Condoleezza Rice says she was stunned CIA mission was leaked
by Olog-hai · 9 replies
Associated Press ^ | Jan 15, 2015 8:51 PM EST | Matthew Barakat
Former national security adviser Condoleezza Rice told jurors Thursday she was stunned to learn that a classified mission to thwart Iran’s nuclear weapons ambitions—now at the heart of a criminal leak trial—had been disclosed to a reporter. Rice testified for the prosecution in U.S. District Court at the trial of ex-CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling, 47, of O’Fallon, Missouri, who is charged with illegally disclosing details of the program to New York Times reporter James Risen. Sterling denies leaking any information to Risen. While Rice’s testimony helped establish the importance of the classified program in question, her testimony did not implicate...
Defiant on Witness Stand, Times Reporter Says Little
· by Brad from Tennessee · 5 replies
New York Times ^ | January 5, 2015 | By MATT APUZZO
ALEXANDRIA, Va. — After losing a seven-year legal battle, James Risen, a reporter for The New York Times, reluctantly took the witness stand in federal court here on Monday, but refused to answer any questions that could help the Justice Department identify his confidential sources. Mr. Risen said he would not say anything to help prosecutors bolster their case against Jeffrey A. Sterling, a former C.I.A. officer who is set to go on trial soon on charges of providing classified information to Mr. Risen for his 2006 book, “State of War.” The Justice Department first subpoenaed Mr. Risen to testify...
Lois Lang was tried, convicted and institutionalized under the assumption that she was mad. According to state psychiatrists, she targeted Deak because of random delusions, and her handlers were figments of her cracked imagination. The first judge to hear Lang’s case ruled her unfit for trial and sent her to Kirby Forensic Psychiatric Center. She was sentenced eight years later, in 1993, when a state Supreme Court justice convicted her on two counts of second-degree murder and sent her to the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility upstate, where she remains. Conspiracy was never part of the trial.Arkadi Kuhlmann has long scoffed at the court’s conclusion. Kuhlmann, then 35 and newly in charge of Deak-Perera’s Canadian operations, became CEO after Deak’s death. Like his Deak-Perera colleagues, he understood that many criminal account holders had lost millions when the firm went bankrupt in 1984. Deak’s subsequent murder, he felt, was no coincidence.
“I never believed that the whole thing was random,” said Kuhlmann, in an interview with Salon. Ditto the government inquiry that triggered the collapse preceding Lang’s rampage. “We were the CIA’s paymaster, and that got to be a little bit embarrassing for them,” he said. “Our time had passed and the usefulness of doing things our way had vanished. The world was changing in the '80s; you couldn’t just accept bags of cash. Deak was slow at making those changes. And when you lose your sponsorship, you’re out of the game.”