In December 2007, John Kiriakou became the first former CIA officer to publicly confirm the agency’s enhanced interrogation program, asserting that torture was official U.S. government policy personally approved by the president.[1]
An incremental turn: the hooding incident
Kiriakou spent fifteen years at the CIA, the first half in analysis focused solely on Iraq and the second half in counterterrorism operations, which he entered before 9/11 working against Greek terrorist groups.[2] He describes his path to whistleblowing as gradual rather than sudden — a slide into becoming “the human rights guy” that began years earlier in the field, the night a special-operations officer on loan to him brought in prisoners with hoods over their heads. Told hooding is a war crime under the Geneva Convention, the officer refused to remove them and threatened, “I’m going to report you to headquarters.” Kiriakou shot back, “I’m already reporting you for committing a war crime.” They reported each other. The episode crystallized, for Kiriakou, a broader pattern: “we’re just going to pretend these laws don’t exist because we’re the good guys.”[3][4][5]
He says his change of heart traced to roughly six months after 9/11, when he realized the post-attack changes he had assumed were temporary were becoming permanent, reshaping the CIA into what he calls a paramilitary and cyber-espionage organization rather than one built around recruiting spies and analysis.[6] He volunteered three times to deploy to Afghanistan before finally being sent to Pakistan as chief of counterterrorism operations, where he helped lead the raid that captured Abu Zubaydah — but says torture was “a bridge too far” for him even after witnessing other illegal and unethical CIA activity over his career.[7] A friend and colleague — a brigadier general and psychiatrist from the same church and men’s group — told him colleagues privately called him “the human rights guy” behind his back; Kiriakou says he took it as a compliment, preferring it to being called “the torturer.”[8] He was passed over for promotion one month after leading the Zubaydah capture, and says the CIA’s chief of counterterrorism told his promotion panel he had displayed “a shocking lack of commitment to counterterrorism” for declining torture training; he was eventually promoted anyway.[9][10] Watching interrogators report back to headquarters, on what he says happened dozens of times, that they believed they had the wrong person, he decided the work “wasn’t for me,” resigned from the CIA in 2004, and — freshly divorced and wanting to spend weekends with his kids rather than return overseas for another year-long tour — did not return to the agency.[11][12][13]
Waiting for someone else to speak first
Kiriakou says he was approached in the CIA cafeteria and asked to be certified in enhanced interrogation techniques; seeking advice on the seventh floor from a senior officer he had worked for a decade earlier, he was told to “run screaming from the room” — that it was a torture program and “a slippery slope right to prison.”[14] Of fourteen CIA officers asked whether they wanted to be trained in the techniques, he says he alone declined, on the grounds that the program was not merely immoral but illegal.[15][16][17] The CIA began torturing Abu Zubaydah on August 1, 2002; Kiriakou was not present, but as executive assistant to the CIA’s deputy director for operations he read the incoming cable traffic and briefed director George Tenet on it every morning. He says every FBI agent stationed in the host country left rather than be present for or associated with the torture.[18][19] He considered it a war crime under the UN Convention Against Torture and the federal Torture Act, and says he expected someone to go public sooner: “I just figured somebody would.”[20]
For years afterward, Kiriakou says he assumed someone else — a doctor present at a black site, an officer who had fainted during an interrogation — would be the one to go to the press first. No one did.[21] He describes cables coming back from the secret sites in which staff from the Office of Medical Services objected on oath grounds — “I took an oath to do no harm, I’m not doing this” — while a secretary fainted watching a torture session and some officers curtailed career-ending overseas assignments in protest; the doctor who revived Abu Zubaydah so the interrogation could continue was nicknamed “Dr. Mengele” by CIA personnel.[22][23][24][25] He says a senior intelligence service woman was escorted out of the White House, had her badge taken, and was told never to return, on suspicion — never confirmed — that she had blown the whistle on the CIA’s secret prisons; he says he never named her.[26][27] By the time he went public, Human Rights Watch (2005), Amnesty International (2006), and a leaked, unpublished International Committee of the Red Cross report (2007) had already stated the CIA was torturing prisoners; someone had also already leaked that the CIA ran secret prisons, though Kiriakou says that leaker’s identity was never determined. He notes he was simply the first current or former CIA officer to confirm it publicly, on the record.[28][29]
Going to ABC News, December 2007
