OMNI
WHISTLEBLOWERS AND LEAKERS NEWSLETTER, Series 2, #4,
October 3, 2019.
Compiled by Dick Bennett for a Culture of Peace, Justice, and
Ecology
Series 2
#1 May 18, 2015 http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2015/05/whistleblowers-and-leakers-newsletter.html
#2 Aug. 6, 2016 http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2016/08/whistleblowers-and-leakers-newsletter.html
#3 Dec. 13, 2018
https://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2018/12/whistleblower-newsletter-series-2-3.html
CONTENTS: WHISTLEBLOWERS AND
LEAKERS NEWSLETTER, Series 2, #4, October 3, 2019.
Reporting in the Northwest
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Whistleblower, the
Newsletter of Government Accountability Project
Bravehearts
by Mark Hertsgaard
Snowden’s New Book, Permanent
Record
Whistleblowers Thomas Drake and John Kiriakou
Army
Reserve Captain, Brittany Ramos Debarros
Film: War on Whistleblowers:
Free Press and the National Security State
TEXTS
RECENT ARTICLES IN THE NADG.
I can’t compare its reporting of wb and leakers to that of other
newspapers, but it is reporting these heroes of truth and democracy, and very
well it appears at least at this tense moment in time. Here are examples I have gathered recently
(and have in a file) in reverse chronological order.
Julian Barnes, et al. (NYT). “Whistleblower Said to Seek Advice Early.” 10-3-19.
Hoyt Purvis. “Whistle-blower Claims Demand Gutsy Response.” 10-2-19.
Plante. (Tulsa World, Editorial Cartoon). “Save the American Whistleblower.” 10-1-19.
D-G Staff. “Schiff: Panel Will Hear from Whistleblower.” 9-30-19.
D-G Editorial. “Whistleblowing 2019.” 9-29-19.
D-G Staff . (AP, NYT, Bloomberg News, and WP, NADG’s main wire sources). “Ex- Official: Trump’s Call Details Restricted.” 9-29-19.
Gillian Brockell. (WP). “In Deep Throat Mystery, Ephron Knew the Scoop.” 9-29-19.
D-G Staff from Wire Reports. “Official: Whistleblower Filing Thorny.” 9-27-19.
D-G Staff . (AP, NYT, Bloomberg News, and WP, NADG’s main wire sources). “Ex- Official: Trump’s Call Details Restricted.” 9-29-19.
Gillian Brockell. (WP). “In Deep Throat Mystery, Ephron Knew the Scoop.” 9-29-19.
D-G Staff from Wire Reports. “Official: Whistleblower Filing Thorny.” 9-27-19.
I’ll stop here in order to finish
the newsletter sooner rather than later.
If you would like to annotate these
reports to help publicize the important work of whistleblowers and leakers, and
assess the quality of the NADG’s
reporting, please send your conclusions to me for publication. And you might yourself investigate the
quantity and quality of Arkansas’ journalism schools’ teaching of investigative
journalism. You would be celebrating and defending
whistleblowers and leakers, important defenders of truth for a representative
government.
Whistleblower, the Newsletter of Government Accountability Project
(GAP): Because Truth Deserves a Champion.
Winter 2019.
Contents:
“GAP’s Work with DHS Whistleblowers.” Immigration: Prioritizing Care Over
Confinement. Drs. Allen and McPherson.
Louis Clark, GAP ED and CEO. “”2018: A Year of Achievement.”
“Our New Agenda for International
Free Speech Rights.” Through the
Whistleblowing International Network.
“Protecting Freedom of Speech Here
at Home.” Whistleblower Legislation.
“Ten Years of Helping Make Food
Safe.” Food Integrity Campaign.
“Private Contractor Under Scrutiny
in Iraq.” A GAP investigation.
“GAP’s 40 Years of Fighting the
Good Fight.”
“EECC: Environment, Energy, &
Climate Change.” Introducing a New
Program within GAP’s Climate Science and Policy Watch.
New Book Bravehearts by Mark Hertsgaard Features
Numerous Past and Present GAP Clients. Staff, May 31, 2016
An Investigative Tour de Force Revealing A New
Chapter In The Edward Snowden Story And Highlighting The Whistle Blowers Who
Pay With Their Lives to Save Ours
By now, almost everyone knows what Edward
Snowden did: leak secret documents revealing that the US government was
spying on hundreds of millions of people around the world. But if you
want to know why Snowden did it, the way he did it, you need
to know the stories of two other men.
