Sterling is set to go to trial in January and faces ten felony accounts for giving classified information about a CIA operation to Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist James Risen.
According to the suit, Sterling told Risen about Operation Merlin, a CIA plan to hand over flawed nuclear weapon blueprints to Iran in 2000. While the charges are not proven, details of Operation Merlin did appear in Risen’s 2006 book, “State of War.”
Risen has himself been a target of federal prosecutors after refusing to testify as to whether Sterling was a key source for his book. In a recent interview, Risen called the president “the greatest enemy to press freedom in a generation.”
But Sterling also tried to go through the kind of proper channels that the Obama administration claims to support. While Sterling’s leak of confidential information to Risen is unproven, Sterling did, in fact, speak to staff members of the Senate Intelligence Committee about concerns he had with the plan.
In a hearing on Monday, Risen refused to answer questions from the prosecution that could reveal his source.
“Sterling’s ordeal comes from a strategy to frighten potential whistleblowers, whether he was the source of this leak or not,” Daniel Ellsberg, who released the infamous Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War, told The Nation. “The aim is to punish troublemakers with harassment, threats, indictments, years in court and likely prison – even if they’ve gone through official channels to register accusations about their superiors and agency.”
Sterling’s upcoming trial also resembles that of John Kiriakou. A former head of CIA counterterrorism activities in Pakistan, Kiriakou is currently serving two and a half years in federal prison for his part in bringing the CIA’s illegal torture programs to light.
Of all the government officials involved in the torture of wrongfully imprisoned detainees, Kiriakou is the only one serving jail time.
With the trial approaching, transparency advocates are circulating a petition that urges the Department of Justice to drop the charges against Sterling. Started by RootsAction.org, the petition already has over 20,000 signatures.
