A commonly recited criticism of whistleblowers is that they need to go through proper channels or else they are not whistleblowers deserving protection. If they don’t go through proper channels, they are arrogant self-serving leakers who appointed themselves as decision-makers for what information should and should not be secret.
This was the criticism levied against former NSA contractor Edward Snowden after it was revealed that he was the one who blew the whistle on secret surveillance programs. Jeffrey Toobin for The New Yorker argued that America’s system “offers legal options to disgruntled government employees and contractors. They can take advantage of federal whistleblower laws; they can bring their complaints to Congress; they can try to protest within the institutions where they work. But Snowden did none of this.”
University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey Stone asserted that Snowden “should have presented his concerns to senior, responsible members of Congress. But the one thing he most certainly should not have done is to decide on the basis of his own ill-informed, arrogant and amateurish judgment that he knows better than everyone else in government how best to serve the national interest.”
On MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports” on June 10, Jeremy Bash, a former chief of staff to secretary of defense Leon Panetta, asserted, “If you have a complaint, you go through this process. You talk to your supervisor. If you don’t trust your supervisor, you go to the inspector general. If you don’t trust the inspector general, you can go to Congress. There are multiple ways to make your concerns heard. Running for China is not one of them.”
Similar statements were made by military prosecutor, Major Ashden Fein, during the trial of Pfc. Bradley Manning, when rebutting his defense’s argument that he was a whistleblower. Fein said Manning did not read every document he provided to WikiLeaks (specifically, all 251,000 diplomatic cables he disclosed). Manning could’ve gone to a “team leader, squad leader, a chaplain or a JAG” with any concerns about what he was seeing. He could have “exercised his rights under the Military Whistleblower Protection Act.”
“He did not reach out to a congressman about abuses he allegedly saw,” Fein added. The prosecutor also seemed to suggest if he had gone up the chain of command and exercised his rights under the Military Whistleblower Protection Act and that went nowhere he would have been able to go to the press as a “last resort.”
One prime example that shows whistleblowers are not protected when they go through proper channels is that of NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake. He, along with other NSA employees, sought to take action against a secret surveillance program that was a private contractor boondoggle rife with waste, fraud, abuse and illegality. Drake and employees went to the Department of Defense inspector general and the inspector general handed their names over to the Justice Department for a leaks investigation.
A major news story by Jonathan Landay of McClatchy features the first public comments from Sabrina De Sousa, a former CIA officer who has revealed details around the kidnapping of radical Islamist cleric Abu Omar in Italy in 2003. She was convicted in absentia for her role in the kidnapping, but she asserts she and others were scapegoated to protect President George W. Bush and other US officials from being held accountable. She also says that “the Senate and House intelligence committees enabled the coverup,” because they failed “to treat her as a whistleblower after she told them of the lack of prosecutable evidence against Nasr and what she called her own mistreatment by the CIA that compelled her to resign in 2009.”
Briefly, Sousa revealed to McClatchy that “former CIA station chief in Rome, Jeffrey Castelli, whom she called the mastermind of the operation, exaggerated Nasr’s terrorist threat to win approval for the rendition and misled his superiors that Italian military intelligence had agreed to the operation.”
“Senior CIA officials, including then-CIA Director George Tenet,” also “approved the operation even though there were doubts about Castelli’s case” that Nasr was not “wanted in Egypt” and he was not on the “US list of top al Qaeda terrorists.”
She also told McClatchy that Condoleezza Rice, who was then the White House national security adviser, “had concerns about the case, especially what Italy would do if the CIA were caught, but she eventually agreed to it and recommended that Bush approve the abduction.”
What happened to De Sousa as she tried to call attention to high-ranking officials’ role in the rendition?
According to Landay’s report, De Sousa “tried for years to report what she said was the baseless case for [Omar's] abduction and her shoddy treatment by the CIA and two administrations.” Pleas and letters were sent but went ignored by “US intelligence leaders, the CIA inspector general’s office, members and staff of the House and Senate intelligence committees, Rice, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Attorney General Eric Holder.”
Furthermore:
She briefly made headlines when she sued the CIA, the State Department and Clinton in 2009 in a bid to secure her diplomatic immunity, but lost. U.S. District Court Judge Beryl A. Howell, however, declared herself troubled by the government’s treatment of De Sousa, which she said sent a “potentially demoralizing” message to U.S. employees serving overseas.
