The German POW chess analogy
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Asked in December 2007 whether he had considered waterboarding to be torture at the time it was being used, John Kiriakou said that he had not, and offered the historical comparison that had shaped his thinking.

Chess with the Germans

He had heard stories, he said, of captured German prisoners from the Second World War who played chess with their interrogators, and who over the course of many weeks and months of chess developed a rapport with them, until the German ended up giving information.  That, in his judgement, was not the situation the CIA faced. Al-Qaeda, he said, is not like a Second World War German prisoner of war; it is a different world. These men hate us more than they love life, and so they are not going to be convinced that because you are a nice guy and they can trust you and they have a rapport with you, they will confess and give you their operations.  When his interviewer put it back to him, that these were not men you could slowly seduce into talking, Kiriakou agreed: not these guys. 

Why he changed his mind

Having laid out the reasoning, Kiriakou then withdrew from its conclusion. At the time, he said, he had felt that waterboarding was something they needed to do; but as time passed and September 11 moved further back into history, he had come to think that waterboarding was probably something the United States should not be in the business of doing.  Asked why he said that now, his answer was a single sentence: because we're Americans and we're better than that.  Asked why he had not felt that way at the time, he said he had been so angry, and had wanted so much to help disrupt future attacks, that he had felt it was the only thing they could do. 

The tension was never fully resolved in the interview. Later in the same conversation Kiriakou described himself as engaged in an internal intellectual battle, weighing the idea that waterboarding may be torture against the quality of the information often obtained after it was used, and said that if another prisoner were caught he would be very tempted to use the same techniques. 

See also

- Waterboarding
- Enhanced interrogation techniques
- Abu Zubaydah
- Brian Ross
- Ticking time bomb scenario
- The CIA defense
