John Kiriakou: The Sad Fate of America’s Whistleblowers

[marmar]

The Sad Fate of America’s Whistleblowers

Posted on Oct 19, 2015
By John Kiriakou


What is it about whistleblowers that the powers that be can’t stand?

When I blew the whistle on the CIA’s illegal torture program, I was derided in many quarters as a traitor. My detractors in the government attacked me for violating my secrecy agreement, even as they ignored the oath we’d all taken to protect and defend the Constitution.

All of this happened despite the fact that the torture I helped expose is illegal in the United States. Torture also violates a number of international laws and treaties to which our country is signatory — some of which the United States itself was the driving force in drafting.

I was charged with three counts of espionage, all of which were eventually dropped when I took a plea to a lesser count. I had to choose between spending up to 30 months in prison and rolling the dice to risk a 45-year sentence. With five kids, and three of them under the age of 10, I took the plea.

Tom Drake — the NSA whistleblower who went through the agency’s chain of command to report its illegal program to spy on American citizens — was thanked for his honesty and hard work by being charged with 10 felonies, including five counts of espionage. The government eventually dropped the charges, but not before Drake had suffered terrible financial, professional, and personal distress. .....................(more)

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_sad_fate_of_americas_whistleblowers_20151019

[merrily]

1. Gosztola of Shadowproof (formerly firedoglake) does a great job writing about whistleblowers.

[leveymg]

2. How long until one of the usual character assassins shows up to smear this whistleblower?

The national security state always operates the same way with whistleblowers. When they can no longer ignore you, they try to destroy your reputation. Then they prosecute you. It always works the same way. Unfortunately, even DU has its own resident smear squad. Special Tasks.

[marmar]

6. Took a couple of hours, but an appearance was made.

[Octafish]

3. They got in the way of profits. I mean ''progre$$.''

Wall Street and War Inc. are where the really Big Bucks go to get made.

Sometimes a fortune rests on a mere scrap of information, like in a "Fistful of Dollars."

CIA moonlights in corporate world

In the midst of two wars and the fight against Al Qaeda, the CIA is offering operatives a chance to peddle their expertise to private companies on the side — a policy that gives financial firms and hedge funds access to the nation’s top-level intelligence talent, POLITICO has learned.

In one case, these active-duty officers moonlighted at a hedge-fund consulting firm that wanted to tap their expertise in “deception detection,” the highly specialized art of telling when executives may be lying based on clues in a conversation.

The never-before-revealed policy comes to light as the CIA and other intelligence agencies are once again under fire for failing to “connect the dots,” this time in the Christmas Day bombing plot on Northwest Flight 253.

SNIP...

But the close ties between active-duty and retired CIA officers at one consulting company show the degree to which CIA-style intelligence gathering techniques have been employed by hedge funds and financial institutions in the global economy.

The firm is called Business Intelligence Advisors, and it is based in Boston. BIA was founded and is staffed by a number of retired CIA officers, and it specializes in the arcane field of “deception detection.” BIA’s clients have included Goldman Sachs and the enormous hedge fund SAC Capital Advisors, according to spokesmen for both firms.

CONTINUED...

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0110/32290.html#ixzz0eIFPhHBh

Then there's the signature tradition of playing both sides off the middle, like selling rifles to both the Allies and the Central Powers during World War I, or the bounty hunters in "For a Few Dollars More" getting one inside to work out.

Stratfor: executive boasted of 'trusted former CIA cronies'

By Alex Spillius, Diplomatic Correspondent
9:08PM GMT 28 Feb 2012
The Telegraph

A senior executive with the private intelligence firm Stratfor boasted to colleagues about his "trusted former CIA cronies" and promised to "see what I can uncover" about a classified FBI investigation, according to emails released by the WikiLeaks.

Fred Burton, vice president of intelligence at the Texas firm, also informed members of staff that he had a copy of the confidential indictment on Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks.

The second batch of five million internal Stratfor emails obtained by the Anonymous computer hacking group revealed that the company has high level sources within the United States and other governments, runs a network of paid informants that includes embassy staff and journalists and planned a hedge fund, Stratcap, based on its secret intelligence.

SNIP...

Mr Assange labelled the company as a "private intelligence Enron", in reference to the energy giant that collapsed after a false accounting scandal.

CONTINUED...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/9111784/Stratfor-executive-boasted-of-trusted-former-CIA-cronies.html

Then, there's Booz Allen, NSA's go-to private spyhaus, vacuums and filters the right stuff for Carlyle Group, a buy-partisan business which always seems to know where and what to bomb and make a buck, but the lines between sides turned out be fuzzy and amorphous nebula-like -- like in "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly."

The Knights of the Revolving Door

When War is Swell: the Carlyle Group and the Middle East at War

by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
CounterPunch, Weekend Edition September 6-8, 2013

Paris.

A couple of weeks ago, in a dress rehearsal for her next presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton, the doyenne of humanitarian interventionism, made a pit-stop at the Carlyle Group to brief former luminaries of the imperial war rooms about her shoot-first-don’t-ask-questions foreign policy.

