The Laura Ingraham exchange is an appearance John Kiriakou recounted on the In Limine podcast in February 2023, in which the Fox News host put her objection to him directly and he answered with what has become one of his standing arguments about torture.
What was said
In Kiriakou’s telling, Ingraham told him on air: “you seem like a nice enough guy, but I really hate your position on this. I just think you’re wrong.”[1] His reply did not contest her preference. He conceded the ground and moved the argument onto the statute books: if she wanted to torture people, that was on her, but the law would have to be changed first.[1]
He then made the demand explicit. If torture is to be part of the American policy arsenal, he said, its supporters should “have the guts to go to Capitol Hill and say, I want to make torture legal.”[2] The question he attached to it — “Why will nobody do that?” — is the part he treats as decisive.[2]
Why he frames it that way
The argument is deliberately procedural rather than moral, and Kiriakou uses it because it forces the other side to act rather than to assert. He does not, in this framing, ask an interlocutor to agree that torture is wrong. He asks them to accept the consequence of their own position: that the Federal Torture Act, the United Nations Convention Against Torture and the Eighth Amendment all currently forbid what they are defending, and that a country cannot claim to be a nation of laws while quietly setting one aside.[2]
That no member of Congress has ever introduced such a bill is, to Kiriakou, the tell. The defence of torture survives in the register of television argument and dies the moment it has to be written down as legislation and voted on by name.[2]