CIA contractor: I was fired for criticizing torture on my blog.

Psuedonymous blogger and CIA software contractor “Econo-Girl” wrote a post criticizing interrogation techniques she said amounted to torture — and she says she was soon fired for it. The blog was not publicly accessible, but posted in an intranet of sorts which is only available to intelligence community members with a high level of security clearance, according to Econo-Girl. Here’s the problem post:

Waterboarding is Torture, and Torture is Wrong

Not to mention ineffective. Econo-Girl has serious doubts as to whether European lives were saved. Econo-Girl’s purpose in writing this blog is to start a dialog on the Geneva Convention, since it now applies to the Department of Defense again. Guess it’s not quaint anymore, eh?

Over the next few weeks, Econo-Girl would like to post articles about the Geneva Convention, like its origin and major provisions. Legal analysis is not the magic some would have you believe. If the grunts and paper pushers are knowledgeable, the anti-torture infrastructure will be strengthened.

Here’s what waterboarding is: Wikipedia Link. And here’s what the pseudonymous blogger writes after losing her job:

The above post is a recreation of a post that got me fired from the CIA. It is not exact, but covers the main points as best I remember them. I had a blog called Covert Communications on a kind of classified Internet. I wrote a version of the above post and classified it so that only Americans with clearances could read it. You couldn’t even get to the blog if you had less than a Top Secret and above clearance anyway.

Another purpose of the blog post was to start a dialog on interogation techniques with the people who are asked to do the interogating. It was to be a public education campaign, of sorts. I was going to do the research on my own time and type in the results when I got to work. I never spent more than 15 minutes writing any of my posts.

More here. Image (via Wikipedia): “The Water Torture”–Facsimile of a woodcut in J. Damhoudère’s Praxis Rerum Criminalium in 4to, Antwerp, 1556. (thanks, anonymous)