Kiriakou describes deciding to speak to ABC’s Brian Ross after concluding the White House would scapegoat him for the torture program regardless of what he did: “In for a penny, in for a pound. Whatever he asks me, I’m just going to tell the truth.”[30][31] He says Ross first approached him around December 11, 2007, claiming a source had said Kiriakou personally tortured Abu Zubaydah, which he denied — he says he had never laid a hand on Zubaydah or any other prisoner, and had instead been “the only person who was ever kind to Abu Zubaydah.”[15][32][33] While he weighed Ross’s invitation to appear on camera, President Bush told a press conference, looking into the camera, “we do not torture” — which Kiriakou, watching with his wife, herself a senior CIA officer, called a “bald-faced liar” moment — and then days later told a reporter shouting a question that any torture was the work of a “rogue CIA officer.” Kiriakou concluded the leak traced back to the White House and that he would be blamed regardless, prompting him to call Ross back and say, “I’ll give you your interview.”[34][35][36] He blew the whistle in December 2007, telling ABC he was asserting three things: that the CIA tortured prisoners, that torture was official U.S. policy, and that it had been personally approved by the president.[37] The day after the interview aired, Bush told reporters, “I don’t know this man. I don’t know why this man would throw me under the bus,” which Kiriakou considers an admission that what he had said was true.[38] Brian Ross has since said he feels “somewhat responsible” for Kiriakou going to prison, noting it was that interview that made Kiriakou the first person to publicly acknowledge the CIA’s use of waterboarding.[39]
‘I only wish I’d had the guts’
Kiriakou says the most important lesson of his whistleblowing was realizing he was not alone in his misgivings: the day after he went public, a retired deputy director of the CIA — a name the public would recognize — emailed him, “You’ve chosen a difficult path, but I’m glad somebody did. I only wish I had had the guts to do it myself.” He says he saved the email as a souvenir.[40][41][42][43] He has separately described FBI apologies — letters and emails from agents who worked his prosecution, since his conviction — in the same register of belated regret: he says two FBI agents involved in his arrest wrote to his attorneys to apologize soon after he went to prison, an anonymous email arrived roughly a month before one interview from a self-identified FBI agent apologizing for “the disgraceful way that the FBI and our government treated” him, and a third such apology followed — each saying, in different words, that agents at the working level had not wanted the case and had been ordered to pursue it for political reasons.[44][45][46][47][48][49]
Kiriakou counts on one hand the friends who abandoned him once his legal troubles began, and says every one of them had themselves been instrumental in running the torture program.[50] He calls his greatest professional accomplishment not the capture of Abu Zubaydah but a phone call from his wife six weeks before his release from prison: the Senate torture report had been released that day, and Senator John McCain had stood on the Senate floor crediting Kiriakou with providing the American people “a great public service” and with prompting passage of the McCain–Feinstein amendment.[51] He separately says McCain stated on the Senate floor that his going public was why the CIA ended the torture program and shut down its network of secret prisons, a rollout of closures running between 2005 and 2007.[52]
Congressional knowledge and the reversal under Brennan
Kiriakou says fewer than two dozen people in the entire U.S. government knew of the torture program when he was told of it, yet the congressional oversight committees both authorized and funded it — so later claims by members of Congress that they “had no idea” were, in his words, “just a lie.”[53][54] He notes that when he worked at the CIA, only eleven people were entitled to a daily President’s Daily Brief — the president, vice president, the secretaries of state and defense, the national security advisor, and a handful of National Security Council members — underscoring how narrow the circle of real knowledge was.[55]
Kiriakou says the FBI first invited him in under the pretext of an unrelated case similar to one involving a Japanese diplomat who had once tried to recruit him; the conversation turned amicable small talk into what he realized was an interrogation, and it became clear the agents cared only about his having disclosed the CIA’s torture program to Brian Ross at ABC News.[56]
He recounts that the Bush administration investigated him for a year and closed the case, because it is illegal to classify a criminal act and the FBI had already deemed torture a crime. The Obama administration, under John Brennan, reopened the case, recast the torture program as not having been a crime, and charged Kiriakou under the Espionage Act.[57][58] He says the CIA filed a crimes report against him with the FBI within 24 hours of the ABC interview, and the FBI investigated him for a year, from December 2007 to December 2008, before issuing a declination letter finding he had committed no crime.[59][60] Four weeks after Obama’s inauguration, Obama named John Brennan Deputy National Security Advisor for counterterrorism, and Brennan asked the Justice Department to secretly reopen the case; Kiriakou says discovery later turned up a memo in which Brennan told Attorney General Eric Holder to charge him with espionage, Holder’s staff wrote back that they didn’t believe he had committed espionage, and Brennan wrote back again, “charge him anyway.”[61] His phones were then tapped, his emails intercepted, and FBI teams followed him and his family — to church, to dinner, to Target, and even into the pews of his Greek Orthodox church, where agents reportedly sat behind them pretending to be congregants — for three years before his January 2012 arrest on five felonies, including three counts of espionage, one false-statement count, and one count of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1981.[62][63][64][65]
