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Enhanced interrogation techniques

The CIA's post-9/11 interrogation program; described by John Kiriakou as torture and as a euphemism designed to insulate the responsible officials from legal exposure.

Enhanced interrogation techniques (EIT) was the official designation used by the United States Central Intelligence Agency for a set of interrogation methods authorized for use on detainees in the years following the September 11, 2001 attacks. John Kiriakou describes the program consistently as torture and the official terminology as a euphemism designed to insulate the responsible officials from legal exposure. In a December 2007 ABC News interview, Kiriakou became the first U.S. official to publicly confirm that the CIA had waterboarded detainees and the first to characterize the technique as torture; he was subsequently prosecuted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act for an unrelated confirmation of a covert officer’s name.

Origin and timeline

Kiriakou spent about fourteen and a half years at the CIA, first as an analyst and later, after growing bored with analysis, as a counterterrorism operations officer.[1] After the September 11 attacks he became chief of the CIA’s anti-terrorism operations in Pakistan, where he led the raid that captured Abu Zubaydah in March 2002.[1]

Kiriakou traces the program’s origin to a cocktail party approximately one month after September 11, 2001, at which someone with proximity to the leadership of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center approached Director George Tenet and pitched a set of interrogation techniques. That person described two psychologists, Mitchell and Jessen, who had worked on the Air Force’s SERE (survival, evasion, resistance, and escape) training program and had reverse-engineered its techniques for use against detainees. For $108 million, they would contract with the CIA and implement what they proposed to call “enhanced interrogation techniques.”[2][3][4][5][6]

The CIA signed Mitchell and Jessen’s contract in January 2002.[5][6] Abu Zubaydah was captured in Pakistan in March 2002 and became the program’s first, and initial, subject of Mitchell and Jessen’s experimentation with the new techniques.[7][8][9] On the strength of the capture, Kiriakou returned to headquarters in May 2002 to a promotion, a medal, and a cash award, and was named executive assistant to the CIA’s deputy director for operations — a post that gave him access to nearly everything the agency was doing worldwide.[10] EIT was first applied to Zubaydah on August 2, 2002, the same day Tenet won Bush’s approval to transfer primacy over the interrogation from the FBI to the CIA.[7][8] Kiriakou himself was approached and asked whether he would be certified in EIT during the first week of May 2002; he refused. His December 10, 2007 ABC News interview marked the first U.S. official public confirmation of CIA waterboarding.[5][6]

DateEvent
September 11, 2001World Trade Center attacks
Early October 2001U.S. bombing of Afghanistan begins
Late October 2001Mitchell and Jessen pitch EIT to George Tenet at a cocktail party
January 2002CIA signs Mitchell and Jessen’s contract
March 2002Abu Zubaydah captured in Pakistan
First week of May 2002John Kiriakou personally approached and asked whether he would be certified in EIT; refused
August 2, 2002EIT first applied to Abu Zubaydah
December 10, 2007Kiriakou’s ABC News interview airs — first U.S. official public confirmation of CIA waterboarding

While John Brennan — who later became Director of the CIA — has publicly opposed torture, Kiriakou identifies him in private as the senior architect of the program: “He’s a guy who runs out and says, ‘Yeah, we shouldn’t torture people.’ When he wrote the fucking torture — he was the godfather of the torture program.”[11] Brennan was part of the leadership structure that oversaw the program during the Bush administration.[12]

The certification offer and Kiriakou’s refusal

Before EIT reached Kiriakou personally, the FBI had already spent six weeks building rapport with the wounded Abu Zubaydah at the secret prison holding him and had begun obtaining actionable intelligence — a method the FBI had practiced in custodial interrogations since the 1946 Nuremberg trials.[13][14] The CIA judged that insufficient; Tenet asked Bush to remove the FBI from the site and give the CIA primacy.[13]

Kiriakou has given several closely related accounts of the offer he received to be certified in EIT, consistent on their essential facts though differing on the precise date, which he has given as May 6, 2002 and, elsewhere, June 6, 2002.[15][16] In one telling, a friend from the Counterterrorism Center approached him informally in the CIA cafeteria at agency headquarters in May 2002: “Hey, I’m so glad I ran into you — I meant to ask, do you want to be certified in the use of enhanced interrogation techniques?” Kiriakou had not previously heard the term.[17][18][19][20] The friend listed ten techniques — waterboarding, sleep deprivation, a “smack in the face,” and others — and stated that “the President approved it and the Justice Department approved it.”[17][18][21][22] In another telling, he was approached while standing in the CIA cafeteria sandwich line by a senior officer who casually asked the same question, describing it as getting “rough” with detainees; on hearing the description of the techniques, Kiriakou replied, “Buddy, that sounds like a torture program.”[23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30]

