He sucks. First of all nobody is “ex-CIA” and antiimperialist media needs to get that through their heads. He lied about being present at the torture of Abu Zubaydah. He was working at places that “tortured some folks”, just not, you know, his main claim to fame. A good rubric to apply to whistleblowers is do they condemn the organization, disavow its personnel, cut all ties with it, and ultimately is their critique structural, merely careerist, or is it in fact a controlled self-critique by the org. Johncharlie Kirkiakou is kind of a codifying example of the shitty whistleblower, he is always moaning about how the CIA had never tortured anyone before the Bush administration and it was a Great Shame on the good Amerikan people etc, blow it out your ass “John”!!! They wrote manuals on that shit in the 50s. Fuck that guy read about the Office of Strategic Services, its postwar collaboration with Nazis, and the inextricable links between the CIA (emphasis on central), other first world intelligence agencies, fascist orgs, and private banking.