The 9/11 truth honorarium
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John Kiriakou spent part of a broadcast working through, in public, an engagement he was due to keep that same night and plainly wished he had not accepted.

How it happened

The booking came through a friend. Kiriakou described a PR man who had run into a very bad period, his wife left him, he lost his job, former employees sued him, he was arrested, and said that he had stayed loyal through it: "I'm one of the most loyal people out there." The man had once done public relations for Julian Assange, WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden, and now works for the far right "because they pay him and the far left walked away."

The request was simple: would Kiriakou give a speech on the anniversary of 9/11 about what the day meant to him? "I said, yeah, sure. He said, I'll give you $500. I said, okay, great. That was it. That was the extent of it."

Only later did someone see a poster advertising the event under the banner of a 9/11 engineers-and-architects organisation, "featuring, you know, John Kiriakou and all these people who I've always considered to be like deeply insane." His complaint to the friend, "Dog gone it, Trevor, you put me with a 9/11 truth organization", drew the answer "didn't you do your due diligence?" Kiriakou's reply was that he had not: "I trusted you. We're friends. You asked me to do it."

The decision not to withdraw

His sister called and told him he had to pull out. Kiriakou refused: "I can't. I made a commitment. I have to stand by my commitments." He said he had thought about it for a couple of weeks before deciding to go. Dennis Kucinich, he noted, was introducing him.

The fee was the whole of the original attraction. "It's an honorarium," he said, "which is the only reason I was doing it. It's $500 I didn't have yesterday", money earmarked, he admitted, for something he had seen on eBay. His manager was less impressed, telling him his rate was $10,000 and that he would be strangled for taking $500; Ted Rall said he was on the manager's side. Kiriakou added a further grievance, the talk was at 9:45 at night, well past when he is usually wound down.

What he intended to say

Kiriakou set out his speech in advance, and it was not a concession. He planned to tell the room: "you and I will never ever agree on whether or not Building 7 was controlled demolition. I'll never believe that it was. I will never believe that such a thing as thermite paint exists and is suddenly somehow spontaneously explosive."

Having said that, he intended to give them the part he does believe: that he can "take a shit on the Saudis for hours without even taking a breath, and on the Israelis, both relative to the 9/11 attacks. And so for sure, that's what I'm going to do." Told the Pakistanis probably deserved some too, he agreed: "That's right."

The lunch

Earlier that day a lunch accompanied the event. Kiriakou found himself beside a man who wanted to explain that the killing of Charlie Kirk had been a shot to the jugular from 200 metres, and to ask who is good at such precision, the Israelis, concluding it was a Mossad operation. Kiriakou cut him off. "I just said, 'Stop. Please just stop. I'm not going to have this conversation. Just stop.'" He had already told Rall he had not realised what he had agreed to when he agreed to it.

See also

- Julian Assange
- Edward Snowden
- The Alternative Obituaries
- Ted Rall
