The cremation footnote is John Kiriakou’s name for a passage he says appears in the declassified executive summary of the Senate torture report, and which he treats as the plainest statement of what was decided about Abu Zubaydah.
Its terms, as he relays them: even though Abu Zubaydah was not a member of al-Qaeda, even though he had never pledged fealty to Osama bin Laden, and even though he never directly committed any crime against Americans or American installations, “he will never be allowed to leave Guantanamo — ever.” The footnote continues that when he dies, the CIA will cremate his body and throw his ashes in the Caribbean.[1][2]
Kiriakou’s objection is not to the man’s treatment in isolation but to what the arrangement forecloses: “That’s not justice. And that’s not the American way. If this man is as bad as we say he is, then let’s give him his day in court — because whether we like his politics or not, that’s what the Constitution says that he gets, and we’ve never given him that.”[2]
Why no trial
He attributes the absence of any trial for the five remaining high-value detainees to institutional self-protection rather than security. The CIA is “rightfully afraid that they will talk about the torture that they underwent” — torture that was a crime domestically and, the United States being a signatory to the United Nations Convention Against Torture, internationally as well — and afraid they will speak about sources and methods, and about the programme itself.[3][4]
His reading of the cost is historical. Because the testimony of Abu Zubaydah, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the other three has been kept secret for twenty years, “we’ll never really know what they have to say”, and “we’ll never know the lessons that could have been learned because of the 9-11 attacks, because we’re not allowed to know them.”[5][6]
He pairs this with the disclaimer in the 9/11 Commission report, whose members held the highest clearances and were nonetheless barred from interviewing the key witnesses — and barred from interviewing the people who had interviewed them.[7][8]