John Kiriakou - Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence

The Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence presents its INTEGRITY AWARD for 2016 to John Kiriakou.

Know all ye by these presents that John Kiriakou is hereby honored with the traditional Sam Adams Corner-Brightener Candlestick Holder, in symbolic recognition of Mr. Kiriakou’s courage in shining light into dark places.

John Kiriakou found himself atop the CIA’s WANTED list when he confirmed publicly that the CIA had been carrying out a White House-approved torture program, which turned out to be using techniques virtually identical to those in the Gestapo Handbuch.

Alarm bells at the CIA. Put this guy in prison before there are additional disclosures. And seduce Hollywood into seducing Americans into “seeing with their own eyes” that torture “works.” And make sure the media ignores others with impeccable credentials, like Army Intelligence chief Gen. John Kimmons, who said on September 6, 2006: “No good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices. … the empirical evidence of the last five years, hard years, tells us that.”

Gen. Kimmons had an institution at his back, not nipping at his heels. Enter the U.S. Senate, another institution that faced into its constitutional responsibility. While John sat in prison, Senate Intelligence Committee investigators pored through original CIA cables and concluded unambiguously that Kimmons and Kiriakou were right, and the CIA (and Hollywood) were dead wrong.

Briefed on those findings, President Obama in August 2014 trivialized torture with a dismissive comment, “We tortured some folks.” Then he joined the CIA in a concerted attempt to squelch the Senate report. But Sen. Dianne Feinstein thwarted that joint campaign and in December 2014 published an executive summary – redacted, but still gruesome beyond imagination.

John Kiriakou’s integrity – and the reality that he sat in prison while the torturers were covering up their actions and their lies – made Sen. Feinstein’s intrepid investigators even more determined to make sure Americans got to know the truth about what was done in their name. As for John, it is a sure thing that he will continue to give no quarter in his passion for spreading truth around, no matter the systemic hurdles he may still have to surmount.

Presented this 25th day of September 2016 in Washington, DC, by admirers of the example set by the late CIA analyst, Sam Adams.

We Can Confront Torture Advocate Michael Pompeo

By John Kiriakou, Reader Supported News
21 November 16

resident-elect Donald Trump’s nomination of Rep. Michael Pompeo (R-Kan.) sends a crystal clear message that Trump was telling the American people the truth when he said that he would bring back the torture program and do “a hell of a lot worse.” Pompeo himself said that CIA officers who engaged in torture “are not torturers. They are patriots.” The only conclusion one can draw is that Trump intends to return the CIA to the dark days of the Bush administration. And this is despite the fact that torture is illegal under the Federal Torture Act, the United Nations Conventions Against Torture, and the McCain-Feinstein Amendment.

Pompeo’s nomination was something of a surprise. Although he supported and endorsed Trump during the Republican primaries, he was not a player in the campaign, he is not one of the more prominent members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), where he served only three years, and he was not among the names being circulated among “people in the know” in Washington for CIA Director. But Trump apparently likes West Point graduates, who are more likely to say, “Yes, sir” than they are to say, “Mr. President, let me tell you why that’s a bad idea.” Pompeo is a yes man with credentials. He graduated first in his class at the U.S. Military Academy, and then went to Harvard Law School before going into business and politics.

Pompeo also has towed the Tea Party line on national security issues since being elected to Congress in 2010. He called NSA whistleblower Ed Snowden “a traitor” and in an interview on C-SPAN added, “he should be brought back from Russia and given due process, and I think the proper outcome would be that he would be given a death sentence.” Pompeo was a member of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, where he said that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had “failed to lead,” despite the fact that his committee’s leadership had found that the former secretary had done nothing wrong related to Benghazi. And he wants to keep the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay open, calling it “the right option for American security” and “an important asset that must remain open.” He said after a visit to Guantanamo that he had seen the detainees there and that he wants them “right where they are.”

Further afield, Pompeo has said that he supports dragnet surveillance against American citizens, including NSA interception of all U.S. metadata, voicemails, emails, and text messages. He wants this information housed along with “lifestyle information” on Americans in a database that would be accessible to all U.S. law enforcement, something more akin to Orwell’s Big Brother than any other politician has put forth. He criticized his Congressional colleagues for rolling back some of NSA’s warrantless wiretapping programs in the aftermath of the Snowden disclosures, and added that the lone wolf attacks in San Bernardino in 2015 were a result of Congress not allowing NSA to do its job. Pompeo apparently has never commented publicly on the civil liberties and legal questions at play when a U.S. intelligence agency spies on American citizens.

