Obama's War on Whistleblowers: Did You Know...

That the Obama Administration has prosecuted more whistleblowers than all other administrations, combined?

Candidate Obama prided himself on his push for open government and transparency between the government and the people:
But now, more than halfway through his first term, the Obama Administration has largely gone in the opposite direction, prosecuting a record five whistleblowers.

We’re not going to be able to change America unless we challenge this system that isn’t working for us and hasn’t for a long time,” Obama said. “Now I know some will say that we can’t make this change. That the culture of corrosive influence in politics is too sprawling to spotlight. Or that the lobbyists writing our laws represent real Americans.

That’s not how I see it. Because when it comes to what’s wrong with this country, the American people are not the problem. The American people are the answer. The American people want to trust in our government again – we just need a government that will trust in us. And making government accountable to the people isn’t just a cause of this campaign – it’s been a cause of my life for two decades.

Perhaps the most well-known of those leakers is Thomas Drake, the ex-NSA agent who the Obama Administration aggressively prosecuted before reaching a plea deal.

Jane Meyer, a staff writer at the New Yorker, explained,

“There are currently 5 leak prosecutions, including the Drake one," under the Obama administration, Mayer reports, "five leak prosecutions are more leak prosecutions than every other previous administration combined."

According to Meyer,

The case stems from [Drake] having gone to a reporter, finally, in about 2006, after he felt he he'd exhausted all other means and methods of complaining about what he saw as gross legal problems inside the NSA," Mayer explained to The Takeaway. "The problems he was talking about were huge wastes of money -- almost 2 billion spent on a program that resulted in nothing but a bunch of schematic drawings. 

Meyer wrote a fascinating article for the New Yorker about the Drake case. The article reads likes a mystery novel, but gives readers an inside look inside the NSA and the way in which the Obama Administration has prosecuted whistleblowers. It can be accessed here: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/23/110523fa_fact_mayer?currentPage=all

The other prominent case is that of Jim Risen, the New York Times reporter who wrote a series of articles regarding a top-secret NSA program. He ultimately won a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 2006 related to the article.

Glenn Greenwald, a well-known blogger and writer at Salon.com, explained the situation as such:

The Obama DOJ's effort to force New York Times investigative journalist Jim Risen to testify in a whistleblower prosecution and reveal his source is really remarkable and revealing in several ways; it should be receiving much more attention than it is.  On its own, the whistleblower prosecution and accompanying targeting of Risen are pernicious, but more importantly, it underscores the menacing attempt by the Obama administration -- as Risen yesterday pointed out -- to threaten and intimidate whistleblowers, journalists and activists who meaningfully challenge what the government does in secret.

The subpoena to Risen was originally issued but then abandoned by the Bush administration, and then revitalized by Obama lawyers.  It is part of the prosecution of Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA agent whom the DOJ accuses of leaking to Risen the story of a severely botched agency plot -- from 11 years ago -- to infiltrate Iran's nuclear program, a story Risen wrote about six years after the fact in his 2006 best-selling book, State of War.  The DOJ wants to force Risen to testify under oath about whether Sterling was his source.

Greenwald wrote a terrific and well thought-out expose about the James Risen case and Obama’s War on Whistleblowers. The article can be found here: http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/06/23/risen/index.html

Perhaps the most powerful part of Greenwald's article is actually a quote from Risen himself. Risen explains that the Obama Administration's war on whistleblowers "will have a chilling effect on the freedom of the press in the United States."

According to Greenwald,

There are two aspects to Risen's Affidavit which merit particular attention.  First, Risen cites a 2006 ABC News report from Brian Ross and others that claimed the Bush administration was, without warrants, spying on the communications of reporters (including Ross) in order to discover the identity of their sources.  I personally never attached much credence to that story because of how unreliable I find Brian Ross to be, but in his Affidavit, Risen states (under oath) that he "has reason to believe that the story . . . is true" because he "learned from an individual who testified before a grand jury in this District that was examining my reporting about the domestic wiretapping program that the Government had shown this individual copies of telephone records relating to calls made to and from me."

The fact that Bush officials were spying on reporters is extraordinary.  Instead of pursuing Cheneyite vendettas by persecuting whistleblowers who exposed newsworthy ineptitude from long-irrelevant CIA plots, the Obama DOJ ought to be investigating that allegation; that it isn't and wouldn't speaks volumes.

Second, Risen links the Obama administration's pursuit of the Sterling case and of Risen to the current President's broader (and unprecedented) war on whistleblowers and investigative journalism.  He writes:
I believe that the efforts to target me have continued under the Obama Administration, which has been aggressively investigating whistleblowers and reporters in a way that will have a chilling effect on the freedom of the press in the United States. 

I initially created this blog post as a way for people to access both the New Yorker article and the Salon article, but I think it's also important to provide a bit of my own commentary.

The Obama Administration's war on whistleblowers is not only hypocritical, but it also appears that a number of classified programs initiated by the NSA are theoretically illegal and at the very least horribly invasive. While I understand that many of these programs were not started under Obama, the fact that he continued and in some cases advanced them is disheartening. For a candidate who swept into office on the mantra of "open government," this appears to be the purest form of hypocrisy.

When candidate Obama spoke of transparent government, I naively envisioned a world in which government and its citizens peacefully co-existed without the need for invasive and warantless wiretapping programs. I envisioned a country where closed door meetings were a thing of the past and where agencies like the NSA took a stand against spying on its own citizens without any legal basis. But I was wrong. The Obama Administration has done nothing to combat fears that its policies will have a "chilling effect on the freedom of the press in the United States." In fact, it's policies towards the press and towards whistleblowers have only served to reinforce the horrifying and disasterous consequences of censored speech. The idea of a reporter going to prison for not revealing a source is extremely distressing. This administrations seems to have done everything in its power to make that quote a rallying point for all those who believe in protecting an uninhibited freedom of the press.

Something that this debate has taught me: There is no such thing as transparent, open government, and their never will be, regardless of party affiliation.