Speaking at a CODEPINK event marking twenty years since the September 11th attacks, John Kiriakou said the thing that had stuck with him from the day itself was a thought addressed to the attackers: “my God, do you have any idea what you’ve done? Do you have any idea how many innocent people are going to be killed now because of this?” He knew what his government was capable of, and had assumed others knew too.[1]
The precedents
What he says came out of that day, worse even than the permanent wartime economy that made military and intelligence contractors rich, was “the number of precedents that we set that made it okay to kill innocent people.” It became acceptable to develop a drone programme; acceptable for the military to cross borders and drop bombs or fire rockets.[2][3]
The formula
And it became acceptable, when entire families were killed at weddings or funerals, simply to say: “well, there was a terrorist there. We knew what we were doing. Take our word for it. If you could see the intelligence that we have, you would know that we did the right thing.”[3]
Kiriakou’s answer is a claim about his own access: “well, I saw the intelligence that they had, and it was all a lie. It was all made up.”[4]
The problem, he adds, is not only the lie but its durability: “many Americans believe those lies and now, twenty years later, continue to believe those lies.”[4]
The 2021 case
He traces the sequence of targets — from the hunt for al-Qaeda and bin Laden, to Saddam Hussein, to ISIS, and by 2021 to ISIS-K in Afghanistan — and applies the formula to the most recent instance: a strike sent to destroy ISIS-K leadership that killed an entire family, including seven children, five of them under the age of five. “And we’re again told: take our word for it. We know what we were doing. There were terrorists there.”[5]
What follows from it
The conclusion Kiriakou draws is about who is left to check. His standing objection — that the executive’s account cannot be taken on trust because “everything that they tell us is a lie” — is supported with a list: weapons of mass destruction, the denial that secret prisons existed, the denial that there was a torture programme.[6][7]
He adds that it does not matter who is in the White House — “it doesn’t matter if it’s a Democrat or a Republican, they’re all guilty of the same thing” — and that the burden therefore falls on the public, and particularly on young people, to keep the pressure up.[7][8]