Letter from Loretto - A Prison Letter from a CIA Whistleblower | Hacker News Reader

Letter from Loretto - A Prison Letter from a CIA Whistleblower

openwatch.net

252 pointsMizza48 comments

If you're interested in the "other side" of this story (such as it is; this article doesn't really take a side), here's what the USG says happened with Kiriakou:

The USG's position is that Kiriakou left the CIA and, in an effort to drum up consulting business and sell a book, told journalists on several separate occasions about (a) the identity of a covert operative who was still undercover, and (b) the affiliation of another USG employee to a program to a classified program capture Abu Zubaydah. Kiriakou was questioned by the FBI and, the USG claims, lied about his disclosures. Kiriakou himself had, according to the USG, repeatedly claimed he hadn't intended to compromise either operative, the subtext apparently being that he assumed the title of "whistleblower" when it became convenient to his defense.

FAS does a great job tracking all these leak investigations:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/jud/kiriakou/

I don't know what to think about this case. It's not the most sympathetic case, but certainly not the least. But I'm also biased, because I think both Guantanamo Bay and the rendition programs were abhorrent.

Thanks for the additional insight! Unfortunately our server is barely able to handle the load at the moment, but as soon as the dust settles I will append that source to the investigation.

Your use of past tense in referring to Gitmo and extraordinary rendition is, regrettably, unwarranted.

How does agreeing with the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights about force-feeding people accused of no crimes makes you "biased" exactly?

http://antiwar.com/blog/2013/04/05/un-gitmo-detention-regime...

What does it say about the U.S. that torture and indefinite detention of random people picked off the street is a political issue?

I've always wondered what would happen if we enumerated the common events of prison life in sentencing. You are hereby sentenced to:

Segregated eating

Daily verbal abuse

The regular disruption of your personal possessions

Being physically assaulted once for every 5-7 years of confinement

Being seriously injured through assault once for every 10-15 years of confinement

Being raped once for every 15-20 years of confinement

While these are extrapolations from prison statistics, the uncertainty makes the sentence all the more chilling. Prison is, in the US at least, a cruel institution, but this is rarely discussed when we talk about what it means to give someone a 5 year sentence or 10 years. Confinement is terrible, but, for many, it is not the worst part of the punishment.

The thing is, I could probably find a pretty substantial percentage of Americans who wouldn't have a problem with any of that, as long as the offender "learns his lesson" or some other similarly-trite authoritarian nonsense.

I don't have any sources handy, but I believe their is much evidence that prisoners do learn very good lessons about violence. Unfourtuantly, those lessons are in how to be violent, which (I think) results in prisons being the best way to make a non-violent criminal into a violent one.

Prisons are like professional conferences for committed criminals where they get to swap tips and tricks and network.

A childhood friend was sent to juvenile detention on a statutory rape charge (not a rapist, they were both 14). After 2 years he emerged to be a worser human being with a huge, justifiable, chip on his shoulder. By 16, he was dealing in cocaine (not weed, cocaine, he gained the connections for that in JD), prostitution (addicts will do anything for blow) and weapons.

And Scarface, the movie character, became his idol. We used to be backpackers (the rapping kind, check urban dictionary) and he transformed into everything that was wrong with hip-hop. And I blame everything on how all the adults completely snowballed a 14yo.

Petraeus, the former director of the CIA, said this in reference to John's conviction:

"This case yielded the first IIPA successful prosecution in 27 years, and it marks an important victory for our Agency, for our Intelligence Community, and for our country. Oaths do matter, and there are indeed consequences for those who believe they are above the laws"

I have to wonder if practitioners of torture will ever have reason to believe otherwise. Somehow, I don't find it to be likely.

It is possible for both things to be true simultaneously: that the specific illegal disclosures Kiriakou made were crimes, and that the torture of detainees at Guantanamo and in sites around the middle east were also (grave) crimes.

