DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA The persecution of John
Kiriakou By Peter Van Buren
Here is what military briefers like to
call BLUF, the Bottom Line Up Front: no one except
John Kiriakou is being held accountable for
America's torture policy. And John Kiriakou didn't
torture anyone, he just blew the whistle on it.
A long time ago, with mediocre grades and
no athletic ability, I applied for a Rhodes
Scholarship. I guess the Rhodes committee at my
school needed practice, and I found myself
undergoing a rigorous oral examination. Here was
the final question they fired at me, probing my
ability to think morally and justly: You are a
soldier. Your prisoner has information that might
save your life. The only way to obtain it is
through torture. What do you do?
At that
time, a million years ago in an America that no longer
exists, my obvious
answer was never to torture, never to lower
oneself, never to sacrifice one's humanity and
soul, even if it meant death. My visceral
reaction: to become a torturer was its own form of
living death. (An undergrad today, after the
"enhanced interrogation" Bush years and in the
wake of 24, would probably detail specific
techniques that should be employed.) My advisor
later told me my answer was one of the few bright
spots in an otherwise spectacularly unsuccessful
interview.
It is now common knowledge that
between 2001 and about 2007 the United States
Department of Justice (DOJ) sanctioned acts of
torture committed by members of the Central
Intelligence Agency and others. The acts took
place in secret prisons ("black sites") against
persons detained indefinitely without trial.
They were described in detail and
explicitly authorized in a series of secret
torture memos drafted by John Yoo, Jay Bybee, and
Steven Bradbury, senior lawyers in the DOJ's
Office of Legal Counsel. (Office of Legal Counsel
attorneys technically answer directly to the DOJ,
which is supposed to be independent from the White
House, but obviously was not in this case.) Not
one of those men, or their Justice Department
bosses, has been held accountable for their
actions.
Some tortured prisoners were even
killed by the Central Intelligence Agency.
Attorney General Eric Holder announced recently
that no one would be held accountable for those
murders either.
"Based on the fully
developed factual record concerning the two
deaths," he said, "the Department has declined
prosecution because the admissible evidence would
not be sufficient to obtain and sustain a
conviction beyond a reasonable doubt."
Jose Rodriguez, a senior CIA official,
admitted destroying videotapes of potentially
admissible evidence, showing the torture of
captives by operatives of the US government at a
secret prison thought to be located at a
Vietnam-War-era airbase in Thailand. He was not
held accountable for deep-sixing this evidence,
nor for his role in the torture of human beings.
John Kiriakou alone The one man
in the whole archipelago of America's secret
horrors facing prosecution is former CIA agent
John Kiriakou. Of the untold numbers of men and
women involved in the whole nightmare show of
those years, only one may go to jail.
And
of course, he didn't torture anyone.
The
charges against Kiriakou allege that in answering
questions from reporters about suspicions that the
CIA tortured detainees in its custody, he violated
the Espionage Act, once an obscure World War I-era
law that aimed at punishing Americans who gave aid
to the enemy. It was passed in 1917 and has been
the subject of much judicial and congressional
doubt ever since. Kiriakou is one of six
government whistleblowers who have been charged
under the Act by the Obama administration. From
1917 until Barack Obama came into office, only
three people had ever charged in this way.
The Obama Justice Department claims the
former CIA officer "disclosed classified
information to journalists, including the name of
a covert CIA officer and information revealing the
role of another CIA employee in classified
activities".
The charges result from a CIA
investigation. That investigation was triggered by
a filing in January 2009 on behalf of detainees at
Guantanamo that contained classified information
the defense had not been given through government
channels, and by the discovery in the spring of
2009 of photographs of alleged CIA employees among
the legal materials of some detainees at
Guantanamo.
According to one description,
Kiriakou gave several interviews about the CIA in
2008. Court documents charge that he provided
names of covert Agency officials to a journalist,
who allegedly in turn passed them on to a
Guantanamo legal team. The team sought to have
detainees identify specific CIA officials who
participated in their renditions and torture.
Kiriakou is accused of providing the identities of
CIA officers, which may have allowed names to be
linked to photographs.
Many observers
believe however that the real "offense" in the
eyes of the Obama administration was quite
different. In 2007, Kiriakou became a
whistleblower. He went on record as the first
(albeit by then, former) CIA official to confirm
the use of waterboarding of al-Qaeda prisoners as
an interrogation technique, and then to condemn it
as torture.
He specifically mentioned the
waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah in that secret
prison in Thailand. Zubaydah was at the time
believed to be an al-Qaeda leader, though more
likely was at best a mid-level operative. Kiriakou
also ran afoul of the CIA over efforts to clear
for publication a book he had written about the
Agency's counterterrorism work. He maintains that
his is instead a First Amendment case in which a
whistleblower is being punished, that it is a
selective prosecution to scare government insiders
into silence when they see something wrong.
If Kiriakou had actually tortured someone
himself, even to death, there is no possibility
that he would be in trouble. John Kiriakou is 48.
He is staring down a long tunnel at a potential
sentence of up to 45 years in prison because in
the national security state that rules the roost
in Washington, talking out of turn about a crime
has become the only possible crime.
Welcome to the jungle John
Kiriakou and I share common attorneys through the
Government Accountability Project, and I've had
the chance to talk with him on any number of
occasions. He is soft-spoken, thoughtful, and
quick to laugh at a bad joke. When the subject
turns to his case, and the way the government has
treated him, however, things darken. His sentences
get shorter and the quick smile disappears.
