The conscientious objectors book is a volume John Kiriakou described in November 2025, prompted by a viewer who identified himself as a conscientious objector from the Army infantry in 2009 and named Kiriakou as his favourite American hero.[1]
Provenance
Kiriakou’s reply was that he had read an absolutely wonderful book, long out of print. It had come from a conscientious objector with whom he was friendly and who has since passed away, sent to him out of the man’s own personal collection — published, he thought, in about 1972 or 1973.[1]
Its contents were a series of interviews with conscientious objectors. Some had gone to Canada; others had been arrested and imprisoned.[1]
What the interviews described
Kiriakou’s summary of the material is that the stories they told were harrowing — and his conclusion from them inverts the usual assumption about who takes the physical risk.[2]
In many cases, he says, it was more dangerous, more physically and personally dangerous, to have been a conscientious objector and then sent to an American prison — and he was specific that these were not minimum-security institutions but “a real honest to god prison.”[2]
The interview he remembered was of a man describing how he fended off what were known inside as the sisters — the situationally gay prisoners who, in the account, would rape whichever new man happened to arrive. The choice offered to a newcomer, as Kiriakou relays it, was that they were either going to beat you to a pulp or they were going to rape you, one or the other. For the man in the interview, every day was another fight.[2][3]
The verdict
His conclusion was addressed back to the viewer who had raised it: “So, being a conscientious objector is a very brave thing to do.”[3]
The judgement is consistent with the position he takes elsewhere on refusing an order: that the cost of refusal is usually paid privately, without publicity, by people whose names never enter the record.
Conscientious objection in practice
The subject is not only historical for him. Kiriakou has said he cannot count the phone calls he has received from men ordered to deploy who simply do not want to go, and that he has referred several of them to Quaker House — a Quaker organisation just outside the gates of Fort Bragg in North Carolina that assists conscientious objectors.[4][5] His account of what those callers are refusing is specific: they are people who want to serve their country but do not believe they should risk their lives for Israel.[4]
He does not tell them what to do. His advice, in his own summary of one long conversation, was that it is a hard decision and “you got to do what’s in your heart.”[5]