That it might be. However, the state is remarkably adept at not pursuing crimes that its agents commit... Unless those crimes harm the interests of the ruling class.

There's a pretty clear - and abhorrent power imbalance at play, here.

Or, the state is adept at making the cases it can actually make, and less adept at making systemic cases whose prosecution would cost tens of millions of dollars and seize up operations at intelligence services that actually do need to function, for instance to curb proliferation of nuclear weapons.

Reasonable people can OBVIOUSLY disagree on this point, but I do not perceive Barack Obama as someone who is sanguine about torture.

Is that perception based on his public speech or on his actions?

Personally, if i were sanguine about torture I would have already closed Guantanamo.

It's very difficult these days to not violate federal criminal statute in one way or another, doubly so for someone who works for the government in a high security environment. The fact that most people never get prosecuted for these crimes boils down to discretion and investigatory focus. Based on my experiece I doubt more than a tiny fraction of intelligence workers haven't violated secrecy laws in some mild form, such as casual conversation between coworkers or ex-coworkers.

Outing the identity of a covert operative to a reporter is not one of those crimes you accidentally commit while making orange juice in the morning.

Yeah. I feel safer.

For comparisons sake Scooter Libby was also convicted of revealing the identity of a CIA operative. But his sentence was commuted by then President George W Bush.

Scooter Libby explicitly and intentionally revealed Valerie Plame's name as retaliation for her husband's New York Time's article detailing the lack of evidence that Saddam Hussein could have acquired Uranium from Niger. John Kiriakou admits to providing a name to a journalist as a source of information on torture but the name has never been published.

Scooter Libby was convicted of outing a CIA operative as retribution for her whistle blowing husband. John Kiriakou is a whistle blower who gave a reporter a yet unpublished name. In both cases the actual whistle blowers were punished. One through losing their career as a CIA operative(Valerie Plame) and the other by being sent to prison(John Kiriakou).

Libby should be still in jail if not on death row - note that AFASK Manning is accused of releaseing secret information however the real identity of a CIA officer is Top Secret.

1st, I speak from experience.

I can see why he didn't get to go to the camp. Usually if your a flight risk (like you ran when you got your indictment), or if you are violent (which could be the unseen possibility here given his previous profession), BOP won't deem you appropriate for a camp.

I agree strongly with tptacek's comment that when you look at a whistleblower's case it's really hard to see that someone who was apart of the problem will grow a conscience (very possible), remove themself from the problem (possible), without intervention or pressure, disclose information about what you and your other people did (unlikely).

I don't believe this guy deserves the attention he is vying for. Although some of the CO's are assholes, the mailroom checks all incoming and outgoing mail, so if some of the details in the letter was true...it would've been lost on departure (shit, I couldn't even get my wired magazine subscription cause I'm a hacker).

Many people inside that I met (at a camp) have hopes of writing a book, explaining how it is, making a change in their life for the best, and profiting off their experiences. Not me, people on here ask me how it was, and I give that experience and advice for free (feel free to email me).

But the more I thought about it, the more this made no sense. Why would the uncle of the Times Square bomber be in a low-security prison? He should be in a maximum.

Why? Should family, rather than crime or danger, dictate what type of prison a sentence is served in?

Well...

Just put it this way... phone calls to Pakistan by a known terrorist threat from an American prison SHOULD not happen.

So this guy was just, kind of, connecting the dots.

Well, he was an intelligence officer. He should be able to know bullshit when he hears it.

In theory what prison you go to depends on perceived public safety risks presented by the inmate. It also depends on how much the inmate needs to be protected from other prisoners.

If the uncle of a high profile terrorist was arrested and put in jail, I'd expect there to be a high perceived risk to the public, and also a good chance that the prisoner would be attacked by other prisoners. For both reasons you'd want a high security jail.

The blood is clearly tainted

His "should" was likely not prescriptive, but instead descriptive.

Wow, $5.25 per month was what they were paying in 1995 as well. They haven't even increased the minimum wage in federal prison!

