John Kiriakou: Butcher and Torturer — the Farce of Whistleblower Allies
The Counterinsurgency infecting the left
This Document is the third part of a series exposing the WWP/PSL/ANSWER connections to the CIA/FBI.
Series Table of Contents:
Part 1: Introduction and Key Terms—A Primer
Part 2: Ray McGovern: Expert Anti-Communist—Nonviolence as Counterinsurgency
Part 3: John Kiriakou: Butcher and Torturer — the Farce of Whistleblower Allies
Part 4: Worker’s World Party: a confidence scheme
Part 5: Unmasking the Hydra: relationships between the “anti-war left” and the WWPSLCIA
Part 6: Ramsey Clark and the afterlife of PHOENIX, COINTELPRO, and MH CHAOS
Author’s Note: This chapter has, by far, the most triggering content of any chapter in the series. Be forewarned that the sections on Kiriakou’s history at the CIA are particularly disturbing. We felt it necessary to include this so that people can know the truth about these his violent history. This was not easy to research or write and it will not be easy to read.
Trigger warnings begin after the section on Phillip Agee.
This Chapter is an examination of three different “anti-war veteran whistleblowers”.
Phillip Agee— While he worked at the CIA he hunted communist guerillas in Uruagay. His whistleblowing in the 1970’s included names of many operatives and details of operations. He was hounded by the CIA around the planet for his leaks. He did the bare minimum for a whistleblower and serves as a measuring stick.
Smedley Butler—The father of the modern “anti-war veteran” movement. He “blew the whistle” on how corporations push war for profit in the 1930’s. He was also a mass murdering monster and the father of United States Marine Corps (USMC) counterinsurgency strategy.
John Kiriakou—Famous “anti-war veteran” and “whistleblower” who is well regarded by and well-connected to ANSWER/PSL and its allied organizations (Codepink even bought him a house). His whistleblowing consists of a controlled opposition scheme to make the CIA look better. His resume includes: hunting communists, recruiting informants, torturing prisoners, and covering up massacres. Kiriakou is also a monster.
Beyond showing that Kiriakou is an agent of empire infiltrating the left, we hope to show that the anti-war veteran movement is fundamentally a counter insurgent movement. And whistleblowers are not our friends.
Phillip Agee — The Bare Minimum
As with almost all whistleblowers, Agee’s “pre-whistleblowing actions” are incredibly violent and unforgivable. His “whistleblowing” itself is what we might call The Bare Minimum. We have included his story as an example. Any whistleblower that does not exceed the example of Agee is absolutely our enemy.
(Author’s Note: The use of Agee as a standard is not an attempt to absolve him of the violence he perpetrated on behalf of the us government)
Phillip Agee worked as a CIA agent from 1957 until 1968. His CIA work included such wretched activities as helping sabotage the pro-Cuba Ecuadorian government and helping the Uruguayan fascist government hunt communist Tupamaros (MLN-T) guerillas. After witnessing (helping with?) the Tlatelolco massacre in Mexico city he quit the CIA and began writing his first book Inside the Company.
One of the most important things that Agee did in his book was “naming names”. This means leaking the names and locations of individuals involved. Agee “published the names of some 400 clandestine CIA officers, agents, and fronts.”1 He created the Covert Action Bulletin in 1978 “which ultimately disclosed some 2,000 CIA officers, agents, and other assets.”2 However, Agee’s “naming names” only lead to the death of one CIA agent, Richard Welch, the CIA station chief in Greece who was assassinated in December 1975 by the communist guerillas with the 17 November Movement.3 It’s also speculated that his leaks led to the assassination of two MI6 agents in Poland.4
This is the good stuff here. Naming names is critical to whistle-blowing. (Rest in piss Richard Welch.) Additionally it disrupted their operations to the point that they had to spend millions of dollars redeploying operatives who had their cover blown. It was a very expensive inconvenience to them to say the least.
The other benefit of his Agee’s leaks were that he showed strategies and tactics of CIA operations in Latin America and around the world. This gave communists and leftists “specific knowledge of the CIA’s Latin American operations and insight into CIA modus operandi in order to permit them to counter U.S. and particular CIA actions.”5 A whistleblower should always be exposing every possible strategy so that anti-imperialists and revolutionaries can defend ourselves from the imperialist military. However, we can only trust their insight if they are first naming names.
