The unarmed ship is the third item in a short enumeration of war crimes John Kiriakou gave during an interview from Tehran, and the one that his interlocutor immediately expanded on.
The enumeration
Kiriakou interrupted his guest’s account of the bombardment to state the legal position himself, in three clauses. “I want to add something too that it is a it is a war crime to strike civilian targets. It’s a war crime to rocket a school and kill 160 children. It is a war crime to sink a naval vessel and then refuse to aid the survivors.”[1]
The sentence that follows is the reason he made the intervention at all: “So this isn’t just you know so many of us yell about the Israelis” — a qualification he leaves unfinished as his guest cuts in, but whose direction is to place American conduct under the same heading.[1]
What was added
His guest, the Tehran academic Mohammad Marandi, supplied the detail about the vessel: that it was not armed, that it had gone to India for a naval programme involving several countries, and that those aboard were “just men on the ship.” Kiriakou did not dispute it, and the conversation moved on to the bombing of hospitals.[2]
That characterisation of the ship is Marandi’s rather than Kiriakou’s; what Kiriakou states in his own voice is the legal proposition — that sinking a naval vessel and then declining to rescue those in the water is a war crime irrespective of who did it.
The standing position
The formulation is consistent with the rule Kiriakou states elsewhere about attacks on civilian infrastructure — that the law is not ambiguous and that violations continue anyway because nobody enforces it. In this interview he applies it to a campaign he describes as jointly American and Israeli, which is why the third clause matters: it concerns a military target, sunk lawfully or not, and locates the crime in what was done afterwards.[1]