Former CIA officer indicted on charges of leaking classified information to journalists

Obama’s unprecedented war on whistleblowers
- Former CIA officer John Kiriakou (L) and
Bradley Manning (Credit: AP/Salon.com)

A former CIA officer who expressed public doubts over the use of waterboarding as an interrogation technique was indicted Thursday on charges that he leaked classified secrets to journalists, including the role of an associate who worked with him on a covert mission to track down and capture a top al-Qaida figure.

The indictment of John C. Kiriakou, returned by a federal grand jury in Alexandria, Va., is part of an aggressive ongoing Justice Department crackdown on leakers and is one of a half-dozen such cases opened during the Obama administration. The five-count indictment charges Kiriakou, who was arrested in January, with divulging to journalists the role of an associate who participated in the capture of suspected al-Qaida financier Abu Zubaydah in the months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The officer’s participation in that mission was classified.

Bill Van Auken: Obama Justice Department indicts ex-CIA agent for exposing torture - Thursday’s indictment of John Kiriakou for exposing CIA torture of detainees confirms yet again that the Obama administration is continuing and deepening the crimes carried out by the Bush White House. Kiriakou, a CIA agent for 14 years, is being prosecuted for speaking to two journalists about the waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah. In December 2007, he appeared in an ABC News interview, becoming the first CIA official to confirm the use of waterboarding of so-called “enemy combatants” and to describe the practice as torture. It is now known that Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times in the space of one month while being held in a series of CIA “black sites” from Thailand to Poland to Diego Garcia. Zubaydah, severely wounded when he was captured by US and Pakistani intelligence agents, had already been suffering the effects of a shrapnel wound to the head he received during the CIA-backed war in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Under US control, he was beaten, placed in extreme temperatures, and subjected to music played at debilitating volumes, sexual humiliation and sleep deprivation. His interrogators also locked him for protracted periods in a small box, where he was forced to crouch in complete darkness, while the stressful position caused his wounds to open up and bleed. At some point during this ordeal, the CIA removed Zubaydah’s left eye.