http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/30226-i-went-to-prison-after-exposing-us-torture-why-werent-the-perpetrators-charged
CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou, who exposed the Bush administration's torture program. (photo: kickstarter)
I Went to Prison
After Exposing US Torture. Why Weren't the Perpetrators Charged?
By John Kiriakou, OtherWords
17 May 15
fter I blew the
whistle on the CIA’s torture program in 2007, the fallout for me was brutal. To
make a long story short, I served nearly two years in federal prison and then
endured a few more months of house arrest.
What happened to
the torture program? Nothing.
Following years of
waiting for the government to do something, I was heartened when I read in my
prison cell — in a four-day-old copy of The New York Times — that the
Senate Select Committee on Intelligence had finally released in December a heavily censored summary of its report on the CIA’s brutal “enhanced
interrogation” techniques.
Finally, I
thought, Congress will do something about our government’s shameful embrace of
torture. It was big news — for two or three days.
I thought there’d
be quick action by courageous members of both parties who respect human rights
and civil liberties. I thought they’d work together to ensure that our
collective name would never again be sullied by torture — that we’d respect our
own laws and the international laws and treaties to which we’re signatories.
In retrospect, I
was naïve, even after having served in the CIA for nearly 15 years and as a
Senate committee staffer for several more.
Despite repeated
efforts by the CIA to impede investigations into its conduct, the report
confirmed that the program was even worse than most Americans had thought.
Take the case of Ammar al-Baluchi, who was arrested in Pakistan and sent to a secret
CIA prison, where interrogators held his head under water, beat him repeatedly
with a truncheon, and slammed his head against the wall, causing lasting head
trauma.
This abuse wasn’t
authorized by the Justice Department. So why weren’t the perpetrators charged
with a crime?
Perhaps worst of
all, CIA officers tortured as many as 26 people who were probably innocent of
any ties to terrorism.
Sadly, the
report’s release didn’t lead to any action by the White House or the Justice Department. The
architects of the program haven’t been held accountable. Nor have those who
clearly violated the law by torturing prisoners without any legal
justifications. Why should the government have locked me up for telling the
truth and given them full impunity?
But there’s still
time for President Barack Obama to order the Justice Department to prosecute
these perpetrators of torture. And there’s a clear precedent in how the
government has confronted similar actions in the past.
In 1968, for
example, The Washington Post published a photo of a US soldier waterboarding a North Vietnamese prisoner. The Defense Department investigated the incident,
court-martialed the soldier, and convicted him of torture.
Why should the
Senate’s torture report elicit less response than a photograph? It was wrong in
1968 to commit torture. It’s still wrong — and prosecutable — in 2015.
Some current and
former CIA leaders will argue that torture netted actionable intelligence that
saved American lives. I was working in the CIA’s counterterrorism center at the
same time they were, and I can tell you that they’re lying.
Torture may have
made some Americans feel better in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks.
It may have made them feel that the government was avenging our fallen
compatriots. But the report found that “the harsh interrogation methods did not
succeed in exacting useful intelligence.”
Whether or not it
ever gleans useful intelligence, however, is beside the point. The question
isn’t whether torture works. Torture is immoral.
There has to be a
red line: The United States of America must oppose torture and ban its use
absolutely. That begins in the Oval Office, and Obama needs to belatedly do
something about it.
© 2015 Reader
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"The master class has always declared the wars; the
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and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and
everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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