The Campaign Against Whistle Blowers in DC - Mother Jones
Is it really Whistle Blowing or is it just a Go-Around? - Peggy
https://motherjones.com/print/161646
How telling the truth could leave you unemployed, bankrupt, and even jailed.
By Peter Van Buren | Thu Feb. 9, 2012 12:07 PM PST
This story [1] first appeared on the TomDispatch [2] website.
On January 23rd, the Obama administration charged [3] former CIA officer John Kiriakou under the Espionage Act for disclosing classified information [4] to journalists about the waterboarding of al-Qaeda suspects. His is just the latest prosecution in an unprecedented assault on government whistleblowers and leakers of every sort.
[5]Kiriakou's plight will clearly be but one more battle in a broader war to ensure that government actions and sunshine policies don't go together. By now, there can be little doubt that government retaliation against whistleblowers is not an isolated event, nor even an agency-by-agency practice. The number of cases in play suggests an organized strategy to deprive Americans of knowledge of the more disreputable things that their government does. How it plays out in court and elsewhere will significantly affect our democracy.
Punish the Whistleblowers
The Obama administration has already charged more people—six [6]—under the Espionage Act for alleged mishandling of classified information than all past presidencies combined. (Prior to Obama, there were only three [7] such cases in American history.)
Kiriakou, in particular, is accused of giving information about the CIA's torture programs to reporters two years ago. Like the other five whistleblowers, he has been charged under the draconian World War I-era Espionage Act.
That Act has a sordid history [8], having once been used against the government's political opponents. Targets included labor leaders and radicals like Eugene V. Debs, Bill Haywood, Philip Randolph, Victor Berger, John Reed, Max Eastman, and Emma Goldman. Debs, a union leader and socialist candidate for the presidency, was, in fact, sentenced [8] to 10 years in jail for a speech attacking the Espionage Act itself. The Nixon administration infamously (and unsuccessfully) invoked the Act [9] to bar the New York Times from continuing to publish the classified Pentagon Papers.
Yet, extreme as use of the Espionage Act against government insiders and whistleblowers may be, it's only one part of the Obama administration's attempt to sideline, if not always put away, those it wants to silence. Increasingly, federal agencies or departments intent on punishing a whistleblower are also resorting to extra-legal means. They are, for instance, manipulating personnel rules that cannot be easily challenged and do not require the production of evidence. And sometimes, they are moving beyond traditional notions of "punishment" and simply seeking to destroy the lives of those who dissent.
The well-reported case [10] of Thomas Drake is an example. As an employee, Drake revealed to the press that the National Security Agency (NSA) spent $1.2 billion on a contract for a data collection program called Trailblazer when the work could have been done in-house for $3 million [11]. The NSA's response? Drake's home was raided at gunpoint and the agency forced him out of his job.
"The government convinced themselves I was a bad guy, an enemy of the state, and went after me with everything they had seeking to destroy my life, my livelihood, and my person—the politics of personal destruction, while also engaging in abject, cutthroat character assassination, and complete fabrication and frame up," Drake told Antiwar.com [12]. "Marriages are strained, and spouses' professional lives suffer as much as their personal lives. Too often, whistleblowers end up broken, blacklisted, and bankrupted," said [13] the attorney who represents Drake.
In Kiriakou's case, the CIA found an excuse to fire his wife [14], also employed by the Agency, while she was on maternity leave. Whistleblower Bradley Manning [15], accused of leaking Army and State Department documents to the website WikiLeaks, spent more than a year in the worst of punitive conditions in a US Marine prison and was denied the chance even to appear in court to defend himself until almost two years after his arrest. Former chief military prosecutor at Guantanamo Morris Davis lost his career [16] as a researcher at the Library of Congress for writing a critical op-ed for the Wall Street Journal and a letter to the editor at the Washington Post on double standards at the infamous prison, as did Robert MacClean [17] for blowing the whistle on the Transportation Security Administration.
Four employees of the Air Force Mortuary in Dover, Delaware, attempted to address shortcomings at the facility, which handles the remains of all American service members who die overseas. Retaliation [18] against them included firings, the placing of employees on indefinite administrative leave, and the imposition of five-day suspensions. The story repeats itself in the context of whistleblowers now suing the Food and Drug Administration for electronically spying on them when they tried to alert [19] Congress about misconduct at the agency. We are waiting to see the Army's reaction to whistleblower Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Davis, who documented [20] publicly this week that senior leaders of the Department of Defense intentionally and consistently misled [21] the American people and Congress on the conduct and progress of the Afghan War.