For those of you who have put the playbill of the Bush administration into a time capsule and buried it beneath the compost bin, the Carlyle Group is essentially a hedge fund for war-making and high tech espionage. They are the people who brought you the Iraq war and all those intrusive niceties of Homeland Security. Call them the Knights of the Revolving Door, many of Carlyle’s executives and investors having spent decades in the Pentagon, the CIA or the State Department, before cashing in for more lucrative careers as war profiteers. They are now licking their chops at the prospect for an all-out war against Syria, no doubt hoping that the conflagration will soon spread to Lebanon, Jordan and, the big prize, Iran.

For a refresher course on the sprawling tentacles of the Carlyle Group, here’s an essay that first appeared in CounterPunch’s print edition in 2004. Sadly, not much has changed in the intervening years, except these feted souls have gotten much, much richer. – JSC

Across all fronts, Bush’s war deteriorates with stunning rapidity. The death count of American soldiers killed in Iraq will soon top 1000, with no end in sight. The members of the handpicked Iraqi Governor Council are being knocked off one after another. Once loyal Shia clerics, like Ayatollah Sistani, are now telling the administration to pull out or face a nationalist insurgency. The trail of culpability for the abuse, torture and murder of Iraqi detainees seems to lead inexorably into the office of Donald Rumsfeld. The war for Iraqi oil has ended up driving the price of crude oil through the roof. Even Kurdish leaders, brutalized by the Ba’athists for decades, are now saying Iraq was a safer place under their nemesis Saddam Hussein. Like Medea whacking her own kids, the US turned on its own creation, Ahmed Chalabi, raiding his Baghdad compound and fingering him as an agent of the ayatollahs of Iran. And on and on it goes.

Still not all of the president’s men are in a despairing mood. Amid the wreckage, there remain opportunities for profit and plunder. Halliburton and Bechtel’s triumphs in Iraq have been chewed over for months. Less well chronicled is the profiteering of the Carlyle Group, a company with ties that extend directly into the Oval Office itself.

Even Pappy Bush stands in line to profit handsomely from his son’s war making. The former president is on retainer with the Carlyle Group, the largest privately held defense contractor in the nation. Carlyle is run by Frank Carlucci, who served as the National Security advisor and Secretary of Defense under Ronald Reagan. Carlucci has his own embeds in the current Bush administration. At Princeton, his college roommate was Donald Rumsfeld. They’ve remained close friends and business associates ever since. When you have friends like this, you don’t need to hire lobbyists..

Bush Sr. serves as a kind of global emissary for Carlyle. The ex-president doesn’t negotiate arms deals; he simply opens the door for them, a kind of high level meet-and-greet. His special area of influence is the Middle East, primarily Saudi Arabia, where the Bush family has extensive business and political ties. According to an account in the Washington Post, Bush Sr. earns around $500,000 for each speech he makes on Carlyle’s behalf.

One of the Saudi investors lured to Carlyle by Bush was the BinLaden Group, the construction conglomerate owned by the family of Osama bin Laden. According to an investigation by the Wall Street Journal, Bush convinced Shafiq Bin Laden, Osama’s half brother, to sink $2 million of BinLaden Group money into Carlyle’s accounts. In a pr move, the Carlyle group cut its ties to the BinLaden Group in October 2001.

CONTINUED...

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/09/06/when-war-is-swell-the-carlyle-group-and-the-middle-east-at-war/

This barely scratches the surface. The reality is that underneath what shows for public navigators is one enormous iceberg made from blood-red ice, invisible to the proles and serfs who are doing their best to keep afloat in a frozen sea of austerity, endless war and debt servitude. And these are, by far, the wealthiest times in human history.

Money trumps peace for a rea$on. Whistleblowers are inconvenient reminders of whose ox is getting gored and whose Constitution is getting trampled in the stampede.

[Hydra]

4. The disdain for law by our Gov't leaders should scare everyone

They feel like they should be allowed to do anything they feel like...and a disturbing number of people support them in that idea.

Since when has law of the jungle been something to cheer about?

[Blue_Tires]

5. Maybe Kiriakou would be happier in Moscow

where whistleblowers are rewarded with a 7.62mm through the dome?

[Jim Lane]

9. Right, because those are the only alternatives

The idea of living in a country that observes the rule of law is just too far-fetched to be worth mentioning. It is an immutable law of nature that the rulers will always and everywhere get whatever they want, so your only realistic choice is to pick the tyrant to whom you'll submit.

Obviously, some of us don't agree with that pessimistic approach.

[Blue_Tires]

10. All I want is some proper perspective and some consistency

Is that too much to ask?

[Jim Lane]

11. The consistency I'd like is between President Obama and Candidate Obama.

What's the "proper perspective"? Well, yes, a whistleblower in the U.S. today is better off than a whistleblower in Russia today. And the average person in Russia today is better off than the average person in France in 1348, what with the Hundred Years' War and the bubonic plague both going strong.