Kiriakou asked for time to think, went up to the agency’s seventh floor (its executive level), and consulted a very senior CIA officer he had worked for a decade earlier in the Middle East. The officer’s advice:

First of all, let’s call a spade a spade — this is a torture program. And you know how these guys are: somebody’s going to go overboard, and they’re going to kill a prisoner. And when that happens, there’s going to be a congressional investigation and then a Justice Department investigation, and somebody’s going to go to prison. You want to go to prison?[31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39]

Kiriakou returned downstairs and declined certification, telling his superiors “this is a torture program, I want no part of it.”[40][41] In total, fourteen CIA officers were offered EIT certification; two initially declined and one of those two subsequently changed his mind and went on to torture people. Kiriakou was the only one who refused in the end — and, as he has put it, the only one of the group who ultimately went to prison.[42][43][44][45][46] His reflection: “The crazy thing is I knew these guys. I was friends with these guys. Our wives were friends. Our kids played together. I had no idea that they had the ability to become monsters, murderers.”[40][32][47] Kiriakou has also given an account, framed around this same 14/13 split, in which he separately sought counsel from a respected senior CIA officer who agreed the proposed methods might cross dangerous moral and legal lines, after which he declined the training.[48] One of the 13 colleagues who agreed to the training came to him a day or two before it began and told him, when Kiriakou called it a mistake, that Justice Department attorneys had assured them it was not torture — to which Kiriakou replied only that they would have to agree to disagree.[49] Elsewhere, Kiriakou has said it was his boss who told him directly that he would need to complete the EIT training to be promoted.[50]

The refusal cost him, at least at first. He was passed over for promotion — the CTC’s chief, Jose Rodriguez, reportedly told the promotion panel that Kiriakou had displayed “a shocking lack of commitment to counterterrorism” for refusing to torture Abu Zubaydah.[51][52][46][53] Colleagues began calling him “the human rights guy” behind his back — a nickname a boss told him was not a compliment.[54][55][56][57][58] A CIA colleague and friend — a brigadier general and psychiatrist — later told Kiriakou that officers turned against him from that moment in 2002, years before his 2007 whistleblowing.[55] When the deputy director of the CIA learned Kiriakou had been passed over specifically for declining the torture training, he promoted him out of cycle, making him his own executive assistant — the post from which Kiriakou would go on to read the compartmented cable traffic from the torture site.[52][56][59]

Approved versus unauthorized techniques

A central distinction in the program, and the basis of Kiriakou’s recurring argument for selective prosecution, is between techniques authorized in writing by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel and acts administered by individual CIA officers on their own initiative.

Among the approved techniques: waterboarding; sleep deprivation (authorized up to 12 days continuous); walling in its formally designed variant (plywood with give, a rolled towel around the neck); and other items on the standard ten-technique list, including grabbing a shirt, a “belly slap,” and a face slap — which Kiriakou says were mostly “not something I would call torture.”[18][60] Kiriakou has described the sequence of the ten Justice-Department-authorized techniques as incremental, running from mildest to most severe: first the “attention grasp” (grabbing the shirt and giving a shake), then the “belly slap” (an open-handed smack to the stomach that leaves a handprint and makes a loud cracking sound but doesn’t hurt much), then an open-handed slap across the face meant to humiliate, continuing up through walling and, at the far end, sleep deprivation and waterboarding — the two techniques Kiriakou has said he considers worse than waterboarding.[61][62] CIA physicians from the Office of Medical Services were nominally present to monitor prisoners’ health during interrogations, but Kiriakou says at least three prisoners were confirmed killed by CIA officers or contractors, with reports of as many as eighteen deaths in CIA custody.[63] Kiriakou has confirmed directly that waterboarding — ranging on the approved list from what was called an “attention shake” up to waterboarding itself — was used on Abu Zubaydah.[64]