De Sousa wanted to resign from the CIA earlier than she did, but, she said, her attorney persuaded her to wait for Barack Obama to take office because he might be more sympathetic to her case.
“We thought, ‘Hope and change.’ But no hope and change happened,” she said.
Instead of having her efforts validated, she has faced a kind of cold shoulder retaliation:
“My life has been hell,” De Sousa said, explaining that her Italian conviction left her career in ruins, crippled her ability to find a good paying private-sector job and left her liable to arrest abroad. Her resignation, which she submitted after the CIA barred her from visiting her ailing, elderly mother in Goa for Christmas, and then refused to fly her mother to the United States, left her without a pension.
“In addition to losing your pension, you’re blacklisted in Washington,” De Sousa said. “Anyone who has anything to do with the agency will never hire you. I lost my clearances.”
This is not different from Drake, who now works in an Apple store after being pursued by the Justice Department under President Barack Obama with charges of violating the Espionage Act. The case collapsed and he pled guilty to misdemeanor of misusing a government computer, but he can never work a job that requires a security clearance again. He can never work in Washington ever again.
Should De Sousa expect to face a leak investigation or some kind of prosecution for divulging information that is still classified? She said to McClatchy the story needed to make clear she did not have any of the cables with her. “Please put that down,” because the Obama administration has engaged in an unprecedented war on leaks.
She believes “this coverup is so egregious.” It has “ruined the lives” of people, including Abu Omar. But, that is unlikely to persuade Justice Department officials to leave her alone if a demand for an investigation is requested by some official internally. Her public comments do not make the Obama administration or the wider national security state look good.
Depending on what kind of impact this news story has, it may force the administration to revisit an issue they do not wish to pay any attention: renditions and accountability for those responsible for executing such operations.
Finally, when individuals like Drake and Sousa are incapable of holding agencies accountable by going through proper channels, government can expect individuals like Snowden to flee the country and then begin a public act of whistleblowing, which government will be unable to control. The government can expect individuals to simply pull documents and find ways to anonymously provide them to a news organization or leaks organizations like WikiLeaks. They can expect conscientious employees to not even bother spending year after year shouting in the wilderness until they are finally heard and then silenced.
Arguments about “proper channels” presume the people overseeing these “proper channels” will actually be responsive to attempts by employees to expose corruption and abuse. When those officials are compromised and become a part of covering for officials a whistleblower may be attempting to hold accountable, there no longer are “proper channels” to go through. They’re instead are dead ends, barriers and cliffs that create a perilous path for anyone with the courage and persistence to take on forces within government.
Read the full story by Jonathan Landay of McClatchy here.
We have ten years of torture, rape killing of civilians etc on record in the media. When has a higher up ever been investigated much less been tried for giving the order.
Only little people get punished and then only if caught. Now then if you want to expose the higher ups why would anyone expect them to investigate let alone punish themselves now?
After what happened to Bradley Manning no whistle blower is going to stay in America. After Snowden no Whistle blower will stay in the EU.
If these reporters you mention think that going up the chain of command is the way to go lets remember that Bradley and Snowden did not leak to the MainStream Media because they did not trust them.
After Snowden the MSM can expect less scoops.
I would like to read FDL’s take on this story we have so many experts here to answer questions if we get a post on this story.
Sure, whistleblowers, trust the Obama administration to follow the law, when it isn’t ignoring criminal activity by banks, or inflicting cruel and unusual punishment against Bradley Manning, or having Americans executed without due process.
By the way, Obama’s administration is one of the world’s predominant leakers of secrets. No proper channels for them. For instance:
Link
“Report: Obama Administration Apologizes for Another National Security Leak”
Note the “Another” in that title.
Whatever happened to Daniel Morgan Perry? He claimed that he tried to report something to the US Consulate and that he was being rendered back to the US. Was he having a genuine mental break of some sort? Was he being rendered back to the US?
MSM should be now termed MSP. P for propaganda. Great work as usual Kevin.
… noted
… seconded
>>> Thank you KG … liking the seeing and saying you do … stay with it
Hehe
Book Salon up. Join BevW in a mid-year discussion about Book Salons past and future.
