John Kiriakou

We executed Japanese soldiers who had waterboarded American prisoners of war, right?

Waterboarding was a death penalty crime.

In January of 1968, the Washington Post ran a front page photograph of an American soldier waterboarding a North Vietnamese prisoner.

On the morning that that picture was published, the Secretary of Defense, Robert S. McNamara, ordered an investigation.

The soldier was arrested, he was charged with torture, he was convicted, and sentenced to 20 years at hard labor at Fort Leavenworth.

The law never changed, but somehow in 2002, like magic, the George W. Bush administration's attorneys at the Justice Department, the CIA, and the National Security Council decided we didn't have to pay any attention to that law.

And because we were the good guys, we could do anything we wanted.

And that's how the torture program came to be.

Many of these places were so secret that the presidents and prime ministers of the countries that they were in had no idea that there was a secret CIA prison in their country.

These were handshake deals.

between George Tenet, the director of the CIA, and whoever happened to be director of the intelligence service in those countries.

And the reason why there were so many of them was not because we had so many prisoners that we needed multiple locations.

It's that word was bound to leak out that these places existed.

And so if word leaked out about prison A, well, by then, all the prisoners had been moved to prison B.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is probably the best example here.

He confessed to, for example, murdering Daniel Pearl.

Daniel Pearl was a Wall Street Journal reporter who came to Pakistan in early 2002.

He was there to meet with a Pakistani extremist with whom he had been emailing for about six months.

He went on to do the interview and months later, his head was found in a vacant lot and his torso was found on the other side of town.

Well, we know who killed Daniel Pearl.