It would be giving him too much credit to say that he was an anti-imperialist. He would emphatically explain that he meant no harm to to CIA agents and that he wasn’t a traitor either. Excerpted from a 1975 interview6:
Interviewer: Many people agree with your aims but disagree strongly with your methods. They say that by revealing the names of CIA agents and exposing CIA procedures your book jeopardizes U.S. security. What is your answer to that?
Agee: I think it’s a little late in the day to pretend that what I’ve written puts the country in any danger. What I’ve written puts the CIA in danger. The CIA claims that secrecy is necessary to hide what it is doing from the enemies of the United States. I claim that the real reason for secrecy is to hide what the CIA is doing from the American people and from the people victimized by the CIA.
In October 1980, the US District Court in Washington DC issued Agee an injunction requiring him to let the CIA censor every one of his future publications.7 He agreed to the injunction and refrained from publicly naming agents from then on. Agee quit doing the most important thing he could do in his position. He was living in West Germany at the time.
Agee did the Bare Minimum here. He named names and he exposed tactics and he did all of it without redacting anything or getting permission from the CIA (until 1980). And yet, he was still pro-amerika. This is the same pattern we will see in every single whistleblower and it is a primary reason why they are not our friends. Sometimes they can be useful, Agee was more useful than others. But their politics inevitably always fall into “America can do better!”. They want colonialism and imperialism, but nicer. We also understand that even his “bare minimum” was enough for the CIA to chase him around the planet and attempt to censor his books. This tells us two important things:
If a whistleblower is still in the united states and freely publishing and getting speaking gigs then they are absolutely still an agent of empire and endorsed, at least tacitly, by the amerikan government.
Just because a whistleblower is deemed “a traitor” and threatened by the amerikan government, that doesn’t mean they are anti-imperialist.
Smedley Butler — Mass Murderer and Slave-Catcher turned “Anti-War Veteran”
CW: discussion of imperialist war crimes, anti-black violence, and words related to SA
Smedley Butler was described as a whistleblower for his 1935 book War Is a Racket as well as for exposing “The Business Plot” which was an attempted coup of FDR. War Is a Racket outlined how corporations and the military work together to propagate war. It serves as the origin of the Anti-War Veterans movement and is often cited by such organizations.
Veterans for Peace has an entire branch called the “Smedley Butler Brigade”
Left Flank Vets—closely partnered with PSL and DSA uses his book title as their organization’s motto; routinely tweets honoring him ; Another ANSWER affiliated org About Face: Veterans Against the War tweets similarly
ANSWER cites him in their articles and “War is A racket” shows up on a lot of their protest signs
PSL twitter posts about him, has articles about his whistle blowing and cites him frequently in their newspaper “Liberation News”.
Spend any amount of time in anti-war veterans spaces and you will see his work come up a lot. Smedley Butler was also a lifelong counter-insurgency expert. He confesses his sins in his book:
I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.
Besides reading exactly like a PSL propagandist Mike Prysner speech8, this is an incomprehensible amount of violence. Smedley Butler terrorized colonized people around the planet. For this, he became “at the time of his death, the most decorated marine in American history”. This captain amerika motherfucker—this war criminal—is the role model and hero to the contemporary anti-war veteran movement and the anti-war left. Let that sink in.
