Sam Smith
For more than twenty years I’ve been a
board member of the Fund for Constitutional Government which, among its
activities, has assisted in funding several groups deeply involved in
helping whistleblowers.
So the Edward Snowden story is
anything but a new one to me. In fact, one of the funded groups – the
Government Accountability Project – aided a couple of whistleblowers now
being widely quoted in the Snowden case. Thomas Drake, and Bill Binney
were clients of GAP. And both had worked for the NSA.
As a
whistleblower site
explains it: “In September 2002, three retired NSA employees and a
retired congressional staffer filed a complaint accusing the NSA of
massive fraud, waste and mismanagement. . .Drake did not sign the
complaint because, still working at NSA, he feared retaliation. However,
Drake became a critical material witness, fully cooperating with the
investigation and using proper channels to provide investigators with
thousands of documents – classified and unclassified.”
And,
reports Wikipedia, “In 2010 the government alleged that Drake
'mishandled' documents, one of the few such Espionage Act cases in U.S.
history. Drake's defenders claim that he was instead being persecuted
for challenging the Trailblazer Project. On June 9, 2011, all 10
original charges against him were dropped. Drake rejected several deals
because he refused to "plea bargain with the truth". He eventually pled
to one misdemeanor count for exceeding authorized use of a computer;
Jesselyn Radack of the Government Accountability Project, who helped
represent him, called it an act of ‘civil disobedience.’"
I
remember sadly Drake’s visit to a FCG board meeting, realizing that
this man, who had shown integrity so rare in the capital, was no longer a
senior official of NSA but working at an Apple store.
And the secrets don’t have to be even classified.
Wikipedia
records people like James E Hansen, a top NASA scientist, who got into
trouble as late as 2005 for revealing data that showed 2005 was the
warmest year in a century. “Restrictions were placed on his ability to
speak publicly about climate change research, including a requirement
that public affairs staff review his lectures, papers, and web postings
before releasing them. News media were repeatedly denied interviews with
Hansen by his supervisors, and drafts of his reports are severely
edited before publication”
About the same time Rick
Piltz of the US Climate Change Science Progress obtained documents that
“showed that a White House official with no scientific training was
editing climate change science program reports in an attempt to confuse
and obscure the perceived human impact on global warming. That official,
previously a lead lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute, was
hired by Exxon Mobil mere days after leaving the White House (on the
heels of the story).’
Hansen and Piltz were GAP clients.
Another
group FCG helps fund is the sainted Project on Government Oversight,
which has pursued matters from the profoundly corrupt to correcting a
ridiculously naïve reflection of how the nature of our government has
come to be misunderstood even on Capitol Hill, i.e. explaining to new
staffers why members of Congress don’t have to file Freedom of
Information requests to get information from the executive branch.
And,
“in 2004, POGO filed a lawsuit against then-Attorney General John
Ashcroft for illegally retroactively classifying documents critical of
the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The classification came to light
after Sibel Edmonds, an FBI translator, discovered that intercepted
memos relevant to the September 11 terrorist attacks had been ignored
due to poor translation. POGO ultimately won the lawsuit.”
Then
there was our long time board member, Ernie Fitzgerald who revealed the
$2.3 billion cost overrun of a Pentagon airplane project. Richard Nixon
fired him for that and only after extensive litigation was he restored
to his post, where he didn’t give up, discovering in the 1980s that his
agency was spending $600 a piece on some toilet seats and $400 apiece
for some hammers.
After you listen to this stuff for a
couple of decades something like the Snowden story is not all that
surprising. And you learn that whistleblowers and their protectors are
among the most valuable souls in the capital. Most people, though,
aren’t that fortunate. The Washington establishment and its embedded
media don’t want these stories remembered. And so premeditated amnesia
accomplishes what improper secret classification couldn’t.
Further,
after listening to this stuff of a couple of decades you also realize
that whistleblowers fail to fulfill the fantasies of either their fans
or their attackers. For one thing, there is no college that offers a
course in whistleblowing. All whistleblowers are amateurs and that can
be dangerous, confusing and depressing. Fortunately, the staff at groups
like POGO and GAP not only know how to help on legal, public relations
and political aspects of the problem, they also are good therapists,
which is immensely valuable since telling the truth in Washington is one
of the most dangerous things to do in town.
One
learns from these folks that whistleblowers are ordinary people who find
themselves in an extraordinary situation and – for reasons ranging from
passion for the decent to a simple habit of honesty – react in a way
that gets them on the front page of newspapers and the front row of a
courtroom.
Yet, as
Jack Shafer of Reuters put it:
Leakers
like Snowden, Manning and Ellsberg don’t merely risk being called
narcissists, traitors or mental cases for having liberated state secrets
for public scrutiny. They absolutely guarantee it. In the last two
days, the New York Times’s David Brooks, Politico’s Roger Simon, the
Washington Post‘s Richard Cohen and others have vilified Snowden for
revealing the government’s aggressive spying on its own citizens,
calling him self-indulgent, a loser and a narcissist.
And we forget that:
Secrets
are sacrosanct in Washington until officials find political expediency
in either declassifying them or leaking them selectively. It doesn’t
really matter which modern presidential administration you decide to
scrutinize for this behavior, as all of them are guilty. For instance,
President George W. Bush’s administration declassified or leaked whole
barrels of intelligence, raw and otherwise, to convince the public and
Congress making war on Iraq was a good idea. Bush himself ordered the
release of classified prewar intelligence about Iraq through Vice
President Dick Cheney and Chief of Staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby to New
York Times reporter Judith Miller in July 2003.
Finally, as Christopher Pyle wrote in
Consortium News:
Why
can’t these politicians respect Mr. Snowden for what he is: an ordinary
young man who does not claim to be a hero, but is willing to go to
jail, if necessary, to start a debate over what our bloated intelligence
community and do-nothing Congress are doing to our liberties?
Part
of the answer is that the politicians don’t want to admit that Congress
(and the courts) have failed to exercise adequate oversight over a
giant network of secret agencies and corporations that is wasting
billions of dollars on worthless surveillance and, in the process,
invading the privacy of millions of Americans and endangering the
capacity of reporters, leakers, and crusading members of Congress to
check the secret abuses of secret government.
