By Ray, September 26, 2016
Former CIA official John Kiriakou, who spent two years in prison for revealing the truth about White House-sanctioned torture, became the 15th recipient of the Sam Adams Award for Integrity (see samadamsaward.ch) at a ceremony at American University on Sept. 25. While John sat in prison, Senate Intelligence Committee investigators were uncovering heinous details about torture by the CIA – details contained its own original, banality-of-evil cables, which also showed that the agency and others had lied in claiming torture “worked.”
President Barack Obama chose to add his weight to a remarkably brazen effort to cover it all up and scuttle the Senate report. To her credit, committee chair Dianne Feinstein, with support from other Democratic senators, faced the President down and published an executive summary in December 2014. While almost three weeks have passed since Obama’s intervention was revealed by The Guardian’s Spencer Ackerman, who interviewed the Feinstein’s chief investigator, for some reason the “mainstream” media missed it.
The President’s active acquiescence, so to speak, not only in CIA’s attempt to suppress the Senate report, but also in the agency’s attempts to retaliate against the investigators – in the process, playing fast and loose with the separation of powers – is stunning. It is no surprise that White House-controlled media decided the less said about this the better. (And what could be better than zero?) This is one reason why Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence wove this new finding about the President and torture into John Kiriakou’s citation, the text of which is included in Ray’s Consortiumnews article (link above).
Former CIA officer John Kiriakou (right) receiving 2016 Sam Adams Award for Integrity from Elizabeth Murray (left) and Coleen Rowley on Sept. 25, 2016, in Washington, D.C. (Photo credit: Linda Lewis)