Kiriakou has said he is proud to sit on the Julian Assange Defence Advisory Committee. Asked about the case in May 2021, he acknowledged that Assange was suffering mightily, and then said something more optimistic than the circumstances suggested: that he thought Assange actually had the upper hand.[1]
The optimism rested on a single structural feature of extradition law, which Kiriakou returned to in interview after interview from early 2020 until the case left the British courts. It is not an argument about journalism, the Espionage Act, or the merits of the charges. It is an argument about what the United States would be required to prove about its own prisons.
What the United States has to prove
To secure the extradition, Kiriakou said, the Justice Department has to prove to the British Supreme Court that the way the United States practises solitary confinement is not a form of torture.[2][3]
That, in his assessment, is impossible, because the finding has already been made in several jurisdictions and in more than one body of law.
The United Nations has declared the American use of solitary confinement to be a form of torture, and has urged member states to limit it to a maximum of fifteen days.[4][5] Kiriakou attributes the finding in particular to Nils Melzer, the UN special rapporteur on torture, who he says has stated repeatedly over the years that the US practice meets the definition.[6][7] Against that fifteen-day international standard, he notes, the United States has held prisoners in solitary confinement for as long as forty-four years.[7][5]
He also points out that the United States does not need the United Nations to reach the conclusion. The federal torture act specifically prohibits torture and defines it, and on that definition, he says, solitary confinement is torture — “it’s not open for debate, it’s just torture, plain and simple.”[8] The United States is a signatory to the UN Convention Against Torture, which also defines it; and not merely a signatory, in his telling, but its author. “We wrote the United Nations Convention Against Torture,” he says — and violate it every day.[9]
The precedents
Beyond the UN finding, Kiriakou counts a line of rulings in which courts have already refused to send prisoners to the United States for this reason.
In the May 2021 telling, two other British courts had blocked extraditions to the United States of prisoners who would have been subject to solitary confinement here, on the ground that it is a form of torture. Together with the UN finding, that made three separate precedents serving to protect Julian Assange.[2][3]
The count and the forum shift between tellings, and Kiriakou does not reconcile them. In February 2020 he said only that there were “precedents plural for British courts refusing to extradite subjects to the United States because of the way the US uses solitary confinement,” an internationally recognised form of torture.[10] Later that month he called them “several precedents in British jurisprudence” in which the courts refused to extradite British prisoners for that reason.[11][6] In June 2021 he put the figure at three and placed them in the British courts: three separate occasions on which the British courts upheld a lower court’s refusal to extradite, specifically because the United States uses long-term solitary confinement.[12]
From late 2021 onward he consistently places the three precedents at the European Court of Human Rights instead — European nationals whom the United States sought to extradite and who won their cases because of the way the United States uses solitary confinement as a punishment.[13][14] Elsewhere he treats the two forums as a single body of authority, saying there is precedent both in the United Kingdom and at the European Court of Human Rights against extraditing prisoners to the United States because of the way solitary confinement is used here as a punishment.[15]
Why the precedent cases turned on mental illness
The clearest account of what the European cases actually decided comes in April 2022. The three prisoners the European Court of Human Rights refused to let the United Kingdom send to the United States had mental illnesses, and the court believed that the US practice of solitary confinement was enough to push them to attempt suicide.[16]
That is the hinge on which Kiriakou hangs the analogy: Assange, he says, is mildly autistic and suffers from chronic depression and anxiety — the same maladies for which the other prisoners were not extradited.[16] The same reasoning underlies his separate observation that the American prison system is so well known for its decrepit state and its weaponised use of solitary confinement that the European court will not extradite people into it at all.[17]
What awaits at the other end
The precedents matter because of what Kiriakou says is certain to happen to a high-profile prisoner who arrives. He would be placed in solitary confinement, or in a communications management unit, in “some godforsaken place” — the ADX at Florence, or the communications management unit in the penitentiary at Terre Haute.[18] There are two such units in the country, he says: one in the former death row at the maximum-security penitentiary at Terre Haute, Indiana, the other at the supermax at Marion, Illinois. Both, in his phrase, are hell on earth.[19] Whatever was decided, he argued, it was going to be terrible, a human rights violation, and it was going to push the man over the edge mentally and possibly lead to his suicide.[18]