… just saw your tweet about J.J.Cale Kevin … thank you for noting this …
I was compelled after having listened to J.J.Cale’s “Crazy Mama” played on Madison.WI radio station 101.5 WIBA -FM “RFM” ( Radio Free Madison ) early 1970′s format to buy J.J.Cale’s “Naturally” album back in 1973 to have “Crazy Mama” to spin on my turntable … I still have that album … J.J.Cale was 74 years old? … I am closing in on age 60 … smoked some potent pot listening to this guy more than a few times… like the Lou Reed song lyrics in “Sweet Jane” put it — “those were different times” … indeed … those were different times …
… RIP J.J.Cale
What troubles me about De Sousa is that I’ve often wondered how strong were her misgivings about the kidnapping in Milan. Did she have any misgivings about extraordinary rendition, in general, in 2003? I do get her point that the “little people” take the fall while the brass at Langley and DC get a free pass and are never investigated or tried for their crimes. Was De Sousa aware in 2003 that extraordinary rendition violated international law, conventions, treaties, and the nations’ laws where the kidnappings took place? Did she go along to get along at the time in order to save her career and her pension? Why was she willing to participate in such reprehensible activities?
I’m wary of accepting the frame that the only justification a whistleblower, especially one trying to protest “Top Secret America”, has for going public is that internal channels have been exhausted, or won’t be responsive, especially when the whistleblower’s purpose is to get information published (as with Manning and Snowden), as opposed to cases (like Drake’s) where the main point was to correct organizational disfunction.
Manning and Snowden possessed vitally important information that they felt rightly belonged to the public; it is inane to demand that their first step should have been to consider how many people inside the secrecy regime they had to tell of their concerns before they were justified in going to the media.
Yes, the prescriptions for staying “in channels” can be factually silly, and should be contested (“Pvt. Manning, why didn’t you just go to your lieutenant about all the killings of Iraqi civilians by the U.S. military that are being kept secret? And if he wouldn’t listen, you could have talked to Congress.”), but the larger point is that we shouldn’t allow established power to impose an administrative, rather than a political, frame on how we view the actions of these courageous and principled dissidents.
Isn’t the whistleblower metaphor that you take a deep breath and blow the whistle as loud as you can, so that everybody pays attention?
I remember one time in particular during the Bush years when the administration wanted to win the news cycle for whatever GWOT horror the Beltway was focused on that day, and so they completely exposed an ongoing British investigation, forcing the Brits to prematurely shut it down and make arrests before they had wanted to.
This was it:
The Bushies’ motivation seemed to be the historically important one of making Joe Lieberman look Tough on Terror in his race against Ned Lamont.
Which is fine with the MSM – they’re in the news-prevention business as opposed to the news-reporting business. The sorry wretched fuckwits that are in charge of news programming within the MSM will have to carve out areas in their respective newsroom just for TMZ and the WWE to staff a bureau. Because once the post-Snowden scoops dry up, they’ll be relying on them to fill hours of air time …
This is writen with incomplete information and may be unfairly harsh. Please feel free to rebut my comment:
Whistleblowers are not created equal. Ms. De Sousa seems to be of the ‘Whistleblower after the fact’ variety. She is justifiable upset with the lack of protection she has received. However, when she was on the inside, her protest activities stayed carefully within the bounds of organizational propriety in the seeming interest of protecting her position and the organization. These protests may be the reason she was left out and unprotected when things fell apart. The fact that Ms. De Sousa is now at risk stems from the fact that her protests were not loud enough. Had she openly condemned the rendition, this would have provided material for the Italian police and she would not have been prosecuted. What she attempts now is futile. The US government has discarded her as unreliable and the Italian government no longer needs her testimony for the case.
Why do ‘Some’ whistleblowers insist on retaining their position within a venal and criminal organization whose activities they feel must be exposed to the public for remediation. Obviously, the whistleblowers are not critical organization personnel, if they were, then they would personally be so immersed in the criminal activities that exposure would implicate themselves.
If people become whistleblowers from a sense of outrage and conscience, they should be protected and pensioned. However, if that conscience is not sufficiently strong to accept the consequence of loosing one’s position, then it is suspect.
In my opinion, there is no way to equate this lady’s actions to those of Bradley Manning or Edward Snowdon.