The Toronto transit detention is John Kiriakou’s account of being physically escorted through Toronto Pearson airport by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police while changing planes on his way home from Athens. He tells it as a short personal story, and treats the humiliation as the point of the exercise.
The trip
Kiriakou dates the episode to shortly after his release from prison in 2015, having served 23 months for blowing the whistle on the CIA torture programme — “Something I would do again today if I had the opportunity.”[1] The Greek government had hired him to help write a new whistleblower protection law and flew him to Athens to meet the Minister of Justice, the Minister of State for Anti-Corruption and half a dozen parliamentarians.[1]
The routing is part of the story: “they did it on the cheap. And the cheapest way to get me out to Athens was to fly out through JFK and to fly back to Washington through Toronto. Toronto is in Canada.”[1]
The stop
Two Mounted Police officers intercepted him at the door of the aircraft as he was getting off — “and grabbed me by both of my arms. I said, ‘Hey, what’s up?’ One of them turned to me and said, ‘You are not welcome in Canada.’”[2]
Kiriakou says he pointed out that he was not entering the country: “I’m not entering Canada. I’m walking from one plane to another so I can go home to Washington.” Nothing further was said to him. “They didn’t say anything else to me the whole time, but they physically pulled me by the arms through the airport with people taking pictures and video. It was all very embarrassing and humiliating, which I think was probably the point.”[3]
They then walked him onto the connecting flight. As he sat down and put his seatbelt on, they said: “Don’t come back to Canada.” He records it as his last experience of the Canadians.[4]
Kiriakou told the story as the preamble to an interview with Richard Falk, the former United Nations special rapporteur, who had himself been held for questioning by Canadian border security on his 95th birthday and asked whether he constituted a security threat — a coincidence Kiriakou drew out deliberately.[4]