I read John Kiriakou’s book and communicated with him a few times. I don’t always agree with him, but I “get” where he’s coming from much of the time. He was also much higher up on the food chain and in CIA and there longer, than Bustamante, who I agree with almost never:
"Two former CIA officers sit at the same table and discover they agree on almost nothing. John Kiriakou opens with the story that sent him to prison: cables coming back from the secret sites where doctors — colleagues grimly nicknamed “Dr. Mengele” — revived Abu Zubaydah so the torture could continue, nurses fainted mid-session, and a senior officer was quietly escorted out of the White House on suspicion of blowing the whistle on the secret prisons. Kiriakou went public instead, and was charged with espionage for naming an agent whose profile was sitting openly on LinkedIn. The charge was dropped, but he did the time anyway, and two of the FBI agents who arrested him later called his attorney to apologize, saying it was a political case and they were ordered to do it.
Andrew Bustamante, who joined the agency after Kiriakou left, takes the other side of nearly every question, and the compilation becomes a genuine debate. They collide over Edward Snowden — “he is a criminal, man,” Bustamante insists, while Kiriakou argues no fair trial is possible — over the NSA whistleblower Tom Drake, who followed every protocol and lost his family, pension, and career anyway, and over whether metadata collection is a tool against terrorists or the scaffolding of a police state. The sharpest moment lands when Bustamante says out loud what most officials never will: the government does not work for us; it exists to continue itself, and it sees Americans as engines of economic development. Kiriakou calls it ideological hogwash — and the argument only escalates from there."