He understands the role his government has
chosen for him: the head on a stick, the example,
the message to everyone else involved in the
horrors of post-9/11 America. Do the country's
dirty work, kidnap, kill, imprison, torture, and
we'll cover for you. Destroy the evidence of all
that and we'll reward you. But speak out, and
expect to be punished.
Like so many of us
who have served the US government honorably only
to have its full force turned against us for an
act or acts of conscience, the pain comes in
trying to reconcile the two images of the US
government in your head. It's like trying to
process the actions of an abusive father you still
want to love.
One of Kiriakou's
representatives, attorney Jesselyn Radack, told
me, "It is a miscarriage of justice that John
Kiriakou is the only person indicted in relation
to the Bush-era torture program. The historic
import cannot be understated. If a crime as
egregious as state-sponsored torture can go
unpunished, we lose all moral standing to condemn
other governments' human rights violations. By
'looking forward, not backward' we have taken a
giant leap into the past."
One former CIA
covert officer, who uses the pen name "Ishmael
Jones", lays out a potential defense for Kiriakou:
"Witness after witness could explain to the jury
that Mr Kiriakou is being selectively prosecuted,
that his leaks are nothing compared to leaks by
Obama administration officials and senior CIA
bureaucrats. Witness after witness could show the
jury that for any secret material published by Mr
Kiriakou, the books of senior CIA bureaucrats
contain many times as much. Former CIA chief
George Tenet wrote a book in 2007, approved by CIA
censors, that contains dozens of pieces of
classified information - names and enough
information to find names."
If only it was
really that easy.
Never
again For at least six years it was the
policy of the United States of America to torture
and abuse its enemies or, in some cases, simply
suspected enemies. It has remained a US policy,
even under the Obama administration, to employ
"extraordinary rendition" - that is, the sending
of captured terror suspects to the jails of
countries that are known for torture and abuse, an
outsourcing of what we no longer want to do.
Techniques for which the US hanged men at
Nuremburg and in post-war Japan were employed and
declared lawful. To embark on such a program with
the oversight of the George W Bush administration,
learned men and women had to have long
discussions, with staffers running in and out of
rooms with snippets of research to buttress the
justifications being so laboriously developed.
The CIA undoubtedly used some cumbersome
bureaucratic process to hire contractors for its
torture staff. The old manuals needed to be
updated, psychiatrists consulted, military
survival experts interviewed, training classes set
up.
Videotapes were made of the torture
sessions, and no doubt DVDs full of real horror
were reviewed back at headquarters. Torture
techniques were even reportedly demonstrated to
top officials inside the White House. Individual
torturers who were considered particularly
effective were no doubt identified, probably
rewarded, and sent on to new secret sites to harm
more people.
America just didn't wake up
one day and start slapping around some Islamic
punk. These were not the torture equivalents of
rogue cops. A system, a mechanism, was created.
That we now can only speculate about many of the
details involved and the extent of all this is a
tribute to the thousands who continue to remain
silent about what they did, saw, heard about, or
were associated with. Many of them work now at the
same organizations, remaining a part of the same
contracting firms, the CIA, and the military. Our
torturers.
What is it that allows all
those people to remain silent? How many are simply
scared, watching what is happening to John
Kiriakou and thinking: not me, I'm not sticking my
neck out to see it get chopped off. They're almost
forgivable, even if they are placing their own
self-interest above that of their country.
But what about the others, the ones who
remain silent about what they did or saw or aided
and abetted in some fashion because they still
think it was the right thing to do? The ones who
will do it again when another frightened president
asks them to? Or even the ones who enjoyed doing
it?
The same Department of Justice that is
hunting down the one man who spoke against torture
from the inside still maintains a special unit, 60
years after the end of World War II, dedicated to
hunting down the last few at-large Nazis. They do
that under the rubric of "never again". The truth
is that same team needs to be turned loose on our
national security state. Otherwise, until we have
a full accounting of what was done in our names by
our government, the pieces are all in place for it
to happen again. There, if you want to know, is
the real horror.
Peter Van
Buren , a
24-year veteran Foreign Service Officer at the
State Department, spent a year in Iraq leading two
Provincial Reconstruction Teams. Now in Washington
and a TomDispatch regular, he writes about Iraq,
the Middle East, and US diplomacy at his blog, "We
Meant Well". Following the publication of his
bookWe
Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the
Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People
(The
American Empire Project, Metropolitan Books) in
2011, the Department of State began termination
proceedings, reassigning him to a make-work
position and stripping him of his security
clearance and diplomatic credentials. Through the
efforts of the Government
Accountability Project and the ACLU, Van Buren
will instead retire from the State Department with
his full benefits of service in late September.
We Meant Well has recently been published
in paperback. Van Buren is currently working on a
second book, about the decline of the blue-collar
middle class in America and the roots of the
"99%."
[Note to Readers: What's next for
Kiriakou? The District Court for the Eastern
District of Virginia began Classified Information
Procedures Act hearings in his case on September
12. These hearings, which are closed to the
public, will last until October 30 and will
determine what classified information will be
permitted during trial. Kiriakou has pled "not
guilty" to all charges and is preparing to go to
trial on November 26.]
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