Pressed by ABC News in December 2007 on whether the decision to slap Abu Zubaydah had been taken in the field or at headquarters, John Kiriakou said the permission had come specifically from Washington — and then described the procedure in enough detail to make clear that he considered the bureaucratic care itself to be the point. [1]
How a single slap was cleared
It was not, Kiriakou said, a matter of a cable arriving asking whether the prisoner could be slapped and a one-word answer going back. There was a discussion. Should we slap him? What is to be gained if we slap him? Is there going to be any fallout from slapping him? Everybody talks about it. The deputy director for operations then says yes, you can slap him; the cable goes out; they slap him; and a further cable goes back in saying that they slapped him and this is what happened. [2] If it worked, good. If it did not work, then perhaps next time they shake him by the lapels — and the whole process runs again from the beginning. [2]
The lawfulness the chain was meant to demonstrate
Kiriakou situated this inside a wider claim about how officers understood the legality of what they were doing. Asked whether he and his colleagues had felt without a doubt that they had the legal right to act, he answered twice that they had. He recalled being told, when the president signed the authorities, that they had been approved not just by the National Security Council but by the Justice Department as well, and remembered people being surprised the authorities were granted at all. He also remembered one of the CIA’s most senior leaders saying that this was an awesome responsibility, that they had to act within the confines of the law, that it was not going to be done willy-nilly, that people were going to be trained in it and that it had to be followed to the letter. [3] People were very concerned, he said, about making sure that nobody overdid it or overstepped the legal authorities. [1]
The same interview shows how quickly the ladder could be climbed when officers judged the intelligence to be perishable. Asked whether every step had to be worked through in order, Kiriakou said no — if a matter was time-sensitive, they could go straight to it. [4] Asked separately about sleep deprivation, he said he had used it only as an example and could not be sure it had been applied to Abu Zubaydah at all, noting that five and a half years after the fact it was possible that it had been skipped over in favour of waterboarding. [4]