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.
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.
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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.)
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A group of U.S. intelligence veterans chastises the mainstream U.S. media for virtually ignoring a British newspaper’s account of the gripping inside story on how the CIA tried to block the U.S. Senate’s torture investigation. (published in Consortiumnews.com, September 17, 2016)
MEMORANDUM FOR: Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Vice Chairman, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence
FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
SUBJECT: U.S. Media Mum On How Your Committee Faced Down Both CIA and Obama
We write to thank you for your unwavering support for your extraordinarily courageous and tenacious staff in (1) investigating CIA torture under the Bush/Cheney administration and (2) resisting CIA/White House attempts under the Obama administration to cover up heinous torture crimes like waterboarding.
We confess to having been shocked at the torture detailed in the version of the executive summary your Committee released on December 9, 2014. We found ourselves wondering what additional behavior could have been deemed so repugnant that the White House and CIA insisted it be redacted; and if the entire 6,700-page investigation – with whatever redaction might be truly necessary – would ever see the light of day. We think you could take steps now to make it less likely that the full report be deep-sixed, and we will make some suggestions below toward that end.
With well over 400 years of intelligence experience under our collective belt, we wondered how you managed to get the investigation finished and the executive summary up and out (though redacted). We now know the backstory – thanks to the unstinting courage of the committee’s principal investigator Daniel Jones, who has been interviewed by Spencer Ackerman, an investigative reporter for The (UK) Guardian newspaper. The titanic struggle depicted by Ackerman reads like a crime novel; sadly, the four-part series is nonfiction:
I. “Senate investigator breaks silence about CIA’s ‘failed coverup’ of torture report”
II. “Inside the fight to reveal the CIA’s torture secrets”
III. ” ‘A constitutional crisis’: the CIA turns on the Senate”
IV. “No looking back: the CIA torture report’s aftermath“
Ackerman’s reporting on Jones’s tenacity in facing down the gorilla CIA makes abundantly clear how richly deserved was the encomium you gave Jones when he left the committee staff in December 2015.
You noted, “Without his indefatigable work on the Intelligence Committee staff, the Senate report on the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program would not have been completed, nor would its 525-page executive summary have been released to the public.”
It seems equal praise might well be due to any Snowden-like patriot/whistleblower who “inadvertently” included the “Panetta Review” in the reams of material given your committee by the CIA.
Remarkably, a full week after The Guardian carried Ackerman’s revelations, none has been picked up by U.S. “mainstream” newspapers. Not the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post – not even The Hill.
(As for alternative media, Charles P. Pierce’s timely piece for Esquire whetted his readers’ appetite for the gripping detail of the Guardian series, explaining that it would be “unfair both to Ackerman’s diligence and Jones’s courage” to try to summarize even just the first installment. “Read the whole damn thing,” Pierce advises.)
And so, the culprits who should be hanging their heads in shame are out and about, with some still collecting book royalties and some blithely working for this or that candidate for president. As if nothing happened. Sadly, given the soporific state of our mainstream media – particularly on sensitive issues like these – their silence is nothing new, although it does seem to have gotten even worse in recent years.
The late William Colby, CIA director from 1973 to 1976, has been quoted as saying: “The CIA owns everyone of any significance in the major media.” Whether or not Colby was quoted correctly, the experience of the past several decades suggests it is largely true. Better sourced is a quote from William Casey, CIA director from 1981 to 1987: “We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.”
In these circumstances, we know from sad experience that there is no way any of us can get on any of the Sunday talk shows, for example – despite our enviable record for getting it right. Nor does it seem likely that any of the “mainstream” media will invite you to discuss the highly instructive revelations in The Guardian. We respectfully suggest that you take the initiative to obtain media exposure for this very important story.
One additional request: As you and your investigators know better than anyone, it is essential to safeguard the integrity not only of the unredacted executive summary but also of the entire 6,700-page committee report on the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program.
And, again, you are aware that as soon as Sen. Richard Burr, R-North Carolina, took the gavel from you, he took steps seemingly aimed at ensuring that the full report never sees the light of day. Could you ask him why, as soon as he became chair, he asked the executive branch to transfer their copies to the Senate Intelligence Committee?
Many interpreted that as an ill-disguised attempt to thwart holding accountable those responsible for the abuses. Moreover, if the report cannot be reviewed by those who might be asked to participate in activities like torture in the future, how is it even possible for anyone to learn from the prior unfortunate experience?
The public is entitled to the entire story about the CIA torture program and its lies to Congress, the White House, and to us. Any attempt to bury the fullest investigation of the torture program – an investigation that provides an example of Congressional oversight at its best – would undermine the democratic accountability that is supposed to be provided by the separation of powers.
Furthermore, as you were quoted in the Guardian series, the agency searches “may have undermined the constitutional framework essential to effective congressional oversight of intelligence activities or any other government function . . .”
Senator Jay Rockefeller, D-West Virginia, was exactly on point: “You either have oversight and separation of powers with the checks and balances that come with that, or you don’t. It’s amazing that, once again, no one at the CIA was held accountable.” Consequently, the issue now is not only the cover-up of torture by the CIA but – at least equally important – the “unbridled agency that spied on Americans (including Senate Intelligence Committee staffers) as eagerly as they spied on foreign adversaries,” as the Guardian described it in referring to the Church Committee investigation in the 1970s.
