How the ACLU, Ron Paul and a former EFF Director helped jail a CIA whistleblower
CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou, who went public about torture programs and was later jailed for leaking the name of a covert CIA agent, was just released from prison to serve out the remaining months of his sentence under house arrest. Kiriakou is the first CIA spy ever jailed for leaking secrets, and only the second American ever convicted under a 1982 law making it a crime to publicly identify covert CIA agents.
The story of how that law, the “Intelligence Identities Protection Act,” came to be is an important and depressing story in its own right, one that’s been totally forgotten. And for good reason: Bad memories are best suppressed, until they creep back up and become a serious “now” problem, and you need to figure out how things got to this point.
The story behind the 1982 law used to jail Kiriakou fills in some of the blanks about how the modern secrecy apparatus was first put together beginning in the Reagan-Bush years. It also reveals the complicity and collaboration of our leading civil libertarians in creating the secrecy-and-censorship leviathan that these same civil libertarians claim to be fighting today on our behalf. Everyone from the ACLU, libertarian hero Ron Paul, even the first executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation was complicit in giving us the anti-whistleblower law that put John Kiriakou in prison.
First, some background. Before 1982, there was no law making it illegal to publish the name of a covert CIA agent. And until the early-mid 1970s, there was no need for one: self-censorship in the establishment media kept this problem to an absolute minimum. But by the mid-1970s—with Watergate, the humiliating defeat in Vietnam, and shocking exposés on CIA programs spying on American dissidents at home, assassinating foreign leaders overseas, and running bizarre behavior modification drug experiments—the country’s mood had swung sharply leftward, anti-authority, and especially anti-CIA.
Journalists and whistleblowers who uncovered CIA spies and operations were suddenly the new pop culture heroes, while the CIA became Hollywood’s pop culture villains, whose evil needed almost no explanation. Polls showed the percentage of Americans who distrusted government rose from 22 percent in 1964, to 62 percent in 1974. Ratings that the CIA would’ve envied: polls showed the Agency was “highly regarded” by just 14 percent of Americans, and just 7 percent of college students. As the Church and Pike Committee hearings exposed CIA scandal after scandal, liberals in Congress like Ron Dellums and Mo Udall were calling for completely gutting or abolishing the Agency outright.
http://pando.com/2015/02/07/how-the-aclu-ron-paul-and-a-former-eff-director-helped-jail-a-cia-whistleblower/
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