So what can be done about a far-right activist CIA director serving a far-right president and being overseen by far-right Congressional committees? For us average citizens, not much, unfortunately.

But there are some things we can do. We can write our members of Congress and demand that they hold the CIA and its new director to both the letter and the spirit of the law. Torture is illegal. That isn’t going to change. If the CIA engages in torture, its leadership must be brought to task. If the Justice Department won’t file charges against torturers and those who order the torture, then maybe foreign courts will, just like Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon, who filed charges of human rights violations against former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. We can write, speak out, and march against human rights and legal violations. We can initiate direct actions. And perhaps most importantly, if we have standing, we can sue, bog the CIA down in litigation, and force as much of the information as possible into the glare of the public spotlight.

Pompeo’s nomination is a bad thing. But it’s not the end of the world. We just have to be ready for a fight.

John Kiriakou is a former CIA counterterrorism officer and a former senior investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act – a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a result of his attempts to oppose the Bush administration’s torture program.

CIA Whistleblower Kiriakou Honored for Integrity

The U.S. government gives free passes to officials who commit war crimes but imprisons whistleblowers who tell the truth, a fate that befell CIA’s John Kiriakou for disclosing torture. But he was honored by some ex-intelligence officers, reports Ray McGovern.
By Ray McGovern

Former CIA official John Kiriakou, who spent two years in prison for revealing the truth about White House-sanctioned torture, became the 15th recipient of the Sam Adams Award for Integrity at a ceremony at America University.

Former CIA officer John Kiriakou (right) receiving 2016 Sam Adams Award for Integrity from Elizabeth Murray (left) and Coleen Rowley on Sept. 25, 2016, in Washington, D.C. (Photo credit: Linda Lewis)

Last year, PEN Center USA, a human rights and freedom of expression organization, honored John Kiriakou, with its “First Amendment” award. It has since become clear that while John Kiriakou sat in prison, Senate Intelligence Committee investigators were uncovering heinous details about torture by the CIA from its own original banality-of-evil cables, which showed that CIA and others had lied in claiming torture “worked.”

President Barack Obama chose to add his weight to a remarkably brazen effort to cover it all up and scuttle the Senate report. To her credit, committee chair Dianne Feinstein, with support from then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and committee members Mark Udall and Ron Wyden (all Democrats) faced President Obama down.

This scarcely believable fact – missed somehow by the “mainstream” media – is woven into the citation presented to Kiriakou on Sunday:

The Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence presents its INTEGRITY AWARD for 2016 to John Kiriakou Know all ye by these presents that John Kiriakou is hereby honored with the traditional Sam Adams Corner-Brightener Candlestick Holder, in symbolic recognition of Mr. Kiriakou’s courage in shining light into dark places.

John Kiriakou found himself atop the CIA’s WANTED list when he confirmed publicly that the CIA had been carrying out a White House-approved torture program, which turned out to be using techniques virtually identical to those in the Gestapo Handbuch.

Alarm bells at the CIA. Put this guy in prison before there are additional disclosures. And seduce Hollywood into seducing Americans into “seeing with their own eyes” that torture “works.” And make sure the media ignores others with impeccable credentials, like Army Intelligence chief Gen. John Kimmons, who said on September 6, 2006: “No good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices. … the empirical evidence of the last five years, hard years, tells us that.”

Gen. Kimmons had an institution at his back, not nipping at his heels. Enter the U.S. Senate, another institution that faced into its constitutional responsibility. While John sat in prison, Senate Intelligence Committee investigators pored through original CIA cables and concluded unambiguously that Kimmons and Kiriakou were right, and the CIA (and Hollywood) were dead wrong.

Briefed on those findings, President Obama in August 2014 trivialized torture with a dismissive comment, “We tortured some folks.” Then he joined the CIA in a concerted attempt to squelch the Senate report. But Sen. Dianne Feinstein thwarted that joint campaign and in December 2014 published an executive summary – redacted, but still gruesome beyond imagination.

