{"id":15697,"date":"2012-07-05T13:28:11","date_gmt":"2012-07-05T21:28:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=15697"},"modified":"2012-07-05T13:28:11","modified_gmt":"2012-07-05T21:28:11","slug":"torture-with-impunity-tell-the-truth-and-go-to-jail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2012\/07\/05\/torture-with-impunity-tell-the-truth-and-go-to-jail\/","title":{"rendered":"Torture With Impunity. Tell the Truth and Go to Jail."},"content":{"rendered":"

Former CIA officer John Kiriakou<\/a>\u00a0was\u00a0one of the first government officials to publicly acknowledge the use of waterboarding during interrogations and to call it what it was – torture. The Obama administration, in its unprecedented war on whistleblowers<\/a>\u00a0is trying to charge\u00a0Kiriakou<\/a> under the Espionage Act (just one of six such cases, more than any of Obama’s predecessors combined).<\/p>\n

Dan Froomkin at the Huffington Post<\/a> writes a lengthy article about the irony of prosecuting him for telling the truth, while the torturers are free. “The bitterest irony of the case is that if Kiriakou had actually tortured, rather than talked about it, he almost certainly wouldn\u2019t be in trouble,” he writes.<\/p>\n

“They are going after someone who blew the whistle on torture and water boarding,” said Jesselyn Radack, national security and human rights director at the Government Accountability Project, which represents whistleblowers, “while at the same time, the people who wrote the memos and issued the orders and carried out the torture are being covered up, and get a pass.”<\/p>\n

“I think it really takes very little time to understand that what is going on is an attempt to use censorship as a means of influencing public opinion, by silencing your critics and enabling or empowering those who present the party line,” said Scott Horton, a human rights lawyer and\u00a0Harper<\/em>\u2019s blogger.<\/p>\n

The administration\u2019s selectivity when it comes to the prosecution of leak cases has also alarmed\u00a0Republicans in Congress<\/a>, some of whom are demanding to know why cases like Kiriakou\u2019s are prosecuted while disclosures of highly classified information that\u00a0bolsters the Obama administration\u2019s national security record<\/a>\u00a0— such as details of the operation to kill Osama bin Laden — go unpunished. As a result, Attorney General Eric Holder in early June appointed two more U.S. attorneys to lead criminal investigation into those leaks as well.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Antiwar.com\u2019s Kelley B. Vlahos\u00a0interviewed<\/a>\u00a0Peter Van Buren, a Foreign Service officer also in trouble for saying things the government didn\u2019t want him to, who had this to say about the\u00a0Kiriakou case: “The bureaucracies know this intimidation keeps people in line. Other employees watch and say, not me, not my mortgage, not my family and remain silent.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Former CIA officer John Kiriakou\u00a0was\u00a0one of the first government officials to publicly acknowledge the use of waterboarding during interrogations and to call it what it was – torture. The Obama administration, in its unprecedented war on whistleblowers\u00a0is trying to charge\u00a0Kiriakou under the Espionage Act (just one of six such cases, more than any of Obama’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":86,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-15697","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15697","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/86"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15697"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15697\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15699,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15697\/revisions\/15699"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15697"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15697"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15697"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=15697"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}