Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), one of the Senate's longtime whistleblower rights champions, took to YouTube recently to defend whistleblowers and their importance in society. He praised whistleblowers as defenders of the public good, and promised his continued support.
Grassley makes some more important points about whistleblowers, but before we get into that, here’s the video:
Summary: The defense team of Bradley Manning – the soldier accused of giving classified information to WikiLeaks – plans to call several military psychiatrists to the stand to testify that Manning was held in torture-like conditions against their advice. They have requested the medical experts appear at the next pretrial hearing in early October. Manning is currently facing 22 counts, though the defense is trying to have some, if not all, of the charges thrown out. He faces life in prison if convicted.
Summary: In an editorial published Friday, the Washington Post criticized the US classifications system, specifically citing the case of NSA whistleblower and GAP client Thomas Drake. Former classification czar J. William Leonard was supposed to testify on Drake’s behalf, before the case collapsed in June 2011. Recently, Leonard has been speaking out about the “egregious” classifying of many documents, including some in the Drake case. The editorial argues: the more that trivial or embarrassing documents are classified, the less effective it is when actual national security information is classified.
GAP National Security & Human Rights Director Jesselyn Radack blogged on this editorial and the Drake case this morning.
Summary: In a recent speech, the NSA director stated that the agency does not collect files on American citizens. However, NSA whistleblower and GAP client Bill Binney is accusing the director of deception, saying that the agency collects many forms of communications, from emails, Twitter posts, to Internet searches from all Americans.
In its third editorial about the Espionage Act prosecution against National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Thomas Drake, the conservative Washington Post (WaPo) editorial board opines that the Drake case demonstrates how dysfunctional the classification system has become.
Just before the Justice Department's case against Drake collapsed in spectacular fashion days before trial last summer, WaPo ran two editorials critical of the prosecution (here and here).Then, former classification czar under G.W. Bush, J William Leonard, was slated to testify as a defense expert for Drake and called the case the most "deliberate and willful example of government officials improperly classifying a document," he had ever seen.
In the year since the prosecution fell apart, WaPo obtained one of the documents that formed the basis of an Espionage Act charge against Drake, which prompted WaPo to opine again - this time sarcastically - on the flimsy evidence the government used to threaten Drake with spending "the rest of his natural life" behind bars:
A document at the center of the Drake case was a classified e-mail summarizing an agency meeting. The e-mail was titled “What a Wonderful Success.” It is an innocuous, self-congratulatory message to a team for its presentation to the director, Gen. Keith Alexander. Two paragraphs were classified “secret.” Now that the e-mail has been released, everyone can see what was so sensitive. One of the paragraphs included the hush-hush fact — be careful if you finish reading this sentence — that Gen. Alexander left a conference room and greeted people in a lab who had worked to make sure the demonstration was a success.
Last summer, WaPo articulated the chilling effect the Drake case has on potential whistleblowers:
Mr. Drake’s prosecution smacks of overkill and could scare others with legitimate concerns about government programs from coming forward.
Summary: The Office of Special Counsel is on track to receive a record number of whistleblower reports this fiscal year. If this pace keeps up, this would mark a 22 percent increase from fiscal year 2011, which saw a dip in reporting.
Key Quote: Tom Devine, legal director for the Government Accountability Project, a whistleblower advocacy group, said the decrease in fiscal 2011 could be attributed to a lack of leadership in the office, as there was a gap between the resignation of the previous director, the disgraced Scott Bloch, and its current chief, Carolyn Lerner.
“The general opinion in the whistleblower community is that the office was dormant,” Devine said, adding, “I would have predicted a much sharper drop during that particular year.”
Summary: GAP's Food Integrity Campaign reports the latest news regarding biotechnology giant Monsanto, including a lawsuit farmworkers filed against the company for horrible labor and housing conditions. Monsanto has also been linked to a controversial coup in Paraguay that ousted recently elected President Fernando Lugo, who fought against genetically modified crops.
The Daily Telegraph (UK): Why Whistleblowing Is Thankfully Becoming a Risk Worth Taking Summary: Thanks to whistleblower testimonies, the Department of Justice recently fined drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline a record $3 billion for mis-marketing medicine. The whistleblowers themselves received a sizable percentage of the recovery for their significant help, and this column argues that these sorts of financial incentives are finally starting to provide whistleblowers some of the compensation they deserve.
Adding to the leak hysteria in Washington, the Senate Intelligence Committee advanced legislation purportedly to limit "leaks." WaPo reports:
The legislation, which has yet to be considered by the full Senate or House, would require the White House to notify Congress whenever it plans to share classified information with the public and would curb an increasingly common arrangement in which top national security officials take jobs as commentators on cable-television shows.
What Congress completely neglects to address in their apparent frustration that the White House leaks to the press before leaking to Congress, is that whistleblowers who are sources for Congress end up getting burned and monitored by the Executive branch.
If the Senate Intelligence Committee really wanted to stop media leaks and preserve its oversight abilities, it would enact meaningful whistleblower protections so that employees who bring concerns to Congress are adequately protected from retaliation. Such a measure would certainly give Congress more information than a head's up from the White House that the White House is planning to make public information that will no doubt benefit the administration.
UPDATE: For a full summary of the anti-leak measures in the Intelligence Authorization legislation see Steven Aftergood's analysis. Key quote:
And yet there is something incongruous, if not outrageous, about the whole effort by Congress to induce stricter secrecy in the executive branch, which already has every institutional incentive to restrict public disclosure of intelligence information.
National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Thomas Drake testified before two congressional committees and brought his concerns massive waste, fraud, abuse, and illegality at NSA to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, in accordance with the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act. However, that didn't stop the Obama administration from charging him under the Espionage Act and threatening him with spending the rest of his life behind bars. (The case against Drake collapsed under the weight of the truth last summer).
Summary: Ecuador’s Foreign Minister is now saying that the country likely won’t decide on whether to grant WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange political asylum until after the 2012 London Olympics, which will end on August 12. Assange has spent the past month holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, awaiting this decision in an effort to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he is wanted for questioning over sexual assault allegations. Lawyers for Assange also feel it is increasingly likely that the US will try to extradite Assange from Sweden, if the extradition is successful.
Summary: NSA whistleblowers and GAP clients Thomas Drake, William Binney, and J. Kirk Wiebe appeared on Viewpoint with Eliot Spitzer earlier this week to talk about the agency’s domestic spying program, which they say has been intercepting Americans’ various communications without their knowledge. All three are also providing evidence in an Electronic Frontier Foundation lawsuit against the NSA.
Summary: Late last year, whistleblowers sparked an investigation into potential security breaches at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport. Now, whistleblowers are sounding the alarm again, saying that there is “an ongoing security breach involving access to catering carts” that pose a threat to food safety.
Summary: GAP National Security & Human Rights Director Jesselyn Radack talks to RT about former CIA agent John Kiriakou’s case and how the “war on intelligence whistleblowers” is turning into an effort to silence journalists. Some lawmakers are even calling for the act of publishing so-called classified information to be punishable under the Espionage Act.
You can see this video, as well as many of Radack’s other TV appearances, at GAP's National Security & Human RightsPinterest page.
Summary: This week, Cargill recalled nearly 30,000 pounds of ground beef products that may be contaminated with Salmonella. GAP's Food Integrity Campaign explains, recounting the outbreak of Salmonella in Cargill's turkey products last year, and the ongoing "recall overload" that consumers endure.
Summary: A new law in Italy would give illegal migrant workers work or residence permits for blowing the whistle on their employers who exploit illegal workers. However, most migrant workers fear retaliation and losing what little work they already get.