Butler was no grunt either, he commanded the First Marine Regiment during multiple invasions in Latin America. During the United States occupation of Haiti he was the commanding officer of the occupation police called the Gendarmerie d'Haïti from 1915-1918. Butler’s job was to put down the revolution led by Maroons. In Open Veins of Latin America, Eduardo Galeano describes how the USMC in Haiti “[re]introduced racial segregation and forced labor, and killed 1,500 workers in just one of its repressive operations.”9 Butler later recalled that he and his troops "hunted the [maroons] like pigs."10
Rather than go into excruciating detail about each of the countless massacres and war crimes that Butler participated in and organized11 , we can see how the US military talks about him. Jeannie Johnson12, the founding director of State Department funded Center for Anticipatory Intelligence at Utah State (their acronym is unironically CAI), wrote a book on the evolution of marine corps counterinsurgency doctrine (it is required reading for all USMC officers) The Marines, Counterinsurgency, and Strategic Culture cites Butler’s role in Haiti as the first successful counterinsurgency operation of the 20th century. His brutality became the birth of USMC official counterinsurgency strategy: “The tales that live in Marine legend are those of fabled figure Smedley Butler… for his audaciously aggressive patrols …resulting in the collapse of the second Haitian rebellion.”13
The book’s primary criticism is how the amerikan public perceived Butler’s massacres: “American public opinion toward Marine practices in the Caribbean nation began to sour as reports filtered out of gratuitous killings of natives—many in somewhat dubiously documented “attempts to escape”—excesses that culminated in a formal Senate inquiry in 1921.”14
Butler took his counterinsurgency expertise back to amerika and became the Philadelphia chief of police from 1924-1926. There, he enforced prohibition and encouraged his officers to murder "bandits". His ruthless programs are credited as a turning point in amerikan urban policing in the 20th century.15 He later ran for us senate in 1932 under a platform of prohibition and veterans benefits. A few months after he lost the election, a group of ~40,000 settler veterans marched on Washington DC demanding the benefits they were promised after world war one. Butler used his popular status as an advocate for veterans to dissuade the mob from rioting and taking the capital. Soon after he convinced them to resort to non-violence, army cavalry units raided the camp and dispersed the would-be rioters.
Butler then wrote his famous book in 1935 and spent his final wretched years of life building the non-profit Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) and giving lectures to veterans about how bad war is for united states soldiers. This theme of centering the harms to oppressors and war criminals is still dominant among the veteran anti-war movement.
In summary, Smedley Butler, the father of the modern anti-war veteran movement, was also the father of modern counterinsurgency strategies; he led entire regiments of marines to murder and oppress colonized people in over a dozen countries; he helped create urban policing strategies in the imperial core for the 20th century; and he expertly pacified militant veterans from attacking the US government. Based on this evidence, it would be absurd to regard this man as representing any peace besides the type of "peace" that underpins the genocidal united states empire.
John Kiriakou
John Kiriakou is another ex-CIA whistleblower war criminal who is very close to the PSL/ANSWER cult. Kiriakou is a close friend of Ray McGovern and was a founding member of VIPS with him. Kiriakou was also the co-host of PSL founder Brian Becker’s podcast Loud and Clear. He is a long term activist with Code Pink (they even paid off his house). He was in the CIA for 14 years and, after hunting communists in Greece during the 90’s was promoted to Chief of Counter-terrorist Operations in Pakistan in 2002. He later gave an interview “whistleblowing” about waterboarding, but in fact he lied to protect the CIA. But he became a popular figure for the anti-war left and whistleblower community anyway. His “whistle blowing” is the perfect example of controlled opposition. In 2012 he went to jail for it—he was sentenced to 30 months but only served 23. Kiriakou will never face justice for his real crimes, the ones committed against the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan. He is a butcher and his politics amount to “Make the CIA great again.”
Kiriakou and CODEPINK
CODEPINK is another non-violent bourgeois anti-war group close to ANSWER that emerged around 2002-2003. Kiriakou has some deep connections with their leadership who paid the mortgage on his home after he was released early from jail. CODEPINK held a “Welcome Home Party” when he was released; he is cited in their new releases and blog posts; he has been a special guest at over a dozen of their events; they even raised money for him while he was in jail. Most recently he was co-author and signatory of a CODEPINK open letter “Keep Torture Apologists Out of the Biden Cabinet!” he was the main speaker for the associated event. Their problem isn’t Biden’s very long history of fascist and genocidal policies, their problem is that he might have a “bad apple” in his cabinet.
CODEPINK’s board of directors include venture capitalists and Army Colonel Ann Wright. Founder Medea Benjamin worked for the Swedish Government and the UN before moving to Cuba in 1979. She was deported from Cuba in 1983 for anti-communist activities before starting her protesting persona in the US. She is also a millionaire who donated over $10,000 to democrats since 2019 and has received multiple awards from Sharpe inspired non-violence organizations including the”Martin Luther King, Jr. Peace Prize” and “Ghandi Peace Award”. She is on the board for Progressive Democrats of America that emphatically supported Biden in 2020. Unsurprisingly, CODEPINK published “Congratulations to Joe Biden on his election as America’s next president!” after the 2020 election.
