Kiriakou raised the story to illustrate a general claim about the cost of whistleblowing: that the government wants to beat you so badly that anyone else thinking of telling the truth decides against it, because you lose your family and you lose your job.[1]
The break
He had a cousin, older than he was, whom he had always respected. The cousin told him that he simply could not speak to him any more. A first cousin — and the reason, as Kiriakou reports it, was that he had brought shame on their family.[1]
The reply
Kiriakou’s answer was to repeat the accusation back as a question and then answer it. “I brought shame on our family?” He said: you imported drugs from the Colombians, and I brought shame on our family.[1]
Then the details. Did the cousin think Kiriakou had not seen his name in the Washington Post as the cocaine dealer to the mayor of Alexandria, Virginia? Did he think Kiriakou did not know that he had run to Greece to hide until the statute of limitations had expired? And after all that, Kiriakou asked, he was the one who had brought shame on the family?[2]
Why he tells it
His host’s response was that every whistleblower has that story, and offered her own: a relative who asked why the FBI would do such a thing if it were not true.[2]
That is the point Kiriakou is making with it. The estrangement he describes is not a disagreement about the facts of his case; the cousin was in no position to make a judgment about torture policy and did not attempt one. It is a judgment about respectability, and Kiriakou’s answer is designed to show that the standard being applied to him was not being applied at all — that a criminal conviction obtained for exposing a crime was treated within his own family as more disgraceful than criminality itself.