Arianna Huffington, founder of the Huffington Post, is the person who — largely by accident — gave John Kiriakou’s prison writing its audience.
The accidental pipeline
Kiriakou’s first Letter from Loretto was never meant for the world: he sent it to his attorney, who passed it to the proprietor of the website Firedoglake, Jane Hamsher. What Kiriakou didn’t know was that Hamsher was good friends with Arianna Huffington — who put it on the Huffington Post under a banner headline. It went, in his words, completely crazy: more than a million hits in the week it published, followed by CNN and 60 Minutes coming to the prison and a press wave that took on a life of its own.[1][2][3][4] “I thought, my God, I have a soapbox here. I can reach people.”[3]
In his fullest account of the chain, the letter went from Kiriakou to his attorney, from the attorney to Jane Hamsher of firedoglake.com — an alternative news site slightly left of centre, whose writers he rates highly, Kevin Gosztola in particular — and from Hamsher, who published it there, on to Huffington, who gave it the banner headline.[5] The newsletter itself was modelled, “very arrogantly,” on Martin Luther King’s letter from Birmingham Jail, and in describing daily life it inadvertently exposed two crimes committed against him by guards, one of them a felony.[6]
Within 24 hours of the Huffington Post publication it had gone, in his word, crazy; within another 24 the prison — not Kiriakou — was fielding interview requests from CNN, Fox, ABC News, NPR, Time, The Week, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, The Economist and Playboy.[7] His conclusion at the time was the same one he draws now: “this is going to be my superpower.”[8] The traffic figure varies between tellings, from more than a million hits to over two million.[9]
The distribution was deliberately redundant and entirely unglamorous. Each letter went out in four copies — to Hamsher, to his lawyer, to his wife, and to his publisher, because he intended to turn the letters into a book. The prison could not work out how he was getting them out, and he let the staff believe he was running a sophisticated smuggling operation: “in fact I was just put an envelope and put a stamp on it and sent it.”[10]
The prison’s response was an investigation — of Kiriakou, and how the blog got out.[11]
The platform
Huffington’s site became the launch pad for the letters that followed. His open letter to Edward Snowden — written expecting a few hundred readers — started at the Huffington Post and was republished everywhere.[12] His exposé of guard corruption led to a Department of Justice inspector general investigation.[13] And when the prison moved to silence him — stripping him to pen and paper, floating diesel therapy — he wrote about that immediately, “and she immediately published it… it went viral.” Oliver Stone and John Cusack tweeted “hands off John Kiriakou,” and Code Pink mobilized its members to call the Bureau of Prisons.[14]
Huffington also came to Loretto in person, bringing two young journalists with her.[15] Kiriakou had blogged for the Huffington Post before prison,[16] and he credits her outlet — alongside The Intercept — with running stories the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post wouldn’t touch.[17]