John Kiriakou’s integrity – and the reality that he sat in prison while the torturers were covering up their actions and their lies – made Sen. Feinstein’s intrepid investigators even more determined to make sure Americans got to know the truth about what was done in their name. As for John, it is a sure thing that he will continue to give no quarter in his passion for spreading truth around, no matter the systemic hurdles he may still have to surmount.

Presented this 25th day of September 2016 in Washington, DC, by admirers of the example set by the late CIA analyst, Sam Adams.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Sam Adams’s painstaking analysis in 1966/1967 revealed there were twice as many Vietnamese Communists under arms in South Vietnam as Gen. William Westmoreland would admit to. The issue became a David-v-Goliath bureaucratic struggle, with CIA analysts unable to prevail against the Army (and the White House). Adams continued to press for honesty and accountability but stayed “inside channels” – and failed. He died at 55 of a sudden heart attack, with profound remorse. He could not rid himself of the belief that, had he not let himself be diddled – had he, in other words, gone to the media – hundreds of thousands of lives might have been saved. His story is told in War of Numbers, published posthumously.

Previous recipients of the Sam Adams Award are:

Coleen Rowley (FBI), Katharine Gun (UK-GCHQ), Sibel Edmonds (FBI), Amb. Craig Murray (UK Foreign Office), Frank Grevil (Major, Danish Military Intelligence)**, Sam Provance (Sgt. US Army, Abu Ghraib), Larry Wilkerson (Col. US Army, Chief of Staff to Secretary of State), Julian Assange (WikiLeaks),** Jesselyn Radack (Department of Justice), Thomas Drake (NSA), Thomas Fingar (Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence), Edward Snowden (NSA),** Chelsea (Bradley) Manning (PFC, US Army),** William Binney (NSA), John Kiriakou (CIA)**

* In bold = Names of former awardees who spoke at Kiriakou award ceremony
** = Earlier awardees imprisoned, confined, exiled for speaking truth

(Originally published at Consortiumnews.com and authored by Ray McGovern, who like Sam Adams, began a career as a CIA analyst under President Kennedy; working on Vietnam, they became close associates. Sam was too straight-arrow to go to the media about the unconscionable fraud regarding the number of Communist forces. Ray knew that and rationalized not doing so himself. So, while a close associate of Sam Adams years ago, Ray fell short of the standard set by the above awardees, who deserved to be honored by Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence.)

——-Additional articles, photographs and video—————————————

Radio Utopie: https://www.radio-utopie.de/2016/09/27/ex-c-i-a-offizier-john-kiriakou-mit-sam-adams-whistleblower-preis-2016-geehrt/

Tom Drake, Larry Wilkerson, Larry Johnson and Phil Giraldi congratulate John Kiriakou

Elizabeth Murray, Coleen Rowley, John Kiriakou and Craig Murray at award event, photo credit Linda Lewis

Ray McGovern, Coleen Rowley and Elizabeth Murray congratulate John Kiriakou, photo credit Linda Lewis

VIDEO of the entire Sam Adams Award event by American University staff

The Real News interviews at SAAII event

John Kiriakou: torture and whistleblowing

(Published on Saturday Morning, Sept 24, 2016)

John Kiriakou is a former CIA officer who in 2002 led the team that located Abu Zubaydah, alleged to be a high-ranking member of al-Qaeda.

John Kiriakou on why he spoke out about the CIA’s use of torture
After a news interview in 2007, in which he confirmed that Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times, describing it as torture, Kiriakou was arrested, tried and sentenced to a 30-month prison term for revealing classified information.

He is now a best-selling author and writes for Reader Supported News. In May he received the 2016 Blueprint International Whistleblowing Prize, and this weekend, he will receive the Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence.

He told RNZ that the US lost its way after the 9/11 attacks and that the Patriot Act has undermined the lawful foundations of the nation. Torture is indefensible and ineffective he says.

“Not just because we’re supposed to be a beacon of human rights and of civil liberties, but because if somebody is undergoing torture he is going to offer up any information he thinks the torturer wants to hear.

“The truth is going to be buried in there, but he is going to say so much it will take weeks, months maybe even years to pore through the data. From a practical standpoint it simply doesn’t work and from a moral and ethical standpoint it’s just simply wrong.”

Waterboarding, he says, was always illegal in the US.

