Question 29e

It Turns On A Name

At the heart of the government’s case against former CIA officer John Kiriakou, the author of a best-selling (and heavily redacted) book about his experiences interrogating Al Qaeda suspects, is a question that Aristotle would appreciate: does a person exist only when he is named?

The facts, very briefly, are best understood with reference to the charge that we can find the most public references to.

The New York Times published a story in 2008 detailing the interrogation of KSM by a “soft spoken” CIA analyst named Deuce Martinez.  Though Martinez was not a CIA case officer, his identity the government considers to be a state secret because he was associated with the classified program, GREYSTONE, that permitted the CIA to rough up suspects and transfer them to third countries that might do the same. 

By associating Martinez with the program, the article allowed at least one GTMO defense attorney to link his client’s interrogation to Martinez, something that, without access to classified information the government wouldn’t provide, the attorney would not have been able to do.  In 2009, the government somehow confiscated from GTMO detainees pages of photographs of government employees provided by their defense attorneys - legally, it seems.  The lawyers wanted their clients to be able to identify their interrogators, and were trading information with journalists in order to compile a list of potential FBI agents and CIA officers… and obtain photographs of them. 

There is a sticky question here: the CIA claims that Martinez’s identity was a valid secret.  The New York Times believed that it was a procedural secret — that is, there was no exigent reason to believe that Martinez himself was properly covered by the Intelligence Identities Protection Act but simply that the CIA was trying to keep the names of everyone associated with interrogations a secret because disclosures of any sort tended to complicate the policy.

The complaint against Kiriakou also alleges that he disclosed Officer B’d identity to two other journalist, disclosed the name of a serving CIA case officer to another journalist, and lied to the CIA about whether a technique used in interrogation was “fictional” — and thus could be included in his book.  The government seems to have an extensive e-mail trail connecting the dots

Some uncomfortable points:  the government seems to have obtained e-mail records for either at least one journalist and one GTMO defense interrogator, because it refers to e-mail correspondence between the two.

“Journalist A,” who is not identified, allegedly provided a GTMO attorney with the identity of a covert CIA officer after learning it from Kiriakou. Context for this information exchange is not provided.  From experience, I can attest to the fact that transactions are often at the heart of national security journalism.  It does appear that both Journalist A and the defense attorney properly decided not to disclose the CIA officer’s identity publicly because he was definitely covert and still serving. 

Kiriakou’s opposition to the rough treatment of prisoners (the catalyst for his book) and his decision to go public a few years ago may elevate his status and earn him sympathy as a whistleblower of immoral government conduct.  Or it may not — he originally told ABC News that waterboarding worked to break KSM, when in fact, it hadn’t…. was the first person to admit openly that wate boarding had been used but wasn’t prosecuted for it. 

So far, we don’t know his side of the story.

Is this the start of a concerted campaign against the “John Adams Project,” which aims to help GTMO lawyers identify the folks who may have tortured their clients? Marcy Wheeler makes the case that it is.