On April 3, 2012, the Obama administration indicted intelligence whistleblower John Kiriakou. Kiriakou is the sixth whistleblower that the Obama administration has charged under the Espionage Act for the alleged mishandling of classified information – more than all past administrations combined. In a rare move, the indictment was sealed until today.
Kiriakou is a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) veteran who headed counterterrorism operations in Pakistan after 9/11, organized the team operation that captured suspected al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah, and refused to be trained in torture interrogation tactics. In December 2007, Kiriakou gave an on-camera interview to ABC News in which he disclosed that Zubaydah was "waterboarded" and that "waterboarding" was torture. Kiriakou was one of the first CIA officers to label waterboarding as torture, and his interview helped expose the CIA's torture program as policy, rather than the actions of a few rogue agents. Kiriakou further exposed the CIA's torture program and the CIA's deception about torture even to its own employees in his 2009 book, The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA's War on Terror.
Government Accountability Project (GAP) National Security & Human Rights Director Jesselyn Radack, a Department of Justice (DOJ) whistleblower herself, represented National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Thomas Drake, the first individual indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act for disclosing massive waste, fraud, abuse and illegality at the NSA through proper channels. The DOJ case against Drake fell apart days before the trial was set to begin last summer, in what was widely seen as a bellwether case for future prosecutions, like that of Kiriakou.
"John Kiriakou is the new Thomas Drake," stated Radack, continuing, "And the case against Kiriakou is just as flimsy as the one against Drake. The Obama administration's unprecedented use of the Espionage Act to target whistleblowers sends a chilling message to any national security worker considering blowing the whistle on corruption and wrongdoing. The Espionage Act is an archaic World War I-era law intended to go after spies, not whistleblowers."
Inexplicably, Kiriakou's indictment was sealed until today. Radack noted "There was no flight risk for Kiriakou, who had already been arrested in January, and no reason to keep the indictment under seal, except perhaps to delay press coverage of the Obama administration's latest criminal prosecution of a whistleblower."
Radack added, "It is outrageous that John Kiriakou – the whistleblower – is the only individual to be prosecuted in relation to the Bush administration's torture program. The interrogators who tortured prisoners, the officials who gave the orders, the attorneys who authored the torture memos, and the CIA agents who destroyed the interrogation tapes have not been held professionally accountable, much less charged with crimes. But John Kiriakou is facing decades in prison for helping expose torture. The fact that national security whistleblowers have become the exception to the Obama administration's meme of 'looking forward, not back' at Bush-era crimes sets a dangerous precedent: if you torture a prisoner, you will not be held criminally liable, but if you blow the whistle on torture, you risk criminal prosecution under the Espionage Act."
Members of the media interested in speaking with Radack can contact GAP Communications Director Dylan Blaylock at dylanb@whistleblower.org to schedule an interview.
Dylan Blaylock is the Communications Director of the Government Accountability Project, the nation's leading whistleblower protection and advocacy organization.
Three of my whistleblower clients (Tom Drake, Bill Binney, and J. Kirk Wiebe) warned us a year ago that the NSA was already doing this: collecting and storing massive amounts of private data on innocent Americans with no connection whatsoever to terrorism, or any crime.
Now Attorney General Eric Holder is just making it official, with new guidelines that permit the federal counterterrorism investigators to collect, search and store data about Americans who are not suspected of terrorism, or anything. This is beyond even the "pre-crime" world of the then-fictional movie Minority Report. Now the government is admittedly collecting and storing information on Americans who are not even thinking about committing a crime, and is resorting to the usual fear-mongering to justify it.
The Obama administration is moving to relax restrictions on how counterterrorism analysts may retrieve, store and search information about Americans gathered by government agencies for purposes other than national security threats.
According to the Justice Department, law enforcement and other national security agencies can copy entire databases and sift through the data for suspicious patterns to stop potential terrorist threats. But the Justice Department is operating under one major logical fallacy: investigating innocent people tells you nothing about the guilty.
Meanwhile, the relaxed guidelines – which privacy advocates compare to the Bush-era now-defunct "Total Information Awareness" program – come on the heels of a blockbuster WIRED Magazine cover story by National Security Agency (NSA) expert Jim Bamford, featuring two GAP clients, NSA whistleblowers Bill Binney and J. Kirk Wiebe. Bamford's article sheds light on construction of a massive NSA facility in Utah designed to store a yottabyte of data, or in Bamford's words:
. . . it would be equal to about 500 quintillion (500,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text.
I appeared on Democracy Now! this morning with National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower, fellow Kossack, and my client Thomas Drake discussing the NSA's spying on American citizens, Drake's experience as the fourth person in history prosecuted under the Espionage Act for alleged mishandling of classified information, and Justice Department's using the Espionage Act as back-door of creating an Official Secrets Act to silence media sources and discourage potential whistleblowers.
