Fair or unfair?


In October, Mr. Kiriakou plead guilty to one charge of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, when he disclosed to a reporter the name of a former agency operative who had been involved in the Bush administration’s brutal interrogation of detainees. The plea was the first time someone had been successfully prosecuted under the law in 27 years.

Mr. Kiriakou, who had worked as a C.I.A. operative from 1990 to 2004, had played a significant role in some of the C.I.A.'s major achievements after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. In March of 2002, he led a group of agency and Pakistani security officers in a raid that captured Abu Zubaydah, who was suspected of being a high-level facilitator for Al Qaeda.

In 2007, three years after he left the C.I.A., Mr. Kiriakou discussed in an interview on ABC News the suffocation technique that was used in the interrogations known as waterboarding. He said it was torture and should no longer be used by the United States, but he defended the C.I.A. for using it in the effort to prevent attacks.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/26/us...e.html?hp&_r=0