A CIA whistleblower talks about Obama’s bizarre secrecy obsession — and why Hillary and Bernie won’t talk about it- This isn’t about Apple vs. the FBI — it’s about a “progressive” president with a dismal record on civil liberties
By ANDREW O’HEHIR, Salon
It’s one of the enduring mysteries of Barack Obama’s presidency, as it sinks toward the sunset: How did this suave and intelligent guy, with the cosmopolitan demeanor, the sardonic sense of humor and the instinct for an irresistible photo-op, end up running the most hidden, most clandestine and most secrecy-obsessed administration in American history? And what does the fact that nobody in the 2016 campaign — not Bernie Sanders, not Hillary Clinton, not anybody — ever talks about this mean for the future? The answer to the second question is easy: Nothing good. The answer to the first one might be that those things are unrelated: Personality doesn’t tell us anything about policy, and our superficial judgments about political leaders are often meaningless.
Bill Moyers warned me about this some years ago, when I asked him how he evaluated George W. Bush as a person. He wasn’t much interested in character or personality in politics, he said. Lyndon Johnson had been one of the most difficult people he’d ever known, and Moyers had never liked him, but Johnson was an extraordinarily effective politician. I wasn’t sharp enough to ask the obvious follow-up question, which was whether Johnson’s personal flaws had fed into his disastrous policy errors in Vietnam.
Bill Moyers has forgotten more about politics than I will ever know, but the thing is, Ido perceive a relationship between surface and substance, and I believe we learn something important about people almost right away. George W. Bush was profoundly incurious about the world, and insulated by layers of smarter people and money. Richard Nixon was always a creep. Bill Clinton wanted to make you cry and get your panties off. Ronald Reagan never had any idea what day it was. Barack Obama seems like a smart, funny, cool guy, and maybe he’s too much of all those things for his own good. Maybe we will look back decades from now and perceive the Obama paradox — the baffling relationship between his appealing persona and his abysmal record on surveillance, government secrecy and national security — in a different light. For one thing, whatever they told him between November of 2008 and January of 2009 must have been really scary.
I called up John Kiriakou, a former CIA agent who spent 23 months in federal prison thinking this stuff over, to see if he could help. Kiriakou is one of the nine government leakers or whistleblowers that the Obama White House and/or the Justice Department has sought to prosecute under the Espionage Act, a law passed under Woodrow Wilson during World War I that was meant to target double agents working for foreign governments. (Among the other eight actual or prospective defendants are Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden.) Under all previous presidents, incurious George included, the Espionage Act was used for that purpose exactly three times. If you’re keeping score, that’s nine attempted prosecutions in seven years, versus three in 91 years.
Kiriakou had a whole lot to say, especially about former Attorney General Eric Holder and current CIA director John Brennan, whom he sees as the prime movers behind the administration’s secrets-and-lies agenda — and also as the guys who railroaded him over what he describes as a minor indiscretion. Kiriakou spent 15 years in the CIA, first as an analyst and then as a covert operative. He was involved in the capture of Abu Zubaydah, and apparently knew that the alleged senior al-Qaida operative was waterboarded by CIA interrogators, although he was not directly involved.
Kiriakou’s decision to talk about CIA torture in a 2007 interview ultimately landed him in prison. But it’s an arcane and suggestive tale and, at least officially, his crime had nothing to do with what he said about Zubaydah and waterboarding. Kiriakou revealed the last name of a covert agent — inadvertently and in passing, he says — to an ABC News journalist named Matthew Cole, who said he was planning to write a book but was actually gathering information for defense lawyers working with detainees at Guantánamo Bay. Later, Kiriakou believes, Cole became a government informant. The whole thing would puzzle John le Carré and Immanuel Kant put together.
Even though Kiriakou’s purported offense occurred when George W. Bush was in the White House, it was Obama’s Justice Department that decided to investigate and prosecute him, a three-year process that left him bankrupt, unemployed and more than a million dollars in debt. In the end, he would up spending nearly two years in prison because he mentioned one person’s last name in one email. When it comes to why the Obama administration has repeatedly taken that approach, Kiriakou sounds just about as puzzled as the rest of us.
I laid out my limited understanding of the Obama paradox, pretty much the way I did a few paragraphs ago, and Kiriakou sighed. “If this had not happened to me, I would be looking at the Obama presidency as one of the most successful and most progressive presidencies in my lifetime, on everything from gay rights to the economy,” he said. “His foreign policy has been largely successful, if you don’t necessarily focus on the Middle East. But I just can’t get past these whistleblower prosecutions, most especially my own.
“People ask me all the time if I blame Obama for this, and I tell them I don’t think Obama has any idea who I am,” he went on. Holder and Brennan had the president’s ear, Kiriakou believes, and for reasons of their own they were devoted to punishing all leakers who made the administration look bad. “I still have friends in the White House. I still have friends in the CIA. They tell me that it was John Brennan who was the real impetus behind these prosecutions, when he was assistant national security advisor for counterterrorism. Brennan was obsessed with leaks just like Holder was obsessed with leaks, and it was Brennan who pushed these prosecutions forward.”
What we see now, at the tail end of Obama’s presidency, is the FBI (which is under the authority of the Justice Department and hence the White House) trying to force Apple to hack open the world’s most popular and beloved handheld device, one of whose principal selling points is its unbreakable encryption. Although the president has taken no visible role in the iPhone struggle, it exemplifies what you might call the Obama line: I’m a reasonable guy and this is a special case. Don’t you trust me with your secrets?
