I've been blogging here, to mixed reception, about the alarming increase of "leak" investigations and prosecutions under President Obama.
Yesterday, the L.A. Times had a lead editorial on "The Obama Administration's Attacks on the Media."
[T]his administration has pursued a quiet but malicious campaign against the news media and their sources, more aggressively attacking those who ferret out confidential information than even the George W. Bush administration did.
It specifically mentions the cases of James Risen, one of the New York Times reporters who broke the warrantless wiretapping story, and Thomas Drake, a former NSA official indicted for supposedly leaking details of NSA secret surveillance programs to the Baltimore Sun.
Risen and Drake are bookends of a disturbing trend in the "Transparency President": keeping information from the public.
Thomas Drake is the ONLY indictment stemming from the Bush administration's years-long, multi-million dollar "leak investigation" (including 5 prosecutors and 25 agents) into who revealed warrantless wiretapping--a bogus investigation to begin with. The indictment of Drake under the Espionage Act weaves a sordid tale of intrigue about how Drake committed dastardly deeds by leaking classified information to a Baltimore Sun reporter. But Drake never gave classified information to a reporter. Upon a close read of the indictment, he is not charged with "leaking" (there is no such crime) anything at all. Rather, he is charged with retention of classified documents for the purposes of disclosure (there is no such crime).
The L.A. Times nails what this is prosecution is really about:
The [Baltimore Sun] reported extensively on technical problems with an NSA program that Drake was involved with; that reporting embarrassed the government, which indicted the individual it says brought about that embarrassment. That smacks of retaliation, not legitimate protection of sensitive information.
Tom Drake is a whistleblower we would have applauded during the Bush years, but now he is facing 35 years in jail.
In a similar vein, the Obama administration renewed a Bush-era grand jury subpoena that orders New York Times reporter James Risen to testify about sources for his 2006 book, State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration. Really?? The L.A. Times again nails this oddity:
Risen's book is now four years old and details the problems of a bygone presidential administration. What purpose is served by prolonging the case against him?
Going after reporters and sources is unacceptable. Reviving and prosecuting leftover leak cases sends a clear message that if you expose illegality, fraud, waste, or abuse, you will be punished.
Tom Drake--who spent the bulk of his professional career in the military and government service--was upholding the Oath he took four times (twice in the military and twice in the intelligence community) to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. . . Drake should not face prison for taking his Oath more seriously than supposed secrecy agreements, which ballooned under Bush and were used to cloak clearly illegal conduct (secret domestic surveillance) of the exact type that Drake exposed.
ACTION PLEA: Please sign the petition to stop the retaliatory prosecution of Tom Drake. You can also "like" the Save Tom Drake page on Facebook.
Coleen Rowley Supports Tom Drake:
If you "like" me due to my having been a "whistleblower" TIME Person of the Year, you'd have to "like" Tom Drake as well. Sherron Watkins (of Enron), Cynthia Cooper (of Worldcom) and myself were able to grab that last fleeting moment in 2002 (after collapses of these fraudulent corporations and after 9/11 failures) when a mainstream news outlet like TIME Magazine actually celebrated truth-telling.