Charlie Savage begins his article, titled "Ex-C.I.A. Officer Charged in Information Leak," with the following paragraph:
WASHINGTON — The Justice Department on Monday charged a former Central Intelligence Agency officer with disclosing classified information to journalists about the capture and brutal interrogation of a suspected member of Al Qaeda, Abu Zubaydah — adding another chapter to the Obama administration’s crackdown on leaks.
But, mysteriously, when you get into the second paragraph, you actually find out what he was charged with:
Investigation accused John Kiriakou, the former C.I.A. officer, of disclosing the identity of a C.I.A. analyst who worked on a 2002 operation that located and interrogated Abu Zubaydah.
Doesn't sound at all like his first paragraph. What this sounds like, is something we got pissed at during the Bush Administration: Everyone remember Valerie Plame. In fact, the next sentence gives a hint as to the entire purpose of the Savage article:
The journalists included a New York Times reporter, it alleged.
Savage is protecting his newspaper.
Let's see if we can find out what Kiriakou is charged with. Here's an article on the same subject from CNN.
Government prosecutors charged a former CIA officer Monday with disclosing classified information to journalists, including the names of CIA officers involved in top secret activities.
John Kiriakou, a CIA intelligence officer from 1990 to 2004, illegally divulged the name of a CIA covert officer and the role of another agency officer involved in a classified operation, the Justice Department said. He is also accused of lying to the CIA board responsible for reviewing the book he was writing to make sure no classified material was being divulged.
He also disclosed the following information:
"[H]e discussed with his co-author a technique known as the magic box, which he said was used during the Zubayda operation. The magic box was described in the June 2008 New York Times article as "an electronic scanner that could track any switched-on mobile phone and give its approximate location."
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It seems that a lot of people here seem to think that if Obama would just leave all of these people alone, someone would release the equivalent of the Pentagon papers and we could do something, though I'm not sure what that something is. What we have here instead is a man putting people's lives at stake because he needs to feed his ego. Check out some of the info on Kiriakou's Wikipedia page:
In 2007 he admitted that the US waterboarded Abu Zubaydah, and that it only took one time to get Abu Zubaydah to talk:
...He was able to withstand the waterboarding for quite some time. And by that I mean probably 30, 35 seconds... and a short time afterwards, in the next day or so, he told his interrogator that Allah had visit him in his cell during the night and told him to cooperate.
Except, as we all know now, that Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times. What we also find out is that Kiriakou was never present for any of the waterboarding sessions.
Even ignoring the fact that he's an apologist for torture, not someone who is opposed to it, his release was to make journalists pay attention to him, and it put people's lives at risk.