John Kiriakou

John Kiriakou
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John Kiriakou was a CIA analyst and case officer from 1990 to 2004. In December 2007, John was the first U.S. government official to confirm that waterboarding was used to interrogate al-Qaeda prisoners, a practice he described as torture. Kiriakou was a former senior investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a former counter-terrorism consultant. While employed with the CIA, he was involved in critical counter-terrorism missions following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, but refused to be trained in so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques,” nor did he ever authorize or engage in such crimes. After leaving the CIA, Kiriakou appeared on ABC News in an interview with Brian Ross, during which he became the first former CIA officer to confirm the existence of the CIA's torture program. Kiriakou’s interview revealed that this practice was not just the result of a few rogue agents, but was official U.S. policy approved at the highest levels of the government. Kiriakou is the sole CIA agent to go to jail in connection with the U.S. torture program, despite the fact that he never tortured anyone. Rather, he blew the whistle on this horrific wrongdoing. John can be reached at: jkiriakou@mac.com.
The summer of 2013 was my first summer in prison after being incarcerated for blowing the whistle on the CIA’s torture program. When summer arrived in Loretto, Pennsylvania, I had already made a handful of friends, most of whom came from the prison’s “Italian” population. One warm day in the...
A building with a tower is seen through a chain-link fence.
Biden administration wants to look tough in an election year Late on August 3, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin threw out a plea deal, without comment, that would have seen three of the most notorious September 11 terror suspects at Guantánamo imprisoned without parole for the rest of their...
Charges Appear to Be Ridiculous The Justice Department has made something of a sport of attacking people on “national security” grounds. Just look at what has happened in recent years to Tom Drake, Chelsea Manning, Jeffrey Sterling, Daniel Hale, and this writer. The Justice Department’s attack dogs told Tom Drake and Chelsea...
Prioritization of funding for the Pentagon and intelligence agencies decimates vital government agencies that are needed for functioning democracy For the fifth time since October 2023, the federal government faced yet another shutdown, thanks to congressional squabbling over the federal budget. The government has been running on a series of...
Makes a Point of Slipping in Disinformation About Russia to Further Propaganda Campaign The New York Times on February 25 published an explosive story of what purports to be the history of the CIA in Ukraine from the Maidan coup of 2014 to the present. The story, “The Spy War:...
Fate of Wikileaks Founder Will be Decided by UK Court The UK’s High Court will hold a two-day hearing on February 20 and 21 on the U.S. request to extradite Wikileaks cofounder Julian Assange to the notorious Eastern District of Virginia (EDVA) to face 17 felony counts of espionage and...
Joshua Schulte was given a forty year sentence for allegedly passing documents that exposed nefarious CIA practices Has been kept under brutal solitary confinement conditions in New York Metropolitan Correctional Center that violate human rights A federal judge in New York in early February sentenced CIA whistleblower Joshua Schulte to a...
In early November, the leadership and board of Consortium News, the independent news site, filed a major lawsuit against the federal government and NewsGuard Technologies, Inc. NewGuard at first glance looks like a media watchdog organization, a group that seeks to keep misinformation and disinformation out of the mainstream....
On October 17, an explosion took place immediately adjacent to the al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza, the result of what appears to have been a rocket attack. Between 200 and 500 people were killed, all of them Palestinians. Gazans and many in the international community immediately blamed the Israeli military...
Anthony Gay is severely mentally ill. And like many Americans who suffer from severe mental illness and who commit a crime, he was placed in solitary confinement after his conviction, rather than in a mental hospital where he could have received treatment for his schizophrenia. Isolated in a six-by-ten foot...