John Kiriakou's Dead Drop - S2E14 The Torture Report

Episode Date: August 17, 2026

IN THIS EPISODE At Loretto Federal Prison, John can almost see the light of his release date in the not-too-distant future. Returning to the Outside World will mean having to shed the prison persona John worked so hard to create - if only for survival purposes. Meanwhile in the outside world, the suibject of John's whistleblowing - the CIA's torture program - is finally getting its day in the court of public opinion as the Senate finally gets up the nerve to release its damning report on torture. Things are coming to a head.SHOW NOTESIf you're enjoying this podcast, please check out the rest of our podcasts at Costard & Touchstone Productions. Your next great podcast obsession is just a click away! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This podcast, it's a Costerton Touchstone production. I told ABC News reporter Brian Ross on December 10, 2007, the truth, that the CIA was torturing prisoners. But three years before Brian approached me in 2004, the same year I left the CIA, the Associated Press and then CBS News, began reporting stories about American military and contract hires abusing prisoners at a place called Abu Ghraib. Now, it's important to remind ourselves that when America attacked Iraq in March 2003, we did so without cause, and we took our eye off the 9-11 ball, which was going on after al-Qaeda and its leadership. Iraq had nothing to do with 9-11, nothing. Saddam Hussein was an annoyance, of course, but he was not a threat. Before the invasion, Abu Ghraib was a notorious prison that Saddam Hussein used to torture people,

especially political prisoners. But when you start a war for bullshit reasons, you can't be surprised when lots of bullshit happens. After the invasion, the prison was ransacked. We closed it in order to refurbish it and then reopen it as a military prison. We had a lot of people we needed to hold and to interrogate. And here was a structure designed just for that purpose.

Expedience can be a little gross sometimes. While organizations like here, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the Red Cross called what was happening at Abu Ghraib torture. The Bush administration called it abuse or mistreatment. Unfortunately for the Bush administration, photos accompanied the descriptions and the photos depicted human rights abuses and torture. In May 2004, almost a year after the reports of abuse began, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the senior officer in Iraq, appointed Major General Antonio Taguba to open an Army Regulation 15-6 investigation into the conduct of the 800th Military Police Brigade.

In his findings of fact, Major General Taguba acknowledged, quote, sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses, unquote, including, quote, punching, slapping, and kicking detainees and jumping on their naked feet, unquote. He cited a naked detainee standing on an MRE box, meals ready to eat, with a sandbag on his head and wires attached to his fingers, toes, and penis to simulate electric torture. That is torture, by the way. There was a male MP having sex with a female detainee and military working dogs without muzzles, intimidating detainees, and in at least one case, biting and severely injuring a detainee. Torture was very much happening. We simply chose to call it by other milder words.

It doesn't change the fact that it was torture, even when it became murder, as it did with several detainees, including a man named Manadil al-Gamadi. Al-Jamadi died of asphyxiation after he was hooded, suffered broken ribs, and shackled in a way that put his entire body weight

onto his arms during interrogation. Afterwards, U.S. Army specialists posed with his dead corpse, and he was giving the thumbs up. For the record, they packed Jamadi's body in ice, allegedly to try to hide his cause of death. Also, for the record, Attorney General Eric Holder refused to press charges against the officers

and personnel who murdered Jamadi. By the time 2007 rolled around and I got involved, it really wasn't news that American forces tortured people and tortured them as part of an interrogation process. plenty of people outside America's borders believed it, in large part because they'd seen the proof. Even without proof, inside America, for reasons that we'll discuss, we were still equivocating. Well, our political leadership certainly was equivocating. It wasn't until 2009, seven years after we'd tortured Abu Zabeda and others at places like

Cite Green in Thailand. Six years after Amnesty International began reporting. supporting abuses that the U.S. Senate put together a select committee to investigate. And then it took them six years, six years, before they published their executive summary report. The full, unredacted report remains classified, and indeed, we aren't even sure if it still exists. That was December 2014. I was serving my sentence at FCI Loretto, doing time like a spy. I'm John Kirooku. Welcome to Dead Drop. What Makes a Spy Tick?

