Submitted by Elaine Magliaro, Guest Blogger
From Change.gov (The Office of the President-Elect Barack Obama):
“Often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government is an existing government employee committed to public integrity and willing to speak out. Such acts of courage and patriotism, which can sometimes save 
lives and often save taxpayer dollars, should be encouraged rather than stifled. We need to empower federal employees as watchdogs of wrongdoing and partners in performance. Barack Obama will strengthen whistleblower laws to protect federal workers who expose waste, fraud, and abuse of authority in government. Obama will ensure that federal agencies expedite the process for reviewing whistleblower claims and whistleblowers have full access to courts and due process.”
Is President Obama following through on his promise to protect whistleblowers? It doesn’t appear so. One has only to look at the case of Jeffrey Sterling to see that our President has definitely not been working to strengthen laws that would protect them. Sterling, an alleged whistleblower, was arrested in early January on charges that he leaked national defense information to the media and revealed the identity of a “human asset.”
In his article The DOJ’s creeping war on whistle-blowers (Salon), Glenn Greenwald writes that Obama’s pretty words have given way to the most aggressive crusade to expose, punish and silence “courageous and patriotic” whistleblowers by any President in decades. As the Federation of American Scientists’ Steven Aftergood put it, “They’re going after this at every opportunity and with unmatched vigor.” And last May, The New York Times described how “the Obama administration is proving more aggressive than the Bush administration in seeking to punish unauthorized leaks.”
Let’s step back a little. Last April, the Department of Justice served a subpoena on author James Risen. The DOJ wanted to know the identity of the source for a story about a botched CIA attempt to “trip up” Iran’s nuclear program that was included in Risen’s 2006 book State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration. According to Josh Gerstein (Politco): “The scheme involved using a Russian defector to deliver the faulty blueprints to the Iranians, but the defector blew the CIA’s plot by alerting the Iranians to the flaws — negating the value of the program, and perhaps even advancing Iran’s nuclear ambitions.”
Greenwald says that the subpoena was originally served but then later abandoned by the Bush DOJ. One has to ask why a President who campaigned on a platform of protecting whistleblowers decided to go after a whistleblower when the previous administration decided to drop the case.
The DOJ eventually uncovered the identity of the alleged source for Risen’s story without Risen’s help. It was Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA agent who left the agency in 2002.
Maybe you’d like to know how Sterling’s identity was uncovered. Well, federal investigators targeted author/reporter Risen. They obtained Risen’s “three private credit reports, examined his personal bank records and obtained information about his phone calls and travel…”
Gerstein says the revelation that the government obtained that information about Risen has alarmed First Amendment advocates, particularly in light of Justice Department rules requiring the attorney general to sign off on subpoenas directed to members of the media and on requests for their phone records. And Risen told POLITICO that the disclosures, while not shocking, made him feel “like a target of spying.”
Greenwald says what he finds “particularly indefensible” is how the Obama DOJ is going back into the past to dig up “forgotten episodes.”
This is how Greenwald closes his article:
For a President who insists that we must “Look Forward, Not Backward” — when it comes to investigating war crimes by high-level Bush officials — this anti-whistleblower assault reflects not only an obsession on preserving and bolstering the National Security State’s secrecy regime, but also an intense fixation on the past. And increasingly extremist weapons — now including trolling through reporters’ banking and phone records — are being wielded to achieve it. As Thomas Jefferson warned long ago: “Our first object should therefore be, to leave open to him all the avenues of truth. The most effectual hitherto found, is freedom of the press. It is therefore, the first shut up by those who fear the investigation of their actions.”
Sources
The DOJ’s creeping war on whistle-blowers (Salon)
I wonder if he inhaled…..nah….just caught a down draft from Willies place….
Remember, call the Governor of WI and to Vote for Huckabee… May they all have a charmed life….
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9KC7uhMY9s?rel=0&w=480&h=390%5D
It probably won’t work for me either, Swarthmore mom, but I’ll give it a whirl…
Still won’t embed.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9KC7uhMY9s?rel=0&w=480&h=390%5D
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9KC7uhMY9s&fs=1&hl=en_US%5D
pete,
LOL!
