Torture. It stands as one of the pillars of American exceptionalism. While it was a major part of the war on terror—one worth hundreds of millions of dollars—a selective amnesia allows it to slip through the pages of history. John Kiriakou suffered for attempting to solidify the record on a torture program that the U.S. has excused itself from countless times through Hollywood propaganda, innumerable redactions to official documents and silencing of dissidents.

Kiriakou joins host Robert Scheer on this episode of the Scheer Intelligence podcast to run back his story as the whistleblower who made one of the most insidious chapters of modern American history widely known. Scheer mentions how the First and Fourth Amendments are treated as indulgences and allowed only if you say the right things in such a setting as the war on terror. If you don’t and “you oppose the torture program, you end up in prison like John Kiriakou. You lose everything, you lose your pension and what have you.”

Kiriakou explains that regardless of what treatment was forthcoming, he felt a necessity to expose the horrific crimes his country was committing. He details how a psychologist once explained to him how whistleblowers have a highly defined sense of what is right and wrong and this sense urges them to act. “That's how I felt. I couldn't stop myself. I couldn't sleep at night knowing that this was happening in our name. That the government was carrying out these crimes in our name. So I had to say something,” Kiriakou said.

The crimes in question Kiriakou also details: “They threatened to use pages of the Koran as toilet paper. The prisoners, of course, were all Muslim. They made them stand naked in front of female soldiers. Anything they could think of to insult them and to belittle them; they trimmed their beards...”