Among the unauthorized techniques applied in practice — which Kiriakou distinguishes sharply from the approved list and says were used against most if not all of the CIA’s high-value prisoners without ever having been authorized by the Justice Department or the President, and which almost no CIA officers, Kiriakou included, knew about at the time:[65][66][67]

  • Forced rectal feeding with pureed hummus — “you can’t force hummus upside someone’s rectum.”[66]
  • Russian roulette with prisoners.[66]
  • The Abu Zubaydah cockroach coffin — exploiting Abu Zubaydah’s “irrational fear of insects,” interrogators sealed him in a coffin with a box of cockroaches and nothing but a diaper, and listened to him scream, for ten days.[68][69][70][71]
  • Sleep deprivation beyond the authorized window — authorized for up to twelve days, even though, per the American Psychological Association’s own research, “people begin to go insane at seven days with no sleep, they begin to die of organ failure with nine days.” People died of it.[72]
  • The cold cell — never authorized as an EIT technique, and fatal to two prisoners. In Zubaydah’s case, Kiriakou says his cell was chilled to ten degrees Celsius while he was held naked and chained to a ceiling bolt, with a bucket of ice water thrown on him every hour.[73][71] Kiriakou says two prisoners were killed this way — deaths that never made the newspapers and for which no one was prosecuted.[74]
  • Walling without the designed safeguards — supposed to use a rolled towel around the neck against a fiberboard wall; administered in practice with no towel, against a concrete wall. Muhammad Atar is now permanently brain-damaged and unable to participate in his own defense as a result.[75][76]
  • Sexual assault using broomsticks.[77][78][79]

In late August 2023 the Department of Defense conceded that Ramzi bin al-Shibh — one of the 9/11 co-conspirators — cannot be tried, because the Pentagon’s own psychiatrist has determined him clinically insane as a direct result of sleep deprivation.[76][80]

Kiriakou, reading the reports arriving at headquarters, describes Abu Zubaydah as having been moved from secret prison to secret prison, each one worse than the last: waterboarded without result, then blasted with light and loud music for seven days without result, then kept awake for up to twelve days — a duration Kiriakou notes usually leads to death — still without result.[81]

Rectal feeding and the exploitation of religious shame

Kiriakou has separately described rectal feeding as an authorized technique administered with a specifically cultural rather than nutritional purpose: tubes were inserted and liquid food — he specifies hummus — was pumped in, exploiting the particular shame attached in Islam to nakedness and bodily humiliation, especially before women.[82][83] He describes the deliberate use of female interrogators as a related humiliation mechanism: prisoners were stripped naked in the presence of women specifically because of those religious beliefs, combining nudity, cold-cell temperatures, and female presence to break religious dignity alongside physical endurance.[84][82]

Kiriakou describes sensory deprivation — an isolation tank with total silence, total darkness, and surrounding water, used for periods of up to three weeks — as, in his assessment, worse than waterboarding: “You’re complete and total. Like you’re dead.”[85][86]

The psychology and justification of the program

The theory underpinning many of the techniques, as conceived by Mitchell and Jessen, is “learned helplessness” — a form of Pavlovian conditioning in which the prisoner comes to associate a sensory cue, such as the rolled towel placed around the neck before walling, with imminent impact, eventually crumpling on presentation of the cue alone.[87]

The program’s standard public justification is the ticking time bomb scenario. Kiriakou rejects it on three grounds: it is illegal; there is no real-world equivalent of a ticking time bomb; and torture produces only what the prisoner believes the interrogator wants to hear, requiring months of analyst review to separate signal from noise — by which time any hypothetical bomb would already have gone off.[88][89] He has described the broader practical problem with torture-derived intelligence in the same terms: it must be verified, consuming months of analyst time and generating false leads that let adversaries continue planning. Subjects under torture provide partial truths — “a kernel of truth” — sufficient to stop the pain in the moment but designed to waste the interrogator’s time.[90]

