The oath in the auditorium is the scene John Kiriakou gives when asked what led him to become a whistleblower.
The scene
Kiriakou has described his very first day of federal service, standing in the CIA’s auditorium with three hundred other new hires, putting his right hand in the air and swearing to protect and uphold the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. [1]
He adds a retrospective judgement he says he hates even to make: that he hates to think he was the only person in the room that day who meant it. [1]
His first day on the job was the day after New Year’s Day 1990; he joined in very late 1989. [2]
The disposition behind it
Kiriakou has characterised himself as someone who has always been respectful of the rule of law even where he disagreed with a particular rule, on the ground that Americans have a way of going about changing laws, and that one cannot simply decide one dislikes a law and pretend it does not exist. [3]
How it applied to torture
He applies the same reasoning to the interrogation programme. He has said that the torture programme was obviously unethical and immoral but also very clearly illegal; that he had always thought reasonable people could agree to disagree about torture as a matter of opinion; but that if you want to torture people in this country, you have to change the law first and then have the law permit it. [4]
The law he cites is the Federal Torture Act, which he says specifically outlawed the techniques later used against al-Qaeda prisoners, and whose force he illustrates with two precedents: the execution of Japanese soldiers who had waterboarded American prisoners of war, and the 1968 conviction of an American soldier photographed waterboarding a North Vietnamese prisoner, who was sentenced to twenty years at Leavenworth. [5] His formulation of what changed is that the law never changed — “we changed.” [6]