John Kiriakou remains the only CIA officer to be jailed over the Agency’s illegal torture program — and he was the whistleblower who exposed it! But the story of how the FBI was able to send Kiriakou to prison on a 30 month sentence is fascinating, shocking, chilling. We discuss this dark chapter in our recent history as well as Mr. Kiriakou’s fascinating upcoming book, Doing Time Like A Spy: How the CIA Taught Me to Survive and Thrive in Prison, in today’s very special Ron Paul Liberty Report:
Reprinted from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity.
A fine interview, worth checking out. Lots of details about the timeline of JK’s career and the govts. attempts to sting/prosecute him because of politics. JK also shares the idea that the CIA is planning to attack Wikileaks for real as a spy service, so it’s legally important for Wilileaks to establish a defense as a legitimate, protected form of journalism/reporting in the public interest – which it should be able to do.
Another point related to JK’s narrative about how he was politically prosecuted for an act of speaking out in the public interest…another case on the opposite side of the spectrum is that of William Weisband. Many consider Weisband to have been most damaging spy of all time working against the US because he tipped of the USSR to NSA/FBI Venona intercepts in the early going. The US only really got codes from Venona they could break from a few years during WWII and they kept working on those for 40 years. Without Weisband’s alert from the inside, they would have gotten a lot more. In spite of this and other real treason spying, Weisband was barely prosectuted and not known to the public because prosecuting him would have been embarrassing to the military rather than good PR for their cause. Even the story in the article I link below is clearly shaded in a false way, – claiming that prosecuting Weisband would have alerted the USSR – they already were alerted; it was just a PR issue. Both cases, Weisband and Kiriakou, in their completely opposite ways, show that politics and PR rather than law or security issues are the driving force for the FBI.
http://spartacus-educational.com/William_Weisband.htm