A change in programming seemed in order over the long weekend. I hope semperloquitur does not see these John Kiriakou critiques as treading on his Sunday movie feature turf.
I started watching Kiriakou from time to time when he was Ted Rall’s co-host on Deprogrammed, as well a long interview with Tucker Carlson, and some earlier comments on the US torture program. Rall gave an update two months ago in A Funny Thing Happened to John Kiriakou:
John Kiriakou wasn’t exactly down and out. But he was struggling.
Not only was John broke, he was drowning in legal fees he owed to the lawyers who’d defended him when the federal government came after him…. He wound up on food stamps. Whether the hitch was his age (61) or being blacklisted by U.S. government, who could say?…
John Kiriakou was the whistleblower who exposed the CIA’s Bush-era torture program, infamous for waterboarding and other atrocities. Rather than the medal and a ticker-tape parade he deserved, the government sent him to federal prison for nearly two years—for the crime of telling a set of awful truths. They destroyed his marriage, stole his pension and framed him as the bad guy.
Now he’s a meme. Actually hundreds of memes. If you’ve been online in the last month, odds are you’ve seen some iteration of CIA John, as twentysomethings call him, over and over and over…
“I didn’t know how to go about turning things around” after he was released. John told me. “So I just decided to start saying yes to podcasts. If you’re a 17-year-old kid and you’ve got a podcast that your high school buddies listen to, the answer is yes. Then, about two years ago, I started getting invitations to go on bigger podcasts.” John spent his days appearing on one podcast after another. He was busy. But he still couldn’t earn a living.
Then some kid made a TikTok.
“My niece called me and said, ‘Uncle John, you are blowing up on the Internet.’ I said, ‘Why?’ She said, ‘There are these hilarious shorts of you.’ I said, ‘From what?’ She said, ‘I don’t know..”. I went on TikTok, and I recognized from what I was wearing that it was from the ‘Diary of a CEO’ podcast. Some kid just took that interview, cut my stories up into shorts, changed my voice from my regular voice to an ‘Alvin and the Chipmunks’ voice and then to this deep ogre’s voice, and then laser beams are shooting out of my eyes.”
“It went crazy to the point where I’m approaching a billion views. It’s nuts to me. The next day, I was filming a documentary with a German production company on the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. We were down at the Pentagon for three hours, and 10 people stopped me for selfies…’”
John’s life has changed…forever? Who knows?…
What is certain is, thanks to that TikTok and the podcast episode that inspired it, John’s penchant for truth-telling has lifted him from relative obscurity—unlike Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, he wasn’t a household name—to international renown.
One of the greatest luxuries in life is being able to become who you were meant to be. The horrific abuse of justice with Kiriakou being the only person prosecuted over the US torture program looks to have made that possible for him. But very few have the intelligence, tenacity, and charisma to turn their lives around the way he did. In particular, he conveys an intense desire to be liked without seeming fawning or needy. It may be that, at least to my ear, he’s pitched his voice in the heroic tenor range, which suggests vigor and what the Japanese call yaruki, which my colleagues at Sumitomo Bank translated as “spirit of aggressiveness” or perhaps more tidily, “can-do”.
Kiriakou has said North by Northwest is his favorite spy movie (while conceding that most would not put it in that category) and that he has seen it at least 100 times.
Below Kiriakou discusses some points of tradecraft. He has more talks on similar topics on YouTube.
Enjoy!
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