John Kiriakou speaks to students about war on terror

John Kiriakou, the former chief of counterterrorism operations in Pakistan and the author of Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA’s War on Terror, addressed students and community members Tuesday.

In 2007, Kiriakou was the first U.S. government official to confirm that illegal torture methods were used to intimidate al-Qaeda prisoners, and, after being charged under the Espionage Act of 1917, was sentenced to 30 months in federal prison. As a seasoned CIA agent, Kiriakou spent years as a Middle East analyst specializing in Iraqi affairs and served in Bahrain, Washington D.C. and Greece before his imprisonment.

During his talk, “Keeping Government Honest: Whistleblowers, Torture and America’s War on Terrorism,” Kiriakou spoke about his experiences in Pakistan and his interaction with one particular CIA most wanted criminal, Abu Zubaydah, and criticized the CIA approach to tackling the war on terror.

According to Kiriakou, after he had captured Zubaydah in a raid that ended up being the largest al-Qaeda catch in CIA history, the FBI was able to acquire actionable intelligence through milder interrogation techniques.

“But the CIA didn’t like the fact that the FBI had taken over primacy in this case,” Kiriakou said.

Due to the disagreement, President George W. Bush agreed to take the FBI off the case.

“Within 24 hours, the CIA began torturing Zubaydah,” Kiriakou said. “And immediately, [Zubaydah] clammed up.”

Torture techniques, according to Kiriakou, spanned from the infamous “waterboarding” approach, which simulates drowning, to sleep deprivation, in which the individual is kept from sleeping for 14-15 days. By day 12, Kiriakou said, the detainee almost always begins to die.

“[No government official] was ever prosecuted,” Kiriakou said. “We’re talking about premeditated murder, possibly. Manslaughter, at the very least. But nobody was ever prosecuted.”

According to Kiriakou, Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times and, to this day, CIA leaders claim that they were able to obtain actionable intelligence through these torture approaches.

“That’s just a lie,” he said. “And these same CIA leaders keep repeating this lie, over and over and over again, hoping that people are either too ill-informed or too stupid to understand that it is a lie.”

Even now, after the CIA attained any possible information from Zubaydah, Kiriakou said that Zubaydah can never be released and, moreover, will never be allowed to have contact with a journalist.

“No matter what happens, no matter who is president, Abu Zubaydah will never have a day in court,” Kiriakou said. “He will never be able to face his accusers. He will never be charged with a crime. He will never have the constitutional rights that anybody in American custody has. This is a failure of the Obama administration.”

Kiriakou added that the way in which the U.S. government tackles the war on terror and the carelessness with which it arrests and incriminates potential criminals is flawed. A chief example of this, Kiriakou said, is the mistaken abduction of Khaled El-Masri, a German and Lebanese grocer. After realizing they had arrested and tortured the wrong man, the CIA released El-Masri and created, according to Kiriakou, “a fundamentalist Muslim extremist. Before, he was just selling fruits and vegetables. We made him an extremist.”

It is this irresponsibility, Kiriakou said, along with governmental agencies’ refusal to adhere to privacy policies, that led to his eventual distrust of the government. In fact, Kiriakou’s discussion about the lack of privacy for U.S. citizens shocked many students in the audience.

“[I was really surprised to hear] about the government having access to all of our information,” said Emily Goodspeed, a freshman majoring in computational neuroscience.

While he staunchly disagrees with the CIA and holds a deep resentment for the agency, Kiriakou also said that he feels that the CIA is “an anomaly.”

“It’s the CIA that’s working outside the law. It’s not [Americans]. These wonderful people — this is what America is. That’s how I got through [the bitterness].”