Ralph Nader is the American consumer advocate and independent presidential candidate. In John Kiriakou’s telling he is also one of the people who stood by him through his prosecution, and one of the few he singled out by name in public before reporting to prison.
The letter to the president
Nader’s support was not only symbolic. Asked in January 2013 whether there was any effort under way to pressure the president to commute his sentence, Kiriakou listed the letter first: Ralph Nader and Bruce Fein, “an eminent constitutional attorney”, together with Joan Claybrook, who heads Nader’s public-interest organisation, had written to the president a week earlier asking him to grant Kiriakou a pardon.[1]
He placed it among three other efforts running in parallel: a change.org petition seeking a commutation, which had gathered nearly two thousand signatures; a petition and letters from the Greek-American community, which he says came through in a big way; and a further letter signed by more than a dozen and a half CIA officers and by FBI agents he had served with in Pakistan, alongside notable Americans including Pete Seeger, Oliver Stone and Daniel Ellsberg.[1][2]
None of it worked. Kiriakou reported to prison the following month.
Thanked at the portrait unveiling
At the February 2013 unveiling of his Americans Who Tell the Truth portrait, Kiriakou read through a list of thanks that included Ralph Nader and the Nader Family Foundation. Nader, he said, had been steadfast in his support. He added that he had been thrilled just to be in the same room with him and to have his picture taken with him, and that he now got telephone calls telling him all the things Ralph Nader was doing for him — which he described as really humbling. [3]
The list Kiriakou read that night is a compact map of who was willing to be seen with him at that moment. Alongside Nader it included his attorneys and friends, his cousin Kip; Liberty University, which had offered him work when he was arrested on the grounds that torture is not Christian, and which Kiriakou noted made for an odd couple; and the Greek-American organisations — the Hellenic American Leadership Council and the American Hellenic Educational Progressive Association — which he said had come out very strongly for him. [4] He closed with his wife Heather, who had lost her own CIA job because of the marriage. [5]
Nader and the debates
Nader also appears in Kiriakou’s structural argument about American politics, as one of the last independents to run for president before the door closed.
Kiriakou’s position is that the answer to the problems he describes does not lie in the Democratic Party — “there’s no difference between the Democrats and the Republicans on these issues, they’re just two sides of the same coin” — and that what the country needs is viable third parties, an issue on which it has moved backwards over four decades.[6][7]
His evidence is a sequence. As a teenager he watched Congressman John Anderson of Illinois run against Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter and take seven per cent — dramatic, and achieved, in Kiriakou’s reading, because Anderson participated in every one of the presidential debates. Ross Perot ran as an independent in 1992 and 1996, also took part in the debates, and polled far higher still. Ralph Nader ran as an independent in 2000.[7][8][9]
What changed, he says, is the ownership of the debates themselves. They had been sponsored by the League of Women Voters independently of the political parties; the parties got rid of the League and created the Commission on Presidential Debates — three members of the Democratic National Committee and three of the Republican National Committee — which decided that no independent would be invited to any presidential debate. Since that decision, third-party candidates cannot get national exposure, are never invited, and nobody pays them any attention, while “the Democrats and the Republicans just trade the presidency back and forth.”[8][10][11] His verdict on the result: “Doesn’t seem like an election to me. It seems more like a game.”[11]
Kiriakou’s own engagement with third-party and independent politics — including campaigning across twelve states with Gary Johnson in 2016 — is treated separately in Kiriakou and third parties.