The Guantanamo detention facility, according to John Kiriakou, began not as the long-term detention infrastructure it became but as a stopgap improvised to solve an immediate overcrowding problem in Pakistan — intended, in the plan Kiriakou was given, to last only two to three weeks.[1][2]
Overcrowding in Rawalpindi
As chief of counterterrorism operations in Pakistan after September 11, 2001, Kiriakou was responsible for the disposition of captured al-Qaeda operatives. The prisoners were held in the Rawalpindi jail — Rawalpindi being a massive city adjoining Islamabad, home to the Pakistani army and defense ministry. When the jail reached capacity, Pakistani intelligence told Kiriakou they could accept no more prisoners and that he needed to remove those already in custody.[3][1]
Kiriakou called CIA headquarters and asked what to do. The answer was to load the prisoners onto a C-12 cargo plane and send them to Guantanamo, Cuba. Kiriakou said his first reaction was: “Why would we send prisoners to Cuba?”[2]
The explanation he was given from headquarters: the plan was to hold the prisoners at Guantanamo for two or three weeks while the CIA and Justice Department determined which federal district court — Boston, Washington, New York — should try each prisoner. Kiriakou accepted this as a sensible interim measure: “Oh, that’s a great idea.”[2][4][5][6] In separate tellings, Kiriakou named the candidate venues as the Eastern District of Virginia, the Southern District of New York, or the District of Massachusetts,[7] and elsewhere as Western Pennsylvania, Eastern Massachusetts, Southern New York, and Eastern Virginia.[8] He says his break with the CIA began when someone in Vice President Dick Cheney’s office decided the Guantanamo detainees had no rights at all and should simply be held there indefinitely.[9] Once attorneys and neoconservative politicians realized detainees at Guantanamo would have no legal rights, including habeas corpus, the plan to try them in federal court was abandoned: “the end was written and we knew that nobody would ever get justice.”[10] The temporary hold, of course, became the permanent facility still in use at Guantanamo Bay — where Kiriakou himself later served as the CIA station’s interim chief during the summer of 2002.[11]
Kiriakou blames the shift from temporary hold to permanent limbo on Congress rather than only the White House: a House vote against bringing Guantanamo detainees to U.S. soil passed 93 to 5, which he cites as proof Democrats were as responsible as Republicans, noting that Democratic Congressman Ike Skelton of Missouri, then chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, joined Republicans in arguing the detainees were too dangerous for American soil.[12]
The first flight
The first transport of prisoners was loaded onto the C-12. Having run out of handcuffs, the team used flexi-cuffs. The plane was routed with refueling stops in Oman and Ghana. During the flight, the co-pilot needed to use the restroom and walked back through the hold. He found a Saudi al-Qaeda prisoner who had broken his flexi-cuffs. The prisoner was on his hands and knees chewing on the hydraulic cable — an attempt to sever it and crash the plane into the ocean.[4][13]
Kiriakou’s characterization of al-Qaeda’s commitment, drawn from the episode: “They hate us more than they love life itself. And you have to appreciate that to really understand what you’re up against.”[13]
Hoods and a reprimand
Kiriakou also describes reporting a subordinate for placing hoods on ten captured al-Qaeda fighters during a mass interrogation operation the night Abu Zubaydah was captured, when so many prisoners were taken at once that the Pakistanis had to bring them over in groups of ten. He told the officer responsible that hooding was a Geneva Convention violation and a war crime; each reported the other to headquarters, and Kiriakou was formally reprimanded for what his superiors called “a shocking lack of commitment to counterterrorism.”[14]
Kiriakou separately references a massacre at a church next to the U.S. Embassy following the Abu Zubaydah operation, in which seven Americans and fourteen people in total were killed, including two of his colleagues.[15]
The Libyan prisoner
Among the detainees loaded for one of the Guantanamo transports was a defiant, older Libyan prisoner with a multicolored beard who tried to incite the other prisoners in the holding area by chanting “Allahu Akbar.” Kiriakou put his arm through the man’s armpit and yanked him up into a standing position so forcefully that the man’s prosthetic leg — shackled to his real ankle — popped off.[16]
The prisoner turned out to be Osama bin Laden’s personal mechanic, and when the loading team frisked him for the flight, they found two homemade shanks sewn into the lining of his clothes.[17] Kiriakou says he felt guilty enough about yanking the man up and humiliating him that he pulled aside FBI agent Jennifer Keenan and told her he wanted to report himself for assaulting a prisoner; she refused to let him, telling him he was out of his mind and to forget it.[18]
The name Kiriakou attaches to the decision
In a later telling Kiriakou puts a name to the figure in Cheney’s office who converted the temporary measure into a permanent one, while flagging the attribution as unconfirmed: “somebody in Dick Cheney’s office, probably David Addington, although he’s never admitted it,” who reasoned that the detainees had no rights in Cuba and could therefore simply be left there indefinitely. His summary of the result, given in July 2026: “and here we are 24 years later.” He puts the facility’s peak population at roughly 770 and the number still held at 34.[19]
The plan that was replaced
Kiriakou has repeatedly described the disposition originally intended for the men his teams captured, and set it against what happened. Speaking in January 2013, he said the object of the 2002 Pakistan operations was to “capture them, to turn them over to the Justice Department and have them face trial. That was the original idea — not to have them sit in Cuba for the next decade.” The sentence is one of his earliest formulations of the point he returns to later: that indefinite detention at Guantánamo Bay was a substitution for a plan that already existed, not the absence of one.[20]
The two-week plan
The decision reached Kiriakou as a logistics problem. After the March 2002 raids his Pakistani intelligence counterpart told him the jail at Rawalpindi was full — “We just can’t squeeze one more person into the jail” — and that the prisoners had to go somewhere. He called the Counterterrorism Center to ask what to do with them and was told: “Put them on a C-12 transport plane and send them to Guantanamo.”[21]
His own reaction was disbelief at the geography rather than at the principle: “Guantanamo, Cuba?” … “Why in the world would we send them to Cuba?” The answer he was given was explicitly temporary. “We’re going to send everybody to Cuba for a couple of weeks until we can decide which federal district court to try them in” — the candidates being Boston, the Southern or Eastern Districts of New York, the Eastern District of Virginia, or the federal district of Washington, D.C.[22][23]
On that understanding he thought it a good idea, and the flights began: “we started loading people onto plane after plane after plane. In the end we sent something like 770 people to Guantanamo.”[24]
What the plan did not survive was the Vice President. “It turned out that the Vice President at the time, Dick Cheney, didn’t have any intention of ever allowing any of those people to go on trial in the United States.” Congress then made the position permanent by banning the transfer of any Guantanamo prisoner into the United States, “even to face trial or to be transferred into a US prison. So that just never happened.”[24]