Hummus — in the enhanced interrogation context — refers to the Central Intelligence Agency’s documented use of pureed hummus as the medium in coercive rectal feeding (also termed rectal hydration) of detainees held at agency black sites during the post-September 11 interrogation program. The practice was one of several techniques disclosed in the December 2014 Senate Torture Report that had not been authorized by the U.S. Department of Justice or the President, and that even most CIA personnel were unaware of until the report was published.[1][2]
John Kiriakou — the former CIA officer who in 2007 became the first U.S. government official to publicly characterize the agency’s interrogation program as torture — is the public figure most consistently associated with the technique, both because he has repeatedly invoked it as the paradigmatic example of CIA abuses that exceeded any plausible legal authorization, and because his repeated discussion of it has produced his subsequent reputation in internet culture as “the hummus guy.”[2][3][4]
Disclosure
The use of hummus in coercive rectal feeding was first disclosed publicly in the executive summary of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s report on CIA detention and interrogation (commonly called the Senate Torture Report), released in December 2014. The same report listed waterboarding, sexual abuse using broomsticks, threats with power drills, and sleep deprivation of up to 180 hours among the techniques applied at CIA black sites in Afghanistan, Lithuania, Romania, Poland, Thailand, and at the secret annex of Guantanamo Naval Base known as Strawberry Fields.[1]
The report was the first public confirmation of the technique. “Even inside the CIA we didn’t know anything about rectal hydration with hummus — no less — with sexual abuse or sexual assault using broomsticks. I mean, people didn’t even talk about those kinds of things in the hallway, so I was absolutely shocked hearing it.”[2]
Authorization status
Hummus rectal feeding was not among the techniques approved by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel or by the President for use by CIA interrogators. It belongs to the category of acts undertaken by individual CIA officers on their own initiative, outside the formal legal cover of the program.[5][3]
This authorization distinction is the basis of Kiriakou’s recurring argument that the officers responsible for these specific acts ought to be prosecuted even by observers who oppose prosecuting CIA personnel for the formally approved techniques:
What about case officers who took the law into their own hands or who flouted the law and raped prisoners with broomsticks or carried out rectal hydration with hummus? Those were not approved interrogation techniques. Why aren’t those officers being prosecuted? I think at the very least that’s where we should start the prosecutions.[5]
In the Kiriakou framing, hummus rectal feeding serves as the limit case in any defense of the enhanced interrogation program: “You can’t force hummus up someone’s rectum, for example. You can’t play Russian roulette with them … Nobody told you you had permission to do something like that.”[3]
The same phrase recurs in his standard refutation of the ticking-time-bomb scenario:
So what do you do? Do you waterboard him? Do you sleep-deprive him? Do you put him in a cold cell? Do you beat him? Do you put cockroaches on him? Do you put hummus up his ass? What do you do?[6]
Prosecutions
As of the most recent source in KiriPedia’s corpus, no Central Intelligence Agency officer has been criminally prosecuted for any of the techniques disclosed in the Senate Torture Report, including the unauthorized ones such as hummus rectal feeding. “Here we are twenty-two years after 9/11 — literally no one has been prosecuted for that crime. No one. Nor will anyone be prosecuted, because the CIA ensured that no prosecutions could be carried out.”[7]
The only person to have served a federal prison sentence in connection with the program is John Kiriakou himself, prosecuted under the Espionage Act for the unrelated confirmation of a covert officer’s name to a journalist.[8]
Cultural afterlife
Repeated discussion of hummus rectal feeding — sometimes in deadpan delivery during long-form podcast appearances — has, in the period since approximately 2025, produced Kiriakou’s emergence as an internet meme figure. He became, in his own description, “the most famous guy on the internet” “literally overnight” in early 2026, with his clipped commentary widely shared on Black Twitter and elsewhere. His informal nickname in this period is “the hummus guy” — or, in a longer form, “the slow-motion hummus guy.”[9][4]
The nickname is, in this sense, both a reference to a specific documented torture practice and to Kiriakou’s persistent role as the practice’s principal public commentator.