Comment by meowface | Hacker News Reader

Comment by meowface | Hacker News Reader

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I never thought I'd say this, but I'm going to (partly) side with the CIA here. He was not charged due to his reveal of CIA torture in the form of waterboarding.

http://www.washingtonian.com/blogs/capitalcomment/local-news...

>Months after the ABC interview, a reporter working on a book about the CIA’s rendition practices asked Kiriakou to confirm the name of a covert officer. The book was never published, but the reporter passed the name to an investigator who worked for lawyers defending Guantánamo detainees. Radack maintains that the operative’s name was already an open secret among journalists and human-rights advocates.

Revealing the name of a covert agent can jeopardize their life and the lives of others. The claim that it's an "open secret" doesn't exactly hold water (being an oxymoron and all).

>John. A. Rizzo, a former lawyer at the Agency, says: “My sense is [Kiriakou] is not a bad man. But he did a bad thing and a stupid thing. The bad thing is that he disclosed the name of at least one covert CIA operative to a reporter via e-mail. The stupid thing is that he lied to the FBI about having done so. These are not trivial criminal offenses.”

Kiriakou alleges that his prosecution was retaliation for his leaking of the CIA's waterboarding tactics. And that's certainly possible. Waterboarding is wrong, and I do think he was in the right for admitting that the CIA used waterboarding. But if you reveal the name of someone undercover, you should be aware of the consequences. He served 23 months for leaking the name and for perjuring himself, which doesn't seem unreasonable.

I don't know much about the story, but a couple thoughts:

1) High-level officials disclose classified information with no or little consequence. For example, someone in the Bush administration outed CIA agent Valarie Plame for political reasons, and General Patraeus disclosed classified information and got a slap on the wrist. And they leak it to the media regularly.

2) It could be that they didn't care about the leak but wanted to prosecute him and found a reason, found in his years of service and in his actions something they could charge him with.

My point is, I wouldn't take it at face value.

To slightly adjust a British military saying, you need to remember your irregular verb "to leak":

The soldier commits a Federal crime. The junior officer displays a marked lack of integrity. The senior officer delivers an off the record briefing to the favoured reporter.

You're right, there are definitely major double standards with leaking of sensitive data. It's absurd that Petraeus wasn't charged with a felony (my understanding is many people in the DoJ wanted him to receive much harsher charges). Clapper should be charged with perjury as well.

The Plame case is a bit different, because the person who originally leaked the name was not actually aware she was covert.

Why do you care about the safety of a torturer?

> Revealing the name of a covert agent can jeopardize their life and the lives of others. The claim that it's an "open secret" doesn't exactly hold water (being an oxymoron and all).

He did not leak the name of just any random agent, but the name of an agent directly involved in the torture program:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/26/us/ex-officer-for-cia-is-s...

> In October, Mr. Kiriakou pleaded guilty to one charge of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act when he disclosed to a reporter the name of an agency officer who had been involved in the C.I.A.’s program to hold and interrogate detainees.

Edward Snowden knowingly intentionally leaked thousands/millions of classified intelligence documents to reporters.

What do both of these men have in common?

They both worked for a government that refused to hold its own criminals accountable.

From http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/24/us/former-cia-officer-plea...

> In 2010, Justice Department officials overruled a recommendation by its ethics office to sanction for professional misconduct the Bush-era lawyers who wrote those memos, and decided not to charge C.I.A. officials for destroying interrogation videotapes. Then in August, Mr. Holder announced that no one would be prosecuted for the deaths of a prisoner in Afghanistan in 2002 and another in Iraq in 2003, eliminating the last possibility of criminal charges by officials who carried out brutal interrogations in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

And let me check http://www.hasjamesclapperbeenindictedyet.com .... still showing "NO". And that's for a man who is taped on YouTube as having committed perjury before congress!

When the government refuses to obey the law it is saying that there are two laws: one for them, and one for us.

Under these circumstances what are you supposed to do?

The definition of a whistleblower is someone who finds themselves in such circumstances. Ethically responsible government employees have no choice but to go outside the system so that the criminals within the system have some shred of a chance of being held accountable. Without names there is no accountability, and without accountability the government will continue to commit crimes with impunity.

>They both worked for a government that refused to hold its own criminals accountable.

Note that Snowden (and presumably some of the people he worked with) went to great lengths to redact names and other personally identifying information in the documents he leaked.

Citizen Four makes it clear that Snowden did not redact anything he gave to Greenwald. He left it up to the journalists to take care of that (and presumably answered questions). I see no meaningful difference here.

Covert agents are usually criminals in the countries they're spying on. So it's right that they should be exposed so they can be brought to justice, just the same as a Chinese spy caught working in America would.

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