I'd rather not send any traffic to
The
Times
(in this case, East coast edition) so if you'd like to 'read more' you'll have to copy the title - "Ex-Officer for C.I.A. Sentenced 30 Months in Leak Case" - and enter it at the search engine of your choice.
ALEXANDRIA, Va. — The first Central Intelligence Agency officer to face prison for disclosing classified information, was sentenced on Friday to 30 months in prison by a judge at the federal courthouse here.
The sentencing was the latest chapter in the Obama administration’s unprecedented crackdown on government officials who disclose classified information to the press.
Since 2009, the administration has charged five other current or former government officials with leaking classified information, more than all previous administrations combined.
The sentenced former CIA officer has an interesting - and confusing - background. Bits and pieces from Wikipedia, in chronological order:
Following the September 11 terrorist attacks [2001-NYC, not 2012-Benghazi] Kiriakou was named Chief of Counterterrorist Operations in Pakistan. In that position, he claims to have led a series of raids on al-Qaeda safehouses that resulted in the capture of dozens of al-Qaeda fighters.
On the night of March 28, 2002, Kiriakou claims to have led a raid in which Abu Zubaydah, then thought to be al-Qaeda’s third-ranking official, was captured in Faisalabad, Pakistan.
Following a 2002-2004 domestic assignment, Kiriakou resigned from the CIA in 2004....
*On December 10, 2007, Kiriakou gave an interview to ABC News where he was described as participating in the capture and questioning of Abu Zubaydah, who is accused of having been an aide to Osama Bin Laden. According to Kiriakou, based on what he had been told by the CIA, it had taken only a single brief instance of waterboarding to extract answers to an interrogator's questions from Abu Zubaydah.
....Kiriakou was a terrorism consultant for ABC News from September 2008 until March 2009.
Following Senator John Kerry's (D-MA) ascension to the chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committeein 2009, Kiriakou became the Committee's senior investigator, focusing on the Middle East, international terrorism, piracy, and counter-narcotics issues....
* On the second to last page of his 2010 memoir entitled The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA's War on Terror, Kiriakou acknowledged that he was not present during Abu Zubaydah's interrogations, and had no first-hand knowledge of Abu Zubaydah's waterboardings.
.... He again resumed counter-terrorism consulting for ABC News from April 2011 to April 2012.
When reading about Kiriakou, just remember that when American leftists refer to "torture" committed by Americans, they usually mean waterboarding, not the very real atrocities routinely perpetrated by Saddam Hussein and his ilk.
.... An Iraqi soldier, who according to the facility's records witnessed the beatings, said interrogators regularly used pliers to remove men's teeth, electric prods to shock men's genitals and drills to cut holes in their ankles.
In one instance, the soldier recalled, he witnessed a Kuwaiti soldier, who had been captured during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, being forced to sit on a broken Pepsi bottle. The man was removed from the bottle only after it filled up with his blood, the soldier said. He said the man later died.
"I have seen interrogators break the heads of men with baseball bats, pour salt into wounds and rape wives in front of their husbands," said former Iraqi soldier Ali Iyad Kareen, 41.
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