Over the weekend, The Listening Post, an Al Jazeera program, aired an episode entirley focused on exploring the Obama administration's attack on intelligence whistleblowers. In the past few years, the administration has charged six intelligence whistleblowers under the Espionage Act, an archaic legislation that was enacted during World War I to catch spies. These six prosecutions are more than all other past administrations combined.

Watch it here.

GAP has spent a lot of time on this issue. It is telling that, despite the implications this has for journalists, there has been a major lack of coverage in the mainstream media. However, the foreign press seems to get it. GAP National Security & Human Rights Director Jesselyn Radack highlighted this in her blog earlier today.

The case of NSA whistleblower and GAP client Thomas Drake was used to exemplify the trumped-up nature of many of these prosecutions. Charges against Drake were dropped shortly before trial last June, when he pled guilty to a misdemeanor and was sentenced only to a year of probation (no fine). That's a far cry from the 35 years the federal government was seeking to put Drake away for.

GAP Executive Director Bea Edwards is also among those interviewed about the current status of whistleblowers in the US. But the second half of the show features an extensive interview with Radack, herself a DOJ whistleblower in the case of "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh. She challenges American media to dig further and address the issue. Radack calls this attack on intelligence whistleblowers the "worst crackdown on public information that we've seen since the McCarthy era."

Hannah Johnson is Communications Associate for the Government Accountability Project, the nation's leading whistleblower protection and advocacy organization.

Now that a bi-partisan group of congressional intelligence committee members has brought Obama's hypocrisy on leaks to the forefront for American mainsteam media (MSM), the contrast between coverage from foreign press and American MSM has never been more stark.

The U.K.'s Guardian ran a lengthy article on the expansion of Executive power and the national security state under Obama. Civil Liberties advocates find themselves publishing abroad rather than in the U.S. The Guardian also ran a must-read opinion piece from the American Civil Liberties Union's (ACLU) Jameel Jaffer and Nate Wessler on the Obama administration's drone propaganda: "First the 'Targeted Killing' Campaign, Then the Targeted Propaganda Campaign:"

Last week's New York Times article serves as a reminder that our public debate about the government's bureaucratized killing program is based almost entirely on the government's own selective, self-serving, and unverifiable representations about it.

This weekend, Al Jazeera English ran a long investigative piece on the whistleblower prosecutions, and the relative lack of coverage in the American MSM. Watch the entire segment here.

After the Justice Department's case against National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Thomas Drake collapsed in spectacular fashion days before trial, Drake's first T.V. appearance was on Russian Television.

In contrast, here in the U.S., it was the blogosphere – NOT the MSM – that focused on the Obama administration's record-breaking number of Espionage Act prosecutions against non-spies, who more often than not are whistleblowers. I called it "criminalization of whistleblowing," but Glenn Greenwald coined the less-wordy moniker "war on whistleblowers." I wrote two years ago that the Obama administration was turning sources and reporters into criminals. And, I received more HR's than ever before when I accused the Obama administration of playing politics with anonymous leaks on national security, an accusation members of Congress on both sides of the aisle have made repeatedly in the past week.

Both the Washington Post and New York Times reported on the House and Senate Intelligence Committees' recent outrage at the volume of "authorized, intentional leaks" of classified sources and methods from the Obama administration.

I have a particular interest in this issue as I represent half-a-dozen whistleblowers either being criminally prosecuted, investigated, or threatened with prosecution for making whistleblowing disclosures exposing government waste, fraud, abuse, mismanagement, illegalities, or a danger to health and public safety.

Both Democrats and Republicans on the Intelligence Committees are rightfully ticked off about the disparate treatment for so-called "leaks," especially considering the Obama administration has prosecuted more whistleblowers under the heavy-handed Espionage Act than all past presidents combined. Using the criminal justice system to target whistleblowers is damaging enough, but doing so while simultaneously "leaking" classified information that provides a political benefit is brazen hypocrisy.

Senator John McCain wrote on the Obama administration's hypocrisy:

“The fact that this administration would aggressively pursue leaks perpetrated by a 22-year-old Army private in the Wikileaks matter and former CIA employees in other leaks cases but apparently sanction leaks made by senior administration officials for political purposes is simply unacceptable,” Sen. McCain said.

The Intelligence Committees promised legislation to stop the flow of leaks:

Citing “the accelerating pace of such disclosures,” the two committees said in a joint statement that they planned to “act immediately” by bolstering legal restrictions and putting new pressure on the Obama administration to stanch the flow of secrets.

U.S. officials tell us that a drone strike has killed al Qaeda's #2 operative - Abu Yahya al-Libi:

One American official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, described Mr. Libi as one of Al Qaeda’s “most experienced and versatile leaders,” and said he had “played a critical role in the group’s planning against the West, providing oversight of the external operations efforts.”

U.S. officials also told us the American cleric Anwar al-Awlaki was a dangerous terrorist, when it turned out he was a propagandist, and not all that influential in the mid-east.

Meanwhile, despite that administration officials claim that civilian deaths are rare and minimal (one official recently said "in the single digits") the think tank New America Foundation estimated that since Obama took office, the number of drone deaths in Pakistan alone totaled between 1,456 and 2,372. Certainly these were not all high-level al-Qaeda operatives.

I can't help but notice the numbers' similarity to some of the casualty numbers from the Pentagon or World Trade Center. Obviously, Americans would no doubt agree with me that -though Obama claims the legal authority to do so - it would morally reprehensible to take down one of the WTC towers with a drone just because an al-Qaeda operative happened to be hiding out in the broom cupboard.  

The question then is: how many innocents is it acceptable to kill to take down one suspected terrorist?

The question is made more stark considering that fuzzy math the Obama administration is using to determine who is a "militant."

. . . Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.