The prostitute dilemma
John Kiriakou poses a hypothetical he uses at colleges: a proven, life-saving terrorist penetration demands you procure him a prostitute before he will give you more intelligence. Most say they would. But then the asset asks for a child prostitute — and, Kiriakou notes, no training class ever teaches where the line is. There is no rulebook at the other end of the cable; the officer must bring his own moral principles and hold them.[1][2][3][4]
Kiriakou says he originated the hypothetical in a speech at American University, using it to illustrate that the CIA gives no training whatsoever in ethics, leaving officers to rely on their own moral values; when he puts the prostitute question to a crowd, he says, about 90% of hands go up in favor of providing one.[5]
Torturing prisoners at a JSOC black site
Kiriakou has written about a JSOC black site where some of the contractors working there encouraged his squad to torture prisoners; he told the privates under him, unambiguously, that they were not to participate.[6]
What the hypothetical was for, and what became of it
Kiriakou frames the exercise as a consequence of an absence rather than a puzzle in its own right: “at the CIA there are no ethics classes. You have to go into the CIA confident in your own moral compass, because there’s not going to be anybody to tell you what’s right and what’s wrong, what’s legal and what’s illegal.” His answer to the second question is unequivocal — “absolutely not, not under any circumstances” — followed immediately by the point of the lecture: “but the problem is that there’s no rule at the CIA saying you can’t do this. You have to know in your heart that it’s the wrong thing to do.”[7][8]
The speech was cleared in advance by the CIA’s Publications Review Board, and Kiriakou gives it at every university he visits. It was nonetheless recycled online as a claim that he had exposed child sex trafficking inside the agency — a distortion he denies flatly. See the child-trafficking misquotation.[9][10]
He applies the same standard to a practice he says did occur. Asked about the bacha bazi boys in Afghanistan, he confirms it happened and that contractors and military officials condoned it — “utterly disgraceful, criminal” — and rejects the defence offered at the time: “well, this is a part of Afghan culture. Yeah, it is. It’s a part of Yemeni culture to marry eight-year-olds … but that’s not cool either. So we shouldn’t have any role in this at all. It’s just wrong.” He says such conduct could be reported to leadership or the inspector general, and that to his recollection the reports concerned contractors and military officials rather than agency officers.[10][11][12]