Kiriakou attributes the program’s existence less to a genuine belief in its effectiveness than to two other forces. The first is a CIA personnel-selection failure: “You put sociopaths in positions of authority where they come to believe that they’re above the law, and that because they’re the good guys they can and should do anything that they want to do.” He extends this characterization explicitly to Jose Rodriguez and to Mitchell and Jessen, all of whom he believes genuinely think they are the good guys.[91][92] He traces this in part to CIA recruitment itself: a CIA psychiatrist once told him the agency actively seeks people with sociopathic tendencies rather than full sociopaths, since true sociopaths lack any conscience and are impossible to control (though they pass polygraphs), while people with sociopathic tendencies feel guilt and fail polygraphs but are nonetheless “still happy to break the law when it’s in the national interest.”[93] Kiriakou has described his own hiring interview at the CIA — before a panel of a psychiatrist, a psychologist, and an anthropologist — in which he was asked what he would do if a recruitment target proved unrecruitable but had material the CIA needed on his office computer; he answered that he would break in and steal it, which the panel confirmed was the “right” answer.[94] The second force behind the program, in Kiriakou’s account, is revenge: CIA leaders who had spent decades building careers felt their legacies would be defined by the failure to prevent the September 11 attacks, and “had to do literally anything to stop them. And even if it’s not to stop them, it’s to pay them back for what they did.” Kiriakou recalls a CIA supervisor whispering “Kill them all” to him as he departed for Pakistan in the months after 9/11 — cited by Kiriakou as evidence that revenge, not intelligence-gathering, was the true motivator.[95][96] “It’s terrible. But we can’t underestimate the role of revenge.”[90]

Kiriakou has also noted the direct contradiction between the program and CIA training doctrine: operational training explicitly teaches that coercion and threats are never to be used in recruiting or handling sources, not only because they are unethical but because they are ineffective and can provoke violent retaliation. Recruits were trained instead that asset development works through establishing genuine friendship and rapport.[97] Kiriakou describes CIA culture more broadly as pushing officers to see everything as a shade of gray, justified by the officers’ sense that they are “the good guys” — a framing he came to reject, insisting that some things, torture among them, are simply black and white.[98][99] He has grounded that view in his own prior posting as the CIA’s human rights officer in both Kuwait and Bahrain, where Congress has mandated an annual State Department human rights report for every country since 1977; in that role he once personally warned a Gulf interior minister against beating a 15-year-old protester to death for taking part in a pro-democracy demonstration.[100] He illustrates the tension between that human-rights function and the CIA’s operational culture with a hypothetical: a station chief walking into the same country and telling the government to ignore the human-rights officer, offering ten million dollars to build a torture chamber and hand over transcripts of whatever it produced.[101] Kiriakou has separately noted that the same State Department human-rights reporting he once helped produce amounts, in his view, to a “smoke screen” alongside the CIA’s simultaneous operation of secret torture sites.[102]

A colleague at Liberty University, where Kiriakou taught for several years as an adjunct professor of intelligence studies at the Helms School of Government, gave his students a final exam built around the ticking-time-bomb scenario. Its questions escalated progressively — would the student use enhanced interrogation on a captured terrorist to defuse a two-hour bomb; would he beat the terrorist’s wife in front of him if the terrorist held firm; would he beat, or threaten to beat, the man’s children — each requiring the student to explain the answer. Kiriakou, recounting the exam, said he was personally unaware of any children actually being beaten during CIA interrogations, but that threatening to beat detainees’ children — who were routinely kept separated from their parents so the parents could not know whether the threats were real — was common practice.[103][104] In a separate telling of the same exam, the final question asked: “You’ve died and you’re standing before the judgment seat of Christ and he tells you to explain your actions. What do you tell him?” Kiriakou described the question as leaving him speechless and said he still thinks about it years later.[105][106]

Institutional resistance: the FBI

The FBI was so deeply at odds with the CIA over the program that its personnel would leave the country entirely rather than be present. Every time Mitchell and Jessen took charge of an interrogation session at a CIA black site, every FBI representative in the country would leave: “The FBI didn’t even want to be in the same country where this torture was taking place.”[107][108]

The fabricated Zubaydah result

Kiriakou’s public involvement began with a call from ABC News reporter Brian Ross in early December 2007, claiming a source said Kiriakou had personally tortured Abu Zubaydah. Kiriakou denied it, telling Ross he had never laid a hand on any prisoner and was, in fact, the only person who had been kind to Zubaydah.[109][110] Days later President Bush, asked by a reporter, looked into the camera and said, “We do not torture” — a statement Kiriakou regarded as a lie.[111][112] When Bush was separately asked about torture allegations days later while walking to a helicopter, he suggested any torture would be the work of a “rogue CIA officer.” Kiriakou concluded that Ross’s original source was inside the White House and that the administration intended to pin the story on him; he decided to go public rather than wait to be blamed.[111]