As always, we thank you from the bottom of our hearts for making us part of your day. There are lots of podcasts out there, lots of great podcasts that you've chosen to listen to ours. That means something to us. And we thank you as well for being of a mind to like, rate, review, comment on, and share the podcast. We really appreciate it. There was a difference between what happened at Abu Ghraib and what happened at places like

site green. The Taguba report blamed Abu Ghraib on, quote, systemic problems within the brigade and a lack of clear standards, proficiency, and leadership, unquote. By contrast, we tortured Abu Zubeda, that includes waterboarding him 83 times as a matter of policy. Abougrabe was carelessness coupled with poor training. Abu Zabeda and everyone else we torture was conceptual wrongheadedness coupled with total intentionality. From my cell at Loretto, I wrote a piece that appeared in The Daily Beast called Time to Reopen the Case on CIA Torture.

In it, I wrote this, quote, I was at the CIA when the torture program was conceived. I refused to be trained in the techniques, and when I left government, I confirmed that torture was official U.S. policy. Partly as a result, I have been locked away almost as long as the Senate report. But the issues remain not only as a matter for history and a question for justice. They remain because we still can't be sure whether ours is a nation governed by people who condone torture or not. It is vital that we know this at a time when so many headlines raise questions about

intelligence gathering that intercepts phone calls and emails or analyzes metadata from millions of different sources. Even if we accept that much of that work is necessary, we should have. We must have confidence that the government will deal honestly, fairly, and with restraint to keep our country and its people safe and without violating the Constitution. How can we have such confidence if the government leaves the door open to torture by pretending it can close that door behind us, that we can just walk away, holding no one accountable for the actions that were taken. The most revealing defense of what the CIA did was published

in the Washington Post in April when the Senate voted to declassify a few pages of its vast report. Former CIA official Jose Rodriguez, the agency's most vocal torture defender, wrote to defend his indefensible position that torture worked. Torture was good. and that the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report highly critical of the program is wrong. Rodriguez, remember, was the head of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center when the agency created the torture program. He implemented the program. He oversaw it.

He defended it to say nothing of the secret prisons, which he also directed. When the press began reporting that torture was taking place and was official U.S. government policy, Rodriguez, who was by then the CIA's deputy director for operations, did not work toward the transparency that he recently lauded in the Post. Instead, he took it upon himself to destroy videotaped evidence of the torture and act many would call obstruction of justice. Rodriguez protested in the Post that the torture program was effective and authorized and that the Senate report is flawed. He even condemned the SSCI vote to declassify

only the report's conclusions. His position is that he knows the truth because he was there and that the SSCI wrote the report with 2020 hindsight. I can tell you that he is wrong. I was there too at the same time. What of the report's conclusions is so objectionable? Among other things,

the SSCI found that torture did not work, agency officials, including Rodriguez, repeatedly and routinely misled the Justice Department, the White House, and congressional leaders, and underreported the program's brutality. The report concludes that the agency deliberately misled the media by leaking classified information, which, quote, inaccurately portrayed the program's effectiveness, unquote, that Rodriguez's management of the program was, quote, deeply flawed throughout its duration, unquote, and that the program, quote, damaged the United States' global reputation and came with heavy costs, both monetary and non-monetary, unquote.

Surely Rodriguez is not solely to blame for the government's immoral decision to torture prisoners. Others in and out of the CIA were up to their necks in the program. There are the torturers themselves, the CIA officials who conceived of and implemented the program, the attorneys at the CIA, the Justice Department, the Bush White House officials who wrote specious legal opinions justifying the torture, and the CIA officials who blocked internal and external investigations. In the eyes of history, President Barack Obama's legacy will be tainted by his 2009 decision that the Justice Department would, quote, look forward, not backward, unquote, on torture. This denied justice and attempted to cover up a

dark chapter in American history, putting us at risk for repeating this immorality in the future. It also allowed people like Rodriguez and his former minions to go to the press and repeat their lies over and over. This is not to say that the Justice Department has done nothing. After I blew the whistle on the CIA's torture program in 2007, I became the subject of a selective and vindictive FBI investigation that lasted more than four years. In 2012, the Justice Department charged me with, quote, disclosing classified information to journalists, including the name of a covert CIA officer and revealing the role of another CIA employee in classified activities, unquote. What I revealed was that the CIA had a program to kill or capture Al-Qaeda members, hardly a secret, and that the CIA was torturing many of those prisoners. The Senate report apparently does not offer any suggestions for next steps.

