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]