Kiriakou has described as an error his statement in that December 2007 Brian Ross interview that Abu Zubaydah had been waterboarded once and that the waterboarding produced intelligence. He now says this was incorrect, and that he said it because Mitchell and Jessen had reported to the CIA that they waterboarded Zubaydah once and he produced intelligence as a result.[113]

The reality, not revealed until 2005, when the CIA inspector general investigated: FBI interrogator Ali Soufan had been obtaining actionable intelligence from Zubaydah daily through rapport-based interrogation, cabling his findings back to the FBI. Those cables never reached the CIA because the FBI’s and CIA’s computer systems were incompatible with each other. On August 2, 2002, Director Tenet asked President Bush to transfer primacy over the Zubaydah interrogation from the FBI to the CIA. That same day, the CIA began torturing Zubaydah; he immediately went silent and stopped providing intelligence.[114][115][113]

Mitchell and Jessen then accessed the FBI’s system, pulled Soufan’s cables, retyped them into the CIA’s system, and reported: “We waterboarded him once and look what he told us.” The CIA internally learned of the fabrication in 2005, when the CIA inspector general opened an investigation into it, but the finding was not declassified and made public until 2009 — seven years after the fact.[116][117][118] Kiriakou has said, citing journalist Ron Suskind, that Bush had separately asked Tenet, regarding the importance of the Zubaydah case, “you’re not gonna make me lose face on this are you” — and that Bush went on to invoke Zubaydah repeatedly when defending the program.[119] Senate Torture Report footnotes, according to Kiriakou, show that Tenet repeatedly tried to brief Bush directly on the program but was rebuffed each time by Dick Cheney, who told Tenet he had already briefed the president himself; it later emerged that Bush had, in fact, never been briefed by Tenet at all.[120] Kiriakou has cautioned that the Senate report does not confirm the specific Suskind “lose face” quote, but does document that Bush approved the full program as presented, with nobody at the White House striking anything out.[121] Kiriakou describes himself as the first person to say on television that the CIA had tortured prisoners; Mitchell and Jessen, by contrast, had been lying about the program’s results through official CIA channels, a deception that Kiriakou and other CIA officers did not learn about until the inspector general’s report was released in 2009.[122][123]

Deaths in custody and body disposal

When prisoners died during EIT sessions — fatalities occurring particularly from hypothermia in the cold cell and from organ failure under prolonged sleep deprivation — the standard disposal procedure at the secret site was on-site burial: “When people would die, they would just dig a hole next to the interrogation building, put him in the hole, cover it up, and then bring the next guy in.” In at least one documented case, disposal was delayed pending direction from headquarters; the instruction relayed was “put him on ice until we can figure out what to do,” which personnel on the ground interpreted literally, placing the body in a bathtub filled with ice until it began to decompose.[124]

Kiriakou, from his post as Executive Assistant to the CIA’s Deputy Director for Operations, disclosed receiving a cable reporting that a prisoner held in a cold cell “didn’t make it through the night.” The facility did not know what to do with the body: it could not be buried locally, and it could not be returned to the man’s family. Personnel packed the body in ice and cremated it; the man’s existence was effectively erased.[125][126]

A related internal consequence Kiriakou documented from the same post: a CIA secretary fainted during an Abu Zubaydah interrogation session and subsequently “curtailed her assignment,” sending an unprompted cable to headquarters announcing her return — “a career-ending decision to curtail an assignment.” Kiriakou describes the episode as one of several similar curtailments demonstrating that he was not alone in his moral assessment of the program, and yet “certainly somebody’s going to come out and say something. And nobody did.”[127][128]

Kiriakou described sleep deprivation as authorized for up to twelve days under the program, citing the American Psychological Association’s finding that people begin to lose their minds at day seven without sleep and enter organ failure at day nine. He noted that Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld had a stand-up desk and claimed to work twenty-four hours without sitting, and did not believe prolonged sleep deprivation was unusual. Kiriakou’s assessment: keeping someone awake for twelve days is torture.[129][130]