Maybe Huckabee could play dueling guitars with his VP.
President Huckabee
i’ve always wanted to hear “Hail to the Chief” with banjos.
Wow, this is really going on…… I knew why I didn’t vote for him… Now I’ll put emphasis on Huckabee…. Not that he is the best candidate…just more beatable…
say one thing, do the opposite. learned much from republicans he has. ready soon he will be.
From Salon (4/16/2010)
What the whistleblower prosecution says about the Obama DOJ
BY GLENN GREENWALD
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/04/16/prosecutions
Excerpt:
The more I think and read about the Obama DOJ’s prosecution of NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake, the more I think this might actually be one of the worst steps the Obama administration has taken yet, if not the single worst step — and that’s obviously saying a lot. During the Bush years, in the wake of the NSA scandal, I used to write post after post about how warped and dangerous it was that the Bush DOJ was protecting the people who criminally spied on Americans (Bush, Cheney Michael Hayden) while simultaneously threatening to prosecute the whistle-blowers who exposed misconduct. But the Bush DOJ never actually followed through on those menacing threats; no NSA whistle-blowers were indicted during Bush’s term (though several were threatened). It took the election of Barack Obama for that to happen, as his handpicked Assistant Attorney General publicly boasted yesterday of the indictment against Drake.
Aside from the indefensible fact that only crimes committed by high-level Bush officials — but nobody else — enjoy the benefits of Obama’s “Look Forward, Not Backward” decree, think about the interests being served by this prosecution. Most discussions yesterday suggested that Drake’s leaks to The Baltimore Sun’s Sibohan Gorman were about waste and mismanagement in the “Trailblazer” project rather than controversial NSA spying activities, but that’s not entirely accurate.
Just consider this May 18, 2006, article by Gorman, describing how and why the NSA opted for the “Trailblazer” proposal over the privacy-protecting “Thin Thread” program, in the process discarding key privacy protections designed to ensure that the NSA would not eavesdrop on the domestic calls of U.S. citizens (h/t ondelette). In that article — which really should be read to get a sense for the whistle-blowing that is being punished by the DOJ — Gorman described at length how then-NSA head Michael Hayden rejected technologies that could “rapidly separate and encrypt U.S.-related communications to ensure privacy” and “that monitored potential abuse of the records.” As she put it: “Once President Bush gave the go-ahead for the NSA to secretly gather and analyze domestic phone records — an authorization that carried no stipulations about identity protection — agency officials regarded the encryption as an unnecessary step and rejected it.”
It’s not hyperbole to say that Bush’s decision to use the NSA to spy domestically on American citizens was one of the most significant stories of this generation. It was long recognized that turning the NSA inward was one of the greatest dangers to freedom, as Sen. Frank Church warned back in 1975, after he investigated America’s secret surveillance apparatus: “That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide.” It was, of course, the December 16, 2005, New York Times article by Jim Risen and Eric Lichtblau which first disclosed that the Bush NSA was illegally eavesdropping on American citizens inside the U.S., but Gorman’s articles regarding the Trailblazer program — in the time period covered by the indictment, using NSA sources (almost certainly including Drake) — provided crucial details about how and why the Bush NSA dispensed with key safeguards to protect innocent Americans from such invasive domestic surveillance.
And then there’s the massive fraud and waste which Gorman also exposed as a result of Drake’s whistle-blowing. The primary focus of her stories was that the Trailblazer project turned into a massive, billion-dollar “boondoggle” which vastly exceeded its original estimates, sucked up enormous amounts of the post-9/11 intelligence budget explosion, and produced very little of value. But look at the coalition of corporations which was contracted to develop this Trailblazer project, the familiar cast of Surveillance State interests who were the recipients of the “boondoggle” which Gorman and Drake exposed:
Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) today announced a contract award from the National Security Agency to be the provider of the technology demonstration platform phase of the TRAILBLAZER program.