I just don't see it as a proper or even useful perspective to think that everyone who complains about anything should be compared to the worst situation or even the worst contemporary situation. Our standard should be higher than "We're not the worst place in the world."

[Blue_Tires]

12. Well then maybe more "whistleblowers" should take advantage of

the legal resources at their disposal instead of outing CIA agents, lying to the PRB and handing out classified material everywhere like Kiriakou?

As much as I hate to throw cold water on the "War on Whistleblowers" talking point, you are aware that there have been natsec whistleblowers (yes, even during the Obama administration) who had nothing happen to them?

[GummyBearz]

14. Yea

Snowden comes to mind. Of course he had to take matters into his own hands to make sure nothing happened to him. Maybe when the country is sane again he will get to come back to a better USA. One without Big Brother in charge. We need more Snowdens in the mean time to make that happen though. The Winston Smith's don't get us anywhere.

[Blue_Tires]

16. I repeatedly made the very strong argument

that the vast majority of Snowden's leaks had nothing to do with "whistleblowing" or serving the public interest...

Of course the brazen audacity of someone fleeing "Big Brother" first deciding to meet with the Chinese government and then defecting to Moscow is beyond words...

In case you haven't been keeping up, Snowden only gets to leave Russia when Putin has no more use for him and allows him to go. He is essentially a prisoner in a cell of his own making.

And why would he even want to come back? The moment he steps off the plane he's getting Hyman Roth'd, assuming he isn't surrendering immediately to U.S. custody...

So you just keep on building up your hero, and I'll just keep deconstructing him...

[GummyBearz]

17. At least Snowden brought us to the point in the conversation

where people like you can't claim "big brother doesn't exist". Or our dear leader Obama would never allow the NSA to do that.... it all ended with Bush! I am really sure if Snowden went through the proper channels, everything would have come out A-OK! *giggles*.

I am also sure it must hurt when authoritarian minded people, who want to be a puppet for their chosen master, get set back a few steps in their pursuit of that noble goal. Good luck in the future though.

[riderinthestorm]

7. K&R! nt

[nashville_brook]

8. k and r

[Rex]

13. SOS emails from Powell confirm there was collusion between Bush and Blair over Iraq.

Yet they will never be considered traitors nor stand trial in any court on the planet. Justice is a joke. Some consistency would be nice. The message sent is - be a big fish if you want to commit treason, small fry get fucked over in the courts.

[struggle4progress]

15. When you sup with devil, bring a long spoon! Far from being a "whistle-blower,"

Kiriakou seems nothing more than an opportunist. His 2007 interview with Brian Ross hardly qualifies as a courageous stand against the torture programs of the Bush regime; in fact, the record shows that Kiriakou was actually an apologist for torture:

... Brian Ross, an investigative reporter at ABC News, invited Kiriakou to discuss the controversy on camera. In a taped interview ... Kiriakou confirmed that Abu Zubaydah had been waterboarded. Kiriakou said that confessions the prisoner had made under duress had “disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks,” and had saved American lives. The C.I.A., he insisted, had been careful to follow rules issued by its own lawyers and by the Bush White House. He had also felt that the rough interrogation techniques were “something that we really needed to do” because of the threats posed by Al Qaeda ... Kiriakou’s phone rang incessantly, and he talked to more reporters. As he saw it, he was defending the agency’s adherence to the rule of law and its commitment to keeping Americans safe ...
The Spy Who Said Too Much
BY STEVE COLL
APRIL 1, 2013

Kiriakou's ultimate prison sentence should be understood as the outcome of covert bureaucratic politics. The rightwing torture enthusiasts naturally wanted the torture programs to remain secret; but if the programs were to be exposed, everyone involved would jockey to avoid accountability. As part of this process, those involved worked to strengthen the wall of secrecy surrounding such operations. Thus the CIA began destroying records; and the mass of material from Congressional investigations was ultimately sealed away. It was inevitable that someone would be prosecuted -- but structural forces ensured the guilty would walk, and that anyone actually prosecuted would serve a warning to others not to reveal too much information. Kiriakou conveniently fit the bill, because he enjoyed attention and had no definite principles: when he thought it to his advantage, he spoke in favor of torture, and when he later thought it to his advantage to say he had misgivings about torture, he said that; but in all cases, his motive largely seems to have been that he could play the-man-in-the-know. It seems to me quite possible that he was set up -- in the sense that those hoping for a distracting patsy could have encouraged the press to contact him, knowing that his love of attention would lead him to chatter in ways that could later be the target of noisy outrage -- but if so, that remains rather his own fault: he went to the devil's for dinner, and the devil bit him

It remains a rather disgraceful myth in some circles that Kiriakou somehow exposed the administration torture programs. These programs were common knowledge long before Kiriakou stood up to defend them: Cambridge University Press, for example, had published a 1200 page compilation "The Torture Papers" of Bushco memoranda, with analyses, several years before Kiriakou hit the news