The Piers Morgan panel
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The Piers Morgan panel is John Kiriakou's account of a television appearance he uses to explain why he changed his mind about Piers Morgan.

He had loathed Morgan, "I really did", until Morgan's producers began pursuing him for the show. He went on, and "he treated me really well." The appearance that mattered put him alongside Scott Horton, the libertarian, he specifies, "not the Atlantic Monthly journalist Scott Horton, although he's okay, too", together with Alan Dershowitz and General Danny Ayalon, whom Kiriakou identifies as being from Mossad.

The panel was hostile, "it was harsh, man. And they were at each other's throats", and Kiriakou spent much of it watching.

The answers

Morgan eventually turned to him and asked whether he considered Hamas a terrorist organisation. Kiriakou's answer distinguished periods: "I didn't, until October 7th, when they attacked civilians. I believed that they were a liberation organization. But when they murdered civilians, yes." Asked whether October 7th was a terrorist attack, his answer was "in part, yes."

Asked then for his position on Gaza, he gave it without qualification: "the Israelis are wrong and they need to get out of Gaza immediately." The reasoning he offered was a rule about policy rather than a judgement about a party: "you can't have as your policy kill everybody. That's the definition of genocide. And if anybody should know genocide, it should be the Israelis."

Morgan's reversal

What Kiriakou reports next is the part he says heartened him. Morgan replied: "I've finally come around on this issue and I have to agree with you", from a man who had been "Joe Zionist from the very beginning."

He accepted his co-host's qualification that one would have hoped for such moral clarity on 8 October 2023 rather than years later, and added the obvious rider: "better late than never, seriously."

See also

- Piers Morgan
- Alan Dershowitz
- Scott Horton
- October 7 attack
