Steve Coll of The New Yorker explains the Obama administration's hypocrisy on suspected so-called "leakers" - who are usually whistleblowers - in straightforward terms without the justifications, accommodations, and rationalizations most other main stream media journalists have afforded the administration.
In a 10-page must-read investigative piece, Coll takes on the Obama administration's war on whistleblowers through the lens of the case against Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) whistleblower (and client of mine) John Kiriakou. The full article requires a subscription, but here are some key sound bites:
...Obama's Justice Department has been usually aggressive in prosecuting government officials for leaking secrets to the press . . . These prosecutions are more remarkable because, apart from jaywalking and pot-smoking, not many crimes in the US are committed more routinely than the disclosing of classified information to journalists by government officials.
Coll highlights a remarkable statistic:
David Pozen, a Columbia University Law professor, recently estimated that fewer than three in a thousand leak cases are prosecuted: he noted that the true rate, if all violations could be counted reliably, is probably "far closer to zero."
Representing whistleblowers at the
Government Accountability Project, I have a particularly unique perspective on the "leak prosecutions," having represented two of the whistleblowers charged under the Espionage Act (National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower
Thomas Drake and John Kiriakou), and other whistleblowers who have faced the threat of an Espionage Act prosecution.
Faced with decades in prison and missing seeing his children grow up, Kiriakou accepted a plea bargain and is currently serving 30 months in prison, while the architects of the torture program, the attorneys who sanctioned torture, and the CIA agents who tortured prisoners are all enjoying the benefits of the Obama administration's "look forward" tack on torture accountability. Coll sees the forest through the trees on Kiriakou's prosecution:
Kiriakou's transgressions seem minor in comparison with the secret, and still unexamined, history of abusive interrogation. The Bush administration established torture as a government policy, yet little is known about how that policy was carried out over year by intelligence officers, government lawyers, and medical doctors. President Obama has declined to look into the history of the C.I.A.'s interrogation program, even by way of a relatively toothless "truth commission" or blue ribbon panel. He has said that he prefers to "look forward," not back.
Prosecutor Neil MacBride protested to Coll that Kiriakou was "clearly not a whistleblower." MacBride may be the Obama administration's hatchet man for leak prosecutions, but he lacks an understanding of whistleblower law.
The government doesn't get to decide who is a whistleblower. In fact, the Justice Department has been a notoriously terrible judge when it comes to correctly identifying whistleblowers: DOJ labeled NSA whistleblower Drake an "enemy of the state," and called me a "traitor" and "terrorist sympathizer" when I blew the whistle. One becomes a whistleblower by operation of law when one makes a disclosure evidencing waste, fraud, abuse, mismanagement, dangers to health or public safety, or illegality. Kiriakou disclosed waterboarding - a practice Attorney General Eric Holder agrees is torture - and the Bush administration's torture policy.
This is not the first time MacBride has wrongly smeared Kiriakou. At sentencing, the prosecution alleged that the charges against Kiriakou were the "tip of the iceberg." Coll notes about the ominous-sounding claim: "The prosecutors offered no evidence to back up this assertion." MacBride's assertion is even more baseless considering that the Justice Department abandoned the vast majority of its case against Kiriakou - it dropped all but one of the charges, including all the Espionage Act charges. DOJ couldn't even prove the indictment, much less any other allegations.
MacBride also makes a bizarre point coming from the prosecution:
[Kiriakou] didn't waterboard, nor was he one of the interrogators. He knew about it. Well, I'm sure a lot of people know about it.
MacBride is right Kiriakou did not waterboard and was not an interrogator - because Kiriakou refused the CIA's torture training. Apparently an official who did not waterboard is a better target for the Justice Department than torturers. I submit that MacBride's prosecutorial talents might be better allocated by targeting the CIA agents who
were the interrogators torturing prisoners and who
did waterboard, rather than on Kiriakou, who helped expose torture. Moreover, the fact that - as MacBride so flippantly retorts - "a lot of people know about it" - and, yet Kiriakou was the first current or former CIA official to confirm waterboarding only reiterates why Kiriakou should have been the last person on the Obama administration's list of so-called "leakers" to prosecute.
As Coll's article reveals, if the Kiriakou case reveals any tip to an iceberg, it is the depth of government's willingness to protect and defend torturers.