The first is Thomas Drake, who blew the whistle on the very same surveillance
ten years before Snowden did and got crushed. The other is The Third Man,
a former senior Pentagon official who comes forward in this book for the first
time to describe how his superiors repeatedly broke the law to punish Drake—and
unwittingly taught Snowden how to evade their clutches.
When insiders such as The Third Man or Big
Tobacco truth-teller Jeffrey Wigand
blow the whistle on high-level government or corporate lying, lawbreaking, or
other wrongdoing, the public can benefit enormously. Liberty is defended,
deadly products are taken off the market, wars are ended. The
whistle-blowers themselves, however, generally end up ruined when they refuse
to back down in the face of ferocious official retaliation. This moral
stubbornness despite terrible personal cost is the defining DNA of whistle-blowers.
The public owes them more than we know.
In Bravehearts, Mark Hertsgaard tells the gripping, sometimes darkly comic
stories of these unsung heroes. Deeply reported, impassioned but
fair-minded, Bravehearts is for citizens of all nations,
especially students, teachers, activists, and anyone wanting to make a
difference.
PERMANENT RECORD by
Edward Snowden. Metropolitan
Books, 2019.
Hardcover $30.00 Metropolitan
Books Henry Holt and Co. 352 Pages
Edward Snowden,
the man who risked everything to expose the
US government’s system of mass surveillance, reveals for the first time the
story of his life, including how he helped to build that system and what
motivated him to try to bring it down.
In 2013, twenty-nine-year-old Edward Snowden shocked the world when he broke with the American intelligence establishment and revealed that the United States government was secretly pursuing the means to collect every single phone call, text message, and email. The result would be an unprecedented system of mass surveillance with the ability to pry into the private lives of every person on earth. Six years later, Snowden reveals for the very first time how he helped to build this system and why he was moved to expose it.
In 2013, twenty-nine-year-old Edward Snowden shocked the world when he broke with the American intelligence establishment and revealed that the United States government was secretly pursuing the means to collect every single phone call, text message, and email. The result would be an unprecedented system of mass surveillance with the ability to pry into the private lives of every person on earth. Six years later, Snowden reveals for the very first time how he helped to build this system and why he was moved to expose it.
Spanning the bucolic Beltway suburbs
of his childhood and the clandestine CIA and NSA postings of his
adulthood, Permanent Record is the extraordinary account of a
bright young man who grew up online—a man who became a spy, a whistleblower,
and, in exile, the Internet’s conscience. Written with wit, grace, passion, and
an unflinching candor, Permanent Record is a crucial memoir of
our digital age and destined to be a classic.THE AUTHOR
·
twitter
·
Facebook
Edward Snowden
exclusive interview: "I'm not asking for a pass. What I'm asking for is a
fair trial" former NSA contractor says CBS News
The New Yorker
Secrecy News from Federation of
American Scientists
“Traitor,” A
Whistleblower’s Tale, Posted on Apr.16,
2012 in Secrecy by Steven Aftergood
Jesselyn Radack’s
memoir “Traitor: The
Whistleblower and the American Taliban” presents the moving story of a young
attorney’s unexpected encounter with official misconduct, and the excruciating
ordeal that ensued when she decided to challenge it.
In 2001, Ms. Radack was a Justice Department
attorney and specialist in legal ethics. In response to an official
inquiry, she advised that the newly captured John
Walker Lindh, the so-called
“American Taliban,” should not be interrogated without an attorney present —
which he then was anyway. When Department officials publicly denied
having received any such legal advice, and even destroyed evidence to the
contrary, she exposed the deception.
Ms. Radack was not looking for a fight, but
only to do the right thing. For her trouble, she was forced out of her Justice
Department position, put under criminal investigation, fired from her
subsequent job, reported to the state bar, and put on the “no fly” list.
“Traitor” is the story of a young professional
whose career is derailed because her ethical compass will not let her be silent
in the face of officIal dishonesty. It is also the story of a political
system that is seemingly incapable of tolerating honorable dissenting views
within the government workforce.
While a handful of “whistleblowers” become
figures of popular acclaim, or heroes of movies such as The Insider or Erin
Brockovich, they are the exception rather the rule, Ms. Radack writes.
“The media glorifies those who risk everything
to expose corruption and illegal activity and rightly so; these lionized
individuals deserve every ounce of praise they receive. But their happy
outcomes are not typical– for every success story, there are a hundred stories
of professional martyrdom. Mine is one of them.”