Clearly, the White House will not reverse itself and pursue criminal charges against anyone involved in the torture program. Rodriguez will continue to brag, as he did last year on the CBS program 60 Minutes, that he put on his big boy pants to lead the torture program. He'll continue to deny that anybody was tortured, and then out of the other side of his mouth, argue that the torture worked and American lives were saved. I went on to demand that President Obama appoint an independent prosecutor and hold public hearings on the torture program, that the SSCI declassify the report in its entirety,

subpoena witnesses, demand the truth, and vow never again to allow the abomination of torture to become U.S. government policy. No such things happened, of course. No one said whistleblowing was easy, I admitted. I finished the piece by saying that, quote, this is the only way that the United States can reclaim the moral high ground on torture and enable the international community to trust our leadership on human rights, unquote. Those were the days, right?

In her book, The Dark Side, journalist Jane Mayer detailed how the unsuccessful prosecution of John Walker Lind, an American Taliban member, convinced President George W. Bush and the team around him, Vice President Dick Cheney's office in particular, that regular criminal trials offered too many protections to those being prosecuted. In response, they began to circumvent those protections. To whom did the rules of war apply? If terrorists stood outside the rules of war, then couldn't they be subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques without breaking any rules or laws? As I told you about in season one, the CIA relied on the legal gymnastics of Deputy Assistant Attorney

General John used torture memos to justify enhanced interrogation techniques, believing their asses were covered legally. Those doing the enhanced interrogating felt bulletproof, so bulletproof that they videotaped themselves, interrogating and waterboarding, both Abu Zabeda and Abdurohimaneshidi. Those 92 videotapes were the key. Not everyone bought into use perverse reasoning. feared that participating would put them in legal jeopardy. In 2005, CIA's deputy director of the National Clandestine Service, Jose Rodriguez, destroyed almost 100 video recordings of interrogations over the objections of the CIA and White House legal staff. Evidently, what those tapes depicted was such strong evidence of likely criminal, if not war criminal behavior, that the idea

suddenly popped up to just destroy the evidence. What's more, Rodriguez destroyed that evidence over the objections of lawyers at the CIA and at the White House. In fact, White House General Counsel Harriet Meyer specifically ordered him not to destroy the tapes. Imagine how awful and unlawful that evidence must have been for Rodriguez

to have taken that risk. If you're enjoying death, Dead Drop, and of course, we hope you are. Then, while you're waiting for new episodes, I'd like to suggest another great, granular story podcast from the Custard and Touchstone family. Just the photographer with David Swanson does for photojournalism what Dead Drop does for spies.

Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist David Swanson tells you stories his amazing news photos just can't, what it felt like being in all those dangerous places, like war zones and natural disasters, doing his job taking pictures. Having been to a few war zones myself, I can tell you this. Just the photographer will put you right there,

on the ground, right next to David. Inside his head, in fact. It's a hell of a podcast, and you can find it wherever you find your favorite podcasts or at costard and touchstone.com. There's a link in this episode's show notes. In fact, you'll find lots of great story podcasts at Costard and Touchstone,

like the donor, a DNA horror story. story, the hall closet, sage wellness within, and the how not to make a movie podcast. Who knows, your next favorite podcast might be just a click away. Now back to Dead Drop. In 2007, two years after press reports that the tapes had existed and had been destroyed, the Senate formed a select committee chaired by California Democrat Diane Feinstein tasked with investigating the CIA's use of torture. In December 2007, the committee, opened an investigation into the tape destruction led by committee staffer and former FBI investigator Daniel J. Jones. He and four other staffers reviewed more than 6.3 million pages of documents,

cables, emails, and other materials principally provided by the CIA. An additional 9,400 classified documents repeatedly requested by the SSCI were withheld by the White House under claims of executive privilege. or was the White House withholding documents because they knew what they were doing was illegal? The report's summary would go on to state that the White House directed that the secretaries of state and defense, both principals on the National Security Council,

not be briefed on program specifics until September 2003. In fact, a CIA email from 2003 worries that then, quote, Secretary of State Colin Powell would blow his, stack if he were to be briefed on what's been going on, unquote. The CIA continued defending themselves by playing an aggressive offense.