“In 1946 the US executed a Japanese soldier who had waterboarded American soldiers, and in 1968 the American government arrested, charged and convicted an American soldier who had waterboarded a North Vietnamese soldier and sentenced him to 20 years in prison – the law never changed.”

He asks why it was illegal then and not in 2002?

So why did he speak out after years of serving in the CIA?

“I left the CIA in 2004 and never said a word until Sept 2007, but in the interim Amnesty International was writing about waterboarding and torture, Human Rights Watch was writing about it, the International Committee of the Red Cross was writing about it, so when Brian Ross of ABC news finally approached me in the days before the interview I thought a lot about it and I decided that no matter what he asked me I was going to tell the truth and just let the chips fall.”

He says he struggled with his conscience at this time.

“It wasn’t just Abu Zubaydah it was dozens, perhaps hundreds, of other prisoners. Nobody was willing to discuss the end, what was the endgame in all of this? Are we going to torture them until we came to the conclusion they didn’t have anything else and then what? Kill them? Disappear them?

“We already had a system of secret prisons around the world something like the gulag system so what was the endgame? To finally silence people?”

He says Zubaydah, when he was finally handed to the CIA after being conventionally interrogated by the FBI, was stuck in a never ending cycle of torture.

As well as the waterboarding, he was beaten and put him in a dog cage for weeks at a time.

“He had an irrational fear of insects, so they would dump cockroaches into the dog cage just to make him crazy. He was subjected to sleep deprivation, he was starved, he was subject to something called the cold cell.

“He was stripped naked, he was chained to an eye bolt in the ceiling, his cell was chilled to 50 degrees Fahrenheit and every hour a CIA officer would go into the cell and throw a bucket of ice water on him. That technique has killed people and Abu Zubaydah went through all of it, every one of the techniques that were authorised by President Bush.”

Kiriakou had a glittering career at the CIA and says while many of his colleagues supported his decision to speak out, his problem is with the organisation’s leadership.

“The leadership of the CIA was largely made up of sociopaths, who believed they were the patriots, but were people no better than common murderers in my view. We’ve killed people during interrogations a number of times, no one was ever brought to justice for those killings.

“And what about the drone wars? How many schools, hospitals and weddings have to accidentally be bombed before we apologise and re-evaluate this programme?”

He says the Republican Party does not have a monopoly on patriotism.

“I consider myself to be a liberal and a progressive and as patriotic as anyone else in the CIA, at the same time we’re a nation of laws, governed by an iron clad constitution, and if we intend to remain a country of laws we have to follow those laws – whether we like them or not, and we didn’t after 9/11.’

(Originally published at: http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/saturday/audio/201817412/john-kiriakou-torture-and-whistleblowing)

2016 SAM ADAMS AWARD CEREMONY HONORING JOHN KIRIAKOU

KAY CHAPEL, AMERICAN UNIVERSITY
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 25
4-5:30 PM

[opening piano music by Tom Dickinson]

4:00 – Welcome to Sam Adams Associates for Integrity Intelligence (SAAII) annual award ceremony by SAAII co-founder Ray McGovern, peace & justice advocate and former CIA Presidential Briefer

4:05 – 4:10 Master of Ceremonies Craig Murray, former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan & 2005 Sam Adams Award recipient

4:10 – 4:15 Thomas Drake, former NSA Senior Executive

4:15 – 4:20 Larry Wilkerson, Col., U.S. Army (ret); Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell

4:20 – 4:25 Larry Johnson, CIA and State Dept. (ret.)

4:25 – 4:30 Philip Giraldi , CIA Operations Officer (ret.)

4:30-4:35 Elizabeth Murray, former Deputy National Intelligence Officer for the Near East, National Intelligence Council and former CIA political analyst (ret.)

4:35 to 4:50 Ambassador Craig Murray speech

4:50- 5:05 Joint reading of Sam Adams Award Citation for John Kiriakou by Elizabeth Murray and Coleen Rowley, 2002 Sam Adams Award recipient & former FBI attorney

• [Tom Dickinson piano music] John accepts Sam Adams Citation and Corner-Brightener award

5:10 to 5:20 John Kiriakou acceptance speech

5:20 to 5:25 Ray McGovern acknowledgment and thanks to Busboys and Poets owner and social activist Andy Shallal for generous donation to the Sam Adams Associates

5:25-5:30 Adjournment (Craig Murray)

5:30-6:00 Reception (Kay Lounge)