Whistleblower Radack Compares Her Bush DOJ Persecution To Obama DOJ NSA Case

[Hissyspit]

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-radack-20100427,0,754088.story

When whistle-blowers suffer

Revealing government misconduct shouldn’t be a crime.

Jesselyn Radack
April 27, 2010

The case of Thomas A. Drake, a former National Security Agency official indicted last week on charges of providing classified information to a Baltimore Sun reporter, is painfully familiar. In 2002, I became the target of a leak investigation stemming from America's first post- 9/11 terrorism prosecution.

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As someone who has been the target of a ruthless leak investigation, I believe, and the Whistleblower Protection Act of 1989 says, that government employees should be protected, not retaliated against, when they disclose conduct evidencing illegality, fraud, waste or abuse.

The worst scandals of the past decade — including government torture and warrantless wiretapping — came to light because of whistle-blowers, derisively labeled "leakers." The bigger the crime, the more likely that the evidence of it was classified, privileged or subject to one of the more than 150 hybrid secrecy categories that ballooned during the George W. Bush years. Although a judge later deemed my e-mails nonclassified, their unclassified status didn't prevent the Justice Department from criminally investigating me, referring me to the state bars in which I'm licensed as a lawyer and putting me on the "no-fly" list.

I submit that Drake, the former NSA official, did not leak. He made valid disclosures revealing the failings of several major NSA programs that use computers to collect and sort electronic intelligence. These mistakes cost billions of dollars. He also described how the agency had rejected a program that would collect communications while protecting Americans' privacy — disclosures eerily similar to those made by Thomas M. Tamm, the former Justice Department lawyer who revealed the NSA's secret surveillance of Americans. Such disclosures are clearly in the public interest. They evidence a violation of law, a gross waste of funds and a patent abuse of authority — the very definition of a protected disclosure under the whistle-blower law.

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For example, Daniel Ellsberg, the patriarch of whistle-blowers in modern times, disclosed the Pentagon Papers, a secret government study of the Vietnam War, to the New York Times. The publication of the papers helped to end the Vietnam War. But Ellsberg was still prosecuted. Tamm revealed an indisputably illegal secret surveillance program, but he has been under criminal investigation since Dec. 30, 2005, a case that remains open. I am still under investigation by the Washington, D.C., bar after nearly seven years, despite the hypocrisy of the Justice Department in declining to prosecute — much less refer to licensing bars — the lawyers who wrote the torture memos related to detainees after 9/11.

In contrast, when I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, unmasked covert CIA operative Valerie Plame, he was not trying to disclose evidence of wrongdoing; in fact, quite the opposite. He put at risk national security and people's lives to undermine a critic. He was trying to punish former Ambassador Joseph Wilson by outing his wife. Libby was leaking, not whistle-blowing. His disclosure to the media had no intrinsic public value whatsoever, and he was rightly prosecuted and convicted.

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