They established a walled-off network share drive, accessible only to committee staff. They demanded that the committee redact the names of all detainees, all CIA officer pseudonyms, and the names of all countries that hosted black sites. Curiously, they also wanted to redact other men. material, like references to Allah. They also wanted to use pseudonyms to identify contractors and interrogators James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, despite the fact that they had both been publicly identified prior to the report's release.

But even as they were working to blunt the committee's investigation legalistically in the open, the agency was also still working in the shadows, too. Unbeknownst to the committee and its investigators, the agency removed hundreds of of pages of documents from the committee staff's CIA provided computer network without informing committee staff. When committee staff confronted the CIA staff, initially the CIA staff denied that any files had been removed. But when the lie got revealed, the CIA blamed IT contractors. And then when that lie died, they claimed that the White House had requested their removal. And that wasn't the worst of it. In March 2014,

Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Diane Feinstein reported that the CIA had improperly gained access to and searched the Senate Intelligence Committee's computer network, had access the committee's computers, had read committee staff's emails, and had sent a criminal referral to the Department of Justice based on false information. That's hacking. That same day that Senator Feinstein made those allegations, CIA Director John Brennan denied them. He said, quote, nothing could be further from the truth. I mean, we wouldn't do that. I mean, that's just beyond the, you know, the scope of reason in terms of what we would do.

When the facts come out on this, I think a lot of people who are claiming that there has been this tremendous sort of spying and monitoring and hacking will be proved wrong, unquote. The CIA Inspector General referred the matter to the Justice Department for prosecution. but the Justice Department declined to prosecute anyone for the CIA hack. An internal review panel appointed by Brennan insisted that the searches, quote, were lawful and, here's the kicker, in some cases done at the behest of John Brennan, the CIA director, unquote, problem solved, apparently. The more than 6,700-page report laid bare an alternate universe, where the most obscene human behaviors had become normalized, or worse.

Of the 119 known detainees, at least 39, were tortured by the CIA. The report notes that this is likely a conservative estimate. On the one hand, reading every vile act listed in the report would make for tedious listening because there's just so much of it. It really is repetitive and relentless. But it's that very repetitive relentlessness that normalizes the brutality. The CIA also tortured several detainees

before even evaluating whether they would be willing to cooperate. That's despite later CIA claims to the committee that detainees were always provided the opportunity to cooperate before enhanced interrogation techniques began. In 2003, CIA interrogators subjected at least six detainees to shackled nudity, sleep deprivation, or other torture techniques before any questioning took place, and then there were the rats.

A prisoner named Janat Ghul was tortured for months based on false accusations made by informant, known as Asset Y. Senior CIA officers had expressed doubt about Asset Y's credibility, and Gould denied having any information about imminent threats to the United States, but interrogators subjected Gull to numerous torture techniques regardless. Even after CIA staff at the site said that they believed Gould was not withholding information, CIA headquarters ordered the torture to continue.

In the end, Gull never provided the information the CIA thought he possessed, and as that why, well, he finally admitted to just fabricating the accusations. The horrors went on. At least two prisoners were subjected to mock executions. CIA interrogators subjected detainee Abu Huudafa to Issa, to ice water baths and 66 consecutive hours of standing sleep deprivation, as well as forced nudity and dietary manipulation. He was later released after the CIA learned that, well, they had mistaken his identity.

Hubefa was one of dozens of individuals whom the CIA detained, who were cases of mistaken identity or otherwise did not meet the requirements for detention. Rape also featured prominently. One prisoner was diagnosed with chronic hemorrhoids, an anal fissure, and symptomatic rectal prolapse. Those are all symptoms normally associated with violent anal rape. The rape threats were not limited to the prisoner's person. Interrogators told prisoners, quote, we could get your mother in here. And, quote, we can bring your family in here, unquote.

