December 14, 2015 — FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
The Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence announces the selection of John Kiriakou as the 15th recipient of the annual Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence.
Kiriakou, a former CIA counterterrorism officer, in 2007 became the first US Government official to publicly confirm and describe CIA use of waterboarding on al-Qaeda prisoners, which he described as torture.
In January 2013, Kiriakou was sentenced to 30 months in prison and was released earlier this year after serving more than 23 months. Since then, he has become a tireless writer and speaker on whistleblowing, torture, and civil liberties. John’s story, as well as that of his attorney, Jesselyn Radack (herself a former Justice Department whistleblower), and former NSA senior executive Thomas Drake is told in “Silenced,” a James Spione film.
Kiriakou is the sole US Government official to have been jailed for any reason relating to CIA torture – a victim of the Obama administration’s unprecedented crackdown on government truth-tellers. John was in federal prison, when President Obama openly acknowledged at a White House press conference on August 1, 2014, “We tortured some folks.” John was in prison for having said essentially the same thing seven years earlier.
Reacting to word that he had been chosen for the award, Kiriakou stated that he is “honored and absolutely humbled.”
Additional information about John Kiriakou is contained in this article by Ray McGovern on the occasion of John’s being honored in 2015, by the PEN Center USA, the West Coast branch of PEN International (a human rights and literary arts organization that promotes the written word and freedom of expression), which gave John Kiriakou its First Amendment Award for his role in exposing waterboarding as torture used during President George W. Bush’s “war on terror:” https://consortiumnews.com/2015/11/18/cia-whistleblower-kiriakou-honored/
The fourteen previous Sam Adams Award recipients are:
Coleen Rowley, Katharine Gun, Sibel Edmonds, Craig Murray, Sam Provance, Frank Grevil, Larry Wilkerson, Julian Assange, Thomas Drake, Jesselyn Radack, Thomas Fingar, Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, and William Binney.
Additional information on Sam Adams (1934-1988), the former CIA analyst in whose honor the award was established, as well as on earlier awardees, is available at: https://samadamsaward.ch/history-of-the-sam-adams-award/