Sourced to current and former legal and counterterrorism officials in the United States government, the New York Times published a story on Sunday on the killing of US-born Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who was targeted by a CIA drone without charge or trial on September 30, 2011.

Much of the material in the story from anonymous individuals could be considered sensitive or classified government information. These selective disclosures, which the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) condemned in a statement, functioned as propaganda.

Kiriakou pled guilty to the charge of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act (IIPA) by revealing the name of an undercover officer on October 23 in a federal court in Alexandria, Virginia. He faced the potential of going to jail for more than a decade and did not want to be separated from his wife and five children for that long.

The Obama administration feared they might lose re-election and in the summer of last year began to develop a set of rules for using drones.

Sometimes I’m truly blown away with how a friendly reporter will spin what is clearly something wrong committed by a powerful leader and turn it into some virtue. No recent example is more jaw dropping than this line from a recent New York Times report about Obama’s use of drones written by Jo Becker and Scott Shane.