Why Kiriakou says torture does not work

Kiriakou states flatly, across numerous interviews, that torture does not produce actionable intelligence, and that its ineffectiveness has been conclusively demonstrated by both the American Psychological Association and the American Psychiatric Association.[131][132] His argument is mechanical rather than purely moral: a tortured prisoner will eventually say anything to make the pain stop, mixing a kernel of truth with large amounts of fabrication, which then forces a team of analysts to spend months separating fact from fiction — time during which any real plot continues unimpeded.[133][134][135] As an illustration of prisoners inventing information under duress, Kiriakou has cited John McCain, who under torture as a Vietnam-era POW falsely named the starting offensive line of the Green Bay Packers as members of his military unit — information his captors dutifully wrote down.[135]

By contrast, Kiriakou credits the FBI’s rapport-based approach — treating a prisoner with respect and engaging him in conversation over time — as the method that actually produces results, and states that this is what worked in practice even inside the CIA’s own program.[132][136] He roots the FBI’s method in the Federal Torture Act and the Nuremberg trials of 1946, and argues that torture demeans the country undertaking it even when — hypothetically — it produces something usable, since the product still cannot be used in court, permanently foreclosing prosecution of detainees such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.[137][138] He has drawn a direct line from that failure to later diplomacy: when President Biden raised the killing of Jamal Khashoggi with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince responded by pointing to Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo — a rejoinder Kiriakou says was fair.[139]

Kiriakou says he still receives worrisome reports, mostly from Afghanistan and occasionally from Syria and Somalia, that CIA, Homeland Security, and military personnel continue torturing prisoners without facing punishment.[140] Inside the program itself, he describes a CIA unit called the Office of Medical Services (OMS) — staffed with psychiatrists and psychologists — whose function at the secret sites was not to prevent torture but to stop an interrogation just short of the point a prisoner would break, so the prisoner could rest before being tortured further.[141] Kiriakou says declassified CIA cables and the Senate Torture Report confirm that some physicians, psychologists, and psychiatrists internally objected to the program, with some electing to return to headquarters rather than continue participating, but that none of them went public; the only thing CIA officials ultimately told the Senate Intelligence Committee was that torture simply did not work.[142]

The program was not a rogue operation. According to Kiriakou, torture was official U.S. policy, personally authorized by President George W. Bush, who signed off on the program and its specific techniques. Kiriakou describes this as a distinction that matters: the people who designed and conducted the program were following orders from the highest level of the executive branch, not acting outside sanctioned channels.[143] Bush signed the executive order authorizing EIT on August 1, and Kiriakou has said the book he co-wrote noted indications that torture actually began before that date, in anticipation of the president’s signature.[144]

Kiriakou describes the legal architecture around the program as a deliberate reinterpretation of existing law. The Federal Torture Act had been on the books since 1946, with documented enforcement history including the execution of Japanese soldiers after World War II. In 2002, Justice Department opinions effectively suspended that history: “But then in 2002, like magic, it’s all legal.”[145] Kiriakou dates this specifically to laws that have “since 1946” outlawed exactly the techniques he was told were legal in 2002, calling their authorization “egregiously illegal” in his own assessment — a judgment he says led him to refuse the training even before he left the agency to wait, unsuccessfully, for someone else to speak publicly.[146] He argues that Justice Department legal memos, including those authored by Jay Bybee and John Yoo declaring the program legal, did not actually make it legal, since the underlying interpretation of the law was never tested or challenged in court.[147] Kiriakou has separately stressed that his refusal was not about defending classified information — an oath he says he never took — but about his oath to defend the Constitution against all enemies domestic and foreign, and his unwillingness to break U.S. law even in a job that otherwise required breaking foreign laws.[148][149] Even so, Kiriakou draws a hard line around what the Justice Department did and did not sanction: it never authorized smashing prisoners’ heads against a wall until they suffered brain damage, freezing them to death, or keeping them awake until their organs failed and then burying them in a ditch beside the interrogation building — nobody at the CIA, he says, ever had permission to do that.[150] He has separately stressed that the CIA has never historically been in the business of interrogation and had no training or institutional mandate for it, with narrow exceptions during the Vietnam War and, after September 11, the enhanced interrogation program itself.[151]

