Torture as a recruiting tool is the argument John Kiriakou makes when asked whether the practices of the war on terror did more harm than good. His answer is not hedged: “I am absolutely positive that that has been the case.”[1]
The claim
The formulation he gives it is deliberately unflattering to his own side, and it covers more than interrogation:
“We always seem to step in a mud puddle, so to speak, where it comes to things like interrogations or drone strikes or attacks on individuals. These activities always serve to promote terrorist recruitment.”
The occasion for it was a question about conditions at Guantánamo having become a recruiting tool for jihadists; Kiriakou accepted the premise and widened it, putting the targeted-killing programme in the same category as the interrogation one.[1]
Stated at full strength, the claim is superlative rather than comparative: torture and the torture program are “the greatest recruiting mechanisms for our enemies,” and they galvanise people overseas.[2] Set beside the two other arguments he makes against the practice — that it is unnecessary and that it does not work — this is the one he reaches for last and hardest: “if anything, it’s the best recruiting tool that our enemies have.”[3]
The arithmetic
What distinguishes his version of a common argument is that he attaches numbers to it, and dates them. “When we first began fighting al-Qaeda in Afghanistan we were talking about a core of just several hundred people. Well, now look at ISIS, which is sort of the next generation of al-Qaeda — we’re talking about fighting something like 35,000 people.”[4]
The conclusion is stated as a share of responsibility rather than as a sole cause: “and I think that we’ve had a hand in that recruitment.”[4]
The evidence from the prisoners themselves
The strongest support Kiriakou offers is first-hand, and he offers it as an analogy that runs from the drone programme back to torture. He was responsible for the capture and interrogation of dozens of al-Qaeda fighters, and says that none of them — “at least at the fighter level” — had any specific problem with the United States until it started bombing their villages and killing their family members. That is when they joined the fight. “The same is true about torture.”[2]
He gives the same testimony in fuller form when talking about drones directly, which he calls “probably the single biggest, the single most important recruiting tool for terrorist groups that exists.” He cannot count, he says, how many al-Qaeda fighters he captured or helped to capture who told him exactly the same thing: that they had no beef with the American government until American drones killed their fathers, their brothers, their uncles or their imam, or blew up the village, the school or the hospital — and then they were compelled to take up arms.[5][6][7]
He also insists the programme was not an aberration of one administration. In George W. Bush’s last month as president, twenty-four people were killed by drones; in Barack Obama’s last month, more than four hundred. “What kind of policy is that? It’s a policy of failure.”[6]
The corrosion argument
Alongside the recruitment claim runs a second, about what the practice does to the country using it. Torture is “a terribly corrosive policy” that “eats away at our humanity.” Americans like to believe, and want other countries to believe, that the United States is a shining beacon for human rights and civil liberties — “and it’s just simply not true.”[8]
His illustration is bureaucratic rather than dramatic. Every year the State Department writes a human rights report on every country with which the United States has diplomatic relations, and a State Department officer walks into a ministry of the interior to say that its government cannot torture people or arrest fourteen-year-olds. An hour later a CIA officer walks into the same office and says not to pay any attention to the State Department man.[8][9] His conclusion is a rule rather than a calculation: “there are some things that we ought not to do no matter what the cost, and torture is one of those things.”[9]
The same passage supplies his account of why the institution tolerated it — that the agency deliberately recruits people with sociopathic tendencies, who have a conscience but are happy to operate in moral and legal grey areas, and that it is impossible to keep out actual sociopaths, who have no conscience and pass the polygraph easily. As in corporate America, he says, it is the sociopaths who rise to the top: Gina Haspel was praised at her confirmation hearing for a spine of steel, when what she had lacked was the spine to say that the programme was illegal, unethical and immoral.[10][11]
The counter-charge answered
The recruitment argument is also Kiriakou’s answer to the accusation that his own disclosure endangered national security. It does not weigh on him for an instant, he says, and he gives two reasons.
The first is that studies concluded it was the torture programme itself that made things more dangerous for Americans, and that the programme had leaked well before he ever said anything about waterboarding — it was the programme, not his interview, that served as a recruiting tool for al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups.[12]
The second is a timeline. He blew the whistle in December 2007. Human Rights Watch published a report in 2005 saying the CIA was torturing its prisoners; Amnesty International said the same in 2006; the International Committee of the Red Cross issued its report in 2007; and there was a leak to the New York Times about the secret prison system in the same period. “So no, the revelations didn’t endanger American lives or endanger national security — the programs endangered American lives and national security.”[13]
He notes that the accusation is standard rather than particular to him, citing Tom Drake, who was told he had the blood of American soldiers on his hands, answered from the stand “name one — name one American soldier whose blood is on my hands, I defy you,” and had all the charges thrown out.[14]