Associated Press – 2013-01-27 01:29:29
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jan/25/cia-whistleblower-john-kiriakou-prison
ALEXANDRIA, VA (January 25, 2013) — The former CIA officer John Kiriakou was sentenced Friday to more than two years in prison, by a federal judge who rejected arguments that he was acting as a whistleblower when he leaked a covert officer’s name to a reporter.
A plea deal required the judge to impose a sentence of two and a half years. US district judge Leonie Brinkema said she would have given Kiriakou much more time if she could.
Kiriakou’s supporters describe him as a whistleblower who exposed aspects of the CIA’s use of torture against detained terrorists. Prosecutors said Kiriakou was merely seeking to increase his fame and public stature by trading on his insider knowledge.
The 48-year-old Arlington resident pleaded guilty last year to violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. No one had been convicted under the law in 27 years.
Kiriakou was an intelligence officer with the CIA from 1990 until 2004. He served overseas and at headquarters in Langley. In 2002, Kiriakou played a key role in the agency’s capture of the al-Qaida terrorist Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan. Abu Zubaydah, who was waterboarded by government interrogators, revealed information that led to the arrest of “dirty bomb” plotter Jose Padilla and exposed Khalid Sheikh Mohamed as the mastermind of the 11 September 2001 terror attacks.
Accounts conflict, however, over whether the waterboarding was helpful in gleaning intelligence from Zubaydah, who was also interrogated conventionally.
Kiriakou, who did not participate in the waterboarding, expressed ambivalence in news media interviews about waterboarding, but ultimately declared it was torture. His 2007 interviews about the interrogations of Abu Zubaydah were among the first by a CIA insider confirming reports that several detainees, including Abu Zubaydah, had been waterboarded.
In court papers, prosecutors said the investigation of Kiriakou began in 2009 when authorities became alarmed after discovering that detainees at Guantanamo Bay possessed photographs of CIA and FBI personnel who had interrogated them.
The investigation eventually led back to Kiriakou, according to a government affidavit. Prosecutors said Kiriakou leaked the name of a covert operative to a journalist, who subsequently disclosed it to an investigator working for the lawyer of a Guantanamo detainee.
Kiriakou was initially charged under the first-world-war-era Espionage Act, but those charges were dropped as part of a plea bargain.
Comments (The first of 105 as of January 26, 2013)
Terribleblodge
So this so called ‘judge’ believes people who expose capital crimes should not only be put in prison but should be put there for more then 2 years? I have to say it seems rather certain that this so called judge is a promoter of crime not an arbitrator of it.
exiledoffmainstreet
The judge herself is a war criminal. The US itself in the successor Nurnberg trials it conducted in the late 40s sentenced “jurists” which included justice ministers, prosecutors and judges, to various sentences. The film, “Judgment at Nuremberg” was based on one of these trials, the Justice case. The Burt Lancaster character who is punished in the fictionalised case is based on an amalgam of the Nazi Justice minister, Schlegelberger and a judge.
kobe56
Maybe she’s angling for a new appointment from the Obama administration. If there’s one thing they love, it’s an ambitious, dishonest and nasty bully. Of course, when the DOJ sees an actual torturer or a fraudulent banker coming their way, they scrape and bow down. But when they get the chance to pick on the powerless, like minorities with drug charges or whistleblowers or internet activists, that’s the time they flex their muscles.
Dom Zakim
I was tortured for almost 3 years by the FBI and their friends only because 85 years old man, Roland Sibens(chicago) convinced them that I am a terrorist. I was tortured for working on my prosthetic legs in the basement. I done absolutely nothing illegal or wrong. They thought that in theory it is possible to hide bomb in them. They saw an opportunity to get famous, so they were trying to torture me till I sign their insane story. They tortured me using more than 100 different torturing methods and trust to me waterboarding is not how they torture nowadays. I dont know where to find justice.
I think that after 9/11 things got out of control. Freedom fighters became tyrants. In 1945, most Germans had an opportunity to learn about Nazis death camps. I hope that one day American citizens will get chance to learn about people like me, who were tortured with no reason for years.
mikesmith
Hopefully the truth will come out someday. But it won’t be under the current ultra right-wing, ultra-repressive, ultra-violent administration. Obama is not a man who cares about the law or who tolerates dissent. To him the law is just a weapon to use in furthering his agenda and lining the pockets of him and his corporate buddies. He’s a diehard imperialist devoted to extending American hegemony and will come down hard on those who get in his way.
Posted in accordance with Title 17, Section 107, US Code, for noncommercial, educational purposes.
