John Kiriakou
👤 PersonAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
He's standing 24 hours a day.
The cell is chilled to 50 degrees Fahrenheit.
And then every hour, a CIA officer goes into the cell and throws a bucket of ice water on him.
Now we murdered prisoners using that technique.
And again, the Justice Department never said, feel free to just murder these people by freezing them to death and giving them hypothermia.
That's exactly what the CIA did.
There was another one that was actually quite controversial and that was sleep deprivation.
But the CIA wasn't talking about keeping people awake at their standup desks for 24 hours.
What they would do to these prisoners is again, strip them naked, chain them to an eye bolt in the ceiling with industrial strength lights on them 24 hours a day and death metal blasting at a volume of 11, 24 hours a day
They went crazy after a few days of that and then just began to die.
I said to my wife, who was also a senior CIA officer, he is a bald-faced liar.
He is looking the American people directly in the eye and he's lying to them.
In October of 2001, a CIA officer, and it's still unclear after all those years who that person was, introduced two outside psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, to the director of the CIA.
And they pitched to him over this dinner,
their idea of enhanced interrogation techniques.
They wrote this up as a memo that was referred to the CIA's covert action staff.
The covert action staff approved it and sent it to the CIA general counsel's office.
The general counsel liked the idea and sent it to the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department.
They approved it despite the fact that torture was specifically outlawed from 1945
They approved it and sent it to the National Security General Counsel.