Asked when his own crisis of conscience began, Kiriakou answered that until 11 September 2001 he genuinely believed that the United States were the good guys, and that the human rights violations one read about were anomalies rather than practice. The reason he believed it was a review carried out in the 1990s.[1]
The review
Under Bill Clinton, Kiriakou says, the CIA went through the files of literally every recruited asset in the world. The name he gives the exercise is mangled by the auto-caption; what he describes is a scrub. Any asset whose file showed a history of human rights abuses was fired.[1]
The scale, in his account, was that the Agency fired fully one third of its recruited agents around the world. His own reaction at the time was that Bill Clinton was serious about human rights, and that this was going to be a new day.[2]
The switch
It was, he says, until September 11th — and then it was like flipping a switch. In his telling the Agency went straight back to the bad old days before the Church Committee and the Pike Committee, and started killing everybody.[3]
What followed, as he lists it, was a torture programme, a directed assassination programme, an extraordinary rendition programme and a system of secret prisons popping up all over the world that nobody knew about. He repeats the phrase to make the speed of it the point: like flipping a switch.[3]