Building the case: charge stacking and a compromised jury pool
Two of the espionage counts stemmed from Kiriakou scanning and emailing a reporter the business card of a former colleague who had worked the rendition of Abu Omar and was never undercover; a third came from telling a New York Times reporter that after 9/11 the CIA had a program to kill or capture al-Qaeda members — information the Justice Department called top-secret despite it having already appeared in Vanity Fair three years earlier, a discrepancy Kiriakou’s attorneys raised in court before the charge was dropped.[66][67] He describes what he calls prosecutorial “charge stacking” — piling on as many felonies as possible so a defendant goes broke defending against them, then offering to drop most of the charges in exchange for a plea to one — as designed to ruin whistleblowers personally, financially, and professionally.[68] He points to a double standard: CIA Director David Petraeus had shown ten covert operatives’ names to his mistress and a disgruntled former officer in Bethesda, Maryland had exposed seven covert names on an anti-CIA website, and neither was charged, while Kiriakou — under the rarely used Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1981, for confirming one colleague’s last name to a reporter who never published it — became only the second American ever charged under that statute.[69][70]
Kiriakou hired O.J. Simpson’s former jury consultant, who reviewed all 15,000 pages of discovery and told him that in the Eastern District of Virginia — sometimes called the “Espionage Court” — a jury drawn from CIA, FBI, Pentagon, and intelligence-contractor employees gave him no realistic chance at trial; he says he then learned from a ProPublica study that the government wins 98.2 percent of such cases.[71][72] His own next-door neighbors in Arlington, Virginia illustrated the case’s political texture: one was a Justice Department national-security prosecutor on the team prosecuting him, while the neighbor’s wife worked at Akin Gump Strauss and sat on Kiriakou’s defense team.[73] Facing up to 45 years in prison, plea offers dropped in the space of a week from ten years to eight to five before he accepted a lesser charge, receiving a 30-month sentence and ultimately serving 23 months; four of the five felonies were dropped because, he says, he had not committed espionage.[74][75][76][77] At his October 2012 plea hearing, when the judge asked whether he had committed the crime on purpose, Kiriakou initially answered no; his attorney told him he had to say yes to secure the deal, so he did. At sentencing the same judge told him there is no such thing as a whistleblower in national security — “only leakers” — and, in a courtroom packed with national-security reporters, said that if she could give him ten years she would, despite having privately called the 23-month deal “fair and appropriate” when the courtroom had been empty three months earlier.[78][79]
Cost to family and finances
Kiriakou says an attorney told him the prosecution was meant to frighten others in the intelligence community who might consider going public with evidence of waste, fraud, abuse, or illegality, and that Edward Snowden later told the New York Times that Kiriakou and NSA whistleblower Tom Drake had inspired him.[80] A CIA officer separately told New York Times reporter Scott Shane that the point of prosecuting Kiriakou was never to convict or incarcerate him but “to scare the daylights out of anybody else who was considering blowing the whistle”; Shane reported that on the day of Kiriakou’s arrest, all of the paper’s national-security sources went silent for more than six months.[81][82][83] Kiriakou’s family went on welfare for three months during the prosecution, qualifying for food stamps, Medicaid, and a nursing-mother supplement, and he was turned down for a baggage-handler job at US Air once the employer learned of the espionage charges.[84][85] He lost his $770,000 CIA pension outright, spent more than half a million dollars on legal fees, and still owed his attorneys $880,000 he says he will never be able to repay.[86][87] His wife — also a former CIA officer — was fired the day of his arrest solely because she was married to him, leaving both unemployed for ten months; she later told him he no longer had to hide his politics. Their marriage nonetheless ended in a bitter divorce; in the ensuing custody dispute she testified in court that the CIA’s Office of Security had asked her to accompany him to the ABC interview and report back on his activities, something she said she continued doing throughout their marriage.[88][89][90] He entered federal prison alongside drug dealers, murderers, and mafia figures — not a minimum-security facility — and was issued prison pants six sizes too large that he had to hold up for an entire weekend, which he believes was done deliberately to humiliate him.[91][92] He received more than 7,000 letters of support during his 23 months in prison and says he personally answered every one.[93] Once released, the IRS audited his taxes every year through the mid-2010s, and as a convicted felon he was turned down for jobs at grocery and department stores and at McDonald’s before landing an unpaid position at a Washington think tank for which he had to raise his own salary at minimum wage.[94][95]
