John Kiriakou
๐ค SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
They're going to go overboard and they're going to kill a prisoner.
And when that happens, there's going to be a congressional investigation.
Then there's going to be a Justice Department investigation and somebody is going to go to prison.
Do you want to go to prison?
I said, no, I don't want to go to prison.
As it turned out, I was the only person who went to prison.
But I said, no, I don't want to go to prison.
I went back downstairs.
I said, listen, I have a moral and ethical problem with this.
I think it's illegal and I don't want any part of it.
The funny thing is I had just captured Abu Zubaydah, who we believed was the number three in Al Qaeda.
And I got passed over for promotion.
And the reason I got passed over, they said, was because I turned down the training.
The head of the counterterrorism center said in my promotion panel that I had displayed a shocking lack of commitment to counterterrorism.
And then the guy who had given me the advice
saw that my name wasn't on the promotion list and he promoted me out of cycle.
So I realized then I was up against something that was gonna be tough.
And then there was a psychiatrist at the agency whom I had known for years.
We earned the same men's group, we went to the same church, and he happens to be both a brigadier general in the army and a CIA psychiatrist.
And he said to me one day, buddy, you know they call you the human rights guy behind your back.