Ex-CIA Official: Obama Pursuing Bush’s Same Policies

Former CIA official John Kiriakou, who blew the whistle on the agency’s torture practices, said that US President Barack Obama has adopted his predecessor George W Bush’s policies.

Kiriakou served as the chief of CIA’s operations in Pakistan after September 11, 2001. Now he is heading to prison, having been sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison for revealing the identity of an agent to a freelance reporter.

“Most people don’t realize this, but President Obama has surrounded himself with the same Intelligence advisors who advised President Bush.,” Kiriakou told the English-language satellite television channel Russia Today in an interview on Saturday.

He said through most of Obama’s first term, the CIA had the same deputy director that Bush had, the same director of operations that Bush had.

“John Brennan, who is President Obama’s new designee to be the CIA director and until a week ago or so, was the deputy national security adviser, was under President Bush the director of the National Counter-Terrorism Center and up to his eyeballs in torture policy,” Kiriakou said. “So even if we changed presidents, there was no real change of Intelligence advisors, at least not on counter-terrorism.”

Voting for Obama, Kiriakou believed that it would bring positive change, but it never came, he told RT. “I never believed I would be going to prison under President Obama. Never.”

Kiriakou’s lawyers and civil rights advocates portrayed the 48-year-old former counter-terrorism officer as a whistle blower who helped expose CIA torture of detainees then held in secret prisons. The CIA and its defenders denied using torture, which is illegal, referring instead to enhanced interrogation techniques.