Contemplating suicide
Kiriakou describes two moments of genuine suicidal ideation during the ordeal. The first came after being told at the FBI’s Washington field office that agents had raided his house and that he would be arrested Monday and charged with espionage, facing a possible 45-year sentence; walking to the Metro, he watched a train come through the tunnel and thought, “I’m gonna jump,” but stopped himself thinking of his three children, then eight, six, and three months old. He says the professor who had originally recruited him into the CIA had since become his psychiatrist and helped walk him through it.[96][97][98][99] He says the second episode came the day of his arrest, when he fully intended to commit suicide and was stopped only by the strength of his then-wife; when the Justice Department later offered him a 45-year plea deal he intended to act on it that night, but his wife sensed something was wrong and talked him into going to bed instead.[100][101] After his arrest his doctor made him promise, “man to man,” not to kill himself before prescribing sleeping pills.[102]
Legal architecture and congressional oversight
Kiriakou describes the internal approval chain for the torture program as running from the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center to the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department, back to CIA General Counsel, then to the Attorney General, NSC General Counsel, the National Security Advisor, and finally the president — a process taking about six months with no court ever involved.[103] He notes the Army Field Manual, which nominally governs interrogation standards, is only an executive-branch document that can be changed “with the stroke of a pen,” meaning the underlying policy was never fully codified into permanent law.[104] He says he could not have reported the torture through any official channel: the CIA’s own Counterterrorism Center had conceived and implemented the program, the inspector general was never read into the compartment, the general counsel had approved it, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel had authorized it in what he calls the OLC “torture memos,” the National Security Council had requested it, and the congressional oversight committees had both approved and financed it — leaving, in his words, only the media.[105][106]
He argues the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence were not real oversight bodies but “cheerleading committees” that emboldened the CIA’s assassination, secret-prison, torture, and rendition programs during the war on terror, tracing the agency’s lack of real oversight back to its first covert action — the 1949 Italian election — through the Church Committee hearings of the mid-1970s, which ended with Iran-Contra.[107] As an illustration of how toothless that oversight was, he notes the Senate committee did nothing when the CIA broke into and hacked the committee’s own computer system during the writing of the Senate torture report.[108] He also says the claimed success of the torture program was only exposed as fraudulent once the CIA Inspector General’s report — written in 2005 but not declassified until spring 2009 — showed that the only actionable intelligence collected at the secret site had in fact been obtained earlier by FBI interrogators before they were removed from the site, with the CIA relabeling FBI-gathered information as its own in its reporting cables to Washington; the fraud is attributed to contractors Mitchell and Jessen.[109][110][111]
Aftermath: prison, honors, and later views on the CIA
Kiriakou says he would do it all over again, calling his only regret the failure to hire an attorney before blowing the whistle — advice he now gives every would-be whistleblower who asks: get a lawyer first, and make sure that lawyer is present for the disclosure itself.[76][77][112][113] He says he counts himself the only U.S. government official ever punished over the CIA’s torture program, and that his role was to expose it rather than to carry it out.[114][115] He was the sixth of eight national-security whistleblowers prosecuted under the Espionage Act during the Obama administration — almost three times the total number of such prosecutions brought by all prior U.S. presidents combined, and, he notes separately, more than double the three Espionage Act prosecutions of press sources brought in the ninety-two years between the statute’s 1917 passage and Obama’s 2009 inauguration.[116][117][118][119][120] When he later applied for a pardon, he refused to express contrition, telling officials he would do it again; asked on the BBC why he showed no remorse, he said he would do it again and expressed none, and has held to that position, saying he holds “zero remorse.”[121][122][123]
He has since received the highest annual award given by the Irish government — a gold medal awarded yearly since 1777, whose recent recipients include the presidents of Ireland and Finland and five Nobel Peace Prize laureates — and a truth-telling medal from the government of Luxembourg.[124] He has also won the Joseph A. Callaway Award for Civic Courage (2012), PEN Center USA’s First Amendment Award (2015), the Blueprint for Free Speech international whistleblowing prize (2016), and the Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence (2016).[125] In 2015 the American Psychological Association hired him to help develop what became known as the “Brookline protocols,” criteria governing whether APA member psychologists may participate in custodial intelligence interrogations; he was the only non-psychologist among the thirteen-member working group.[126] He has become a dual U.S.–Greek citizen who can vote in Greek elections.[127] He rejects the label “traitor,” citing the constitutional definition of treason as providing aid and comfort to the enemy in wartime.[128]
