On Monday, National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Thomas Drake and my Government Accountability Project colleague and Justice Department whistleblower Jesselyn Radack will receive the Sam Adams Award from Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence. Former CIA analyst and activist Ray McGovern explained the award:
Our country's need for courageous whistleblowers is now. That is mostly why Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence (SAAII) publicly honors people who have spoken truth, and suffered the consequences, as Sam Adams, my former analyst colleague at CIA, did on Vietnam.
Unfortunately, as I wrote yesterday, despite recognition from the whistleblowing community (Drake also received the renown Ridenhour Truth Telling Prize in April) and the Justice Department's glaring defeat in the Drake case, the government is refusing to make amends with Drake and his fellow whistleblowers. The Baltimore Sun ran a front-page top-of-the-fold article reporting that Drake and four other whistleblowers filed a lawsuit seeking to recoup property that the government seized in retaliatory raids back in 2007. Drake said the request is simple:
We'd like our stuff back.
After putting Drake through what federal Judge Richard D. Bennett called "four years of hell," and criminally targeting his fellow whistleblowers (retired NSA employees William Binney, J. Kirk Wiebe, and Edward Loomis and former intelligence congressional staffer Diane Roark), the government has now forced them to sue to get their property back. The Sun reported:
The court motion filed by Drake and the four others is brief and cites a federal rule governing property seizures. It says the computers are being held in an FBI storage facility on Beltsville Drive in Calverton. "When asked why they have not returned the property," the court motion says, "the FBI responds that it has been waiting for months for the NSA to provide the FBI with its policy regarding this matter."
Hardly significant national security information, the property the government has refused to return after years (the FBI seized the property in retaliatory raids in 2007) includes, for NSA whistleblower J. Kirk Wiebe,
. . . old photos of his ancestors from Ireland and of his parents from Indiana, along with family recipes for fish chowder from Scotland.
Radack weighed in on the government's refusal to return the whistleblowers' property.
Jesselyn Radack with the Government Accountability [Project], which helped the NSA employees with their whistle-blower claims, said that "either the government needs to give back the computers or cough up a reason for holding on to them. After the spectacular failure of the Drake prosecution, you'd think that the government would be eager to mend fences with the whistle-blowers they so unfairly targeted."
Drake and Radack will receive the Sam Adams Award at a free event this coming Monday, November 21, at 8:10 p.m. at the Ward Circle Bldg, Rm. 2, at American University. The Award has been given in previous years to truth tellers Coleen Rowley of the FBI; Katharine Gun of British Intelligence; Sibel Edmonds of the FBI; Craig Murray, former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan; Sam Provance; former US Army Sgt; Maj. Frank Grevil of Danish Army Intelligence; Larry Wilkerson, Col., US Army (ret.), former chief of staff to Colin Powell at State; and Julian Assange, of WikiLeaks. Scheduled speakers for Monday's ceremony include McGovern, Rowley, Wilkerson, and American University Nuclear Studies Institute professor Peter Kuznick.