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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsOnce Again, The Administration Vindictively Charges A Whistleblower As Being A Spy
from the scary-stuff dept
This is getting ridiculous. When President Obama was campaigning and even when he first took office, he claimed that it was a priority to support whistleblowing activities. And yet, as President, he has been ridiculously aggressive in pushing vindictive criminal lawsuits against whistleblowers -- often by abusing the Espionage Act. The Espionage Act is supposed to be used against spies. But the Obama Justice Department has used it over and over again against whistleblowers in a purely vindictive manner. In fact, he's used it to bring charges against whistleblowers more often than every other President combined. This strategy turned out to be a disaster in the Thomas Drake case (which was initiated by President Bush, but continued with strong support by President Obama), where the case completely collapsed, once it became clear that the charges were nothing but a vindictive attack on a whistleblower.
Apparently the Obama administration has not learned its lesson. It has now used the Espionage Act to go after a former CIA agent, John Kiriakou, who blew the whistle on the CIA's waterboarding torture regime. This now makes it the sixth Espionage Act prosecution of a whistleblower brought by the Obama administration. All other presidents before him used it a total of 3 times. As the Government Accountability Project notes, the really stunning thing in all of this is that Kiriakou will be the only person prosecuted in relation to the use of waterboarding -- and simply for blowing the whistle on it.
<snip>
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120406/12325418410/once-again-administration-vindictively-charges-whistleblower-as-being-spy.shtml
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KansDem
(28,498 posts)http://www.democracynow.org/seo/2012/4/10/training_terrorists_in_nevada_seymour_hersh
The hypocrisy is mind-boggling...
Response to KansDem (Reply #1)
emulatorloo This message was self-deleted by its author.
OKNancy
(41,832 posts)and revealing another person's classified activities. He also lied to the CIA to get his book published.
Weren't we up in arms when Valerie Plame was outed? Of course they got away with it. Perhaps this
administration doesn't want a repeat of that.
JDPriestly
(57,936 posts)Further, revealing another person's classified activities and lying to get a book published -- are those acts spying? I thought that other laws prohibited them. Why prosecute under the Espionage Act when other laws were intended to permit prosecutions of those specific acts?
This looks like laziness and inappropriate application of the law on the part of the Justice Department.
If these people are believed to have committed crimes, then try them under the laws devised to allow for the prosecution of those crimes. But the Espionage Act? No. It should not be used in this day and age unless we actually are dealing with espionage.
Response to JDPriestly (Reply #3)
emulatorloo This message was self-deleted by its author.
JoePhilly
(27,787 posts)I think I know why. Also ... you forget that Scooter Libby was punished.
Basically, there were at least 3 leakers. Armitage, Rove, and Libby. The use of three leakers is important. Each leaked her name on background, and each claimed that they did not real leak the name, but only confirmed that she worked at the CIA. Each also claimed that they thought the press person who they spoke with already knew she worked for the CIA. So their confirmation was accidental.
Once she was outed, Armitage immediately went back to the investigators and said "I think I might have confirmed her ID not realizing that it was not common knowledge." This inoculates him. You only get prosecuted if you intended to leak the info. By coming forward, and claiming he might have accidentally confirmed her ID, he gets off.
Rove held out longer. I'll come back to him.
Libby said he learned her status from Russert at NBC. This lie was told to prove that the press already knew who she was. You can't out some one who the press already knows is CIA. The thing is, Russert didn't know. Scooter thought that some one had already done a background leak to Russert. Hell, the VP's office had been leaking to Russert for years. So Scooter thinks Russert already knows. But he does not. So now Scooter is caught in a lie.
Back to Rove ... Rove's lawyer and Scooter's lawyers are pals. Rove's lawyer learns that Scooter's situation is a mess. This causes Rove, who has been interviewed multiple times, to request another meeting, at which he "recalls" that he might have also accidentally confirmed her ID, much as Armitage did.
So Scooter gets indicted for lying.
I think the plan here comes from Cheney ... he learned a lot in the Nixon administration during Watergate. Multiple leakers, on background, unsourced ... then let the press do the digging. Blame gets outed, and no one is guilty of leaking her name.
JDPriestly
(57,936 posts)It may have been a well orchestrated plan, but Cheney was directing in my opinion.
Luminous Animal
(27,310 posts)that the CIA objected to.
http://www.salon.com/2012/04/09/journalists_casualties_in_the_war_on_whistleblowers/singleton/
The information that Kiriakou confirmed revealed war crimes, thus his actions deserve whistleblower protections. Plame's outing was pure political payback done to provide cover for war crimes.
railsback
(1,881 posts)It doesn't really matter that the operative's name wasn't made public. What matters is that Kiriakou revealed highly classified information to people he wasn't supposed to. If you were the head of a government and discovered that someone was revealing classified information that had the potential of costing lives, what would you do?
I have no sympathy for Kiriakou, or people like him. Obama really has no choice but to send a very stern message to potential whistleblowers that they better be damn well sure about what they're doing. We have covert operatives all over the world, putting their lives in danger, and those lives can be suddenly snuffed out by some irresponsible turd who gets blinded by either his romantic notions of doing something honorable and/or the lure of money.