Kiriakou has said on the record that he believes the CIA should be shut down, noting the U.S. maintains 18 intelligence agencies — now overseen by Tulsi Gabbard — compared to the one or two most countries run.[129] He calls himself a realist who accepts the CIA will never actually be dismantled, and advises anyone wanting to reform it to work from inside: run for Congress and join an oversight committee, or join the CIA itself and rise into a position of authority.[130] He points to the Twitter Files’ revelation that active-duty CIA, NSA, and FBI employees worked at Twitter, Meta, Instagram, and Facebook as reason for concern given the intelligence community’s ties to In-Q-Tel, Palantir, and Abraxas.[131]
The rabbi
Kiriakou attributes his survival inside the agency after refusing enhanced interrogation training less to policy protection than to patronage. Endorsing a formulation put to him — “You don’t need a mentor, you need a rabbi or an angel” — he says he had one: a senior officer who “sat above the guys making these torture decisions” and who told him simply, “Don’t worry about it… You did the right thing.”[132]
That protector’s reasoning was not moral but actuarial. He called the program a slippery slope and forecast where it ended: “You know how these guys are. Somebody’s going to kill a prisoner and then they’re going to go to prison.”[132]
The protection was real but partial. Kiriakou says that once his position became known he was “kind of squeezed out” — and that what saved the trajectory was performance elsewhere: he had done well enough in Pakistan that he was made executive assistant to the Deputy Director for Operations, so that “my career just continued to go straight up.”[133]
The four denials
Speaking from the vantage of the job that followed Pakistan — executive assistant to the deputy director for operations, a post from which he says he could see “literally everything that the CIA was doing around the world” — Kiriakou reduces the agency’s public position after 9/11 to four statements, and rejects each in turn. There was no torture program: there was a torture program. There was no archipelago of secret prisons around the world: there was. There was no program of renditions, under which people never charged with a crime were kidnapped and delivered to countries they had no ties to so that they could be tortured: there was. And nothing was happening at Guantanamo, where prisoners were merely being held to await trial in the appropriate federal district courts: they were not.[134][135][136] His summary of the four: “Literally everything they said was a lie.”[136]
He pairs the indictment with an admission about himself — “I will admit to you I was a true believer for a long time” — and with the political inheritance it cost him: three generations of progressive Democrats, a photograph of Franklin Roosevelt kept on the family television set and still in his possession, and a conclusion that he can no longer abide what the Democratic Party does any more than what the Republican Party does, “because they’re all lying to us.”[136][137]
Silence, complicity, and who gets to narrate it
Asked in 2026 what institutional forces keep good people quiet, and whether those who stayed silent should be judged as complicit or merely trapped, Kiriakou called it “a very deep question” and came down on the forgiving side. “Maybe I’m maybe I’m the forgiving sort. But I don’t blame most of my colleagues. Most of them most of them were not complicit. Uh most of them very quietly, privately opposed the torture program. But you know they had pensions and families and mortgages and kids and you can’t rock the boat.” He treats his own conduct as the anomaly rather than the standard: “I’m one of those guys who just couldn’t keep silent. Most people can keep silent.”[138][139]
He draws the line at the Counterterrorism Center, where “there were there were many who were complicit. And not just complicit, they they’ve written books about how great torture was and what a great idea it was and how many lives it saved.”[140]
That asymmetry — that the program’s defenders retained the ability to tell its story — is what he illustrates with the International Spy Museum, whose small room on the torture program loops video of the torturers alone and never mentions him.[141]
What the agency’s rank and file now says
Asked in June 2026 whether his former colleagues resent his public criticism, Kiriakou said the question mistakes where the opposition ever was: “You’d be surprised, actually. My detractors were at the top in the CIA and to a man, they’re all either dead or retired.”[142]
What he reports in their place is a generational turnover. He says he hears often from people still inside the CIA telling him “that everything has flipped” — that the rank and file are supporters of his, and not of the torture regime.[143]
His own account of why he kept speaking rests on a judgement he says he reached and never revised: “what the American government had done in the war on terror was wrong. It was illegal, it was immoral, it was unethical, and it was anti-American. It may have made us feel good in the short term, but it set us back over the long term.” Once the policy needed changing, he concluded, “I had to be the one to change it.”[144] He frames the persistence as instrumental rather than personal — there is a greater good, and it “will only be accomplished if I continue to speak out and if I can inspire other people to speak out.”[145]
