Kiriakou's FOIA request from prison
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Kiriakou's FOIA request from prison was a Freedom of Information Act request that John Kiriakou filed on himself with the Bureau of Prisons about six weeks after arriving at FCI Loretto.

He was not supposed to. As part of his plea deal he had promised never to file a Freedom of Information Act request on himself. His reasoning for doing it anyway was that he doubted the government was competent enough to have implemented the restriction, and that the worst thing that could happen was that they would say no.

The response

About six weeks later a big fat envelope arrived containing roughly 250 pages. Kiriakou describes about 230 of them as silliness, his medical records, his visitors' list, and similar material.

The remaining 20 pages, he says, were very important. Every one of them had been stamped in red at the top and the bottom: FOIA exempt, do not release to inmate.

Kiriakou offers two explanations without choosing between them. Either somebody at the Bureau of Prisons was stupid enough not to notice the markings, not to pay attention to them or not to know what they meant, or somebody at the Bureau of Prisons was taking pity on him, and it could even have been a supporter inside the agency. He describes that as a recurring theme over the following 23 months.

The warden's memorandum

Among the withheld pages was a memorandum, in gigantic type, from the warden to all prison employees, dated four days before Kiriakou arrived. It said: caution, inmate has access to the media.

It was followed by a longer memorandum setting out why nobody should interfere with him, that he was smart, that he was trained to be ruthless, that he was skilled, and that he was skilled in escape. Kiriakou says that last item was invented and that he got a chuckle out of it, and may even have laughed out loud.

Effect

Kiriakou's assessment is that for half the staff the memorandum functioned as a licence to interfere with him rather than a warning not to, an outcome he says was perfectly fine with him. He describes telling one officer that the officer would be in that prison far longer than he would: that the man lived there eight hours a day, while Kiriakou would be gone, living his life and making money, and the officer would still be in the prison.

At least one officer read it the other way. The guard known as Blue told a colleague of Kiriakou's that he never messed with him, because the last thing he needed was to finish a shift and find CNN standing next to his car.

See also

- Freedom of Information Act
- FCI Loretto
- Blue
- John Kiriakou
- Correctional officers at FCI Loretto
