The Uyghur resettlement trade
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The Uyghur resettlement trade is John Kiriakou's account of why the United States prosecuted Brad Birkenfeld, and he offers it as the clearest single demonstration of what publication by WikiLeaks is for. He introduces it as a deliberate scaling-down from policy to the individual: "even down lower on a human level, let me tell you one short story. And I hope that this helps to humanize what it is that WikiLeaks does for us."

The disclosure, and the sentence

Birkenfeld, a friend of Kiriakou's, blew the whistle at the Swiss bank UBS on "money laundering and income tax evasion by very, very wealthy Americans, 19,000 of the wealthiest people in America," returning to the United States on holiday carrying thumb drives that proved it. The disclosure allowed the government to recover "10 billion dollars in back income taxes, unpaid income taxes." He was prosecuted anyway and sent to prison for three and a half years. Kiriakou puts the question the outcome raises twice over: "Why? Why prosecute the whistleblower? Why send him to prison for three and a half years?"

What the cables showed

On Kiriakou's account Birkenfeld had no explanation at all until WikiLeaks published the Chelsea Manning tranche. Inside it was a diplomatic cable from Hillary Clinton's State Department to the president of Switzerland about the disposal of Uyghur prisoners held at Guantanamo: "we have these Uyghur prisoners in Guantanamo. We want to release them. We need to find countries to take them. We're going to send two to Albania. We're going to send two to Tahiti. And we want Switzerland to take two Uyghurs."

The reply was a refusal, "we're not going to do that. We don't want any Chinese Uyghurs in Switzerland", and the exchange that followed is the part Kiriakou tells in direct speech.

> "And Hillary wrote back and said, yeah, we really want you to take these Uyghurs. And the Swiss wrote back and said, arrest Brad Birkenfeld and we'll take them. And Hillary responded, done. And Brad Birkenfeld was arrested and prosecuted."

Birkenfeld later won what Kiriakou calls a massive lawsuit against the Treasury and Justice Departments, "but he wasn't able to collect on it until he was finally released from prison." The conclusion Kiriakou draws is about the source rather than the story: "we wouldn't have any idea that it was Hillary Clinton that started that whole legal process against Brad Birkenfeld to silence yet another whistleblower had it not been for Julian Assange."

See also

- Brad Birkenfeld
- Julian Assange
- Chelsea Manning
- Guantanamo Bay
- Hillary Clinton