The crimes report that went nowhere
Immediately after the broadcast the CIA filed what is called a crimes report with the Justice Department, alleging that Kiriakou had violated his secrecy agreement by leaking classified information. The FBI investigated, watched the tape, and concluded “that it was already common knowledge that we were torturing prisoners” — Human Rights Watch had published a report, Amnesty International had published a report — “so I had added nothing technically to the debate.”[146]
What he had added was standing: “what I had done was, I had become the first CIA officer, current or former, to actually confirm that we were torturing prisoners, and that torture was our policy.”[147] He also notes that the investigation opened in December 2007 never in fact closed — “they never stopped investigating me, from December of 2007 until my arrest in 2012” — though he was unaware of it at the time.[148]
What he was trying to say
On the persistent reading that he had defended waterboarding on air, Kiriakou concedes the failure and describes the intent. “A lot of people think that I was defending it. In fact I was trying to be nuanced, and I failed at being nuanced.” He was trying to keep two questions apart: “one, did it work; and two, was it right. And I said it wasn’t right. It was wrong morally and ethically, it was torture, and I was opposed to it.”[147][149]
The evidence he offers for the opposition predates the interview: a senior officer in the counterterrorism centre had asked whether he wanted to be certified in the use of the techniques, and he declined, saying he had a moral problem with it.[149]
Asked in hindsight whether the waterboarding had been worth it, his answer separates the two questions again: it may have compromised American principles “at least in the short term,” and the country should be debating openly whether it wants this as policy — “I’m not saying now that we should, but at the very least we should be talking about it. It shouldn’t be secret.”[150][151] On his own change of mind: “I think that waterboarding is probably something that we shouldn’t be in the business of doing … because we’re Americans and we’re better than that.”[152][153]
He also states the by-product plainly: “the CIA is the organization that made me a human rights activist. It’s the CIA that’s made me want to take to the streets to defend our civil liberties — otherwise I wouldn’t have given it two minutes of thought.”[154]
The comparison he was asked to draw
Interviewed in May 2017 about a president disclosing classified material, Kiriakou was asked for a thumbnail of his own case as the contrast, and gave it in one pass. He blew the whistle in December 2007. “The FBI investigated me for a full year, and then determined that I had not committed a crime, and they closed the case against me. But when President Obama was inaugurated, the CIA asked him to secretly reopen the case against me, and I was investigated for another three years. I had no idea I was under investigation.”[155]
What that investigation produced was “five felonies, including three counts of espionage” — charges that rested, he says, on the passage of an unclassified business card to a journalist from the New York Times and one from ABC News, and on his having told a reporter that a former colleague who had never been undercover had worked in the bin Laden unit — “which I hadn’t done in the first place. The New York Times came to me with that information.” He notes that the names of the people he was accused of exposing “were never made public.”[156]
The arithmetic he ends on is the comparison itself: “I faced 45 years in prison, and ended up doing 23 months.”[157]
From house arrest, February 2015
Interviewed days after his release from prison and while still under home confinement, Kiriakou was put the two things he had said about the sentence — that they were terrible years that ruined him personally, and that it had all been worth it — and asked to reconcile them. He did not withdraw either: “I really do believe that it was worth it. I’m proud to have played a role, however small, in the outlawing of torture in the United States. And to me the past now is water under the bridge. I’m proud to have played that role, and it’s time to move on and continue this fight for human rights and civil liberties.”[158]
On the asymmetry of the outcome he was sharper, and the sharpness is aimed at a narrower target than usual. The general complaint is familiar: the Justice Department “is hypocritical to charge me for a crime — not just me but other whistleblowers as well, Ed Snowden, Chelsea Manning and others — and then to allow the torturers to go free.” But what he says actually bothers him is the absence of prosecutions in the cases where prisoners died: “there’s no prosecution of CIA officers who obviously violated the law — those CIA officers who were conducting interrogations in which prisoners were killed. I have no idea why there’s no outrage, and why those officers aren’t being prosecuted.”[159]
Asked whether he would do it again, he answered through his family rather than through the principle: “I would do it again. As terrible as it’s been, as difficult as it’s been, I have a family that is rock solid in its support of me, and a family that knows right from wrong. Torture is wrong. I’m proud to have played a role in the end of torture as US government policy, and I would do it all again.”[160][161]