Salon With Robert Scheer: John Kiriakou Challenges the American Injustice System
Kiriakou opposes torture and went to prison for exposing it. Now he is working to reform the American security state. The former CIA officer explains how to Truthdig Editor-in-Chief Robert Scheer.
John Kiriakou is a true American hero.
He was an intelligence operative for the CIA for 14 years, from 1990 to 2004. After the World Trade Center attack in 2001, he was involved in Pakistan in the capture of the third-highest-ranking leader of al-Qaida. He blew the whistle on torture in 2007, in an interview with ABC.
After that, while working for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he ran into trouble because of an interview he gave to a reporter for The New York Times, in which he revealed the name of a former non-covert CIA agent who talked about his CIA job on social media. This disclosure led to his prosecution in 2012 for violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act—a 1982 amendment to the National Security Act of 1947—and was payback for his admission to ABC that the United States waterboarded prisoners. Kiriakou served more than two years in prison. He was released in 2015 and now is working to reform the security state in America.
Kiriakou shared his story during a salon with Truthdig Editor-in-Chief Robert Scheer in Los Angeles. We captured it with Evrybit.
—Posted by Eric Ortiz
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