Luminous Animal
(27,310 posts)the system was sanctioned from the top down saved lives.
I have no sympathy for torturers. Nada, none zip.
railsback
(1,881 posts)Jeezuz. The man divulged secrets that are a matter of national security - and lives. The whistleblower has no purpose to divulge operative's names who are still in the field. He's an idiot, like Manning, and should pay.
Luminous Animal
(27,310 posts)of national security. Even if that operative is a torturer, we must keep our mouths shut. Pinochet would be proud.
railsback
(1,881 posts)You have no idea who this joker was revealing, or the many other operatives tied to the said operative who had nothing to do with what said operative may have been doing.
Unbelievable.
Luminous Animal
(27,310 posts)that those who had been tortured positively identified.
Unbelievable plus the entire population of the world!
JDPriestly
(57,936 posts)Torture is a crime, and those who torture or authorize torture are criminals.
Since when is the outing of a criminal protected on grounds of national security?
Isn't that how the Russian gulags and the NAZI concentration camps were kept hidden?
EFerrari
(163,986 posts)of officials in the highest levels of our government.
Better Believe It
(18,630 posts)railsback
(1,881 posts)Numerous times. But that's not the point at all. I'd expect more logical due diligence from this community. Let's simplify this: Suppose you divulged your bank account number to a so-called trusted confidant, who has sworn an oath of secrecy to all matters pertaining to you. Later you find out your trusted confidant has shared your account number with other entities, whom you have no knowledge of. You don't know what they'll do with it, if anything, but suddenly all your savings are at risk. What do you do?
Luminous Animal
(27,310 posts)to an illegal regime of torture? Whistleblowers reveal illegal actions, in the case war crimes. That is the nature of whistleblowing.
Egalitarian Thug
(12,448 posts)It's akin to the incessant comparisons of the national budget of the world's largest economy to a household checking account. They can't begin to understand even the most basic principles of the subject, so they have to paint it as something comprehensible to their audience.
railsback
(1,881 posts)That is what the Right does.
JDPriestly
(57,936 posts)Stealing or misappropriating it would be.
Torture is criminal activity.
Because torture is a crime, exposing it is not a crime.
Now I'm feeling like I'm on a Rightwing blog, all this 'in one ear, out the other' overemotional, irrational responses here. Exposing torture isn't the issue here. He's not the first to 'expose' it, nor will he be the last to 'expose' it. Its what he did with classified material - NAMING NAMES OF THE NAMELESS - that is the ISSUE. I seriously can't understand why that's so hard to understand
EFerrari
(163,986 posts)despite your repeated, ad hom, off topic claims.
whatchamacallit
(15,558 posts)are something I imagine you're very familiar with.
JDPriestly
(57,936 posts)at least as far as I'm concerned. I don't have any clue as to who the nameless are. I doubt that many, if any, people do.
Do you understand the absurdity of your capitalizing the NAMING NAMES OF THE NAMELESS. Sounds like something out of a child's fairytale.
It's positively juvenile as is much of the cloak and dagger stuff in the first place. And to make people's lives miserable over it, to prosecute them under a law like the Espionage Act has no place in a country that claims to be a democracy.
TheKentuckian
(25,029 posts)Plame was outed for political blowback not to expose war crimes committed.
When you set up such a playing field then you make accountability impossible.
This lame defense is false equivalence on crack.
uponit7771
(90,359 posts)Luminous Animal
(27,310 posts)Let's let the torturers go unnamed and free while prosecuting those that reveal their activity.
ProSense
(116,464 posts)"Yeah. Those classified activities = torture."
...a second believe that Kiriakou cared about torture.
Why did he wait until 2007 to reveal this information?
Why didn't he make this known prior to 2004 election? Could he have prevented more people from being tortured?
Why didn't he release this information when people were fighting the torture amendment in 2006?
What I see is a person who was out for personal gain.
Whistleblowing on Torture
In December 2007 Kiriakou gave an interview to ABC News[10] where he was described as participating in the capture and questioning of Abu Zubaydah, who is accused of having been an aide to Osama Bin Laden. According to Kiriakou, based on what he had been told by the CIA, it had taken only a single brief instance of waterboarding to extract answers to an interrogator's questions from Abu Zubaydah.
...He was able to withstand the waterboarding for quite some time. And by that I mean probably 30, 35 seconds... and a short time afterwards, in the next day or so, he told his interrogator that Allah had visit him in his cell during the night and told him to cooperate.[11]
Eventually it became known that Abu Zubaydah had in fact been waterboarded at least 83 times,[12] and that little or no useful extra information may have been gained by "harsh methods".[13][14] However, even when Kiriakou was under the mistaken belief from the CIA that Zubayda was waterboarded only once, he acknowledge that even the relatively mild single instance of waterboarding he described constituted a form of torture and expressed reservations about whether the value of the information was worth the damage done to the United States' reputation.
