Asked whether he had ever encountered the abuse of boys during his service, John Kiriakou answered that in Afghanistan “you actually run into it with some regularity.”[1]
The practice
He describes the governing distinction as physical maturity rather than age: “it’s this weird thing in Afghan culture that if a boy does not yet have whiskers, if he hasn’t yet reached puberty, you can have sex with him.” He calls it “this weird perverted cultural thing that they have,” and says a good many Taliban fighters would rape young boys.[1]
Kiriakou attributes the practice to culture rather than to doctrine, though he does associate it with a particular community. He offers no estimate of prevalence beyond “with some regularity,” and no source for the rule as he states it.
What he says happened at Abu Ghraib
The question was put to him in the context of reports that young boys had been raped at Abu Ghraib in front of their parents as an interrogation method. Kiriakou did not confirm it: “to the best of my understanding that didn’t happen.”[2]
What he does say happened is the threat. “It’s my understanding that some of our soldiers threatened prisoners with that. That if you don’t talk we’re going to rape your children. If you don’t talk, we’re going to rape your wife or we’re going to rape your children in front of your wife. We’ll rape your wife in front of you.” He adds: “now, that that’s also a violation of law, both US law and the United Nations Convention on Torture.”[2]
He calls the threat “almost as bad” as the act, and says the agency and the military “actually did that kind of thing in Abu Ghraib, at least threatened it.”[2]
The wider point
Kiriakou has not been to Abu Ghraib and says so when asked. His knowledge of it, on his own account, is second-hand and photographic — “you’ve seen some of those pictures that came out of there” — and he catalogues what they showed before returning to the argument he makes about all of it: that these were “things that aren’t appropriate in any circumstance, whether in war or peace,” and that they were not effective in getting confessions or intelligence either.[3]