One interrogator convinced Abdurihim Anashti that he was being held in a Middle Eastern country, where it's normal for interrogators to sexually abuse female family members in front of detainees. Five CIA detainees were subjected to rectal rehydration or rectal feeding. Several prisoners almost died and became completely unresponsive or nearly drowned during waterboarding. Interrogators told prisoners that they would be killed. One told Abu Zabeda, quote, we can never let the world know what I've done to you, unquote. While visiting one of the people,

of the CIA black sites, a federal Bureau of Prisons representatives said that they had, quote, never been in a facility where individuals were so sensory deprived, meaning constant white noise, no talking, everyone in the dark, detainees constantly being shackled to the floor or the wall, and the starkness of each cell, concrete and bars. There is nothing like this in the Federal Bureau of Prisons, unquote. Well, that's a good thing. There absolutely shouldn't be anything even remotely like that in the Federal Bureau of Prisons. On the plus side, there were occasions where even the CIA agreed interrogators went too far or practiced unsanctioned forms of torture.

The agency sent one interrogator home early after he threatened prisoner Nushiti by racking a handgun and revving a power drill next to Nashiti's hooded head. The interrogator had not sought headquarters approval for such, quote, unauthorized actions, unquote. What's more, CIA interrogators used unauthorized forms of torture or used authorized techniques for more time or in more extreme ways than were approved. Other unauthorized techniques and divergence from authorized applications of techniques included improvised stress positions, punitive water dowsing, nudity, temperature, and dietary manipulation, and waterboarding that differed from the approved methods.

Can you imagine? CIA interrogators also subjected multiple detainees to unauthorized torture techniques that headquarters later retroactively approved. Torturing prisoners caused them serious mental harm, including dementia, paranoia, insomnia, and attempts at self-harm, including suicide. In November 2002, after torturing detainee Gus Rahman, CIA officers and contractors left Rahman chained to a wall in a cold cell, on a cold floor in a seated position wearing only a sweatshirt.

He died of hypothermia, or should I say, they used hypothermia to murder Rahman. For the record, no CIA employees were disciplined as a result of his death, or as the result of any of the deaths. The Senate's report listed 20 key findings. These are verbatim from the report itself, quote, the CIA's use of its enhanced interrogation techniques was not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining cooperation from detainees. The CIA's justification for the use of its enhanced interrogation techniques rested on inaccurate claims of their effectiveness. The interrogations of CIA detainees were brutal and far worse than the CIA represented to

policymakers and others. The conditions of confinement for CIA detainees were harsher than the CIA had represented to policymakers and others. The CIA repeatedly provided inaccurate information to the Department of Justice, impeding a proper legal analysis of the CIA's detention and interrogation program. The CIA has actively avoided or impeded congressional oversight of the program. The CIA impeded effective White House oversight and decision-making. The CIA's operation and management of the program complicated and in some cases impeded the national security missions of other executive branch agencies.

The CIA impeded oversight by the CIA's office of the inspector general. The CIA coordinated the release of classified information to the media, including inaccurate information concerning the effectiveness of the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques. The CIA was unprepared as it began operating its detention and interrogation program more than six months after being granted detention authorities. The CIA's management and operation of its detention and interrogation program was deeply flawed throughout the program's duration, particularly so in 2002 and early 2003. Two contract psychologists devised the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques and played a central role in the operation, assessments,

and management of the CIA's detention and interrogation program. By 2005, the CIA had overwhelmingly outsourced operations. related to the program. CIA detainees were subjected to coercive interrogation techniques that had not been approved by the Department of Justice or had not been authorized by CIA headquarters. The CIA did not conduct a comprehensive or accurate accounting of the number of individuals it detained and held individuals who did not meet the legal standard for detention. The CIA's claims about the number of detainees held and subjected to its enhanced interrogation

techniques were inaccurate. The CIA failed to adequately evaluate the effectiveness of its enhanced interrogation techniques. The CIA rarely reprimanded or held accountable, personnel for serious or significant violations, inappropriate activities, and systematic and individual management failures. The CIA marginalized and ignored numerous internal critiques, criticisms, and objections concerning the operation and management of the CIA's detention and interrogation program. The CIA's detention and interrogation program was inherently unsustainable and had effectively ended by 2006 due to unauthorized press disclosures, reduced cooperation from other nations, and legal and oversight concerns. The CIA's detention and interrogation program damaged the

