[net-gold] Secrecy News -- 04/16/12
- From: "David P. Dillard" <jwne@xxxxxxxxxx>
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- Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2012 15:29:22 -0400 (EDT)
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Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2012 13:39:59 -0400
From: Steven Aftergood <saftergood@xxxxxxx>
To: saftergood@xxxxxxx
Subject: Secrecy News -- 04/16/12
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SECRECY NEWS
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from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy Volume 2012, Issue No. 35 April
16, 2012
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Secrecy News Blog:
http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/
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** "TRAITOR," A WHISTLEBLOWER'S TALE
** U.S. ENERGY OVERVIEW, AND MORE FROM CRS
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"TRAITOR," A WHISTLEBLOWER'S TALE
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Jesselyn Radack's memoir "Traitor: The Whistleblower and the American
Taliban" presents the moving story of a young attorney's unexpected
encounter with official misconduct, and the excruciating ordeal that ensued
when she decided to challenge it.
http://books.google.com/books/about/Traitor.html?id=FbGOtgAACAAJ
In 2001, Ms. Radack was a Justice Department attorney and specialist in
legal ethics. In response to an official inquiry, she advised that the
newly captured John Walker Lindh, the so-called "American Taliban," should
not be interrogated without an attorney present -- which he then was anyway.
When Department officials publicly denied having received any such legal
advice, and even destroyed evidence to the contrary, she exposed the
deception.
Ms. Radack was not looking for a fight, but only to do the right thing. For
her trouble, she was forced out of her Justice Department position, put
under criminal investigation, fired from her subsequent job, reported to the
state bar, and put on the "no fly" list.
"Traitor" is the story of a young professional whose career is derailed
because her ethical compass will not let her be silent in the face of
offical dishonesty. It is also the story of a political system that is
seemingly incapable of tolerating honorable dissenting views within the
government workforce.
While a handful of "whistleblowers" become figures of popular acclaim, or
heroes of movies such as The Insider or Erin Brockovich, they are the
exception rather the rule, Ms. Radack writes.
"The media glorifies those who risk everything to expose corruption and
illegal activity and rightly so; these lionized individuals deserve every
ounce of praise they receive. But their happy outcomes are not typical--
for every success story, there are a hundred stories of professional
martyrdom. Mine is one of them."
Ms. Radack eventually found a measure of redemption as an attorney with the
Government Accountability Project where she has turned her own experience to
advantage in promoting whistleblower rights. She was among the most
stalwart and effective defenders of Thomas Drake, the former NSA official
and whistleblower whose dubious prosecution under the Espionage Act ended
with the dismissal of all felony charges against him.
The Bush administration (in which she worked) was hostile to whistleblowers,
according to Ms. Radack, but the Obama administration is even worse.
"The Bush administration harassed whistleblowers unmercifully," she writes.
"But it took the Obama administration to actually prosecute them."
I don't think it is true, however, that the prosecution of Thomas Drake "was
a test case for the Justice Department to try a novel legal theory... that
the Espionage Act could be used to prosecute leakers" (p. 159).
Far from being novel, the use of Espionage Act to prosecute unauthorized
disclosures of classified information predates the Drake case by decades.
At least since the conviction of Samuel L. Morison in the 1980s for
providing classified intelligence imagery to Jane's Defence Weekly -- and
the Supreme Court's refusal to review the case -- this application of the
Espionage Act has been seemingly well established.
And there is some ambiguity about who qualifies for the appellation
"whistleblower." It is a loaded term both because it presumes the pure
intention of the individual challenger, and because it takes for granted the
corruption of his target. These need to be demonstrated, not simply
asserted. It cannot be the case that a strong sense of personal conviction,
untethered from legal or ethical constraints, is enough to entitle anyone to
be called a whistleblower. If that were so, then Jonathan Pollard and other
disreputable figures could claim the title.
Ms. Radack states twice that the Obama Administration has prosecuted leakers
"who more often than not were whistleblowers" (p. 69, 92). This suggests
that she thinks at least some of the six leak defendants to have been
prosecuted by the Administration may not have been whistleblowers. But if
so, she does not specify which ones they were, or why she came to that
conclusion.
I would say that "whistleblowers" are not a separate category of people in
any essential sense. Anyone can act with integrity under some
circumstances. The whistleblowers that we honor are people who act with
integrity under extreme duress and sometimes at great cost. Jesselyn
Radack's memoir is an eloquent account of one such case.
U.S. ENERGY OVERVIEW, AND MORE FROM CRS
Newly updated reports from the Congressional Research Service that Congress
has not made readily available to the public include the following.
Millennium Challenge Corporation, April 12, 2012:
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/RL32427.pdf
The G-20 and International Economic Cooperation: Background and Implications
for Congress, April 12, 2012:
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/R40977.pdf
U.S. Trade Deficit and the Impact of Changing Oil Prices, April 13, 2012:
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RS22204.pdf
Teenage Pregnancy Prevention: Statistics and Programs, April 12, 2012:
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RS20301.pdf
U.S. Energy: Overview and Key Statistics, April 11, 2012:
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R40187.pdf
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_______________________________________________
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Secrecy News is written by Steven Aftergood and published by the Federation
of American Scientists.
The Secrecy News Blog is at:
http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/
To SUBSCRIBE to Secrecy News, go to:
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Support the FAS Project on Government Secrecy with a donation:
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_______________________
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Steven Aftergood
Project on Government Secrecy
Federation of American Scientists
web: www.fas.org/sgp/index.html
email: saftergood@xxxxxxx
voice: (202) 454-4691
twitter: @saftergood
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