Google Cache if you are experiencing an error 504 gateway timeout: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttps...

Ahhh sorry about the 504s! You should be able to retry if it's giving you issues. We only have 4 gunicorn workers running on a single Linode right now, we'll try to bump it up to 6-8 to see if that helps in the meantime.

edit: Increased the worker count to 8. Hopefully that helps a little bit.

edit2: Turned on memcache.

Nginx's proxy caching[1] should help you with the load.

[1]: http://serverfault.com/questions/30705/how-to-set-up-nginx-a...

So, i'm pretty disappointed that you took an article posted on FireDogLake (http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2013/05/29/imprisoned-cia-t... ), simply pulled the PDF and the text which they transcribed by hand, rehosted it yourself, and then posted it to HN.

Especially since you did it without any citation/reference (and since FDL notes that they did the legwork on this).

Edit: I'm going to give the OpenWatch guys the benefit of the doubt, and assume that they never saw the FireDogLake post, and that they were linked directly to the PDF of the letter that is hosted on DocumentCloud's S3 account.

It would be nice if they acknowledged the original source of the letter.

This is a true American hero.

Who may have, and was convicted of, doing something else not that heroic (disclosing covert agent's identities) completely separate from the water-boarding disclosures.

It's convenient for Kiriakou to gloss over the events he was convicted of and insist that it was merely retribution (which of course it might be, but good luck proving that). His statements about persecution have to be taken with some grains of salt.

> His statements about persecution have to be taken with some grains of salt.

In the fight between the National Security State and the individual, I always give the individual the benefit of the doubt. Then again, I always back the underdog.

Sounds like Shawshank Redemption in parts of this letter. How did this letter even make it out of the prison?

perhaps dictated over one or more phone calls?

He makes me think a of modern-punk cicero, with a sense of justice for others (tortured people) above his own self. Give this guy a break for his broken oath: he pays a harsh price already.

Ah, now I see why weev asked to be sent to the same prison.

If letters like this were getting out (and all content is true), then of course I see why weev would want to be there. ESP given the fact that at camps, there are usually cell phones floating around....and weev has a pr campaign to uphold (apparently this guy does too, but at least I like weev).

Prisons are long overdue for disruption.

Trouble is, at the end of the day you can't sell it off to Yahoo.

They've done a great job "disrupting" the industry through privatization! /s

I fear how powerful that lobby is going to get over the next few decades -- Think about what they'll be able to prevent... any realistic shot at rehabilitating our country's drug laws into something sensible will be completely dismissed.

I could not agree with you more!

I went to Taft (the camp) which is privately owned by a company called MTC. When I was there, I hurt my leg extremely bad to the point where something popped (I was only 22 and a jock in HS, so it was bad). I couldn't walk on it at all. The nurse guy came out to the yard and made me get into a wheel chair and he pushed me to the nursing area. He ran my hurt leg into a concrete pillar. Everyone told me don't get hurt inside, because you'll stay longer, your release date will somehow disappear, and it looks bad on the facility so they don't release you until your better. When I got into the nursing area and he checked it, he made me stretch it and I swear I held back tears from the pain and said I'm fine. Other prisoners would tell you that Taft is good, they sell tobacco in the commissary, or they're more laid back.....prison is prison and PRIVATE ones like this make money off of you being there. Don't get hurt, don't piss off the co's, or you'll end up with no release date like 1 person I met, or dead like a healthy person that needed their medication, but didn't get it in time.

I don't feel sorry for the guy in Club Fed that tattled on the CIA. If you want some real prison stories read "Papillon":

http://www.amazon.com/Papillon-P-S-Henri-Charriere/dp/006112...

Or see the movie with Hoffman and McQueen. Amazing.

Great movie, but the book contained a lot more they didn't show.

Took me about 5 minutes of furiously rubbing my phone against my shirt to realize that it's the website background that's dirty looking, not my screen! Grr.

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