The Senate WikiLeaks ban
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The Senate WikiLeaks ban is John Kiriakou's account of how the legislature responded to the publication of the Chelsea Manning cables. He was then the senior investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff and watched it happen from inside.

> "The Senate security officer went from office to office to office, it took him days to go to the office of every one of the hundred senators and then every one of the committees and subcommittees, and said you may not access any of this information on a US Senate computer. It would constitute the crime of unauthorized access of classified information."

The instruction was backed by an explicit threat: "they threatened everybody with prosecution, and so nobody dared go to the WikiLeaks website." The prohibition reached only the desks. "Well, of course we're all news hounds, so we all watched the news coverage and we see exactly what it was that was released."

What he says was actually in it

Kiriakou's own assessment of the tranche, made from the coverage rather than from the documents, is deflationary. Ninety-nine per cent of it, he says, was "just regular normal diplomatic cables. They meant nothing. This diplomat went to the foreign ministry and delivered a démarche or a white paper, or we asked this country to support our nominee for the international board of fisheries, or whatever, just normal diplomatic nonsense."

The remainder is where he locates the argument: "one percent of it was interesting, important, exposed crimes." On the standing objection he is unequivocal, and treats the passage of time as the evidence: "Did it harm the national security? I think we can say definitively after all these years, absolutely not."

From which he draws the conclusion he repeats three times across the interview: "the American people have the right to know what the government is doing in their name, and if what they're doing is against the law, a violation of either US or international law, not only do the American people have the right to know, but those crimes ought to be prosecuted."

See also

- Chelsea Manning
- Julian Assange
- Senate Foreign Relations Committee
- John Kiriakou
