Closing a statement of what he thinks should happen to the institution he served, John Kiriakou turned from the CIA to the people it held.
The two propositions
He begins with the institution. He is on record, he says, as believing there should not be a CIA at all — “I think it’s a force for evil.” But if there has to be one, then it is up to the American government and especially the congressional oversight committees to ensure that it respects the rule of law and respects human rights and human dignity. “And we’re still not there yet.”[1]
The second proposition is personal. “And also, I feel like I owe so many of these men an apology for what my government did to them.”[1]
The conditions he names
What was done to them, in his phrasing, happened “in the darkness, in the shadows, outside the rule of law.” On that basis, he says, “they deserve an apology. They deserve compensation, which they’ll never get, but at the very least, they deserve an apology.”[1]
The shape of the claim
The passage is unusual in his record for the pronoun it uses. Kiriakou did not conduct the interrogations — he has said repeatedly that he declined training in the techniques and was the only officer approached who refused — and he is not, on his own account, among those who owe a debt in the direct sense. The apology he describes is one he feels he owes because his government did it, not because he did.
He does not name any of the men, and does not distinguish between those later found to have been correctly identified and those who were not. The claim is made about the whole category of people held and mistreated.
Placing it
The statement sits immediately after his account of what intelligence services are legitimately for — recruiting spies to steal secrets, and being subject to oversight because they work for the taxpayers who fund them — and immediately before his observation that most countries fail at that oversight and that the United States has failed many times over the decades. The apology is the human residue of the institutional failure he has just described.