CODEPINK includes Veterans for Peace and many other associated organizations amongst their “allies” list. Their actions include “tactical arrests”:
Benjamin said she and her fellow activists have a sort of working relationship with the officers, who often greet them cordially as they wait in line outside a hearing room in the morning.
"We respect each other, we even like each other," she said. "There can be a bad apple here among them, just as they probably think the same about us.
"They see us in the morning and they start laughing and joking and say, 'Give me a hug now because I might have to arrest you later.'"
The most prominent women’s anti-war organization in the country is friends with cops. This should be adequate to get a sense of their interests and purpose.
Kiriakou and ANSWER
Kiriakou also co-hosted Loud and Clear podcast with Brian Becker for 2 years. During this time he interviewed many upper echelons of PSL and ANSWER and outlines PSL talking points with figures such as Gloria La Riva, Mike Prysner, and Eugene Puryear. He made a point to cover up CIA operations on multiple occasions during the show such as denying that CIA created Al Qaeda by arming the Mujahadeen, and denying CIA involvement in bringing Saddam Hussein to power.16 When one guest accused the CIA of crimes against humanity during the Reagan and HW Bush regimes, Kiriakou yelled “you are accusing a lot of people, including me, of committing crimes against humanity!” (35:27 in podcast). During one episode with Mike Prysner and Abby Martin (key PSL propagandists) and Walter Smoleak (Chief editor of PSL newspaper Liberation News) Kiriakou jokes and says they’ve all been “longtime friends”. Smoleak wrote an article in Kiriakou’s defense in 2017 after he was accused of being a Russian spy.
After the Loud and Clear podcast was cancelled due to “lack of funding” they raised over $30,000 to renew it but it was not renewed. Who knows where the money went. Anyways, Kiriakou created his own new podcast called Political Misfits in 2020 which began promptly interviewing PSL folks like Eugene Puryear and Mike Prysner.17
His politics amount to “Make the CIA Great Again” in the sense that he wants to return the CIA to the glory days before 9/11. During one interview when a woman asks him why, with its “terrible history” he joined the CIA, he replied “I thought that history was over. In retrospect, I think it was over until September 11.”
This is not ignorance, this is purposeful misdirection. At no point in time has the CIA ever been anything besides a particularly vile tentacle of the amerikan military. The CIA has always been involved torture since the very beginning (MKULTRA began in the 50’s). Kiriakou’s narrative specifically leverages the idea that the amerikan government, the amerikan military, and the CIA are not just salvageable but actually a force for good in the world. This is only one of the reasons why his presence in the anti-war movement is so insidious.
Kiriakou the Whistleblower?
CW: Discussion of Torture, Imprisonment, Psychosis, Massacres,
Authors Note: The remaining content of the chapter is extremely disturbing.
Kiriakou’s claim to fame is that he exposed the CIA waterboarding techniques. This could not be further from the truth. Even imperialist magazine Foreign Policy called him out in 2009:
In 2007, Kiriakou famously went on television to describe waterboarding, and discussed the single incidence in which Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded for just 30-35 seconds. Kiriakou said “From that day on, he answered every question…The threat information he provided disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks.”
But Kiriakou wasn’t there for the waterboarding — he was half a world away, in Langley — and Zubaydah was waterboarded more than 80 times. The New York Times first noted the difference in the two stories.
Then in 2010 in his autobiography, Kiriakou admitted that he made his original claims up:
"I wasn’t there when the interrogation took place; instead, I relied on what I’d heard and read inside the agency at the time”
"In retrospect, it was a valuable lesson in how the CIA uses the fine arts of deception even among its own."
