John Kiriakou

And they said, yes.

I said, why in the world would we send them to Cuba?

And they said, and I thought this was a great idea, we're going to keep them in Cuba for two or three weeks until we can figure out which federal district court to charge them with.

The idea was that we would charge all of them with terrorism or conspiracy or providing material support for terrorism.

And we would charge them in Washington, New York, or Pennsylvania because that's where the fourth plane went down.

I said, that's a great idea.

loaded everybody onto a series of C-12s, flew them to Guantanamo.

We put 770 people there at one point.

But then someone in Vice President Dick Cheney's office observed, you know, they don't really have any rights in Guantanamo.

It's ours.

We control it.

But it's not American territory.

So they don't have any U.S.

legal rights there.

Why don't we just keep them there forever?

And then that became the policy.

And that's where the big split came for me.

I did not yet know that there was a formal torture program.

I learned that in May of 2002.

Torture actually began on August the 2nd, 2002.