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On Tuesday, authorities released 14-year former CIA veteran John Kiriakou, sentenced to two-and-a-half years in federal prison after disclosing the CIA torture programme, to serve the rest of his sentence under house arrest. Kiriakou received a 30-month sentence in federal prison due to his decision to release details about the CIA post-9/11 torture tactics to the press, a disclosure that also leaked the name of a covert officer. His sentence began 28 February 2013, at the Loretto Federal Correctional Institution near Pittsburgh PA and will officially finish in August 2015. In a tweet posted Tuesday, Kiriakou smiled with his children. He referenced Martin Luther King Jr in the post, writing, “Free at last. Free at last. Thank God Almighty, I’m free at last”.
Kiriakou first revealed details about the CIA’s use of torture, such as waterboarding, back in 2007, during an interview with ABC News. He was the first official with direct knowledge to discuss the programme in public. The criminal investigation that eventually led to Kiriakou began in 2009, when government officials learned that defence lawyers for high-profile al-Qaeda suspects at the Guantánamo Gulag were identifying witnesses to their clients’ interrogations while in CIA custody. The lawyers asserted that the US government tortured their clients, and wanted someone involved to testify. Authorities discovered during a FBI investigation that back in 2008 Kiriakou told a journalist the name of a covert CIA officer involved in interrogating al-Qaeda suspects. Then, the journalist disclosed the covert officer’s name to a researcher working for a lawyer at Guantánamo. With the name of an officer involved in the torture program in hand, Guantánamo lawyers were able to name the officer in their lawsuits. News of this leak led to an uproar within the CIA, which filed a crimes report. The case cleared defence lawyers and the researcher of any wrongdoing, but Kiriakou received indictments in 2012 on one count of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, three counts of violating the Espionage Act, and one count of making false statements. He agreed to plead guilty to the IIPA violation last October… the first successful IIPA prosecution in 27 years.
Defence lawyers argued that Kiriakou’s actions… giving a journalist the name of a former CIA officer alleged to have taken part in waterboarding… were those of a whistleblower. As a CIA officer from 1990-2004, Kiriakou led an operation that captured Abu Zubaydah, a suspected al-Qaeda facilitator in 2002. CIA records documented that it subjected Zubaydah to waterboarding (simulated drowning) 83 times during interrogation. Prosecutors argued Kiriakou was merely seeking to increase his fame and public stature by trading on his insider knowledge. He later worked as a consultant for an American news network and published a book about his time at the CIA. Kiriakou said that although his conviction was for leaking the name of a covert officer, they really targeted him for revealing the torture programme to the public.
4 February 2015
RT
http://rt.com/usa/229103-john-kiriakou-released-prison/
Editor:
We hung Nazis for torturing people after World War II, calling it “crimes against humanity”. The objective situation is no different here. Both are cases of “might makes right”. Look at how the USA holds people for years in illegal and amoral detention at Guantánamo! The US Republican Party, in particular, wets its pants in glee at such enormities. In fact, the USA holds Guantánamo illegally, as the Cuban government has repeatedly asked the USA to leave, but it refuses. The Ukrainian triumvirate of the Rabbit, Turdchinov, and Avakov all aided the CIA torture programme… indeed, it’s one of the reasons why the USA supports them… they’re criminals on a level with their CIA enablers. We hung SS officers for torturing people as war criminals… therefore, we should hang James Clapper et al as war criminals… for doing the very same thing! We hung Hans Frank {Oops! I meant “Wilhelm Frick”… one of my Cabinet was kind enough to point up my mistake… sometimes, “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing”. I apologise: editor} for providing the legal basis for the Holocaust… ergo, we should hang Antonin Scalia for providing the legal basis for torture. If you doubted that the Nazi and Republican Parties were similar… look at Frank {“look at Frick”: editor} and Scalia. QED.
By the way, the above is NOT a threat. It’s a historical comparison. Scalia SHOULD hang for his legal whoring, but I doubt that he shall. We don’t live in a perfect world… Scalia’s defence of torture is proof of that. Note well that the “pro-lifers” cream their jeans over this legal prostitute (who defends aggressive war in foreign parts, yet never served in the forces himself… a classic “Chicken Hawk” if there ever were such).
America’s soul is in the shitter… it’ll stay there until we repent of the actions of Scalia and Clapper (and those like them).
BMD
Voices from Russia 
MID Big sez We Should Punish Those Involved in Torture at CIA Secret Prisons
Tags: Central Intelligence Agency, CIA, Crime, crimes against humanity, Diego Garcia, heinous crimes, Langley, Lawrence Wilkerson, political commentary, politics, Russia, Russian, torture, United States, USA, war crimes
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On Friday, Konstantin Dolgov, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MID) Human Rights Officer, spoke about CIA crimes on the British island of Diego Garcia, saying, “In recent days, Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to US Secretary of State Colin Powell, made known new testimonies of Britain’s participation in torture programs at CIA secret prisons outside the USA”. Dolgov pointed up that Wilkerson said US special services sources confirmed the information, including a CIA veteran who had been in the US global torture programme, saying, “Human rights activists say that Wilkerson’s statements offer us yet another confirmation of the fact that the British government covered up the truth about its role in CIA programmes, trying to avoid responsibility”. Earlier, Amnesty International noted that the British authorities soft-pedalled the case and they’d instructed the parliamentary committee on intelligence and security to investigate it, but preserved absolute freedom for them to hide the information. Wilkerson said that data on UK involvement in crude violations of human rights by the CIA disappeared from a recent report of the US Senate after British officials, with Home Secretary Theresa May on the list, held 24 rounds of consultations with the senators… authors of the document. Dolgov said, “We believe that attempts to withhold from the international community the gravest human rights violations, committed under the cover of the fight against terrorism, shed unfavourable light on both London and Washington, but they continue their blind-alley attempts to preach to the rest of the world how, in their opinion, everyone should respect human rights. We’re confident that to close the case means to bring the guilty to responsibility, but there’s still a long way to go”. Along with this, Dolgov said that the CIA promotes the perpetrators of torture; in Britain, Sir John Chilcot’s official inquiry is still some way off from publishing a report on how UK troops took part in the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.
6 February 2015
ITAR-TASS
http://itar-tass.com/en/russia/776010