Today’s Must Read

A lot of people want to talk to John Kiriakou. After the leader of the team that interrogated senior al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah in 2002 — one of the detainees whose interrogation was secretly recorded — went public, a lot of confusion remained. Did Abu Zubaydah really break after 35 seconds of waterboarding, as Kiriakou said? Or, as the FBI’s Dan Coleman and others have said, did Abu Zubaydah’s interrogation yield the best information through non-coercive techniques? Very few people are sure of the answer. Many want to ask Kiriakou more questions.

Not least of whom: the Justice Department.

Jonathan Landay of McClatchy reports that the CIA has referred Kiriakou’s case to the Justice Department. No, the department isn’t investigating whether Kiriakou’s role in Abu Zubaydah’s interrogation was potentially illegal. That would be an admission that the torture apparatus established after 9/11 is illegal, and you know that Michael Mukasey and Mark Filip can’t make up their minds about that. Rather, the FBI wants to know if Kiriakou criminally disclosed classified information by speaking to ABC News about the interrogation.

What’s more, Kiriakou’s former employer, the CIA — which surely wasn’t happy about seeing Kiriakou confirm on TV that his team waterboarded Abu Zubaydah and then call waterboarding torture — won’t confirm that it dimed him out.

A CIA spokesman declined to comment when asked if the agency had sought a criminal probe of Kiriakou. But the spokesman, George Little, added, “Separate and apart from any specific instance, when the agency has reason to believe there has been a possible violation of the law, such as the unauthorized disclosure of classified information, it has an obligation to refer the matter to the Department of Justice.”

Quoth Kiriakou’s attorney, Mark Zaid — your go-to lawyer if you’re a CIA official in legal jeopardy: “it wouldn’t surprise me and I wouldn’t find it unusual” if the CIA turned around and got Justice to open a criminal investigation into Kiriakou for the disclosure. None dare call it retaliation.

But even if the FBI doesn’t look at whether waterboarding is torture in Kiriakou’s case, the investigation — if it results in court filings — could prove troublesome for the Bush administration in other ways. Lawyers for Guantanamo detainees (Abu Zubaydah has been one since September 2006, when he was moved there from a secret CIA prison) told Landay they could use prospective disclosures to help their clients:

“This could also be helpful in a civil action seeking damages from the abuse in the CIA secret detention program,” said Jonathan Hafetz of the New York University law school’s Brennan Center for Justice.

Zaid isn’t taking this lying down, either. More on that in a minute.