Kiriakou stayed silent about the program for nearly five years in part because Mitchell and Jessen continued reporting from the field that they were gathering actionable intelligence that was saving American lives — a claim Kiriakou, with access to nearly all CIA reporting worldwide, never saw reflected in anything that actually crossed his desk.[152] He left the CIA in 2004 for the private sector, partly to earn money to put his five children through college, and waited for someone else to reveal the program publicly; when no one did, he eventually went to ABC News himself.[153][154] He has said his one substantive regret about the original 2007 interview was being too nuanced — that a message like “we are torturing prisoners” needs to be delivered bluntly, not hedged.[155]

Nothing obtained under EIT from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, or Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri is admissible at trial, “because the CIA tortured it out of him.” This has left the U.S. government with the choice of holding the detainees indefinitely without charge or releasing them.[156][157] Kiriakou has said the CIA maintained a “high-value targets” (HVT) list within its Counterterrorism Center, and that individuals on it, once captured, were sent to a network of secret prisons the CIA had established around the world.[158] Arrangements for those prisons were handshake deals struck directly between the CIA director and the head of the host country’s intelligence service — agreements sometimes concealed even from that country’s own president or prime minister.[159] Kiriakou has separately described the CIA’s secret prisons collectively as an “archipelago,” where detainees who died in custody were cremated and their existence effectively erased.[160] Once torture began on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, his son-in-law Ammar al-Baluchi, and Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Kiriakou says all three either stopped cooperating (if they had previously been talking to the FBI) or began giving deliberately useless, garbled answers — evidence, in his view, that the program set U.S. intelligence back and left Americans in more danger, not less.[161]

White House counsel Harriet Miers explicitly told Jose Rodriguez, then CIA Deputy Director for Operations, and Gina Haspel, then head of counterterrorism, not to destroy the videotapes of the torture sessions. As soon as Rodriguez and Haspel returned to CIA headquarters, they put all the tapes through an industrial grinder and destroyed them.[162][163] Several of the program’s architects later co-authored their own book defending the program in response to the Senate torture report, which Kiriakou dismisses as an attempt to justify torture that instead sealed the authors’ reputations.[164]

According to Kiriakou, the program ran for approximately four years before being shut down in 2006. The internal determination was that the information obtained under torture “wasn’t amounting to anything.” Kiriakou attributes the shutdown decision to CIA Director Porter Goss.[165]

Prosecution and accountability for Kiriakou himself

Kiriakou says the Obama administration made an explicit decision, in the president’s own words, to “look forward, not backward” — protecting the torturers themselves, the officials who designed the program, those who funded it, and the members of Congress who approved it, from any accountability.[166] Kiriakou was 43 years old when he blew the whistle.[167] He has pushed back on the CIA’s preferred public image — that officers sat around and casually decided to torture people — insisting instead, without discussing specific techniques, “we don’t torture people,” while separately acknowledging that waterboarding was used on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. He has also noted that critics of the program tend to forget the palpable, uninformed fear that gripped the CIA in the aftermath of September 11, when so much about the threat remained unknown.[168][169] He argues Obama’s own pursuit of him personally stemmed from a combination of the president’s inexperience (only two years as a U.S. senator before taking office), his reliance on John Brennan — whom Kiriakou calls a war criminal — for intelligence expertise, and what Kiriakou describes as a “Nixonian obsession” with plugging national-security leaks.[170] Of the eight whistleblowers charged with espionage during the Obama administration, Kiriakou says two or three were arguably closer to genuine foreign-agent cases — one tied to China, one to South Korea — but that the majority, himself included, were pure media-leak whistleblower prosecutions.[171]

Kiriakou says he personally faced up to 45 years in prison, and that this was the Justice Department’s own initial plea offer.[172][173] A Justice Department official involved in his case — who later became deputy attorney general for the criminal division under President Biden, and whom Kiriakou has declined to name publicly — told him directly to take the 45-year offer, saying, “Take the 45 years, Mr. Kiryaku, and you may live to meet your grandchildren.”[174] He was ultimately charged with three counts under the Espionage Act, all of which were dropped because, in his account, he had not committed espionage; his lawyers told him the prosecution’s real purpose was to frighten other potential government whistleblowers.[175] He was instead found guilty of a single count of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1981, for confirming the name of a former colleague to a journalist who never made the name public.[176] When Kiriakou went on ABC News to make his allegations public, the CIA did not attempt to stop the broadcast; instead, the agency told ABC to air the interview while publicly denying that any torture program existed.[177]