Kiriakou's accounts of Abu Zubaydah's waterboarding, and the relatively mild nature of it, were widely repeated, and paraphrased,[15][16] and he became a regular guest expert on news and public affairs shows, on the topics of interrogation, and counter-terrorism.
On the second to last page of his 2010 memoir entitled The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA's War on Terror[2] Kiriakou acknowledged that he was not present during Abu Zubaydah's interrogations, and had no first-hand knowledge of Abu Zubaydah's waterboardings:
I wasn't there when the interrogation took place; instead, I relied on what I'd heard and read inside the agency at the time. [17][18]
Charged
On Monday, January 23, 2012, Kiriakou was charged with repeatedly disclosing classified information to journalists, including the name of a covert CIA officer and information revealing the role of another CIA employee, Deuce Martinez, in classified activities. [19][20][21] In addition to leaking the names and roles of CIA officers, Kiriakou was alleged to have lied to the CIA to get his book published. [22]
On 5 April, he was indicted. The indictment charges Kiriakou with 1 count of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, 3 counts of violating the Espionage Act, and 1 count of making false statements for allegedly lying to the Publications Review Board of the CIA.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kiriakou#Whistleblowing_on_Torture
Even his limited knowledge would have had a much bigger impact in 2004 and during the 2006 debate on the torture bill.
Luminous Animal
(27,310 posts)who confirmed an illegal war crime torture regime.
bahrbearian
(13,466 posts)saras
(6,670 posts)...at some point it will be so psychopathically bizarre that EVERYONE will admit it, at which point he can quit trying to impress us and move on to something else.
lame54
(35,321 posts)Better Believe It
(18,630 posts)Boy, that's a whole lot of government documents hidden from the public in order to protect us from terrorists, subversives, pinkos and other un-American types. 54 million in just one year!
Do you think the "classification rubber stamp" is being abused just a wee bit in order to protect government functionaries and cover up possible misdeeds?
Noooooo. That would never happen!
From the ACLU Memo:
" The National Archives and Records Administration’s Information Security Oversight Office
(ISOO) released its annual report on the government’s security classification programs today,
revealing useful statistics about how much information the government hid from public view for
national security reasons in 2009.1 The American Civil Liberties Union offers this memo to
highlight the importance of this new data and to call for more significant reform of a bloated
secrecy regime that kills public accountability and cripples our constitutional system of checks
and balances.
Typically ISOO’s annual reports are useful in determining whether the government is classifying
more or less information than in previous years. For 2009, however, ISOO changed the way it
counts classified electronic records – making comparisons to previous years impossible but
providing a clearer picture of the amount of classified information the government actually
produces. The result is startling. Under the new counting system, ISOO determined the
government made over 54 million classification decisions in 2009, which is well more than
double the previous record 23 million decisions ISOO reported for 2008.
Read the full ACLU Memo at:
http://www.aclu.org/files/assets/Inerested_Persons_Memo_re_ISOO_Report_for_FY_2009_and_Derivative_Classification.pdf
ProSense
(116,464 posts)This document basically states that the increase is a result of more accurate counting. President Obama changed the counting method, he had nothing to do with the process of classifiying the documents.
From the snip you posted:
More from the document:
The good news in the ISOO report is that the number of original classification decisions is down considerably, continuing a trend that started in 2005. Original classification decisions are the initial determinations made by original classification authorities (OCA) who are specifically designated by the President or agency heads and trained to judge what information absolutely must be safeguarded to protect national security. Only 183,224 original classification decisions were made in 2009, and a record number of those (67%) assigned declassification dates of ten years or less, which is on the shorter end of the spectrum of possibilities.3 One might think that this downward pressure on original classification decisions, combined with choosing to classify information for shorter periods of time, would lead to shrinking amounts of classified information, but overall classification has gone up precipitously, even before ISOO’s counting methodology changed. The problem lies not with original classifications, but rather with the unregulated growth of derivative classifications.
II. The Problem of Derivative Classification
The vast majority of classification decisions, 99.66% of them in 2009, are made by government employees and contractors who may have had little or no training in classification policy, yet have the authority to wield classification stamps with little oversight and virtually no accountability. Derivative classification, the ISOO report explains, is “the act of incorporating, paraphrasing, restating, or generating in new form information that is already classified and, therefore, not considered new ‘secrets.’”4 For example, when a CIA analyst writes a report that includes information from another document that is already marked secret, or which references a program or operation that an OCA has declared classified, the CIA analyst will “derivatively” mark the new document at the same classification level as the source material. ISOO suggests that derivative classification, therefore, creates no “new secrets.” In theory that might be true, but in practice when derivative classifiers are creating 99.66% of the classified information the government produces each a year they are most certainly creating many “new secrets.”
The problem of derivative classification was highlighted in a 1997 study of government secrecy conducted by the Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy, better known as the Moynihan Commission after its chairman, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. The study revealed the then-startling fact that only 6% of classification actions were taken by trained OCA.5 The Moynihan Commission reported that any of the over 3 million security clearance holders in government and private industry, ranging from entry-level soldiers to government contractors to political appointees, could derivatively classify information.
unionworks
(3,574 posts)