Just a reminder that President Obama has not yet pardoned John Kiriakou, the CIA whistleblower who revealed the agency’s torture practices Kiriakou went to jail on February to serve 30 months.
Obama has also not punished anyone in the US government for extensive torture practices and has allowed evidence to be destroyed.
The only transparency about the Obama Administration is their bold use of a hundred year old sedition law.
Wrong, very wrong, all wrong that John Kiriakou is still in prison. For shame, Mr President.
June Butler
If we could, I know a couple folks who would serve portions of his sentence for him, up to a month at a time.
Is there any way to do this ?
Great idea, I’d gladly share punishment for Courageous Honesty – short of sharing imprisonment, I guess I ought to donate to his defense. And thank you Juan Cole for reminding us.
Let us not forget: “The purpose of torture is torture.” State Security types torture for Very Important Reasons, and because they get off on it. Apologists like John Yoo-Hoo and others, including some who have Spoken here, tell us it’s all been decreed Legal And Proper by the Proper Authorities. Our Great Nation, or a subset of it anyway, even runs schools and seminars on how to do it most efficiently. And puts out training manuals and books and policy documents and videos and stuff on the proper administration, in all senses, of the Curious Activity.
And we are going to have to decide if people like Kiriakou actually fit into the carefully circumscribed mandatory definitional niche of “whistleblower” at all. And people who are so disloyal as all that, spilling the beans where everyone can see them, just have to absorb the consequences of their behavior, right? I mean, how else are all those things we don’t want to see or think about our special selves going to be kept under wraps?
So for the life of me I guess I am personally hard pressed to see what the big deal problem is, right? I mean, it’s not like it’s being done to tens or hundreds of thousands of people, is it? Oh, it is? And, like, so what if it’s notoriously ineffective? I mean, c’mon, there’s worse things done in the name of Freedom’n’Liberty ™, after all… It’s really just Human Nature, after all, one of our little endearing, enduring tics…
I think that there is a sinister purpose behind this torture that goes beyond just torture as a deterent to those that would oppose the US MIC. The CIA agents and others who take part in torture are being tested to see where their loyalties lie. They are also being trained. Trained to do things that the chain of command in the CIA want them to do not things that they should be doing. They are essentially being inocculated with a Zombie virus.
The whistle blower said that Americans are better than this.
Well obviously he is wrong. If Americans were better than this it would not have happened. That America has made torure a routine policy is just one reason among many that
I hope that in the not to distant future there is a transfer of power in America that is not peaceful transfer of power.
Without a non peaceful transfer of power there would be no reason to believe that there has been real change in the power structure of the USA. No accountability is just more business as usual.
Such a cancellation of the democratic process would amount to a collective punishment for the American people. That is
supposed to be forbiden by some regulation somewhere. But the American people have collectively earned a collective punishement.
I like Obama and I think he’s a decent guy dealing with a large number of not-so-decent folks out there. But for the life of me, I don’t get this story. He ought to issue a Presidential pardon & be done with this.
You don’t get this story because you incorrectly think Obama is a decent guy. He doesn’t pardon. He keeps Kiriaku in prison to intimidate potential whistleblowers in the CIA. He keeps Bradly Manning in prison to intimidate potential whisteblowers in the military.
This isn’t the behavior of a decent guy, it’s the behavior of a mob boss.