CIA analyst who lied about waterboarding charged with leaking classified info

John Kiriakou, a CIA intelligence officer from 1999 to 2004, illegally divulged information about two CIA employees and their involvement in classified operations between 2007 and 2009, the Justice Department said in a statement," CNN reported.

Kiriakou, 47, is being charged on two counts of violating the Espionage Act and one count of violating the Intelligence Identities Protect Act, "for allegedly illegally disclosing the identity of a covert officer," the Justice Department statement said, according to CNN. The covert officer whose identity was allegedly divulged was described in this report.

Kiriakou made headlines when he claimed in a 2007 interview that the controversial simulated drowning interrogation technique known as "water-boarding" had gotten a senior al-Qaida operative to break in 35 seconds.

But formerly classified Justice Department memos released in 2009 showed that Zubaydah was in fact subjected to water-boarding 83 times in August 2002, as first noted by the New York Times. And it further emerged that Kiriakou was not actually present during the water-boarding of Zubaydah, as he implied. The controversial interrogation technique has since been banned by the Obama administration.

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/envoy/former-cia-analyst-charged-disclosing-covert-officer-id-191356673.html