Apr 17 2010

Obama Prosecutes Whistle-Blowers Instead of War-Criminals

From Glenn Greenwald…

 During the Bush years, in the wake of the NSA scandal, I used to write post after post about how warped and dangerous it was that the Bush DOJ was protecting the people who criminally spied on Americans (Bush, Cheney Michael Hayden) while simultaneously threatening to prosecute the whistle-blowers who exposed misconduct.  But the Bush DOJ never actually followed through on those menacing threats; no NSA whistle-blowers were indicted during Bush’s term (though several were threatened).  It took the election of Barack Obama for that to happen, as his handpicked Assistant Attorney General publicly boasted yesterday of the indictment against Thomas Drake.

Think about to whose interests the Obama DOJ is devoted given that — while they protect the most profound Bush crimes based on the Presidential decree of “Look Forward, Not Backward” — they chose this whistle-blower to prosecute (and Drake, incidentally, is apparently impoverished, as he’s been assigned a Public Defender to represent him).  

In the process, of course, the Obama DOJ also intimidates and deters future whistle-blowers from exposing what they know, thus further suffocating one of the very few remaining mechanisms Americans have to learn about what takes place behind the virtually impenetrable Wall of Secrecy surrounding the Surveillance State — a Wall of Secrecy which the Obama administration, through its promiscuous use of “state secrets” and immunity claims, has relentlessly fortified and expanded.

Mark Ambinder provided another salient detail in the Atlantic…

Drake faces up to 40 years in prison.

40 years in prison for exposing crimes which will never be prosecuted.

Look Forward Not Backward, America!

Look forward to foreclosures surging to another absolute record!

Look Forward Not Backward, America!

Look forward to larger defense budgets in constant dollars than the War in Vietnam, when we had 500,000 troops in the field!

Budget

Defense expenditures in constant dollars, slightly under-representing Obama’s military budget of $716 billion for 2011.

And here we are right back at the beginning of my diary, because…

If anybody on the inside is ever tempted to blow the whistle about waste and fraud in our bloated national security establishment, then he or she should carefully consider the case of Thomas Drake…

And then there’s the massive fraud and waste which Gorman also exposed as a result of Drake’s whistle-blowing.  The primary focus of her stories was that the Trailblazer project turned into a massive, billion-dollar “boondoggle” which vastly exceeded its original estimates, sucked up enormous amounts of the post-9/11 intelligence budget explosion, and produced very little of value.

2 comments

  1. Julian Sanchez at the Cato Institute (!) also discusses the prosecution of Thomas Drake and provides some details about one of the programs he exposed…

    Drake didn’t spy on the conversations of Americans without a court order, or subject detainees to simulated drowning or sleep deprivation. Far worse, apparently, he embarrassed the NSA. The first article for which he acted as a source, “Computer ills hinder the NSA,” detailed how the agency had squandered billions on faulty computer systems that were getting in the way of effective intelligence work:

    One [system] is Cryptologic Mission Management, a computer software program with an estimated cost of $300 million that was designed to help the NSA track the implementation of new projects but is so flawed that the agency is trying to pull the plug. The other, code-named Groundbreaker, is a multibillion-dollar computer systems upgrade that frequently gets its wires crossed.

    The downfall of the Cryptologic Mission Management program has not previously been disclosed. While Congress raised concerns about the agency’s management of Groundbreaker in a 2003 report, the extent and impact of its inadequacies have not been discussed publicly.

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