President Obama has not covered himself in glory - using the Espionage Act to silence critics twice as many times as all previous administrations combined.
"Change we can believe in" - not sure that's the direction of chnage his supporters thought he was promising.
"Never be outflanked by the Right", acording to President John F Kennedy. President Johnson managed this as he escalated the war of aggression against Vietnam.
President Obama is doing exactly the same. So when his supporters tell the world, and US voters, that A Romney White House would be far worse, it would be worth remembering his record vis a vis the reviled George W. Bush.
Thursday,
Feb 9, 2012 04:05 PM +0000
From Manning to Kiriakou, critics are aggressively
targeted as the White House turns a blind eye to abuses
On
January 23rd, the Obama administration charged
former CIA officer John Kiriakou under the Espionage Act for disclosing classified information
to journalists about the waterboarding of al-Qaida suspects. His is just the
latest prosecution in an unprecedented assault on government whistleblowers and
leakers of every sort.
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
— under the Espionage Act for alleged mishandling of classified information
than all past presidencies combined. (Prior to Obama, there were only three
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, 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
to 10 years in jail for a speech attacking the Espionage Act itself. The Nixon
administration infamously (and unsuccessfully) invoked the
Act 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 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. 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. “Marriages are strained, and spouses’ professional lives
suffer as much as their personal lives. Too often, whistleblowers end up
broken, blacklisted and bankrupted,”
said
the attorney who represents Drake.
In Kiriakou’s case, the CIA found an excuse to
fire
his wife, also employed by the Agency, while she was on maternity leave.
Whistleblower
Bradley
Manning, 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 U.S. 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 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 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
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 Congress about misconduct at the agency. We are waiting to see the
Army’s reaction to whistleblower Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Davis, who
documented
publicly this week that senior leaders of the Department of Defense
intentionally and consistently
misled the American
people and Congress on the conduct and progress of the Afghan War.
And this remains the most partial of lists, when it comes to
recent
examples of non-judicial government retaliation against
whistleblowers.
Government bureaucrats know that this sort of slow-drip intimidation keeps
people in line. It may, in the end, be less about disciplining a troublemaker
than offering visible warning to other employees. They are meant to see what’s
happening and say, “Not me, not my mortgage, not my family!” — and remain
silent. Of course, creative, thoughtful people also see this and simply avoid
government service.
In this way, such a system can become a self-fulfilling mechanism in which
ever more of the “right kind” of people chose government service, while future
“troublemakers” self-select out — a system in which the punishment of leakers
becomes the pre-censorship of potential leakers. At the moment, in fact, the
Obama administration might as well translate the famed aphorism “all that is
necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to remain silent” into Latin
and carve it into the stone walls of the CIA’s headquarters in Langley,
Virginia, or NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, or the main office of the State
Department at Foggy Bottom where I still fight to keep my job.
Silent State
I am told that, in its 223 years of existence, I am the only Foreign Service
Officer ever to have written a critical book about the State Department while
still employed there. “
We
Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi
People“ exposed what State did not want people to know: that they had
wasted enormous amounts of money in Iraq, mostly due to ignorance and a desire
for short-term successes that could be trumpeted back home. For the
crime
of writing this book and maintaining a
blog
that occasionally embarrasses, State Department officials destroyed my career,
even as they confirm my thesis, and their own failure, by
reducing
the Baghdad Embassy to half its size in the face of Iraq’s unraveling.
“The State Department was aware of Mr. Van
Buren’s book long prior to its release,” explains attorney Jesslyn Radack, who
now represents me. “Yet instead of addressing the ample evidence of fraud,
waste and abuse in the book, State targeted the whistleblower. The State
Department’s retaliatory actions are a transparent attempt to intimidate and
silence an employee whose critique of fraudulent, wasteful and mismanaged U.S.
reconstruction efforts in Iraq embarrassed the agency.”
Without allowing any rebuttal or defense, State suspended my security
clearance, claiming my blogging was an example of “poor judgment,” transferred
me from a substantive job into a meaningless telework position, threatened
felony conviction over alleged disclosure of classified information, illegally
banned me from entering the building where I supposedly work, and continues to
try to harass and intimidate me.
My travel vouchers from as far back as the law allows have come under
“routine” re-examination. My Internet activity is the subject of daily reports.
My credit reports have been examined for who knows what. Department friends who
email me on topical issues have been questioned by agents of Diplomatic
Security, the State Department’s internal police. My Freedom of Information Act
request
for documents to help defend myself and force State to explain its actions has
been buried.
Without a security clearance, and with my Diplomatic Passport impounded, I
will never serve overseas again, the lifeblood of being a Foreign Service
Officer (FSO). A career that typically would extend another 10 years will be
cut short in retaliation for my attempt to tell the truth about how taxpayer
money was squandered in Iraq.
All of this has taken place in such a way that I cannot challenge it (except
by writing and speaking about it in public — at additional risk). The State Department
has standard disciplinary procedures that it could have invoked against me, but
those leave room for public challenges and, in some cases, would allow me to
force documents into the open that State would rather not share with you.
Hall Walkers: Ghosts in the Machine
Before “telework” existed as an option that allowed undesirable employees to
be sent home and into a kind of benign house arrest, people like me at State
were called “hall walkers.” They were the ones whom the Department no longer
wanted as employees, but who could not be fired due to lack of evidence. So
they would have their security clearances suspended without recourse, be
removed from their assignments, and yet told that, to get paid, they needed to
be physically present in the main State building eight hours a day.
