Asked in 2021 what he made of a particular foreign policy website, John Kiriakou declined to rate it and instead offered a rule for reading the genre.
The scale of the sector
We have to be very careful of groups like this, he said. By a Washington Post count, there are more than 1,200 organisations — if you can imagine — in Washington DC alone, or in the DC area, that describe themselves as think tanks. It is almost impossible to know who finances them. But we need to know who finances them, he says, so that we can use our own critical thinking skills to decide whether we should believe them: whether they take positions that are workable, or whether they are answering to something like one of the defence contractors. [1] [2]
The example
Then he gave a case. Someone to whom he used to be very very close worked for a major Fortune 100 defence contractor, and was in charge of doling out about two hundred thousand dollars in donations to think tanks that thought the right way and wrote the right kinds of articles. [2]
She went to see one of these think tanks — a household name, Kiriakou says — and decided that they were not pro-defence-contractor enough. So the next year she gave the two hundred thousand dollars to the other one, the one who was going to pander to the defence contractors. [3]
Now multiply that, he says, by every defence contractor in America. And that is where these stupid and crazy foreign policy ideas come from. [3] [4]
Where it fits
Kiriakou treats think tank money as the upstream half of a system whose downstream half he describes in lobbyists writing legislation — the same interests that fund the arguments also draft the text — with the leadership chokepoint described in the Speaker’s office as gatekeeper ensuring the result is voted through. His related account of a senator whose whole objection was to government waste of every kind, including the covert budget hidden inside the Pentagon’s, is set out in William Proxmire. [5] [6]