"The government is the biggest leaker"
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Put to him on the eve of his imprisonment was the administration's own case: that if such disclosures are allowed, the clandestine service can no longer operate clandestinely. John Kiriakou rejected it flatly.

The answer

"I do not," he said, when asked whether he bought the argument at all. "The government is the biggest leaker in the United States. This administration seems to sanction leaks and indiscretion whenever it suits them."

The two examples

He named two. The first was the cooperation given to the makers of Zero Dark Thirty, who were told "some of the details of the raid on Osama Bin Laden." The second was the provision of details of drone attacks and targeted killings to the New York Times "in the middle of last year's heated election campaign."

The pairing is deliberate: one disclosure served a film that presented torture as productive, the other served a president's re-election. Neither, in his account, was investigated.

The contradiction he draws from it

The conclusion Kiriakou reaches is not that classification is meaningless but that its enforcement is selective. Set against the same administration's record, more leak prosecutions than all prior administrations combined, the pattern he describes is one in which the same act is a crime or a communications strategy depending on who authorises it.

It is the same asymmetry he applies to his own case, in which he was prosecuted over a single name that was never published while, by his account, a second officer who gave the same reporter ten was never investigated.

He has made the point about the film more than once, since Zero Dark Thirty, released weeks before his sentencing, argued in public that torture had produced the intelligence that found bin Laden, a claim he had helped put into circulation in 2007 and had since retracted as untrue.

See also

- John Kiriakou
- Zero Dark Thirty
- The second officer in the same case
- Espionage Act
- Official leaks
