John Kiriakou on Torture, Whistleblowing, and Prison

• 20:42Tim asks how to pronounce Kiriakou's last name.
• 21:00The book 'Doing Time Like a Spy' chronicles Kiriakou's 30-month prison sentence and how CIA skills helped him survive it.
• 21:43Kiriakou was one of the first anti-torture whistleblowers, confirming in a 2007 ABC News interview that CIA torture was official U.S. policy approved by the president.
• 22:15He received a 30-month sentence but served only 23 months due to good behavior, forfeiting halfway house time because he kept writing a blog from prison.
• 22:56While imprisoned, Kiriakou wrote an open letter about daily life that went viral, getting over a million hits and attracting Jake Tapper and 60 Minutes to the prison.
• 23:43Guards told Kiriakou that an Arab prisoner he'd greeted in Arabic had called Pakistan to have him killed, a claim he later realized made no sense.
• 24:49The guards claimed the prisoner was the uncle of the Times Square bomber, but the bomber was Pakistani while the prisoner was Iraqi—exposing the setup as amateurish.
• 25:40Kiriakou reported the guards' attempted incitement to violence as a federal crime: conspiracy to incite violence in a federal facility, a class D felony punishable by two years.
• 26:29In 2002, Kiriakou was the only one of 14 people who declined to be trained in torture techniques, citing ethical and legal concerns.
• 27:05In December 2007, after three and a half years out of the CIA, ABC News reporter Brian Ross called claiming a source said Kiriakou had tortured Abu Zubaydah.
• 27:42President Bush denied torture on TV while simultaneously suggesting any torture was the work of a rogue CIA officer, prompting Kiriakou to decide to tell the truth on camera.
• 28:51After the FBI closed its investigation finding no crime in December 2008, the CIA secretly asked the Obama Justice Department to reopen the case.
• 29:31Kiriakou left the CIA in 2004 to spend time with his two young sons living with his ex-wife in Ohio rather than deploy overseas again.
• 30:50Desperate to go to Afghanistan, Kiriakou threatened to walk straight to Exxon with his Arabic skills unless the deputy director sent him—within 24 hours he was deployed to Pakistan as chief of counterterrorism operations.
• 32:01In Pakistan, the CIA was so obsessed with killing Osama bin Laden that it took months before anyone asked what to do if they actually caught someone.
• 34:19In May 2002, a senior officer invited Kiriakou to training in 'enhanced interrogation techniques'—waterboarding, extreme heat, stress positions, isolation, sleep deprivation, and walling.
• 35:20A senior officer warned Kiriakou that torture is a slippery slope: someone will kill a prisoner, triggering congressional and Justice Department investigations that could land him in prison.
• 35:48Despite Kiriakou's prediction of consequences, no congressional investigation occurred, no Justice Department investigation followed, and Obama declined even to establish a ceremonial commission.

President BushJohn KiriakouBarack ObamaAbu ZubaydahCIABrian RossABC NewsMitchell and JessenPakistanArianna HuffingtonJake Tapper