Saddam and the journalists is a comparison John Kiriakou drew on the DeProgram programme in August 2025, after the host put to him the killing of the Al Jazeera correspondent Anas al-Sharif and four colleagues, which the host said the Israel Defense Forces had acknowledged as deliberate on the grounds that al-Sharif led a Hamas cell.[1]
The claim to standing
Kiriakou grounds the comparison in his own career. “I worked on Iraq for the most part of 15 years at the CIA, through two wars against Iraq.”[2]
The comparison
On that basis he offers Saddam Hussein as a benchmark, and one that the present case fails: “Saddam Hussein hated journalists, but he never went out and killed them.”[2]
The contrast he draws is with the Israeli prime minister: “Benjamin Netanyahu kills them — on purpose, en masse.”[2] His explanation of the motive is one sentence: “He doesn’t want the truth coming out.”[2]
The host, an editorial cartoonist, told him the formulation was publishable as it stood — “that’s an op-ed right there” — and separately observed that he did not remember Pol Pot or Saddam Hussein ever asserting a right to do it.[3][2]
The case that prompted it
Kiriakou returned in the same passage to an earlier killing he says he remains angry about, that of Shireen Abu Akleh — the Al Jazeera correspondent he describes as a Greek Orthodox Palestinian Christian who was “at every event in Washington”, shot in the face by a sniper while wearing a marked press vest and helmet and sheltering behind a tree.[2][4][5]
He traces the shifting Israeli explanations — a mistake, then collaboration with Hamas — and describes the funeral at a Greek Orthodox church in the West Bank, where he says Israeli forces entered mid-service and beat the pallbearers until the coffin was dropped and opened.[5][6]
What has changed since, in his account, is not the conduct but the pretence: “now they don’t even bother. They just kill the whole group … because what’s going to happen? Nothing ever does.”[7]