Kiriakou has described December 2014 as the month that made his sentence worthwhile, and both of the things that did it reached him through a television set or a newspaper he was not fully allowed to read.
The newspaper
He was sitting in prison reading a copy of the New York Times that was four days old by the time it got to him. Staff would, as a matter of routine, go through his copy of the paper and cut out the articles they did not want him to read.[1][2]
What survived the scissors that day was an interview with Edward Snowden.[2]
What Snowden said
In it, Snowden said that he had watched Kiriakou’s case, and that he had watched Thomas Drake’s case — Drake being the National Security Agency whistleblower — and that neither of them had backed down despite the enormous pressure they were under. That, Snowden said, had inspired him to go public with his own revelations.[2]
Kiriakou’s reaction was that this, together with one other thing that happened the same month, made it all worthwhile.[3]
The other thing
The second was a television. A man walked into his cell and told him he was on TV. Kiriakou got up, walked over, and found John McCain standing on the floor of the Senate saying that without Kiriakou’s revelations the American people would never have known there was a torture programme, or that people were being tortured in their name — and that although he was in prison, he deserved the thanks of the American public.[3][4]
That, Kiriakou says, completely changed the way he saw himself.[4]
The two moments have a common structure worth noting. Both arrived while he was incarcerated and unable to answer; both came from people he had never coordinated with; and both told him that the thing the prosecution had been designed to prevent — other people concluding that what he did was worth doing — had happened anyway.