Since they were not assigned to an office, State was wholly unconcerned
about how they occupied themselves during those long empty days. And though as
a “teleworker” I am not one, the hall walkers are still with us.
The main State building is enormous, with literally miles and miles of
corridors, and the hall walker might wander them, kill time at the library,
have a long lunch, stop in to chat with former colleagues still willing to be
seen in his or her company. Even in the first FSO training course called
A-100, young diplomats are
advised that the most ignominious end to a career is not failing at your job,
but being thrown into the purgatory of hall walking — still on the payroll but
no longer a member of the tribe. Disowned, shunned, exiled in the ancient Greek
tradition.
Hall walking is a far cry from being dragged through a trial or spending two
years in solitary, but it exists on the same continuum. No one at State will
say how many employees still exist in the shadow world of hall walking, but at
least dozens is a reasonable guess.
I am told as well that State Department officials are increasingly moving to
suspend security clearances for acts wholly outside the realm of security, like
blogging they find offensive. One State Department Human Resources employee
confided to me that this has, in fact, become the go-to strategy for winnowing
out unwanted employees in the too-hard-to-fire category, a sad evolution, given
the sorry history of the State Department in the McCarthy era.
Fighting Back
For a government employee being punished extra-legally by an agency ignoring
its own rules, there is still one recourse: the
Office
of the Special Counsel. Created in 1979, it was to be an ombudsman meant to
keep an eye on governmental nastiness and ensure the implementation of the
Whistleblower
Protection Act. Empowered, among other things, to investigate and “make
right” instances of federal retaliation against legitimate whistleblowers, the
office was sidelined through several administrations.
Under George W. Bush, it was
embroiled
in scandal when its head, Special Counsel Scott Bloch, instead purged its
staff of lawyers who disagreed with him and announced that he would not follow
up on cases of discrimination based on sexual orientation. Last summer, Bloch
pleaded
guilty to deleting evidence from his computer while under investigation for
retaliating against his own staff.
At a moment when government extra-legal retaliation against whistleblowers
and leakers is on the rise, call it ironic, but the Office of the Special
Counsel has seen a rebirth under its current head, Obama appointee Carolyn
Lerner. As the Washington Post recently
described
her, Lerner has “gone to the mat and tried to expand the boundaries of the
law’s protections for whistleblowers. She has lifted long-sagging morale at an
agency that, instead of behaving as an independent watchdog, has treaded water
for much of its existence.”
Specifically, Lerner reassignedstaff members to review a backlog of cases
against whistleblowers facing reprisals, including “veterans’ hospital staff
members reporting poor lab procedures [and] air traffic controllers claiming flight-pattern
dangers.” She has enforced a 60-day limit on responses from federal agencies.
The Office seems to have re-embraced its mission. “She’s a pit bull,” saysTom
Devine, legal director of the
Government
Accountability Project, which defends whistleblowers.
There are other signs of resistance in Washington to the urge to cloak the
government in silence. For example, Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA) launchedan
investigation into the Food and Drug Administration’s secret email monitoring
of scientists warning that unsafe medical devices were being approved over
their objections. Whistleblowers, said Grassley, often are treated “
like
skunks at a picnic.”
The Senator demanded that FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg disclose who
authorized the monitoring, how many employees were targeted, and whether the
agency obtained passwords to personal email accounts, allowing communications
on private computers to be intercepted. He also wants to know whether the
agency’s two-year surveillance campaign is still ongoing.
In another recent case, the Office of the Special Counsel formally
asked
the Air Force to
take
harsher disciplinary action against supervisors at the Dover mortuary who had
tried to fire two whistleblowers who raised accusations about the mishandling
of soldiers’ remains.
The Government Accountability Project has filed a complaint on my behalf
with the Office of the Special Counsel demanding that the State Department
cease its retaliatory personnel practices against me. The Department is
particularly vulnerable, given its
drumbeat
of support for the
rights
of bloggers and other dissidents in the Middle East and China. State has
already been forced to readmit me to the building and return my access
badge. I remain an optimist, believing that my complaint will succeed and
that, someday, I will return to work at a State Department where employees can
talk openly about the bad as well as the good.
It Matters
Americans, who elect and pay for their government in Washington, deserve to
know exactly what it does there — and elsewhere around the world — with their
dollars. As in my case in Iraq, such information often is only available if
some insider, shocked or disturbed by what he or she has seen, decides to speak
out, either directly, in front of Congress, or through a journalist.
The Obama administration, which arrived in Washington promoting
“sunshine” in
government, turned out to be committed to silence and the censoring of
less-than-positive news about its workings. While it has pursued no
prosecutions against
CIA
torturers, senior leaders responsible for
Abu Ghraib
or other
war
crimes, or anyone connected with the
illegal
surveillance of American citizens, it has gone after whistleblowers and
leakers with ever increasing fierceness, both in court and inside the halls of
various government agencies.
There is a barely visible but still significant war raging between a
government obsessed with secrecy and whistleblowers seeking to expose waste,
fraud and wrongdoing. Right now, it is a largely one-sided struggle and
the jobs of those of us who are experiencing retaliation are the least of
what’s at stake.
Think of those victims of retaliatory personnel practices and imprisoned
whistleblowers as the canaries in the deep mineshaft of federal Washington,
clear evidence of a government that serves its people poorly and has no
interest in being held accountable for that fact. This administration fears the
noise of democracy, preferring the silence of compliance.
