Next Skirmish in Obama's War on Whistleblowers

I worked as a Legal Advisor at the Justice Department and blew the whistle when my advice not to interrogate “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh without an attorney (and, parenthetically, not to torture him) was ignored and then “disappeared” from the file in contravention of a federal court discovery order. After I blew the whistle, the Justice Department retaliated against me by, among other things, placing me under criminal investigation, referring me to the state bars in which I’m licensed as a lawyer based on a secret report to which I did not have access, and putting me on the “No-Fly” List. (The D.C. Bar charges are still pending 8½ years later.)

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[CIA officer John] Kiriakou is charged with identifying a covert agent, three Espionage Act counts, and making a false statement, for which he faces 50 years in prison. In the government’s own words: “The charges result from an investigation that was triggered by a classified defense filing [by attorneys representing Guantánamo detainees], which contained classified information the defense had not been given through official government channels, and in part, by the discovery . . . of photographs of certain government employees and contractors in the materials of high-value detainees.” In other words, instead of investigating the government’s withholding of exculpatory information from Gitmo detainees’ lawyers, the government investigated how the lawyers obtained the information. And instead of investigating the approximately 70 names and 25 photos of the detainees’ alleged torturers, the government investigated how the prisoners found them out.

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The indictment of John Kiriakou, like that of Tom Drake, is meant to chill whistleblowers and the journalists who report their stories.  [...The] government’s desired message is especially odious because Drake and Kiriakou are the only people to be prosecuted in relation to two of the Bush administration’s biggest scandals—warrantless surveillance and torture. After being put through what a federal judge called “four years of hell,” Drake is out a career, a federal retirement package, and almost a hundred thousand dollars in attorneys’ fees. Kiriakou himself has also spent tens of thousands in attorneys’ fees and is struggling to raise the million dollars his defense is expected to cost.

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Kiriakou’s Indictment fails to mention that Kiriakou served the CIA and the United States at great personal peril – he survived at least one assassination attempt — for almost 15 years and was trusted with the country’s most sensitive secrets and counter-terrorism operations. It also fails to mention that he was the first CIA officer to call waterboarding “torture” and that he revealed that the CIA’s torture program was policy rather than aberrant playtime.  […] National security and intelligence whistleblowers have become the glaring exception to the Obama administration’s mantra of “looking forward, not backward.”  If you committed crimes under the guise of national security and the war on terrorism, you will not be held criminally liable, but if you blow the whistle on crimes, you risk criminal prosecution under the Espionage Act.

  Jesselyn Raddack