John Kiriakou argues that raising concerns about civil liberties lost in the name of national security is routinely met with the accusation that the critic is “siding with the terrorists,” when in fact, he says, “people want our country to continue to live up to the ideals on which it was founded.”[1]
Kiriakou states that “a national security regime, a secrecy regime cannot coexist with a constitutional democracy” — that “something has to give.” He notes that only ten people in American history have been charged with espionage for leaking classified information, seven of them under President Barack Obama, and describes the effect of an espionage charge — being viewed as a traitor, shunned by family and friends, and burdened with massive legal bills — as part of the price paid.[2]
Kiriakou also states that the U.S. government “has routinely violated the constitutional protections afforded its own citizens while disregarding the internal integrity of other states and the fundamental rights of non-U.S. citizens,” in reference to bulk collection of phone calls and emails without clear authority.[3]
Kiriakou traces the balance to before 9/11: he says he would rather run the risk of another terrorist attack than give up the civil liberties generations of Americans fought for over 240 years, adding that he doesn’t mind taking his shoes off at airport security but draws the line at handing over his laptop, phone, and passwords.[4] He says his Orthodox Christian faith shaped that belief — that a country must live according to the principles it professes or admit it does not — invoking Ronald Reagan’s 1984 “shining city on a hill” speech as a standard he says the United States, in practice, fails to meet.[5][6]
He describes CIA officials leaning on lawmakers behind closed doors by invoking the 3,000 deaths of September 11, 2001 and implying another attack would follow any budget cut — “if you knew what we knew… you wouldn’t even think of voting no on our budget.”[7] Asked in 2026 about the 1975 Church Committee’s revelation that the CIA had developed a dart gun capable of causing an untraceable heart attack, Kiriakou declined to discuss it, saying only “that’s one of those things — no can do.”[8] He has also said he fears for free-speech rights in the U.S., calling it dangerous when large social media companies position themselves as arbiters of what is true.[9] He says he has never in his life seen the legislative branch cede its power and authority to the executive branch so willingly.[10] He argues the resulting political realignment around national-security issues leaves traditional progressives like himself with nowhere to go besides the Green Party or the Libertarians.[11]
The Nixon yardstick
Kiriakou measures the present against the president his generation was raised to treat as the floor. For most of two generations, he says, Richard Nixon was “the clearest example of what not to want in a president” — on freedom of speech, on foreign policy, even on some economic policy. That comparison has now inverted: friends of his own age, on both the right and the left, are “pining for the days of Richard Nixon,” and the joke lands every time because Nixon’s policies have come to look “quaint.”[12][13]
He is careful not to soften the original. Nixon, he says, came down “like an iron fist” on Vietnam war demonstrators and encouraged others to do the same — pointing to Governor Rhodes in Ohio and the Kent State massacre, for which “they all got away with it.” His judgement is nonetheless that the present situation is the more dangerous of the two, and he attaches that judgement to a specific cause: that the United States has ceded its foreign policy to Israel.[13]
He draws the parallel from the campus protests themselves, saying the demonstrations over Gaza and the arguments over human rights and war crimes remind him of the Vietnam-era protests, and that what is called antisemitic speech now routinely means nothing more than criticism of Israel — a conflation he says collapses in the face of groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace.[14][15]
”Democracy is under threat”
Asked directly whether American democracy faces serious problems, Kiriakou’s answer was “definitely yes.” What he says mystifies him is how few Americans realise how right-wing the country is.[16]
The examples he gives are domestic rather than clandestine: a very conservative Supreme Court; abortion banned for all practical purposes across most of the country; and school book bans reaching subjects including slavery and homosexuality. On slavery he is pointed — it is a fact of American history that people owned human beings here, and it is not something that can be treated as never having happened.[16][17]
He offers the renaming of Fort Bragg as a measure of the temperature: the base had been named for a Confederate general who was a slave owner and a racist, and the protests when it was renamed came from people who wanted the old name kept.[18]
His sharpest point is about January 6. The participants, he says, “are no less energized now”; they genuinely believe the election was stolen from Donald Trump; “they really wanted to kill Nancy Pelosi, and they would do it again if they had the opportunity.” His conclusion is that the threat is from the right, and is something to be aware of and protect against.[19][20]