As of the most recent source in KiriPedia’s corpus, no CIA officer has been criminally prosecuted in connection with any technique applied under the program, authorized or unauthorized: “Here we are twenty-two years after 9/11 — literally no one has been prosecuted for that crime. No one. Nor will anyone be prosecuted, because the CIA ensured that no prosecutions could be carried out.” Mitchell and Jessen’s 2001–2002 contract with the CIA — to develop the program from their reverse-engineering of U.S. military SERE training — was worth $108 million: “We paid those guys $108 million to say, ‘Oh, we think you should torture people. Here are the torture techniques. Just let us know when you want us to start.’” The only person to have served federal prison time in connection with the program is Kiriakou himself, for an unrelated Espionage Act prosecution.[107][178][179]

The CIA’s program is also documented, in brief, in the 2014 whistleblower feature documentary Silenced: the agency initiated a program referred to as “enhanced interrogation techniques,” which Kiriakou has publicly referred to as torture.[180][181]

See also

References

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  3. ↑ PBD Podcast, 2025-07-09 — 12:00 on YouTube · Transcript
  4. ↑ PBD Podcast, 2025-07-09 — 12:30 on YouTube · Transcript
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  6. ↑ Julian Dorey Podcast, 2026-01-16 — 56:05 on YouTube · Transcript
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  148. ↑ adventures in the free sta, 2016-07-11 — 20:33 on YouTube · Transcript
  149. ↑ Former Congressman Matt Ga, 2026-03-10 — 21:24 on YouTube · Transcript
  150. ↑ John Kiriakou's Dead Drop, 2026-04-20 · Transcript
  151. ↑ John Kiriakou's Dead Drop, 2026-04-13 · Transcript
  152. ↑ adventures in the free sta, 2016-07-11 — 21:04 on YouTube · Transcript
  153. ↑ The Unfettered Speech Podc, 2025-12-09 — 08:42 on YouTube · Transcript
  154. ↑ Salem Access TV - Public, 2019-03-14 — 02:40 on YouTube · Transcript
  155. ↑ Robin Hensel, 2015-11-14 — 1:00:23 on YouTube · Transcript
  156. ↑ Dalton Fischer Podcast, 2023-11-26 — 08:54 on YouTube · Transcript
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  160. ↑ failure, 2024-09-04 — 16:20 on YouTube · Transcript
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  162. ↑ PBD Podcast, 2025-07-09 — 38:00 on YouTube · Transcript
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  165. ↑ The Dr. Phil Podcast, 2025-04-23 — 8:21 on YouTube · Transcript
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  167. ↑ Spartan Leadership Podcast, 2024-07-30 — 26:00 on YouTube · Transcript
  168. ↑ Spartan Leadership Podcast, 2024-07-30 — 00:00 on YouTube · Transcript
  169. ↑ Spartan Leadership Podcast, 2024-07-30 — 00:31 on YouTube · Transcript
  170. ↑ The Unfettered Speech Podc, 2025-12-09 — 23:51 on YouTube · Transcript
  171. ↑ The Unfettered Speech Podc, 2025-12-09 — 26:58 on YouTube · Transcript
  172. ↑ The Unfettered Speech Podc, 2025-12-09 — 25:57 on YouTube · Transcript
  173. ↑ Lionel Nation, 2025-03-29 — 17:23 on YouTube · Transcript
  174. ↑ The Unfettered Speech Podc, 2025-12-09 — 26:27 on YouTube · Transcript
  175. ↑ Lionel Nation, 2025-03-29 — 18:24 on YouTube · Transcript
  176. ↑ Heidi Weber (No Stop Heidi, 2021-03-10 — 09:58 on YouTube · Transcript
  177. ↑ Lionel Nation, 2025-03-29 — 19:27 on YouTube · Transcript
  178. ↑ Dalton Fischer Podcast, 2023-11-26 — 10:30 on YouTube · Transcript
  179. ↑ The Joe Rogan Experience, 2025-10-10 — 28:40 on YouTube · Transcript
  180. ↑ jspione, 2025-10-14 — 29:04 on YouTube · Transcript
  181. ↑ jspione, 2025-10-14 — 29:34 on YouTube · Transcript
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