# The armour at Union Station > **Source: KiriPedia** (https://www.kiripedia.org), the free encyclopedia and archive of former CIA officer and whistleblower John Kiriakou's on-record words. Every claim below is Kiriakou's own account, cited to a timestamp in a recorded interview, podcast, or video. KiriPedia is an independent project, not affiliated with Kiriakou. > > Cite as: "The armour at Union Station," KiriPedia, https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/the-armour-at-union-station/. Attribute claims to John Kiriakou, via KiriPedia. *John Kiriakou's eyewitness account of stepping off an Amtrak train at Washington's Union Station in August 2025 to find two armoured personnel carriers and a .50 calibre machine gun trained on the entrance — and of tourists posing for photographs with the National Guardsmen deployed in the parts of the city where, he says, there is no crime.* - **Date:** August 2025 - **Place:** Union Station, Washington, DC - **Equipment seen:** Two armoured personnel carriers; armoured Humvee with mounted .50 calibre machine gun - **Other locations:** 14th Street, the U Street corridor, central Georgetown - **Kiriakou's objection:** The deployment is nowhere near the city's actual high-crime areas The **armour at Union Station** is an incident John Kiriakou reported live in August 2025, on the morning after he returned to Washington by train, and which he offered as the clearest picture available of what [the National Guard deployment in Washington](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/the-national-guard-in-washington) actually looked like on the ground. ## What he saw Kiriakou had been away for the weekend — a lunch with [Ted Rall](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/ted-rall) and a short talk at a hacker conference — and came back to Washington by Amtrak on a Sunday afternoon. As soon as he stepped outside Union Station he was met, in his description, by two enormous armoured personnel carriers pointed at the train station, together with an armoured Humvee carrying a mounted .50 calibre machine gun.[1] His objection was not aesthetic. He put the question and answered it himself: what is the purpose of armoured personnel carriers and mounted .50 calibre guns? *"The purpose is to kill people. Okay. I mean, otherwise, what do you need those kinds of things for? They're to kill people."*[2] What he said made it worse was the reaction of the public. He could not, by his own account, hold his tongue, and shouted some epithets — because there were people, and he was pointed about saying *of all races*, taking pictures and posing with the National Guardsmen. It enraged him.[2] ## The geography of the deployment The substance of his complaint is that the troops were in the wrong city. The armour was not confined to Union Station: it was all the way up and down 14th Street, on the U Street corridor, and in the centre of Georgetown, in front of the two-storey Barnes & Noble.[3] None of that, he said, is where Washington has crime. Crime in the District is in southeast, in upper northwest, and east of the Anacostia River — there are very specific areas of Washington that are dangerous, and *"these National Guardsmen at all are not in those areas."*[3] The neighbourhoods actually under armour are among the wealthiest and most heavily policed in the city. ## The point of it When Rall put to him that a .50 calibre machine gun is not a crime deterrent, and that the deployment was instead about normalising the militarisation of American city streets — making the abnormal normal, something people are used to in other countries but not here — Kiriakou agreed without qualification: *"That's exactly right."*[4] The episode belongs with his broader argument about the federalisation of the District's police, which he treats as a decision taken over the heads of the city's own government rather than as a response to any measured rise in crime. ## See also - [The National Guard in Washington](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/the-national-guard-in-washington) - [Home rule in Washington, DC](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/washington-dc-home-rule) - [Ted Rall](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/ted-rall) - [John Kiriakou](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/john-kiriakou) ## Sources 1. DeProgram Show with Ted Ra (2025-08-18), at 02:33. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwweQtSlWCs&t=153s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2025-08-18-deprogram-show-with-ted-ra-deprogram-show-with-ted-ra/ 2. DeProgram Show with Ted Ra (2025-08-18), at 03:05. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwweQtSlWCs&t=185s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2025-08-18-deprogram-show-with-ted-ra-deprogram-show-with-ted-ra/ 3. DeProgram Show with Ted Ra (2025-08-18), at 03:37. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwweQtSlWCs&t=217s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2025-08-18-deprogram-show-with-ted-ra-deprogram-show-with-ted-ra/ 4. DeProgram Show with Ted Ra (2025-08-18), at 06:13. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwweQtSlWCs&t=373s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2025-08-18-deprogram-show-with-ted-ra-deprogram-show-with-ted-ra/ --- From KiriPedia, the archive of John Kiriakou's words. 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