Ms. Radack eventually found a measure of
redemption as an attorney with the Government Accountability Project where she has turned her own experience
to advantage in promoting whistleblower rights. She was among the most
stalwart and effective defenders of Thomas Drake, the former NSA official and
whistleblower whose dubious prosecution under the Espionage Act ended with the
dismissal of all felony charges against him.
The Bush administration (in which she worked)
was hostile to whistleblowers, according to Ms. Radack, but the Obama
administration is even worse.
“The Bush administration harassed
whistleblowers unmercifully,” she writes. “But it took the Obama
administration to actually prosecute them.”
I don’t think it is true, however, that the
prosecution of Thomas Drake “was a test case for the Justice Department to try
a novel legal theory… that the Espionage Act could be used to prosecute
leakers” (p. 159).
Far from being novel, the use of Espionage Act
to prosecute unauthorized disclosures of classified information predates the
Drake case by decades. At least since the conviction of Samuel L. Morison
in the 1980s for providing classified intelligence imagery to Jane’s Defence
Weekly — and the Supreme Court’s refusal to review the case — this application
of the Espionage Act has been seemingly well established.
And there is some ambiguity about who
qualifies for the appellation “whistleblower.” It is a loaded term both
because it presumes the pure intention of the individual challenger, and
because it takes for granted the corruption of his target. These need to
be demonstrated, not simply asserted. It cannot be the case that a strong
sense of personal conviction, untethered from legal or ethical constraints, is
enough to entitle anyone to be called a whistleblower. If that were so,
then Jonathan Pollard and other disreputable figures could claim the title.
Ms. Radack states twice that the Obama
Administration has prosecuted leakers “who more often than not were
whistleblowers” (p. 69, 92). This suggests that she thinks at least some
of the six leak defendants to have been prosecuted by the Administration may not
have been whistleblowers. But if so, she does not specify which ones they
were, or why she came to that conclusion.
I would say that “whistleblowers” are not a
separate category of people in any essential sense. Anyone can act with
integrity under some circumstances. The whistleblowers that we honor are
people who act with integrity under extreme duress and sometimes at great
cost. Jesselyn Radack’s memoir is an eloquent account of one such case.
Irony-free zone: Congress
"appreciates" whistleblowers
|
|
10:05 AM (6 hours ago)
|
|
||
|
||||
|
||||
FILM
Sessions’ War on Whistleblowers
|
9:06 AM (19 minutes ago)
|
|
||||
|
||||||
|
||||||
Brittany won't be silenced, do you have her
back?
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||
Dear Dick,
Have you heard about
the brave acts of truth-telling by Army Reserve Captain, Brittany Ramos Debarros? Well the military has heard about it and
they aren't happy. They're currently doing mental gymnastics to try to find a
way to punish Brittany for her damning tweets that simply share facts about US
military operations, with much of the data coming from the government itself.
Brittany has been
doing social justice work and organizing for years but things escalated
when she gave this powerful speech about the harm caused by US militarism and her
chain of command began threatening to have her investigated.
Brittany has refused
to be silenced. On her last regular two-week assignment of training and war
preparation, she set up daily tweets sharing one fact per day about US
militarism. Multiple media outlets have covered Brittany's truth-telling
campaign and since then she has been informed she's formally under
investigation and subject to court martial.
Let Brittany know we
have her back. We need more people like her speaking out against never-ending
war so that the public will realize that supporting war is not supporting the
troops. We all deserve better and with your help we will keep demanding
more.
In Solidarity,
Maggie Martin
Co-Director
About Face: Veterans Against the War
(formerly Iraq Veterans Against the War)
Co-Director
About Face: Veterans Against the War
(formerly Iraq Veterans Against the War)
Put following at end
Contents: Whistleblowers, Series 2, #3, December 13,
2018
Whistleblowers and
Support Organizations
Great Whistleblowers, Google Search
Government Accountability Project (GAP)
National Whistleblower Center (NWC)
Books
Mark Hertsgaard, Bravehearts, google search
Jesselyn Radack, Traitor: The Whistleblower and the
American “Taliban” (John Walker Lindh).
American “Taliban” (John Walker Lindh).
Reporting on
Whistleblowing in the NADG
Contents of Series 2,
#2
END WHISTLEBLOWERS AND LEAKERS NEWSLETTER Series
2, #4
No comments:
Post a Comment