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Showing Original Post only (View all)Torture Whistleblower: I got 30 months in prison. Why does Leon Panetta get a pass? [View all]
by John Kiriakou
The confirmation in December that former CIA Director Leon Panetta let classified information slip to "Zero Dark Thirty" screenwriter Mark Boal during a speech at the agency headquarters should result in a criminal espionage charge if there is any truth to Obama administration claims that it isn't enforcing the Espionage Act only against political opponents.
I'm one of the people the Obama administration charged with criminal espionage, one of those whose lives were torn apart by being accused, essentially, of betraying his country. The president and the attorney general have used the Espionage Act against more people than all other administrations combined, but not against real traitors and spies. The law has been applied selectively, often against whistle-blowers and others who expose illegal, corrupt government actions.
After I blew the whistle on the CIA's waterboarding torture program in 2007, I was the subject of a years-long FBI investigation. In 2012, the Justice Department charged me with "disclosing classified information to journalists, including the name of a covert CIA officer and information revealing the role of another CIA employee in classified activities." I had revealed no more than others who were never charged, about activities that the CIA had a program to kill or capture Al Qaeda members that were hardly secret.
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Gen. James "Hoss" Cartwright, once known as the president's "favorite general," was reportedly targeted as the source of information about the Stuxnet virus leaked to a New York Times writer. That investigation has dropped from sight, and Cartwright has so far faced no charges.
Yet when senior National Security Agency official Thomas Drake blew the whistle on waste, fraud and abuse at the NSA in the form of a bungled project that cost more than $1 billion he wound up buried under espionage charges, all of which were eventually dropped but only after his life was in shreds.
When former State Department intelligence advisor Stephen Jin-Woo Kim talked to a Fox News reporter about North Korea, he was charged with espionage, and his prosecutors were absolved by the presiding judge from having to prove "that the information he allegedly leaked could damage U.S. national security or benefit a foreign power, even potentially."
If Panetta and Cartwright aren't accountable while Drake, Kim and I have been crucified for harming U.S. national security all of us accused of or investigated for the same thing: disclosing classified information to parties not authorized to know it then what does that say about justice in America or White House hypocrisy?
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/commentary/la-oe-kiriakou-panetta-whistleblower-20140309,0,7028492.story#ixzz2vOLrDw8Z