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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsIs John Kiriakou really a whistle-blower?
The most recent Project Censored continues to promote the idea of Obamas War on Whistleblowers
The predictable result is a new chorus of the now-familiar media claims that President Obama has invoked the Espionage Act of 1917 more than every other president combined. But such media claims are easily seen to be grossly incorrect and ahistorical, as will be evident to anyone who attempts even the most cursory review of the actual history, which has sometimes involved hundreds of prosecutions of the mildest speech as criminal activity
So it is important to examine what Project Censored actually says, rather than relying on inaccurate soundbite summaries. Among the claims made by Project Censored is the assertion: The Obama justice department has also used the Intelligence Identities Protection Act to obtain a conviction against Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) whistleblower John Kiriakou for exposing the waterboarding of prisoners, ironically making Kiriakou the first CIA official to be sentenced to prison in connection with the torture program. Unfortunately, this somewhat-more-accurate assertion about Kiriakou is still highly misleading
Former CIA-employee Kiriakou first became a major news story due to a long interview with ABCs Brian Ross in December 2007 (transcripts here and here). Unfortunately, Kiriakou seems not to have been entirely accurate and honest in these interviews: for example, in discussing the capture of Abu Zubaydah, Kiriakou told Ross I tore up a sheet and
tied him to the bed, although in fact Kiriakou seems to have been thousands of miles away in Langley at the time of the capture
The Kiriakou interview attracted attention at the time because Kiriakou admitted Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded -- and claimed the treatment had been extraordinarily effective:
... he told ABC and other news organizations that Abu Zubaydah had stopped resisting after just 30 or 35 seconds of the suffocating procedure and told interrogators all he knew. That was grossly inaccurate - the prisoner was waterboarded some 83 times, it turned out ...
... Some critics say that the now-discredited information shared by Mr. Kiriakou and other sources heightened the public perception of waterboarding as an effective interrogation technique. "I think it was sanitized by the way it was described" in press accounts, said John Sifton, a former lawyer for Human Rights Watch, an advocacy group ... Mr. Kiriakou told MSNBC that he was willing to talk in part because he thought the CIA had "gotten a bum rap on waterboarding."
Is John Kiriakou a Whistleblower?
By Peter Hart
So, although Kiriakou was one of the early insiders to discuss waterboarding with the press, his first splash in the news on the topic was not "whistle-blowing" but was rather a DEFENSE of water-boarding, coming at a time when the Bush administration was under continuing attack for its poor treatment of detainees
The mythology portraying Kiriakou as an anti-torture whistle-blower, rather than as the water-boarding apologist he actually was, seems to have been a PR-strategy of his defense team: ... he's just been sentenced to 30 months in prison for blowing the cover on a fellow CIA agent. Having copped a plea in the case, he nonetheless portrays himself as a "whistleblower" on CIA torture. The judge didn't buy it. "This is not a case of a whistleblower," US District Judge Leonie Brinkema told Kiriakou at his sentencing hearing ...
Warren Stupidity
(48,181 posts)struggle4progress
(118,356 posts)You have a star: so check the frickin archives
I went on national TV to convince the public waterboarding was wondrously effective never spelled W-H-I-S-T-L-E-B-L-O-W-E-R in my book
If you somehow get the bug for in-depth research, maybe you can find out just how Kiriakou was involved in the outting of Valerie Plame
GeorgeGist
(25,323 posts)Ah, the memories of Fitzmas past.
treestar
(82,383 posts)And yet we are to think of him as the victim of that evil Obama!
randome
(34,845 posts)That's the same type of logic applied to Snowden and Manning, right?
As for Obama, that evil genius has so many wars going on against America, it's not even funny!
[hr][font color="blue"][center]No squirrels were harmed in the making of this post. Yet.[/center][/font][hr]
treestar
(82,383 posts)Obama actually signed the act, but lest we give him credit for that, we have to make a tortured interpretation of the signing statement. It is a harmless and mild statement that it will be interpreted consistent with other law, as all new laws are. This is just stupidity of people determined to find something - like Issa or any Republican.
ucrdem
(15,512 posts)the cypto-Libertarian crowd would have nailed him for helping a Bushler torturer. Take a legacy Bush-Cheney prosecution, add a healthy dose of ODS, and voila, another Kenyan crucifixion is born.
p.s. adding this to my sig link
p.p.s. happy new year S4P, treestar, randome, and all DU faithful friends and (hey it's a holiday) feckless fools
okaawhatever
(9,462 posts)identity of a CIA agent. Remember Valerie Plame anyone? What he did he did to sell books. He isn't a hero or a whistle blower he's a guy who laughed at having lied to the CIA about info in his book, outed the identity of a CIA officer and gave classified info to a reporter.
He was charged with On January 23, 2012, Kiriakou was charged with repeatedly disclosing classified information to journalists, including the name of a covert CIA officer and information revealing the role of another CIA employee, Deuce Martinez, in classified activities.[23][24][25] In addition to leaking the names and roles of CIA officers, Kiriakou was alleged to have lied to the CIA to get his book published.[26]
On April 5, he was indicted. The indictment charges Kiriakou with one count of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, three counts of violating the Espionage Act, and one count of making false statements for allegedly lying to the Publications Review Board of the CIA
He also is a frequent speaker at Liberty University. Maybe he wasn't trying to stop waterboarding or help people with their civil liberties.