The September 10th country is the phrase John Kiriakou uses for the America he says was lost after the September 11 attacks, offered in answer to a question about whether, having served a prison sentence, he still considers himself a patriot.
Patriotism, restated
Kiriakou answers that he is a patriot — and not just a patriot, but one who spent twenty years serving his country in some of the most awful and dangerous places on earth.[1] He says he knows his country is better than this: better than waterboarding people, than forcing hummus up their rectums, than killing them in the middle of interrogations, and better than droning American citizens overseas who have not been charged with a crime and have had no chance to meet their accusers in court. That, he says, is not the America he knows and loves, and he does not know where this came from.[2]
The two wars
Asked directly whether he still supports the wars, Kiriakou separates them.[3]
He says he never supported the Iraq War and never thought it a just war, and that he devoted a good amount of space to the point in his first book. It was, in his description, a war of choice and a war of revenge for the family.[3]
Afghanistan he did support, and no longer does. His reason is that the whole point of the Afghan war was to defeat al-Qaeda, and al-Qaeda was defeated by the middle of 2003 — so everything since 2003 has been nation building, which he says is never a good idea.[3][4]
The verdict
His conclusion is the phrase itself: he is still a patriot, and he wants his September 10th country back.[4] Asked who ruined it, he answers without hesitation — by George W. Bush and by Barack Obama equally.[4]
The same even-handedness runs through his account of the Espionage Act prosecutions, which he says were used three times between 1917 and 2009 and nine times after Barack Obama became president.[5]