John Kiriakou the “whistleblower” made up a cover story to make it look like:
Torture was an effective tool for “fighting terrorism”
Torture is a new practice for the CIA
Torture is rarely used by the CIA
All three of these are complete lies. Torture does not get people to tell accurate information. The 1983 CIA manual “Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual,” set forth the so-called D.D.D method of interrogation, for Debility, Dependency and Dread: “The purpose of all coercive techniques is to induce psychological regression in the subject by bringing a superior outside force to bear on his will to resist.” Torture is about inducing psychosis and it has been used this way for decades. The CIA Tortured more than a hundred people between 2002-2005 ALONE and some victims were tortured hundreds of times.
Kiriakou was deliberately spreading misinformation in order to build support for torture and the CIA. When confronted with his lie he blamed the CIA for deceiving him. This misdirection enabled him to continue his role as an “anti-war activist” (aka CIA plant).
It’s no wonder that the government decided not to prosecute him until 5 years after he originally “leaked” information on waterboarding. Zubaydah never had any connection to Al Qaeda by the way, the CIA just enjoyed torturing him and claimed he gave them useful information. Kiriakou only spent 23 months in jail but Zubaydah, still locked up, has been tortured in amerikan military prisons since March 2002.
As with all “whistleblowers” he remains adamant he never wanted to hurt amerika: when discussing his leaks, he said “[I] had no criminal intent, and there was no harm to the national security.”
At the time of his “leaks”:
His wife Heather Kiriakou was still serving her long tenure as a CIA officer:
“Heather Kiriakou had served as a top analyst on some of the most sensitive subjects that the agency tracks, including leadership developments in Iran.” They have since divorced but she’s now “director of Global Strategy & Business Development” at DOD contractor Northrop Grumman.
John was working at infamous consulting firm Deloitte on a secret team with other ex-CIA agents. They were doing undercover work to steal intelligence from other consulting firms working for the federal government.
After his 2007 interview he began working at Rhodes Global Consulting until 2013. Rhodes doesn’t seem to exist anymore but we do have Kiriakou’s Linkedin job description:
“Provide actionable information and analysis on current international business and political developments for hedge funds and mutual funds in the United States. Conduct due diligence investigations in difficult or denied areas, primarily in the Middle East and South Asia. Provide cultural, technical, and security consulting to ongoing and post-production films dealing with the Middle East, South Asia, and terrorism.”
Kiriakou didn’t really quit doing intelligence work after leaving the CIA and his supposed whistle blowing. It seems that he simply moved into the more profitable arena of working with other “ex-CIA agents” at consulting firms. This brings us to the question: what exactly did this sniveling worm do while he was at the CIA?
Kiriakou Hunting Communists
On December 23rd 1975, the Greek communist guerillas Revolutionary Organization 17 November (17N) assasinated CIA agent Richard Welch in Athens. This would be the first of many attacks against against Amerikan, Turkish, and British targets. They also assasinated right-wing Greek politicians and bombed tax buildings. During the 1990’s, there were multiple anti-imperialist urban guerilla organizations operating in Greece. Some were anarchist, some were communist, all of them attacked imperialist targets. For two years from 1998-2000, Kiriakou was stationed in Greece as a “counter-terrorism officer”.
In Kiriakou’s autobiography The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA’s War On Terror he describes a bit of his activities there. A large part of his job involved recruiting snitches. He claims he was quite good at it. 18
I was in Athens on special assignment principally to work against Greek terrorists who continued to harass and target U.S. interests.
…
The value of a clandestine operative’s currency rises and falls with his or her relative success in recruiting and running agents—that is, people who are paid by America to deliver information considered important, directly or indirectly, to U.S. national security. I did pretty well while I was in Greece, recruiting several agents.
While we know Kiriakou to be a liar, when a man tells you that his job is to infiltrate guerilla movements and turn members to being snitches you should damn well listen.
Kiriakou also admits to his violent streak as an operative. He wasn’t removed from his assignment in Greece in 2000 after he almost beat a local to death in public with his bare hands: “I was on top of the driver, holding his hair and beating his head against the pavement. I could have killed him. I would have killed him, if my guardian angels hadn’t gotten there first.”19
Kiriakou also does not hide his disdain for the communists that he was hunting. He describes 17N communiques this way: “the usual Marxist-Leninist claptrap … think of Unabomber Ted Kaczynski’s 1995 manifesto, all thirty-five thousand words of it and you’d get some idea of the tone and substance of the 17 November jeremiads.”20 It’s no surprise then that he is still an anti-communist today.
