Kiriakou spent fifty-six hours at Abu Zubaydah’s bedside after the March 2002 raid that captured him, under an order from CIA director George Tenet to keep American eyes on the prisoner around the clock.[1] During that time the two men talked at length.
The conversation
By Kiriakou’s account they discussed Christianity and Islam; the prisoner recited poetry, cried a good deal, and said he would never know the touch of a woman or the joy of fatherhood.[2] He also wanted to know what had happened to him, and could not remember: Kiriakou told him he had tried to escape by climbing onto the roof of his safe house to jump to the roof of the house next door, and that a Pakistani policeman had shot him.[2]
It is against that register of self-pity that Kiriakou set his own line. He told the prisoner he was not the victim here: there were fifty thousand people in those towers. What did he think was going to happen? Did he think the Americans would not try to find him, to kill him, to kill bin Laden? He was lucky to be alive — they could have killed him the other night.[2][3]
The answer
The reply, as Kiriakou reports it, was: “no, I only wanted to kill Jews. I was overruled.”[3]
Kiriakou’s response was to hold his position rather than pursue the claim: “well, be that as it may, you’re not the victim here.”[3]
What it does and does not establish
Kiriakou has never presented the remark as intelligence. He was not conducting an interrogation — he has been consistent that he had no need to know what was to happen to the prisoner and was not read into the programme that followed — and he reports the line as something said by a badly wounded man in a hospital bed who had spent the previous day asking to be killed.
What he does draw from the exchange is the distinction he pressed on the prisoner directly, and has pressed since: that a man who helped move fighters into and out of a war did not get to describe himself as the injured party, whatever the target he says he would have preferred.