The clemency campaign of January 2013
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Asked two days before his sentencing whether anything was being done to press the president to commute his sentence, John Kiriakou described four separate efforts then under way.

The letter to the president

Ralph Nader and Bruce Fein, whom Kiriakou describes as an eminent constitutional attorney, together with Joan Claybrook, who headed Nader's public-interest organisation, had sent a letter to the president a week earlier asking him to grant Kiriakou a pardon.

The petitions

A change.org petition asking for a commutation had gathered nearly two thousand signatures. Separately, the Greek-American community, "and I'm a Greek American, very proudly so", had "come through in a big way" with a petition of its own and letters from prominent Greek Americans around the country.

The colleagues' letter

The fourth was a letter signed by "more than a dozen and a half" CIA officers and FBI agents he had served with in Pakistan, together with what he calls notable Americans, Pete Seeger, Oliver Stone and Daniel Ellsberg, asking the president to commute the sentence.

That detail is the one Kiriakou tends to return to: that the signatories included serving and former colleagues from the operation in which he had captured Abu Zubaydah. None of the four appeals succeeded. He was sentenced on 25 January 2013 and served 23 months.

Why he thought it was happening at all

Asked in the same interview what he thought explained an inverted justice system in which whistleblowers are punished and the architects of torture rewarded, Kiriakou answered in terms of code rather than politics. Whistleblowers, he said, are seen by many as "people with big mouths, people who broke the code of silence," and he calls it a natural human reaction, wrong, but natural, to try to cover up a crime before finally coming clean about it. The programme was too big to stay hidden: "it was going to get out, it was going to be investigated by Congress, it was going to hit the press." The shame, in his telling, is that the CIA's reaction was to deny, to cover up, "and then to come after me."

See also

- John Kiriakou
- Ralph Nader
- Pete Seeger
- Daniel Ellsberg
- Kiriakou pardon request
