Torture whistleblower John Kiriakou released from prison

CIA torture whistleblower John Kiriakou has been released from prison

(Image credit: Twitter.com/RT)

published 4 February 2015

The only person who has been prosecuted or convicted in connection with the CIA's torture program was one who exposed it, a former CIA employee named John Kiriakou. After a deal in October 2012 in which he pled guilty to violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, he was sentenced to 30 months in prison. And unlike Dick Cheney's chief of staff Scooter Libby, who was convicted of obstruction of justice in connection with the exposure of another undercover operative but got his sentence commuted by President Bush, Kiriakou had to serve his time.

But that was January 2013. Now Kiriakou's prison time is up, and he's out on house arrest for the next 86 days. Before leaving, he penned a final scathing "Letter from Libretto," describing the horrible conditions in prison. From the "semi-literate half-wits" on staff, to the medical unit where "people die with terrifying frequency," to the forced labor: "if you don't, you go to solitary," American prisons are bad places to be. Read the whole thing here, courtesy of FireDogLake's Kevin Gosztola.

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Ryan Cooper is a national correspondent at TheWeek.com. His work has appeared in the Washington Monthly, The New Republic, and the Washington Post.