by Ray McGovern, Consortium News:

Former CIA operations officer Jeffrey Sterling will receive the Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence this Wednesday, joining 17 earlier winners who, like Sterling, demonstrated extraordinary devotion to the truth and the rule of law by having the courage to blow the whistle on government wrongdoing.

Tuesday will mark the fifth anniversary of the eerie beginning of Sterling’s trial for espionage — the kind of trial that might have left even Franz Kafka, author of the classic novel The Trial, stunned in disbelief.

There can be a heavy price exacted for exposing abuse by secretive governments — especially ones that have neutered the press to the point where they are immune to exposure when they take serious liberties with the law. Making this reality plainly obvious, of course, is one of the U.S. government’s primary aims in putting whistleblowers like Sterling in prison — lest others get the idea they can blow the whistle and get away with it.

With his Sam Adams award, Sterling brings to five the number of award recipients imprisoned for exposing government abuse (not counting 2013 Sam Adams laureate, Ed Snowden, who was made stateless and has been marooned in Russia for over six years). Worst still, Julian Assange (2010) and Chelsea Manning (2014) remain in prison, where UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer says they are being tortured.

The Sam Adams Award recipient in 2016, John Kiriakou, having served his own two-year prison term for speaking out against U.S. torture, will be among those welcoming Sterling at Wednesday’s award ceremony. Both were subjected to the tender mercies of Judge Leonie Brinkema— widely known as the “hanging judge” of the gallows-friendly Eastern District of Virginia, where Assange has also been indicted under the same World War I Espionage Act used to convict Sterling.

Not a Miscarriage; an Abortion

Jeffrey Sterling in 2016. (Eleivy, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)

Sterling’s trial has been wrongly called a “miscarriage” of justice. It was not a miscarriage, it was an abortion. I am an eyewitness to it.

Five years ago, with Kafka casting a long shadow, I sat through Sterling’s trial with a handful of colleagues painfully aware of the Queen-of-Hearts kind of “justice” Brinkema was likely to apply. Sadly, she exceeded our expectations — gloomy as they were. As for Sterling, he knew he was innocent. He had followed the rules by going to congressional oversight authorities cleared for classified information in order to expose a covert operation what was not only feckless but also dangerous. Thus, he was confident he would be vindicated — despite the “hanging judge,” the all-white jury, and the draconian Espionage Act.

He knew he was innocent, but these days knowing you are innocent can create a false sense of security as well as self-confidence. Sterling assumed — correctly, it turned out — that the government could come up with no persuasive evidence against him. In these circumstances it would make little sense for him to accept the kind of plea bargain customarily offered in such cases. Clearly, his ultimate trust in our judicial system was misplaced. How could he have known that he could be tried, convicted, and sent to prison with no more evidence than “metadata”; that is, content-less, circumstantial evidence.

The good news is that Sterling’s prison time is now behind him. He and his intrepid wife Holly will be back this week in Washington, however briefly, with friends and admirers who are eager to celebrate the integrity that he and Holly have shown over these past five painful years.

‘Unwanted Spy: The Persecution
of an American Whistleblower’

Kafka. (Wikipedia)

That is the title Sterling gave to the excellent memoir he published last fall. Activist/author David Swanson, who also attended the trial, wrote the first review for Amazon; he titled it “Join the CIA: Travel the World Passing Out Nuclear Blueprints.” (Warning: Before you read Swanson’s typically perceptive comments, you may wish to “have your credit card ready” as you may find it difficult to resist the impulse to order the book.)

Further background on Sterling’s version of The Trial can be found in the blanket, contemporaneous coverage Consortium News gave to it five years ago. Later, (on March 2, 2018) Consortium published what is by far the most trenchant and instructive analysis of the entire codenamed Operation Merlin caper to trap Iran — an article by award winning investigative reporter Gareth Porter entitled “How ‘Operation Merlin’ poisoned U.S. Intelligence on Iran.”

Porter’s piece is far more than just an “inside baseball’ account of some of the personal and structural disasters befalling U.S. intelligence over the past two decades. Rather, it is a well documented indictment of the ambitious clowns running the CIA in those times and their pandering to powerful interests like the Israel Lobby in trying to manufacture the image of an Iranian “mushroom-cloud” — counterpart to the one conjured up to “justify” war on Iraq.

Indeed, it is fairly well known that Israel wanted President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney to “do Iran” first, before attacking Iraq. Bush’s neocon advisers were beating their chests, shouting, “Real men go to Tehran.”

In my view, the miscreant intelligence chiefs, who kowtowed to that braggadocio and tailored “intelligence” to help, are the ones that should have been put in prison — not patriots like Sterling, who tried to expose the foolishness. Porter’s findings with regard to the “poisoning of U.S. intelligence on Iran” have huge implications today. Can we afford to take at face value the “intelligence” served up to justify U.S. hostility to Iran? Porter’s piece is a must read in these days of dramatic confrontation with Teheran.

Risen. (Wikipedia)

Sterling’s trial included elements of farce as well as drama. In an example of both, the CIA released original cables carefully selected to prove that Sterling was guilty of leaking the gory details to Risen of the Iran-targeted Operation Merlin, a CIA plot to use a Russian cutout to pass a flawed design for a nuclear weapon, intended to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program.

The cables were heavily redacted, of course. But, alas, not enough to hide what seems to be an important aspect of the Merlin story — namely, that Iraq, as well as Iran, was in the crosshairs of the Merlin covert action. Unsurprisingly, the media missed this, but Swanson, who attended some of the trial, closely scrutinized one of the cables introduced as evidence and found it to be amateurishly redacted. Inspector Clouseau, himself, could have figured out some of the key words beneath the redaction.

Swanson published his findings under the title: “In Convicting Jeff Sterling, CIA Revealed More Than It Accused Him of Revealing.” Swanson’s piece is revealing.

Only those seeking the truth about Operation Merlin took notice. All it required for Swanson was (1) to care about whether justice, or an abortion of justice, was about to occur, and (2) to apply some rudimentary tradecraft common to detective work and intelligence analysis.

Those with strong stomachs who have not yet read the Operation Merlin chapter in Risen’s State of War, are strongly encouraged to do so. Risen’s chapter will provide readers with a strong flavor for why the pro-active ringleaders of CIA’s well funded covert operations were so upset with the revelations and so obsessed with the notion that additional leaks were likely unless someone — anyone — could be framed, blamed, and imprisoned.

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