou said he would report him to headquarters; the colleague said he would report Kiriakou. Kiriakou took the hoods off, and both men reported each other. 

The reprimand

Kiriakou was the one reprimanded.  He has described his reaction as a recalibration rather than an escalation: the Geneva Convention was, in his reading, crystal clear that hooding a prisoner is a war crime, and so he concluded that it was a new world and that he would have to get used to it. 

As a precursor

Asked when he first became aware of what would later be called enhanced interrogation techniques, Kiriakou dated his first inkling to this period in Pakistan, and offered the hooding dispute as the specific instance.  The formal proposal came later, after his return to headquarters in May 2002. 

See also

- Abu Zubaydah
- Geneva Conventions
- Enhanced interrogation techniques
- Pakistan Station (2002)
