HUFFINGTON
07.01-08.12
PAUL J. RICHARDS/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
SQUELCHING SECRETS
bigger fish to fry, and they’re still
flapping away.
In the Plame case, Fitzgerald
stopped short of indicting Cheney
and White House adviser Karl
Rove, both of whom had been targets in his investigation — Rove for
repeatedly lying about his role in
leaking Plame’s identity to thenTime magazine reporter Matt Cooper, and Cheney for telling Libby
about Plame, then sending him out
to talk to reporters. (See related
story on Fitzgerald’s Legacy.)
“I think it was a missed opportunity,” said David Gray Adler,
incoming director of the Cecil Andrus Center for Public Policy at
Boise State University. “It was really unfortunate that he did not
pursue Rove and Cheney, because I
think Americans deserved to know
the truth of the entire matter.”
Adler, who writes about the expansion of executive power, said
that in both the Libby and Kiriakou
cases, Fitzgerald fell short of his
obligation to prosecute abuses of
power. “It’s bizarre to me that those
who were involved in waterboarding
have been granted immunity, and
now Kiriakou’s going to be prosecuted for leaking information that
exposed illegal actions,” Adler said.
And while Fitzgerald’s limited
mandate in this investigation was
to expose leaks — not to prosecute
torturers — Adler said the charges
against Kiriakou were misplaced.
“This is overkill,” he said. “And anytime that you go after those people
who are whistleblowers, then you’re
going to send a message, you’re trying to intimidate people from practicing a good and open government.”
‘THE RELUCTANT SPY’
Trained as an analyst and operations office, Kiriakou in March
2002 coordinated the capture in
Pakistan of Abu Zubaydah, at the
time thought to be a major al Qaeda figure. He left the CIA in 2004
and first came to the public’s attention in December 2007, when
he showed up on ABC News.
In addition to calling waterboarding torture, Kiriakou also confirmed what torture opponents had
long suspected: that every decision
leading to the torture of CIA detainees was documented and approved
in cables to and from Washington.
“The cable traffic back and forth
In 2005,
protesters
from
MoveOn.org
march near
the White
House, where
Karl Rove was
attending a
fundraising
event.