Last night I saw a premiere of the movie Fair Game, the story of how Bush administration officials ruined the CIA career of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, in retaliation for Ambassador Wilson blowing the whistle on the Bush administration's lies about Iraq obtaining yellow cake uranium from Niger - the reason we went to war in Iraq. At the end, Ambassador Wilson urges us, as American citizens, to "stand up and hold our government to account."
I wish everyone could heed Ambassador Wilson's advice, but the reality is, Obama - not Bush - has criminalized whistleblowing.
As Michael Isikoff so poignantly expressed yesterday, the Obama administration's policy dictates that picking the wrong issue to hold the government account for can land you in jail.
Isikoff's recent piece articulates the disturbing disparity - or as Isikoff puts it "double standard" - in the Obama administration's unprecedented criminal prosecution of whistleblowers. Compare, as Isikoff does, the massive disclosures of high-value national security information in Bob Woodward's new book (Obama's Wars) with the relatively minor disclosures of former State Department contractor Steven Kim and lawful disclosures of former National Security Agency (NSA) official Thomas Drake.
Woodward's book includes disclosures such as:
the code names of previously unknown National Security Agency programs, the existence of a clandestine paramilitary army run by the CIA in Afghanistan, and details of a secret Chinese cyberpenetration of Obama and John McCain campaign computers.
Meanwhile, the Obama administration indicted Kim for allegedly disclosing North Korea's nuclear intentions to a FOX News reporter, a disclosure of public interest to be sure, but hardly a ground breaking revelation.
Kim's case was the fourth leak prosecution brought by the Obama administration in recent months. That’s more than the last three administrations combined. And, by some accounts, Kim’s alleged disclosures to Rosen involved information (about how North Korea was planning to respond to a U.N. Security Council resolution by setting off another nuclear test) that was largely unremarkable.
Thomas Drake is facing decades in prison for legally blowing the whistle on a failed and wasteful (multi-billion dollar) NSA spy program that compromised Americans' privacy.
Yet the seemingly more revealing disclosures in Mr. Woodward's book are left alone. Perhaps that's because
In the past, according to John Rizzo, the former general counsel to the CIA, pursuing criminal cases against those who leaked to Woodward for his books has proved especially difficult because many of the "leaks" appear to have been authorized or sanctioned at the highest levels of the government — by officials like the president or the CIA director.
Obama's quest to plug the leaks is only intended to stop those leaks without express or implied government approval or, worse, only a war on whistleblowing disclosures that expose embarrassing or illegal government conduct. However, we are not obligated to to blindly trust the government to pick and choose what national security information leaks warrant a jail sentence. The conspiracy to retaliate against Ambassador Wilson by leaking Valerie Plame's name certainly demonstrates such trust would be disastrously misplaced.
Ambassador Wilson's wise words to "hold the government to account" require us to aggressively question the double standard for "leak" prosecutions. Of course, the answer is not to prosecute all "leaks" but to clearly distinguish between leaking (when Bush officials revealed Plame's name) and whistleblowing (when Thomas Drake went through proper channels to disclose government waste).
To hold the government to account for its misguided policy on criminalizing whistleblowing, please sign the petition to stop the retaliatory prosecution of Thomas Drake and "like" the Save Tom Drake Facebook Page.