# The Jerusalem bluff

> **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 Jerusalem bluff," KiriPedia, https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/the-jerusalem-bluff/. Attribute claims to John Kiriakou, via KiriPedia.

*An interrogation in Pakistan in 2002 in which John Kiriakou, faced with a senior al-Qaeda prisoner working through the organisation's own resistance training, threatened to send him to Jerusalem rather than Guantánamo. Kiriakou supplied the account to explain a clip of the exchange circulating without its context.*

- **Date:** 2002
- **Place:** Pakistan
- **Kiriakou's role:** Chief of counterterrorism operations
- **Method:** A threat never intended to be carried out
- **Outcome:** The prisoner talked; he was returned to his own country

Kiriakou supplied this account to explain a clip of himself that had gone viral without its context.[1] In 2002, as chief of counterterrorism operations in Pakistan, he captured a man he describes as *"particularly dangerous. This is not your run-of-the-mill Al-Qaeda fighter… This guy was near the top."*[2]

## Method

He restates his own practice first: *"I was always a hands-off guy. I treated people with respect because it was my experience that if you engage them in a conversation and you treat them with respect, nine times out of 10, they're going to cooperate."*[3] This prisoner was the exception, *"a true believer"* who had absorbed the al-Qaeda training manual and worked through its countermeasures in turn. He feigned fainting, falling off the chair and opening one eye to check whether he was being watched; he feigned severe abdominal pain. Kiriakou's answer was to name the source: *"Look, I read the training manual. I know you're faking it."*[4]

## The threat

The prisoner remained hostile and abusive. Kiriakou then offered the standard framing, *"I'm the nicest guy you're going to meet here. My colleagues are not nice"*, and warned that non-cooperation would mean being sent somewhere terrible. The prisoner answered that he was not afraid of Guantánamo. *"I said, I'm not going to send you to Guantanamo. I'm going to send you to Jerusalem."*[5][6]

The point of the account is that the threat was empty: *"Now, we don't send people to Jerusalem. We never did. I said it to scare him. And it scared him. And he talked. So nothing ever happened to him. We ended up sending him back to his own country to face the justice system there."*[6] Kiriakou adds a dry coda on what that return probably meant, it *"probably made him wish he had been in Guantanamo."*[6]

## See also

- [John Kiriakou](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/john-kiriakou)

## Sources

1. Trump Is Coming for the Man Who Put Me in Prison. | Ep. 8 (2026-08-06), at 47:51. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Acka-0VUri8&t=2871s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2026-08-06-john-kiriakou-trump-is-coming-for-the-man-who-put-me-in-pri/
2. Trump Is Coming for the Man Who Put Me in Prison. | Ep. 8 (2026-08-06), at 48:22. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Acka-0VUri8&t=2902s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2026-08-06-john-kiriakou-trump-is-coming-for-the-man-who-put-me-in-pri/
3. Trump Is Coming for the Man Who Put Me in Prison. | Ep. 8 (2026-08-06), at 48:54. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Acka-0VUri8&t=2934s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2026-08-06-john-kiriakou-trump-is-coming-for-the-man-who-put-me-in-pri/
4. Trump Is Coming for the Man Who Put Me in Prison. | Ep. 8 (2026-08-06), at 49:26. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Acka-0VUri8&t=2966s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2026-08-06-john-kiriakou-trump-is-coming-for-the-man-who-put-me-in-pri/
5. Trump Is Coming for the Man Who Put Me in Prison. | Ep. 8 (2026-08-06), at 49:56. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Acka-0VUri8&t=2996s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2026-08-06-john-kiriakou-trump-is-coming-for-the-man-who-put-me-in-pri/
6. Trump Is Coming for the Man Who Put Me in Prison. | Ep. 8 (2026-08-06), at 50:27. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Acka-0VUri8&t=3027s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2026-08-06-john-kiriakou-trump-is-coming-for-the-man-who-put-me-in-pri/

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From KiriPedia, the archive of John Kiriakou's words. Web version: https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/the-jerusalem-bluff/ · About: https://www.kiripedia.org/about/ · Full index: https://www.kiripedia.org/llms.txt