John Kiriakou keeps a standing editorial practice that he describes without euphemism, and which has occasionally reached the families of its subjects.
The practice
“Anytime somebody associated with the CIA’s torture program dies,” he said, “I write a really mean-spirited alternative obituary saying that the world is better off without them in it.”[1][2] The pieces run in CovertAction Magazine, and he acknowledges freely that they have got him into trouble.[1]
The adjective is his own. He does not present the obituaries as balanced assessments that happen to be harsh; he presents them as written in order to be harsh, against a specific and closed category of people.
The daughter’s call
Three or four years before the conversation, Kiriakou said, he wrote one whose subject’s daughter telephoned him.[2] Her opening was: “Shame on you, you monster.”[2]
His reply, as he reports it, gave no ground at all. “You want to see a monster? Take a look at your father, and imagine the people that he murdered.”[2] He then explained why he would not soften it: “Sorry, but now’s not the time to try to pretty things up. He had that opportunity in 2002, and he elected to be with the bad guys.”[2][3]
The date is doing specific work. 2002 is the year the CIA torture program began, and Kiriakou’s argument to the daughter is that her father’s reputation was settled by a choice he made then, not by anything written afterwards.
The principle behind it
Kiriakou raised the practice in agreement with a case Ted Rall had been making about speaking ill of the dead. Rall, who said he is probably more famous for it than anyone in the country and had been attacked by Sean Hannity for remarks about Ronald Reagan on the day he died, argued that “there is no better time to assess someone’s life than at the time of their death,” and that for a public figure the moment of death is precisely when what they said and did will be — and should be — assessed.[4][5]
Kiriakou’s response was unqualified: “Yeah. Yeah. I agree with that.”[1]
Rall drew a further distinction that framed the exchange — between speaking badly of a dead man’s opinions and celebrating his death, holding that one may say a person was contemptible and that nobody should have killed him.[5] Kiriakou’s obituaries, on his own description, sit on the first side of that line and lean hard against it.