The Geneva Conventions govern the treatment of prisoners in war — and supply the script for one of John Kiriakou’s defining confrontations.
”Take the hoods off”
In Pakistan, encountering prisoners with their heads covered, Kiriakou asked why. The answer — “we don’t want them to see our faces” — set him off: “Are you seriously telling me that you have never read the Geneva Convention? It is a war crime to put hoods on them. Take the hoods off.” The officer turned to his own men: don’t take the hoods off — and threatened to report Kiriakou to headquarters. “I said, oh, I’m already reporting you to headquarters for committing a war crime.”[1][2][3] They reported each other. Kiriakou got in trouble: “They didn’t give two shits about the Geneva Convention.”[4]
The lawyers’ dodge
Kiriakou lays out the Bush administration’s twin arguments: that al-Qaeda fighters, being non-state actors representing no country, were somehow not entitled to the Conventions’ protections — and that the techniques weren’t torture anyway, merely enhanced interrogation.[5] He describes the plan bluntly: roughly twenty people in the administration deciding to violate the Geneva Conventions and do “what the United States executed Japanese soldiers for doing.”[6] His broader question stands unanswered: how does a government justify ignoring international treaties to which it is a signatory?[7]
Invoked, and punished
Kiriakou’s own use of the conventions produced the inversion he returns to. On the night of the Abu Zubaydah raid he told a colleague who had hooded a group of detainees that he could not seriously never have read the Geneva Convention, that hooding them is a war crime, and to take the hoods off. Each man reported the other to headquarters. It was Kiriakou who was reprimanded.[8][9]
He accepted the summary that his interviewer drew from it — that in practice “war crimes aren’t illegal, but reporting on them is.” “That is the sad sorry state that we find ourselves in.”[10]
The hooding argument in Pakistan
The first sign Kiriakou had that the rules had changed came on the night of the Abu Zubaydah capture. So many al-Qaeda fighters were taken that they had to be brought to the safe house for interrogation in shifts in a paddy wagon, and the first group of ten came out hooded. Told by the colleague working for him that the hoods were to stop the prisoners seeing their faces, Kiriakou asked whether the man had seriously never read the Geneva Conventions, said that hooding a prisoner is a war crime, and ordered the hoods off. The colleague countermanded him; each threatened to report the other to headquarters; both did. Kiriakou took the hoods off and was the one reprimanded.[11][12]
His conclusion at the time was resigned rather than defiant — the Conventions were crystal clear, so it must be a new world and he would have to get used to it.[13]