This Should Have Been Done A Long Time Ago

Yesterday the Washington Post reported that a former CIA Officer is being charged with repeatedly leaking classified information. After leaving the CIA in 2004, John Kiriakou worked as a Senate aide, working as an investigator on the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for a year before leaving in 2010.

The article reported:

Kiriakou made a media splash in 2007 when he appeared on ABC News describing the use of waterboarding against al-Qaeda suspect Abu Zubaida, also known as Zayn al-Abidin Muhammed Hussein.

He also revealed the name of the CIA’s interrogator of Mohammed.in a piece he wrote for the New York Times in 2008.

The article further reports:

The Kiriakou investigation appears to have been triggered by a CIA referral to the Justice Department as well as a separate probe into how photographs of CIA operatives ended up in the possession of high-value detainees at Guantanamo Bay in 2009.

Investigators believe that defense attorneys obtained the photos after learning the identities of CIA operatives from a journalist who had been in contact with Kiriakou. The photographs, which included shots taken surreptitiously outside CIA employees’ homes, were shown to the detainees as part of an effort by defense attorneys to identify participants in CIA interrogations and potentially call them as witnesses in terrorism trials.

A interesting piece of information was left out of the story in the Washington Post. Newsbusters reported that between 2009 and last year Kiriakou worked as an investigator for Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The NBC report on this story by Michael Isikoff reported this in the second paragraph.

This man needs to be charged with treason. His actions put CIA operatives and their families in danger. After reading the article, I wondered if Mr. Kiriakou was motivated by idealism or politics. He was undermining President Bush as Commander-in-Chief during a time of war. He didn’t mind breaking the law in order to do that.

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