White House Keeps Secrets as CIA Agent Goes to Prison

When he receives an expected sentence of 30 months in federal prison later this week, John Kiriakou will pay the price for a catastrophic error in judgment. But he shouldn’t suffer alone: the Barack Obama administration, too, needs to do a little penance if it hopes to live up to the president’s famous promise to “usher in a new era of open government.”

Kiriakou is a former Central Intelligence Agency official who came to public notice in 2007 when he told ABC News that while he believed waterboarding could be an effective interrogation technique, he felt this method was a form of torture and it was critical to “shine some light on what was happening” in CIA interrogations.