The Panetta bin Laden disclosure
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Kiriakou acknowledges that Leon Panetta accidentally revealed the name of the special forces ground commander who led the operation to kill Osama bin Laden, not knowing that a Hollywood screenwriter was among the audience cleared to hear him speak.

His argument is that the accident is legally irrelevant. In Kiriakou's own case, U.S. District Court Judge Leonie Brinkema ruled that evidence of the accidental release of national defence information was inadmissible, and added that the government did not have to prove that a leak of classified information had actually caused any harm to the United States. On that reading, disclosing the kind of broad information covered by the Espionage Act is prosecutable regardless of outcome or motive.

The scale of the disclosure

A spokesman for the former director said Panetta had assumed everyone present had proper clearance. When the transcript of the speech was released, more than 90 lines had been redacted, implying, in Kiriakou's reading, that Panetta disclosed a great deal more classified information than one operative's name. He also cites the conclusion of the CIA's own Office of Security that agency security policy and administrative procedures were not followed in allowing a member of the media access to the classified bin Laden operation award ceremony.

The comparison

Kiriakou places the case alongside two other prosecutions. Thomas Drake, a senior national security official who blew the whistle on waste, fraud and abuse at the NSA in the form of a bungled project costing more than a billion dollars, was charged under the Espionage Act; the charges were eventually dropped, but only after his life was in shreds. Stephen Jin-woo Kim, a former State Department intelligence adviser who spoke to a Fox News reporter about North Korea, was charged with espionage, and the presiding judge absolved his prosecutors of having to prove that the information could damage U.S. national security or benefit a foreign power even potentially.

If Panetta is not accountable while Drake, Kim and Kiriakou were prosecuted for the same act, disclosing classified information to parties not authorised to receive it, then Kiriakou's question is what that says about justice in America. He argues that Panetta should have had his private life dug into, sifted and seized as evidence, as happened to Kiriakou and six other people during the Obama administration.

His proposed remedy is that the Espionage Act be rewritten to deal with intent, accidental disclosures, and with real harm done. Until then, his stated position is that it is right and just to charge Panetta with espionage, accidental though the revelation may have been.

The op-ed

Kiriakou's public response was a Los Angeles Times op-ed whose question was simply why Panetta was not in prison, on the view that reading the names aloud and showing the classified mock-up to an audience that was not cleared is a violation of the Espionage Act, "you can't just talk about this stuff. It's above top secret." The identities of special operators are supposed to be perpetually classified, and his objection extends to the commercial afterlife of the raid: the memoirs, the consulting credits on network drama, and the fact that of the two operators who wrote books, one was bankrupted and the other was not.

See also

- Leon Panetta
- Espionage Act
- Leonie Brinkema
- Thomas Drake
- NSA
