News
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/
Exclusive: Courage, like cowardice, can grow when an action by one person influences decisions by others, either toward bravery or fear. Thus, the gutsy whistle-blowing by some NSA officials inspired Edward Snowden to expose mass data collection on all Americans, recalls ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern.
By Ray McGovern
When Edward Snowden in early June 2013 began to reveal classified data showing criminal collect-it-all surveillance programs operated by the U.S. government’s National Security Agency, former NSA professionals became freer to spell out the liberties taken with the Bill of Rights, as well as the feckless, counterproductive nature of bulk electronic data collection.
On Jan. 7, 2014, four senior retired specialists with a cumulative total of 144 years of work with NSA – William Binney, Thomas Drake, Edward Loomis, and Kirk Wiebe – prepared a Memorandum for the President providing a comprehensive account of the problems at NSA, together with suggestions as to how they might be best addressed.
The purpose was to inform President Obama as fully as possible, as he prepared to take action in light of Snowden’s revelations.
On Jan. 23, 2015 in Berlin, Binney was honored with the annual Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence. Ed Snowden was live-streamed-in for the occasion, and said, “Without Bill Binney there would be no Ed Snowden.” (Binney had been among the first to speak out publicly about NSA abuses; apparently that emboldened Snowden to do what he did.)
Snowden had already said when he fled to Hong Kong in June 2013 that he had learned an extremely important lesson from the four years of government persecution/prosecution of Tom Drake; namely, that he, Ed Snowden, had to leave the country in order to fulfill his mission – and to have some reasonable chance to avoid spending the rest of his life behind bars. (Eventually, all the felony charges against Drake were dismissed.)
An important take-away lesson from Binney’s and Drake’s boldness and tenacity is that one never knows what impetus courageous truth-tellers can give to other, potential whistleblowers – like Ed Snowden.
(full article here)
Edmund D. Fountain, Times
Wednesday, November 25, 2015, in the Tampa Bay Times.
Sen. Bill Nelson is right. Those responsible should be fired if a Pentagon investigation of U.S. Central Command at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa finds classified intelligence was manipulated to downplay setbacks in the fight against the Islamic State. The Obama administration and Congress have to be given the unvarnished truth about efforts to fight terrorism in order to make the most informed decisions about protecting the nation.
The Pentagon is investigating serious allegations by CentCom analysts who say supervisors have changed intelligence reports to make it appear the United States has been more successful fighting ISIS than the original assessments indicated. Investigators are reviewing electronic files that recount the rise of the terrorist group, and a congressional committee is widening its review to include CentCom reports about Afghanistan and other areas. The New York Times reported this week there are concerns that some emails and documents were deleted before the documents were given to investigators, and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence is comparing CentCom’s reports to those generated by the Central Intelligence Agency and other government agencies. Anyone attempting to slant intelligence reports for political reasons or to protect the military or intelligence community from criticism should be rooted out and removed.
In an environment that requires secrecy and respect for the chain of command, the CentCom analysts who took their concerns to the Pentagon’s inspector general this summer performed an important duty. Lives can be lost when decisions about foreign policy and military strategy are made based on bad information, and it’s even clearer since the Paris attacks that the Obama administration and Congress were not anticipating the rapid rise of ISIS and its expanded reach. It would be one thing if intelligence information was off base; it’s another if those assessments by the analysts were altered by their superiors to create a false impression of success.
CentCom analysts say that supervisors changed some conclusions to minimize U.S. failures in training Iraqi troops and to enhance the result of bombing campaigns in Iraq and Syria. The New York Times reported, for example, that revisions were made to a report detailing the retreat of the Iraqi army battling ISIS fighters last year to suggest the Iraqis had just been “redeployed.” While military analysts should debate their findings and voice disagreements, their ultimate conclusions should not be rewritten by their superiors who may have ulterior motives.
Bad intelligence about weapons of mass destruction that turned out not to exist in Iraq led this nation into an unnecessary war that cost thousands of lives. It took decades for the American people to learn the full story of what happened in Vietnam, and a more accurate account of events from the government and the military at the time would have ended that war much sooner. With the situation changing quickly in the war on terrorism against a brutal and nimble foe, it is imperative that intelligence reports be as accurate and candid as possible.
The investigators for the Pentagon and Congress should conduct a thorough review of the allegations at CentCom, and anyone found to be rewriting intelligence reports to create a false sense of success or to minimize setbacks should be removed.
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.
