Ruining the whistleblower is John Kiriakou’s description of the actual objective of a whistleblower prosecution, distinguished from the formal one. He states it as a thing he learned late.[1]
The account
“No whistleblower really sets out to be a whistleblower. I saw a policy that I believed was not just wrong but was criminal, and I decided to speak about it. You know, I really didn’t think long-term about how the US government can bring its full weight against a whistleblower. The goal really of the Justice Department is to ruin the whistleblower personally, professionally and financially. I hadn’t thought that through — and that’s exactly what happened to me.”
The three adverbs are the substance of it. A conviction is one outcome among several the process can produce; the loss of a career, a pension, a savings account and a circle of friends does not require one, and on Kiriakou’s account is not a side effect but the design.[1] The particulars in his own case — the pension, the friends, the job — he sets out in his account of the Publications Review Board’s two roads, and the financial end of it is the subject of whistleblowers die broke.
The coda
He does not leave the account there, and the sentence that follows it is the reason he says the years were worth it: “but again, it’s opened up a whole new world for me, in the realm of human rights and civil liberties.”[2]