Human Rights Watch (HRW) is the organization that got to the CIA torture story first — a fact at the center of John Kiriakou’s account of why his prosecution was retaliation, not law enforcement. It is also, in his telling, the organisation whose investigative work put him in prison.
First to report
In 2005, Human Rights Watch published a report, in real detail, saying the CIA was torturing its prisoners; Amnesty International followed in 2006, and the International Committee of the Red Cross in 2007.[1][2][3] In the account he gives of what he had actually registered at the time, the HRW report was specifically that Abu Zubaydah had been tortured — something he was “vaguely aware” of while trying to start a new life.[4][5]
That sequence is why Kiriakou insists his 2007 ABC interview revealed nothing new: the FBI watched the tape and concluded it was already common knowledge — “I had added nothing, technically, to the debate. But what I had done was I had become the first CIA officer, current or former” to confirm it.[6][7] Put to an Arabic-language audience, the same claim is narrower and more precise: everything was already in the Human Rights Watch reports, and what he supplied was the first confirmation by an intelligence officer that those reports were accurate.[8] The declination letter the FBI sent his attorney made the argument for him, naming HRW, Amnesty and the Red Cross as having already published it.[9][10]
The leaks to HRW, Amnesty, and the Red Cross also meant someone inside was already talking — another whistleblower whose identity, he notes, has never been learned.[11][12] It was those accumulating reports that convinced him he had waited long enough for somebody official to speak.[13]
He uses the same chronology to answer the charge that he endangered American lives. Studies concluded that it was the torture program that made Americans less safe, by serving as a recruiting tool for al-Qaeda and other groups — and that program had leaked well before he ever said anything about waterboarding, through HRW in 2005, Amnesty in 2006, the Red Cross in 2007 and a New York Times story on the secret prison system. “The revelations didn’t endanger American lives… the programs endangered American lives.”[14][3]
Kiriakou also cites HRW’s drone-war findings — that the great majority of drone-strike dead were innocent civilians near the target — as one of the independent voices against an agency that expects the public to take its word that the dead were bad people.[15][16]
In the chain of his arrest
The organisation’s other role is the one he tells with most bitterness. The John Adams Project, working with Human Rights Watch, hired investigators to try to identify CIA torturers on behalf of the Guantánamo detainees’ defence teams. Kiriakou’s verdict on it is unqualified — “one of the most f[——]ed up human rights projects I’ve ever encountered in my life… a bunch of people who meant well, apparently, and then broke the law and ruined lives in order to achieve their goals.” He grants that everyone is entitled to legal representation and objects to the method: “why do I have to get thrown under the bus so that they get their day in court? Why am I lied to? Why am I tricked?”[17][18]
The man they were hunting was misidentified from the start. Someone had said that a person referred to in Kiriakou’s first book was one of the torturers; he was not — he was crew on a rendition flight, and Kiriakou had never called him a torturer. They found him anyway, because Kiriakou confirmed his surname.[18]
From there the name moved along a chain Kiriakou can now recite in both directions. Matthew Cole — posing as an author writing a book about the Abu Omar rendition while secretly working for the Guantánamo defence attorneys — gave it to the Human Rights Watch investigator John Sifton; Sifton gave it to the defence attorneys; the attorneys filed a classified motion asking a judge for leave to depose the man; the judge recognised the name as classified and called the FBI.[19][20][21][22] The Bureau then walked it back link by link: “They went to Human Rights Watch. Where’d you get the name? John Sifton gave it to us. They went to Sifton. Where’d you get the name? Matthew Cole gave it to us. And then went to Matthew Cole. Where’d you get the name? John Kiriakou gave it to me. And so the story of my arrest began.”[23][24][25][26] Two dozen FBI agents raided Kiriakou’s house and charged him with five felonies.[24]
Cole was implicated in the case and fired from ABC News, went briefly to The Intercept, and there outed Reality Winner, Terry Albury and Daniel Hale before leaving — which prompted Kiriakou to tweet at the publication asking whether it was an FBI front organisation, “because everybody who offers you information ends up in prison.”[23][27]
When he asked for help
Human Rights Watch was among the organisations Kiriakou approached during his own prosecution, and among those that declined. “When I was arrested they ran screaming from the room. I got literally no help from Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch or the ACLU — nothing.”[28][29] He notes one distinction in HRW’s favour: once his profile was high enough, Human Rights Watch did eventually come to the party — before Amnesty, which held out until Ai Weiwei vouched for him.[28][30]