Transparency & Accountability
Torture whistleblower John Kiriakou takes on Washington's Israel consensus
Image credit: John Kiriakou — Wikimedia Commons · License
Original Reporting
No serving or former CIA officer believes Iran was anywhere near a nuclear weapon, John Kiriakou told Tucker Carlson this spring — and the pressure for war, he argued, has a return address.
"The Israelis have long wanted us to attack Iran," the former CIA officer said on the 27 April episode of The Tucker Carlson Show, tracing how the case for striking Tehran reached Washington and who carried it there.
The man who paid for the truth#
Kiriakou spent 14 years at the CIA as an analyst and case officer, and in 2002 led the team in Pakistan that captured Abu Zubaydah, the first prisoner in the agency's secret interrogation program.
In December 2007 he sat before ABC News cameras and became the first CIA officer to confirm publicly that the agency was waterboarding prisoners — and that it was policy, approved at the top, not the work of rogue interrogators. He called it torture.
The government answered in 2012 with prosecution. Kiriakou pleaded guilty to confirming a covert officer's name to a reporter and served nearly two years in federal prison, from February 2013 to February 2015.
The only American imprisoned in connection with the CIA's torture program is the man who revealed it.
The prisoner whose capture made him famous carries a Palestinian story of his own. Abu Zubaydah, a stateless Palestinian raised in Saudi Arabia, was waterboarded 83 times in a single month by the Senate intelligence committee's count. He has never been charged, and he remains in Guantánamo today.
The Israel file#
Kiriakou has spent the decade since prison mapping what he calls Israel's outsized reach inside the American security state — on the record, with names and dates.
At the 2022 IsraelLobbyCon conference in Washington he delivered an address titled "Israel's negative, disproportionate and widespread influence on the US national security state," published by the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. In it he recounted an Israeli officer opening a liaison meeting by testing whether the young CIA man might be recruitable; Kiriakou said he shut the approach down in a sentence.
In October 2025 he went further on The Joe Rogan Experience, describing Israeli operatives' attempts to spy on and recruit inside US intelligence facilities — claims that Israel Hayom and other Israeli outlets reported and contested within days.
And in the Carlson interview this April he located the Iran war file in the same drawer: the alarming intelligence came through Israeli channels, he said, while inside Israel the Mossad itself had counselled restraint.
Gaza on his desk#
Kiriakou's own microphones now work the story from the other side of the ledger. On his DeProgram show with cartoonist Ted Rall, the 22 October 2025 episode carried the title "Gaza Genocide 2.0" — the genocide treated as a finding, not a question.
A month later, on 25 November, his DEEP FOCUS program gave a full hour to Richard Falk, the international law scholar who leads the Gaza Tribunal project, on the question of who is complicit in Gaza's destruction.
Times of Palestine has added Kiriakou to its standing watchlist. His interviews, columns and broadcasts now feed the paper's accountability file, and what he says next — on the Iran intelligence, on the lobby, on Gaza's tribunal — will be reported here: attributed, dated and checked.
