- Today, John Kiriakou is in a federal prison in Loretto, Pennsylvania, serving two and a half years for disclosing classified information — confirming the name of a CIA agent to a New York Times reporter. Facing 30 years, he took a plea deal for 30 months. He has five children, and it's been difficult to see them while he's been inside. He's scheduled to move to house arrest in February, before his sentence finishes up in May.
Do you know what the context was for him outing the CIA agent? It's one thing to bring to light illegal or immoral practices by an agency/govt but it's another to out an agent, right?
"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 visited him in his cell during the night and told him to cooperate." Eventually it was reported that Abu Zubaydah had been waterboarded at least 83 times, and that little or no useful extra information may have been gained by "harsh methods". Kiriakou was under the mistaken belief from the CIA that Zubayda was waterboarded only once, and even that single instance he described as a form of torture and expressed reservations about whether the value of the information was worth the damage done to the United States' reputation. On January 23, 2012, Kiriakou was charged with repeatedly disclosing classified information to journalists, including the name of a covert CIA officer and information revealing the role of another CIA employee, Deuce Martinez, in classified activities.On December 10, 2007, Kiriakou gave an interview to ABC News where he was described as participating in the capture and questioning of Abu Zubaydah, who is accused of having been an aide to Osama Bin Laden. Kiriakou, who did not witness the waterboarding, said he had been told by CIA associates that it had taken only a single brief instance of waterboarding to extract answers to an interrogator's questions from Abu Zubaydah.