Kiriakou: Butcher and Torturer
After the september 11th attacks and subsequent amerikan invasion of Afghanistan, Kiriakou was promoted to “Chief of Counter terrorist Operations in Pakistan". He led a few special forces raids. Three things we want to bring forward: Kiriakou overseeing CIA torture and covering up US war crimes; and CIA arming and supporting the Taliban in Pakistan.
Overseeing Torture
In his autobiography, Kiriakou makes every effort to limit his association with actually doing any of the torture but he even admits that his staff learned waterboarding techniques and applied them on prisoners:
At one point in the early summer of 2002, the Counterterrorist Center approached several CIA people with post-9/11 field experience and asked whether we wanted to be trained in what they called “enhanced techniques” for interrogation. We had some inkling of what these enhanced techniques entailed, enough to impel me to seek counsel from a top CIA officer I respected enormously. He suggested that these methods might well cross a dangerous moral and legal line, and I declined to be trained in them. Some of my colleagues accepted the invitation, and who could have blamed them at the time? Remember, this was still in the frantic months of mid-2002, when the prospect of another massive al-Qaeda attack, perhaps with biological or chemical weapons, seemed all too real. We needed actionable intelligence to prevent the next big one. Compared with kinder and gentler means of interrogation, these enhanced techniques of persuasion might get us what we needed.
A few things to note.
First, as the chief of counterinsurgency operations, all kidnapping and torturing would have occurred under his oversight and with his approval.
One such case is Ramzi bin al-Shibh who was kidnapped on Septmber 11th 2002 and tortured for 3 days before being sent to a different CIA black site at Morocco for more torture.
Gul Rahman who died in custody as a consequence of torture at a CIA black site in Afghanistan
Kiriakou himself was involved in raids to kidnap “suspected terrorists” including capturing Abu Zubaydah who wasn’t even involved with Al-Qaeda. He even tortured Zubaydah himself while Zubaydah was in a Pakistani hospital: ““There was blood everywhere. It was all over him. It was all over the bed. It pooled under the bed. It was all over us every time we had to move him.” Kiriakou says that he tied Abu Zubaydah to the bed with a sheet, and began to interrogate him after he woke from his coma.”
Running of the CIA Black site in Asadabad (on the boarder of Afghanistan and Pakistan) and the CIA Black Site in Faisalabad, Pakistan. How many people were passed through these facilities and the other local CIA black sites in Afghanistan? How many people’s lives did Kiriakou destroy? He would have been well aware of the process through which ‘suspected al qaeda’ he captured in Pakistan were transferred through secret CIA Black Sites (see: torture facilities) from Thailand to Morocco to Poland.
Second is that we have no reason to believe that he “declined to be trained in them” as he says. Kiriakou is a lying sack of shit. We have documented some of his lies here and considering the book was approved by CIA censors, he obviously wouldn’t snitch on himself. In chapter 11 he admits to assaulting a prisoner21 and then claims the CIA told him not to report it. If this is what he’s admitting to then we know that he did much much worse.
Third is that he is, AGAIN, reiterating that torture is justifiable as long as it “prevent the next big one”. This propaganda is insidious because it presents the CIA as a legitimate organization protecting people. It presents CIA agents, himself included, as a force for good in the world. He is making excuses for these sadistic fucks.
Covering up War Crimes:
Operation Anaconda
In March of 2002 NATO forces in Afghanistan carried out Operation Anaconda in the Shah-I-Kot valley near the border with Pakistan. A lot of the details about US war crimes have been buried but we do know that US soldiers routinely murdered civilians for fun and even the German soldiers were disgusted by the amerikan war crimes. They witnessed :
"U.S. Forces flattening entire villages during Operation Anaconda: free to pillage". An officer embedded with US forces for Anaconda said: 'The pictures of Abu Ghraib, the torture in Iraqi prison camps, did absolutely not surprise me.'
All the media coverage is about the so-called “heroism” of invading us soldiers during the operation. There are almost no records or investigations into what exactly happened to the local Afghan people during Operation Anaconda. John Kiriakou knows though.