The argument lands: January 2021
When the district judge refused the extradition in January 2021 on health grounds, Kiriakou read the ruling as a vindication of exactly this campaign. After years of writing about conditions inside the communications management units, holding monthly vigils and publishing in outlets around the world, “the judge actually took this seriously.”[20] He also credited an own goal by the other side: Mike Pompeo’s statement that WikiLeaks was a non-state hostile intelligence service, which he called outrageous and “just too much” — the ruling tied Assange’s anticipated treatment in an American prison to how the US government had publicly characterised him.[21]
The gap in the argument
Kiriakou identified the flaw in his own optimism himself, and said so plainly: he had been accused of being overly optimistic, and had come to realise that he was.[22]
The problem is procedural rather than substantive. Assange could still apply to the European Court of Human Rights for relief, but the UK government took the position that he was perfectly free to appeal without the extradition being paused while the appeal was heard — “so that defeats the whole purpose of the appeal.”[23] There is, he said, no law requiring the British to stay an extradition while a Strasbourg case is pending.[14] Meanwhile the order moved to the home secretary, Priti Patel, who had already said she would sign it if it reached her, leaving Assange’s attorneys fourteen days to appeal to the UK Supreme Court — an appeal that, in his estimate, would delay matters by fourteen days.[24][25]
He was also clear that even a British refusal would not end the matter. With no charges pending against him in the United Kingdom, Assange would have to be released from Belmarsh and expelled to Australia as an Australian national — and the United States would then simply ask Australia to extradite him.[26]
The prediction
Kiriakou’s forecast was correspondingly confident about the law and unsparing about the treatment. The British, he said, were being jerks about it and would not let Assange out of Belmarsh prison pending the appeal. But honestly, he added, he did not see how the United States could win this appeal — they were going to have to let Julian go.[27] In the June 2021 version the same conclusion is stated flatly: there is no way the Justice Department is going to win this case in the British appellate courts.[12]
The same argument, sworn: the Duggan affidavit
In October 2025 Kiriakou gave the argument its most formal outing, in an expert affidavit in the extradition case of the Australian former military pilot Daniel Duggan. He traces its origin to a series of articles he wrote for Consortium News in 2022 and 2023 on the effects of solitary confinement on the mental well-being of American prisoners, and is careful to say that his own exposure was slight by comparison — nine days in total, about which he jokes that he needed to lose the weight anyway.[28][29]
The affidavit’s historical claim is that solitary confinement as a punishment is an American invention, created in 1829 at the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia — an escape-proof neo-Gothic block of tiny cells radiating like spokes from a central guard post, each containing a bed, a chair, a small table, a chamber pot and a Bible, on the theory that a man with nothing to do but eat, sleep and read scripture would emerge a good law-abiding Christian. Instead, “everybody went insane” — and that is where the severe psychological effects were first learned: anxiety, depression, paranoia, hallucinations, suicidal thoughts and suicidal actions. “We’ve known this for 200 years, and we’re still using it.”[30][4]
The affidavit then supplies four or five worked cases, of which Kiriakou singles out one. Anthony Gay was severely mentally ill and was placed in solitary confinement in a Colorado prison immediately after conviction rather than sent to a mental hospital for the schizophrenia he was suffering from. In a six-by-ten-foot cell twenty-four hours a day he became paranoid and began self-mutilating: he stabbed himself in the eye with a razor blade, cut off pieces of his own flesh and ate them, and cut out one of his testicles, hung it on the doorknob of his cell and stitched his scrotum closed with a zipper taken from his trousers. He did not, in Kiriakou’s account, realise what he was doing. His seven-year sentence was extended to ninety-seven years because he kept doing these things and adding time. The original crime, in 1993, was stealing a one-dollar bill from a restaurant tip jar; he served two decades of the sentence in solitary.[5][31][32]
From that the affidavit reaches its conclusion about Duggan specifically: as a high-profile prisoner he will be placed either in solitary confinement or in a communications management unit, which Kiriakou describes as akin to solitary in that the prisoner is completely cut off from the outside world — and unless he is stronger than anybody Kiriakou has ever encountered, it will have the same effect on him that it has had on everyone else who has gone through it.[33]
The argument is one Kiriakou is unusually well placed to make and unusually invested in. His own account of the American prison system, and his description of solitary confinement as the only escape available to a prisoner who cannot defend himself, supplies the factual premise on which the whole legal objection rests.