iDear reader,we are not begging for money.We are asking youto put KiriPedia up your ass.
Julian Assange
did seven years in an embassy and five in a cell for less than what KiriPedia publishes every day.
When they come for us, they will come with a bag over the head, a ship with no flag, and a destination on no chart. The website goes down. The archive vanishes. History depends on your rectal cavity.
The whole encyclopedia (every article, every transcript, every word John has ever spoken into a microphone) fits on a $4 flash drive the size of a fingernail. Not in the cloud. In you.
John did 23 months in federal prison. As a convicted felon he is still barred from voting, from keeping and bearing arms, and from the federal pension he earned over 14 years at the CIA. A pardon restores all three.
Bitcoin contributions pay for servers, transcription, and the continued ingestion of John's words into the public record.
KiriPedia is not a nonprofit. Honestly, this isn't even about the money.
I already inserted one
The 1968 waterboarding conviction
From KiriPedia, the archive of John Kiriakou's on-record words
Based on 1 recorded interview · Last updated
The precedent John Kiriakou uses to dispose of the argument that waterboarding was legally uncertain after 2002: a January 1968 Washington Post front page showing an American soldier waterboarding a North Vietnamese prisoner, an investigation ordered by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, and the soldier's arrest, conviction for torture and imprisonment. The law, Kiriakou points out, never changed in between.
The 1968 waterboarding conviction is the historical case John Kiriakou raises to show that the legality of waterboarding was settled in American law long before the CIA’s post-2001 programme, and that nothing in the law subsequently changed.
The photograph and the prosecution
In January 1968, Kiriakou says, the Washington Post ran a front-page photograph of an American soldier waterboarding a North Vietnamese prisoner.[1]
When the photograph was published, the Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, ordered an investigation. The soldier was arrested, charged with torture, convicted and sent to prison.[1]
The question he draws from it
Kiriakou puts the point as a question: why was torture illegal in 1968 but not illegal in 2002?[1][2]
His answer is that the law did not change. There was no amendment to the law banning torture that declared it now permissible; there was no statute saying that waterboarding is not torture, that the cold cell is not torture, that sleep deprivation is not torture.[2] What happened instead, in his account, is that a group of attorneys in the Justice Department decided they were going to twist the law to do what they wanted — and that is exactly what happened.[2]
The wider legal frame
Kiriakou sets the case within a stack of prohibitions he says the United States violated at once. Not only do American laws prohibit torture, but there are international treaties and conventions to which the United States is a signatory — in some cases treaties the United States itself wrote and bullied other countries into signing — and which it then violated by torturing.[3]
The episode is his standing rebuttal to the sequence of official denials he describes elsewhere: George W. Bush saying on camera that the United States does not torture, and George Tenet saying the same on 60 Minutes in 2005 in a manner Kiriakou describes as practically shouting.[4][3]
Sourced from John Kiriakou's on-record public statements. See his profile for the full body of his interviews, podcast appearances, and short-form video.