Murdering Civilians
Estimates from the imperialist media suggest that over 400 civilians in southern Afghanistan were murdered by us airstrikes alone during the first 6 months of 2002. Amerikan aircraft bombed entire villages under the premise that intelligence sources placed Al-Qaeda fighters in the area. A New York Times article says:
The evidence suggests that many civilians have been killed by airstrikes hitting precisely the target they were aimed at. The civilians died, the evidence suggests, because they were were made targets by mistake, or because in eagerness to kill Qaeda and Taliban fighters, Americans did not carefully differentiate between civilians and military targets.
….
American military commanders insist they take pains to ensure that civilians are spared, often verifying their targets with several sources of information.
…
American commanders say they have not kept track of civilian deaths in Afghanistan, but they say their strategy has succeeded.
There is no way for us to know how many people the US military killed during that time. In his position as chief of counter-terrorism operations, Kiriakou absolutely would have been involved in these war crimes and subsequent attempts at coverups.
Shipping Container Massacre
Kiriakou would have also been a part of covering up the Dasht-i-Leili massacre. In Dec 2001 the Northern Alliance (a US proxy) with the help of CIA operatives and US special forces massacred thousands of "suspected Taliban and Al-Qaeda" by locking them in shipping containers to be suffocated. Most of those who did not die in the containers were shot on sight.
It was not until 2009 that any officials would acknowledge that it even happened. However, the CIA and DOD knew about the massacre and covered it up under orders from the Bush regime.
Keep in mind that the US military has consistently designated any men and boys in war zones between 16-40 as "enemy combatants".
Andrew, Christopher; Vasili Mitrokhin (2000). The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB. Basic Books. ISBN 0-465-00312-5. p. 230
Stevenson, J. (2021). A drop of treason: Philip Agee and his exposure of the Cia. The University of Chicago Press. page 108
Stevenson page 109
Christopher Moran, Company Confessions: Secrets, Memoirs, and the CIA (New York: Thomas Dunne, 2015), 137
Stevenson page 108
Stevenson page 118
LOTS of CW’s for racial slurs, abuse, and torture: Video Transcript Excerpts (page 11)
Galeano, E. (1997). Open veins of Latin America: Five centuries of the pillage of a continent. Monthly Review Press. (Page 108)
Hans Schmidt, Maverick Marine: General Smedley D. Butler and the Contradictions of American Military History (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998) Page 85
Her resume includes “working for the CIA as an intelligence analyst from 1998 to 1999 and pioneering the Cultural Topography Framework with Matt Berrett”
Johnson, J. L., & Mattis, J. N. (2018). The Marines, counterinsurgency, and strategic culture: Lessons learned and lost in America's wars. Georgetown University Press. (Page 145)
Ibid.
https://pearl.plymouth.ac.uk/handle/10026.1/8902
This article is written by a PSL bootlicker but it is accurate in criticizing Kiriakou
Kiriakou, J., & Ruby, M. (2012). The reluctant spy: My secret life in the Cia's War on Terror. Skyhorse Publishing Co. Chapter 5
Kiriakou Chapter 7
Kiriaou Chapter 5
Kiriakou Chapter 11 excerpt:
“I confessed my proximate sin to Jennifer Keenan, a tough FBI agent and one of my favorite people. Jennifer shrugged and suggested that I keep it to myself. But I couldn’t; I had violated the rules and needed to report myself—perhaps it was an overreaction to my experience in Athens.
My second priest was Bob Grenier, the head of our office in Pakistan.
“Bob, I assaulted a prisoner,” I told him over the phone.
“Oh, God, what happened?”
I told him about the chanting and my threat to beat him to death if it didn’t stop.
“When did you assault him?” Grenier was still puzzling out the circumstances.
“Well, I grabbed him and pulled him up.”
“Yeah, but you didn’t hit him?”
“No, I didn’t hit him. But I made physical contact with him.”
“John, what are you doing? We’re not reporting this. You’re just asking for trouble if you put this in writing. If you do put it in writing, I’m not going to send it.” As the boss, he had to clear all cables to headquarters. “Just take it easy and forget about it.””