Does American democracy deserve any less than an intense investigation of the CIA’s obstruction of the democratic process in the 2000s?
The Guardian revelations make it still more difficult for the kind of excuses made by those who can hardly pretend to be disinterested observers – former CIA directors George Tenet, Porter Goss, Michael Hayden, for example – who wrote Rebuttal: The CIA Responds to the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Study of Its Detention and Interrogation Program, published on September 9, 2015. We published our own (VIPS) critique of “Rebuttal” five days later. And before the final vote on John Brennan’s nomination to become CIA director, we tried to warn you not to trust him.
We believe you will agree that more needs to be done to replant the moral moorings of honesty that must anchor the intelligence profession to which we have given so many years. And we think that one step in that direction would be for you to seize this new opportunity to give prominence to the edifying story of how your committee and its staffers stepped up so effectively to their responsibilities in investigating and exposing the very sad and delicate chapter of CIA torture.
The play-by-play provided by the Guardian series, with its appropriate focus on the top investigator Daniel Jones, has created an opportunity we hope will not be squandered; a chance to tell a truly uplifting story sure to encourage others to behave in similarly exemplary manner.
For the Steering Group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)
Jean Maria Arrigo, PhD, member of 2005 American Psychological Association task force evaluating the role of psychologists in U.S. intelligence and military interrogations of detainees (associate VIPS)
Eugene DeFriest Betit, Ph. D., DIA, US Army (ret.)
Thomas Drake, former Senior Executive, NSA
Bogdan Dzakovic, Former Team Leader of Federal Air Marshals and Red Team, FAA Security, (ret.) (associate VIPS)
Mike Gravel, former Adjutant, top secret control officer, Communications Intelligence Service; special agent of the Counter Intelligence Corps and former United States Senator
Matthew Hoh, former Capt., USMC, Iraq & Foreign Service Officer, Afghanistan (associate VIPS)
Larry C Johnson, CIA & State Department (ret.)
Michael S. Kearns, Captain, USAF (Ret.); ex-Master SERE Instructor for Strategic Reconnaissance Operations (NSA/DIA) and Special Mission Units (JSOC)
John Kiriakou, Former CIA Counterterrorism Officer and former senior investigator, Senate Foreign Relations Committee
Edward Loomis, NSA, Cryptologic Computer Scientist (ret.)
Linda Lewis, WMD preparedness policy analyst, USDA (ret.) (associate VIPS)
David MacMichael, National Intelligence Council (ret.)
Ray McGovern, former US Army infantry/intelligence officer & CIA analyst (ret.)
Elizabeth Murray, Deputy National Intelligence Officer for Near East, CIA and National Intelligence Council (ret.)
Todd E. Pierce, MAJ, US Army Judge Advocate (Ret.)
Coleen Rowley, FBI Special Agent and former Minneapolis Division Legal Counsel (ret.)
Scott Ritter, former MAJ., USMC, former UN Weapon Inspector, Iraq
Peter Van Buren, U.S. Department of State, Foreign Service Officer (ret.) (associate VIPS)
Kirk Wiebe, former Senior Analyst, SIGINT Automation Research Center, NSA
Lawrence Wilkerson, Colonel (USA, ret.), Distinguished Visiting Professor, College of William and Mary (associate VIPS)
Valerie Plame Wilson, former CIA Operations Officer
Ann Wright, Col., US Army (ret.); Foreign Service Officer (resigned)
(Published here on Sep 7, 2016 by The Real News, produced by Tom Hedges)
Former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray blew the whistle on how the Americans were using Uzbekistan’s medieval torture program to produce false intelligence in the war on terror.
Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence is a movement of former CIA colleagues of former intelligence analyst Sam Adams, together with others who hold up his example as a model for those in intelligence who would aspire to the courage to speak truth to power. SAAII confers an award each year to a member of the intelligence community or related professions who exemplifies Sam Adam’s courage, persistence, and devotion to truth – no matter the consequences. Read more about the history here.
The annual Sam Adams Award has been given in previous years to truth tellers Coleen Rowley of the FBI; Katharine Gun of British Intelligence; Sibel Edmonds of the FBI; Craig Murray, former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan; Sam Provance, former US Army Sgt; Maj. Frank Grevil of Danish Army Intelligence; Larry Wilkerson, Col., US Army (ret.), former chief of staff to Colin Powell at State; Julian Assange, of WikiLeaks: Thomas Drake, of NSA; Jesselyn Radack, formerly of Dept. of Justice and now National Security Director of Government Accountability Project; Thomas Fingar, former Deputy Director of National Intelligence and Director, National Intelligence Council, and Edward Snowden, former contractor for the National Security Agency; Chelsea Manning, US Army Private who exposed (via WikiLeaks) key information on Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as State Department activities; and to retired National Security Agency official William Binney, who challenged decisions to ignore the Fourth Amendment in the government’s massive — and wasteful — collection of electronic data.
Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence is a movement of former CIA colleagues of former intelligence analyst Sam Adams, together with others who hold up his example as a model for those in intelligence who would aspire to the courage to speak truth to power. SAAII confers an award each year to a member of the intelligence community or related professions who exemplifies Sam Adam’s courage, persistence, and devotion to truth – no matter the consequences. Read more about the history here.