Intelligence & Military Whistleblowing
Intelligence,
defense whistleblowers remain mired in broken system
BY MARISA
TAYLOR
McClatchy Washington BureauDecember 30, 2014 Updated 6 hours ago
Thomas Drake, a former senior official at the NSA,
cooperated with a Pentagon inspector general inquiry in 2002 into allegations
of waste and mismanagement of an NSA surveillance program known as Trailblazer.
When The New York Times revealed the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping and
electronic surveillance programs in 2005, Drake was caught up in the FBI’s
investigation in to leaked information, despite having no ties to the Times’
reporting. The U.S. Justice Department brought 10 charges against Drake, but
all charges were eventually dropped.T.J. KIRKPATRICK — McClatchy
WASHINGTON — When Ilana Greenstein
blew the whistle on mismanagement at the CIA, she tried to follow all the
proper procedures.
First, she told her
supervisors that she believed the agency had bungled its spying operations in
Baghdad. Then, she wrote a letter to the director of the agency.
But the reaction from
the intelligence agency she trusted was to suspend her clearance and order her
to turn over her personal computers. The CIA then tried to get the Justice
Department to open a criminal investigation of her.
Meanwhile, the agency’s
inspector general, which is supposed to investigate whistleblower retaliation,
never responded to her complaint about the treatment.
Based on her
experience in 2007, Greenstein is not surprised that many CIA employees did
little to raise alarms when the nation’s premier spy agency was torturing
terrorism suspects and detaining them without legal justification. She and
other whistleblowers say the reason is obvious.
“No one can trust the
system,” said Greenstein, now a Washington attorney. “I trusted it and I was
naive.”
Since 9/11, defense
and intelligence whistleblowers such as Greenstein have served as America’s
conscience in the war on terrorism. Their assertions go to the heart of
government waste, misconduct and overreach: defective military equipment,
prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, surveillance of Americans.
Yet the legal system
that was set up to protect these employees has repeatedly failed those with the
highest-profile claims. Many of them say they aren’t thanked but instead are
punished for speaking out.
More than 8,700
defense and intelligence employees and contractors have filed retaliation
claims with the Pentagon inspector general since the 9/11 attacks, with the
number increasing virtually every year, according to a McClatchy analysis.
While President Barack
Obama expanded protections for these whistleblowers, his changes didn’t go far
enough to address the gaping holes in an ineffective and unwieldy bureaucracy for
those who claim retaliation, McClatchy found.
The daunting obstacles
for defense and intelligence whistleblowers in such cases include:
– A battle between
investigators and managers at the Pentagon inspector general’s office over the
handling of reprisal claims, culminating in accusations that findings were
intentionally altered in ways that were detrimental to whistleblowers.
– An entrenched and
pervasive anti-whistleblower attitude, especially when the claims involve
high-level officials or significant or embarrassing wrongdoing.
– Delays that discourage
even the most persistent whistleblower.
‘A Trojan horse’
“Only someone with a martyr complex would submit
themselves to this system,” said Tom Devine, legal director of the Government Accountability Project, an advocacy group
that’s helped whistleblowers since 1977. “We advise intelligence whistleblowers
to stay away from established channels to defend against retaliation. In our
experience they’ve been a Trojan horse, a trap that ends up sucking the
whistleblower into a long-term process that predictably ends up with the
whistleblower as the target.”
Obama rejected such
criticism of the whistleblowing system after National Security Agency
contractor Edward Snowden pointed to the leak prosecution of an NSA
whistleblower as one of the reasons he’d decided to go to the news media about
the spy agency’s collection of Americans’ data.
“I signed an executive
order well before Mr. Snowden leaked this information that provided
whistleblower protection to the intelligence community for the first time,” the
president said after the leaks in June 2013. “So there were other avenues
available for somebody whose conscience was stirred and thought that they
needed to question government actions.”
Officials with inspectors
general’s offices also say they already investigated reprisal complaints before
the expanded protections. Employees, however, often can’t prove they were
retaliated against under the terms outlined in whistleblower laws, they said...
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