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 actually looked like on the ground.
What he saw
Kiriakou had been away for the weekend — a lunch with 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.