The TDP phase of the TRAILBLAZER program is currently estimated at $280 million and will be performed over a period of 26 months.
The NSA selected the SAIC-led Digital Network Intelligence Enterprise team that includes Northrop Grumman, Booz Allen Hamilton, The Boeing Company, Computer Sciences Corporation and SAIC wholly-owned subsidiary Telcordia Technologies to contribute to the modernization of the NSA’s signals intelligence capabilities.
War Criminals Obama, Holder, G.W. Bush, et al ahould be arrested.
NWO RINO’s John Boehner, Eric Cantor and Darrell Issa (also all War Criminals to be arrested) should step down now. They are selling out our country. We need real leaders to start an investigation into Obama’s eligibility with a committee or subcommittee of the House compelling by subpoena the production of all the available records relevant to Obama’s eligibility.
Some Presidents grow into the job … sadly, Obama hasn’t hit a growth spurt.
As long as the Republican Party insists that only the worst of the worst, amoral, brain-dead candidates can get the nomination Obama, and the Democrats have no need to do the right thing.
Obama is much better than Boy Blunder and his Super Friends – that is obvious. He is also demonstrably better than the other choice in ’08. Sadly, that does not make him a good President; only the best one we are allowed to have at the moment. Maybe someday this fever will pass from the body politic and we can again be proud of a President.
Elaine; yes I realize about Holder. Sometimes a sin of omission is as bad as a sin of commission. He has the power to come down hard on some of these folks. I am astounded that the same US Attorney in Alabama that pushed the questionable prosecution of Governor Siegelman is still on the job. Just think what the political landscape would look like if the US Attorneys around the country went after other corrupt governors and oligarchs with the same zeal.
einobob,
I don’t think that the left can successfully wage a battle for civil liberties when it is involved in an existential fight for the cornerstone of its coalition (unions). Wisconsin gives me hope, too – but if we take our eyes off of the ball there I believe the Kock-suckers will find a way to win. As important as civil liberties are, it’s never worthwhile to lose the war for the sake of a battle… (one may argue that losing civil liberties is also losing the war, but it is a far, far slower path than losing unions).
Otteray,
Holder is Attorney General. I doubt all this would have happened without his approval.
Otteray Scribe,
I, too, often wonder about burrowing – there was certainly an effect when the Bush administration ignored the restrictions on firing Justice Department employees and politicized the agency (and anything else they could get their hands on) to a completely unprecedented degree. The fact that the Justice Department routinely produces action that seems like the wet dream of some Bush administration war criminal… – I mean lawyer – strikes me as evidence that burrowing has had a substantial influence on the Justice Department. Although whether he was complicit in this attack on civil liberties or just unable to stop it, AG Holder (and, to a lesser extent, President Obama) also deserves some of the blame for this travesty.
It’s not Important…
You never know what would make the people take to the streets,Wisconsin gives us all hope.
“I could imagine thousands of people marching on the Capitol to demand fair treatment for people like Mr. Sterling and the author of the Wikileaks dump, but when it requires all of the public’s focus to fight the barbarians at the gate (or the Republicans and their corporate masters) how can we defend against this sort of behind-the-scenes attack on our rights?’
It is an unhappy truth that the public doesn’t have the political will to hold President Obama’s feet to the fire regarding this (nor would, say, defeating him for re-election likely do anything but worsen this situation). In less perilous times I could imagine thousands of people marching on the Capitol to demand fair treatment for people like Mr. Sterling and the author of the Wikileaks dump, but when it requires all of the public’s focus to fight the barbarians at the gate (or the Republicans and their corporate masters) how can we defend against this sort of behind-the-scenes attack on our rights?
One has to wonder how much of this is the President and his staff and how much id due to the Bush cronies who “burrowed in” before the Worst President In History left office. Dislodging those trolls is going to be a major undertaking due to restrictions on firing them outright. I know that Obama wants to be the Great Conciliator, but it ain’t working folks.