I have a great respect for Bill Arkin, especially his reporting on Top Secret America. He is known for being a thorough investigator and researcher, hence, my surprise and confusion that someone way too smart for such carelessness makes so many careless errors about a case as widely-reported as that of National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Thomas Drake.
I have to wonder what is going on behind the scenes that Arkin completely misses the widely-reported facts about the Drake case and lashes out at Drake for pointing out what nearly every expert has agreed on and the facts reveal: that the Obama has used the Espionage Act to target so-called "leakers" (who are usually whistleblowers) more times than all past presidents combined.
After the jump are a few of the mistakes Arkin makes in his recent blog, which responds to Thomas Drake's Daily Kos diary posted earlier this week.
(1) Arkin says in response to Drake's claim "That Obama has gone after whistleblowers and leakers more than Bush ever did. . . . . I doubt that this is true but would be interested in being corrected if someone’s got some facts."
Here are some facts. Far from being the statement of Salon or lefty bloggers, every mainstream media outlet has documented that Obama has launched an unprecedented war on whistleblowers, including editorials in the Washington Post (here and here), theNew York Times, the L.A. Times, and the Economist, to name a few.
Ralph Nader, Jennifer Harbury, Drake, Radack, Shetterly, and Jane Mayer at the event.With the recent crackdown on whistleblowers, the stories of GAP National Security & Human Rights Director Jesselyn Radack and National Security Agency whistleblower/GAP client Thomas Drake are all the more potent. Last month, both spoke at Americans Who Tell the Truth: Ethics, Integrity and the Law, a "Founder's Day" event at the American University Washington College of Law. The event featured talks and presentations from notable whistleblowers and activists, with a keynote from Ralph Nader.
As a part of the event, each speaker is represented in portraits by artist Robert Shetterly. All presentations focused on ethics and integrity in the context of fighting for positive social change. The whistleblower panel featured Drake, Radack, and Army Corps of Engineers whistleblower Bunny Greenhouse.
Here are a few photos from the event. A more extensive album can be seen on our Facebook page.
Drake, Radack, and Greenhouse stand beside their portraits, painted by artist Robert Shetterly.
Ralph Nader provided the keynote address at the American University event.
Radack and Shetterly converse with Nader.
Drake and Radack shared their experiences as whistleblowers during a panel presentation.
Hannah Johnson is Communications Associate for the Government Accountability Project, the nation's leading whistleblower protection and advocacy organization.
The New York Timesreports today on White House Press Secretary Jay Carney's dodge ball non-response to ABC's Jake Tapper on the hypocrisy of promoting an aggressive free press abroad while criminally prosecuting a record number of "leakers" a.k.a. sources a.k.a. whistleblowers in the U.S. under the Espionage Act, a World War I era law intended to go after spies, not whistleblowers. (I blogged about the exchange on Friday). The Times notes something important I've been saying all along, but that the MSM has been slow to recognize:
. . . the majority of the recent prosecutions seem to have everything to do with administrative secrecy and very little to do with national security.
In case after case, the Espionage Act has been deployed as a kind of ad hoc Official Secrets Act, which is not a law that has ever found traction in America, a place where the people’s right to know is viewed as superseding the government’s right to hide its business.
Tapper deserves credit for pushing the White House on the glaring hypocrisy of the self-proclaimed "most transparent administration in history" using the Espionage Act to criminally prosecute whistleblowers. The larger implications were not lost on the Times, which specifically referenced the now-failed Espionage Act case against my client, National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblowerThomas Drake:
These kinds of prosecutions can have ripples well beyond the immediate proceedings. Two reporters in Washington who work on national security issues said that the rulings had created a chilly environment between journalists and people who work at the various government agencies.
Journalist Jane Mayer received much-deserved recognition on Monday. Mayer won the prestigious George Polk Award for Magazine Reporting for her New Yorker story on National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Thomas Drake.
The Polk judges called Ms. Mayer’s article “a study in prosecutorial excess that helped lead to all major charges against Drake being dropped.”
Glenn Greenwald was right when he called Mayer's article the "must-read magazine article of the month," and the award confirms that the article is a must-read of 2011. Mayer's brilliant reporting went beyond Drake's personal story.
The author ends her masterful tale with the conclusion that America’s bloated "national-surveillance state" poses a greater threat to civil liberties than ever before.
The recognition for Mayer is particularly meaningful to me personally because Mayer wrote an article nearly a decade ago exonerating me when I blew the whistle in the case of American "Taliban" John Walker Lindh. I felt the whole world was against me until she left a note on my doorstep. Her reporting(and subsequent book The Dark Side) validated my story in the court of public opinion, as she did for Drake. In fact, I have a whole chapter in my new book called "Amazing Jane."
