John Kiriakou

After his signature, it went to National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice.

And after Rice approved it, it went to the president.

And as soon as the president signed it, the CIA began torturing its prisoners.

I remember at the time thinking, you know, these guys have been in Guantanamo for a long time and we're not hearing anything about trials or jury selection or federal charges or anything.

And a colleague said to me, oh, the vice president nixed that.

It was Vice President Dick Cheney.

who decided or realized or concluded that while at Guantanamo, these men had no rights.

Upwards of 80 or 85% of the people that we had at Guantanamo were innocent people who were scooped up in these dragnets.

Most of them were...

Afghan citizens or Pakistani citizens who were involved in disputes with neighbors.

Maybe they had loaned money to a neighbor and the neighbor didn't want to pay it back.

So he would call the Americans and say, hey, my neighbor is Al-Qaeda.

The US Army or the CIA grabs the guy, puts him on a flight to Guantanamo, and nobody ever sees him again.

In an interview with ABC News, I said that the CIA was torturing its prisoners, that torture was official US government policy, it was not the result of a rogue, and that the policy had been personally approved by the president.

Within 24 hours, the CIA filed a document with the FBI called a crimes report saying that I had disclosed classified information to the media.

That's a crime under the Espionage Act.

The FBI investigated me from December of 2007 until December of 2008.

And in December of 2008, they sent my attorneys something called a declination letter, declining to prosecute me.

They said that torture was a crime,

and that we have a law in the United States that says you cannot classify a crime for the purpose of keeping the information from the American people.