Pakistani prisons came up in December 2025 when a viewer donating to the show asked that Imran Khan be kept in mind, describing him as still in illegal custody while the field marshal had gone, in the viewer’s phrase, full fascist.[1]
The pattern
Kiriakou said that was his understanding too, and set the case in its national context rather than treating it as an aberration: “a lot of prime ministers and former prime ministers end up in prison in Pakistan.”[2]
Rall’s observation was that what is never clear is the conditions under which they are held — with the aside that a Pakistani prison cannot be that pleasant.[2]
What Kiriakou knows about them
Kiriakou’s answer is unusual in his commentary because it rests on direct observation of the facilities themselves rather than on reporting. “I I wouldn’t want to be in I listen, I’ve I’ve gone to many Pakistani prisons because we were locking people up there. I would never want to be incarcerated in a single one of them.”[2][3]
The clause because we were locking people up there refers to the post-2001 period of CIA operations in Pakistan, during which detainees were held in Pakistani custody as well as American — the same period covered by his own service at Pakistan station.
No VIP wing
Asked directly whether there is any kind of VIP lounge or first-class treatment for a figure of Khan’s standing, his answer was a single word — “No” — followed by the only available alternative: “You’d have to get on your hands and knees and beg for home confinement.”[3]
The assessment sits alongside his long-running commentary on incarceration in the United States: where he treats American prisons as places that reform nobody, he treats the Pakistani system as one where confinement itself is the punishment and no status protects against it.