United States standing in the world and resulted in other significant monetary and non-monetary costs. It seems a little odd to be pointing to a moment from America's past where America's harmed its own reputation in the world through its actions, considering the mess that we're making of our reputation right now. Our leaders seem to have a habit of doing that. The rank and file? A lot less so. The report cites CIA documents showing that various CIA officers

at the secret detention sites repeatedly protested the torture program. One interrogator called the program a train wreck and wrote, quote, I intend to get the hell off the train before it had. happens, unquote. The head of CIA counterterrorism operations, the notorious Jose Rodriguez, reprimanded CIA officers at one site for their protests, warning them against using, quote, speculative language as to the legality of given activities, unquote, in their CIA cables. Higher-ups, including CIA directors, George Tenet, Porter Goss, and Michael Hayden,

all overruled objections to torture and kept the, the program going until Barack Obama ended it in 2009. In June 2015, the full Senate voted 78 to 21 in favor of legislation outlawing torture, co-sponsored by the late Senator John McCain and Senator Dianne Feinstein, 33 Republican senators supported the legislation, which has since become law. By then, I was a free man, my out date being February 3, 2015. The irony can be a little overwhelming. I was punished for telling America the truth that the CIA was breaking the law, torturing people, and then covering it up.

Meanwhile, no one responsible for the actual torture has ever been forks to pay a price. That goes for the people who manufactured tortures legality to. Making dubious legal arguments in the abstract is one thing. Making them knowing full well what the results of your dubious legal argument will crush other human beings, that's monstrous. If there's a bottom line to the story, it's this. The CIA's leadership knew that the enhanced interrogation techniques they were pushing were illegal. On page 33 of the Senate Torture Report, the summary notes that senior lawyers at the CIA

internally circulated a draft letter to Attorney General John Ashcroft dated July 8, 2002 expressly acknowledging that the enhanced interrogation techniques violated. the U.S. torture statute. They admitted it in writing. While it's unclear if that letter was ever actually sent, it did request that the Department of Justice give the CIA immunity in advance via something called a formal declination of prosecution.

In other words, a free pass promising never to prosecute. What would anyone prosecute you for if what you're doing is legal? The CIA officials claimed that they relied on guidance from Justice Department Legal Counsel in good faith, but instead the document makes clear that senior CIA officials knew their tactics were illegal from the get-go. The point of the exercise was to create legal cover for those illegal tactics. When their efforts to obtain a get-out-of-jail-free card in advance failed, they tried to authorize the techniques via the torture memos drafted by the Justice Department. Department's Office of Legal Counsel and the White House counsel beginning in August 2002,

but those memos were not an honest assessment of the law prescribing torture. Rather, they were a perverse attempt to justify the unjustifiable. The point of whistleblowing is accountability, speaking truth to power and holding it to account. That work gets a whole lot harder when the people responsible for maintaining the legal system become accomplices in illegality. No one said doing the right thing was easy. Meanwhile, back at Loretto, I wouldn't say my end date was fast approaching because time in prison simply doesn't work that way.

But it was pinging, loud, and steady on the radar. It was coming. That meant life outside Loretto back in the real world. As this season has illustrated, in order to survive prison, I had to change in some pretty dark ways. To reclaim and rebuild my life. I was going to have to try and leave all vestiges of that survivor behind. In the next episode, I'll begin to navigate my way toward the light,

toward one last letter from Loretto. There were still battles to be fought and scores to settle. There was still whistleblowing to be done. Until then, thanks again for listening. I'm John Kirooku. Dead Drop is written by John Kirooku and Alan Katz. Kostart and Touchstone Productions produces the podcast, and John Kariaku, Alan Katz, and Nick Mechanic are its executive producers.

This podcast, it's a custard and Touchstone production.