[THS] Glenn Greenwald: The Motive Behind Whistle-blower Prosecutions

[The Harder Stuff in news and commentary]

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25945.htm

The Motive Behind Whistle-blower Prosecutions

By Glenn Greenwald

July 15, 2010 "Salon" -- One of the more flamboyant aspects of the Bradley Manning
arrest was the claim that he had leaked to WikiLeaks 250,000 pages of "diplomatic
cables."  Those were the documents which anonymous government officials pointed
to when telling The Daily Beast's Philip Shenon that the leaks "could do serious
damage to national security."  Most commentary on the Manning case has tacitly
assumed that the leaking of "diplomatic cables" would jeopardize national security
secrets.  But a new BBC article today contains this quote from former UK intelligence
analyst Crispin Black:

    Diplomatic cables don't usually contain huge secrets but they do contain the
unvarnished truth so in a sense they can be even more embarrassing than secrets.

As usual, government concern over leaks is about avoiding embarrassment and other
accountability; national security harm is but the fear-mongering excuse.  Similarly, a
new Washington Post article today details the Obama DOJ's prosecution of NSA
whistle blower Thomas Drake, whose disclosures resulted in no claimed national
security harm, but rather, was evidence of "waste, mismanagement and a willingness
to compromise Americans' privacy without enhancing security" (leaked only after his
use of the official channels resulted in nothing, as usual).  As is true for virtually every
whistle blower prosecution or threatened prosecution, there is no actual national
security harm identified from that leak.  Other than when a covert agent's identity is
blown (as happened to Valerie Plame), has anyone ever heard of any actual,
concrete national security harm from any of the high-profile leak cases, whether it be
the illegal NSA eavesdropping program, the network of CIA black sites, the release of
the Apache helicopter attack video, or the corruption and privacy infringements
revealed by Drake?

The Post today quotes Obama DOJ spokesman Matthew Miller's justification for the
administration's escalated war on whistle blowers as follows:  "We have consistently
said that leaks and mishandling of classified information are matters that we take
extremely seriously."  There's no doubt that they take such acts "extremely seriously,"
but what's the reason for it?  There's been no identified harm to national security
from any of these leaks.

What these leaks have actually accomplished is to "embarrass" the Government by
revealing what the intelligence analyst quoted by the BBC calls "the unvarnished
truth" about the illegal, corrupt, and embarrassing acts it undertakes.   In all of these
cases where the Obama DOJ is persecuting whistle blowers, they're punishing the
greatest sin there is -- exposure of high-level government wrongdoing -- not harm to
national security.  Amazingly, that was even the explicit rationale used by Obama
when he and the Democratic Congress re-wrote FOIA to shield photographs of
detainee abuse from court-ordered disclosure:  these photos would reflect poorly on
the U.S. government and therefore harm national security.  And, of course, the
administration's repeated, Bush-replicating invocation of the "state secrets" privilege
has been justified with vague appeals to National Security but actually motivated by a
desire to shield government crimes of detention, surveillance and interrogation from
disclosure and accountability.

Most of what the U.S. Government does of any significance -- literally -- occurs
behind a vast wall of secrecy, completely unknown to the citizenry.  While a small
portion of that is legitimately classified, these whistle blower prosecutions and other
disclosure controversies demonstrate that the vast majority of this secrecy is devoted
to avoiding embarrassment and accountability.  It has nothing to do with "national
security" -- one of the all-justifying terms (along with Terrorism) for what the
Government does.  Secrecy is the religion of the political class, and the prime enabler
of its corruption.  That's why whistle blowers are among the most hated heretics.
They're one of the very few classes of people able to shed a small amount of light on
what actually takes place.

The great irony is that there is a perfect inverse relationship between the secrecy
powers of the Government (which rapidly increase) and the privacy rights of citizens
(which erode just as rapidly).  The citizenry meekly acquiesces to the notion that it
must sacrifice more and more privacy to the Government in order to deter and
expose criminality, corruption and other dangerous acts of private citizens, yet
refuses to apply that same rationale to demand greater transparency from the
Government itself.  The Government (and its private corporate partners) know more
and more about citizens, while citizens know less and less about the actions of the
government-corporate axis which governs them.

The reason Iceland is poised to enact an unprecedentedly potent shield for whistle
blowers and other leakers is that they realized that the oozing elite corruption that led
to their financial collapse was caused by rampant secrecy.  They realized that
unauthorized leaks are the most effective check against the crimes of the powerful,
which is precisely why such leaks in the U.S. are targeted with such a fury.  What
possible valid reason is there to keep classified that Apache attack video, or evidence
of our civilian casualties in Afghanistan, or massive private contractor corruption at
the NSA, or Bush crimes on torture and eavesdropping, or the lending programs of
the Fed?  The real criminals are not those who are leaking embarrassing information
about corruption and wrongdoing -- those whom the Obama DOJ is prosecuting with
an unprecedented vengeance -- but rather the political officials who are misusing
powers of secrecy to hide information for which there is no legitimate secrecy basis.

* * * * *

Speaking of the benefits of secrecy for corrupt elites, here is a righteous and
appropriately angry rant from MSNBC's Dylan Ratigan yesterday on a prime cause of
America's ongoing financial crisis, first noted by Digby:



UPDATE:  Regarding yesterday's discussion of the new, Far Right neocon group
"Emergency Committee for Israel" -- founded by Bill Kristol and Gary Bauer -- Daniel
Luban takes a look at the twisted and hateful rantings of the third founder, Rachel
Abrams:  wife of neocon convict Elliot Abrams, daughter of Midge Decter, and step-
daughter of Norm Podhoretz.  This is the group that media mavens everywhere are
instantaneously bestowing with credibility and Seriousness as some sort of
mainstream organization.
Glenn Greenwald's Unclaimed Territory

I was previously a constitutional law and civil rights litigator in New York. I am the
author of two New York Times Bestselling books: "How Would a Patriot Act?" (May,
2006), a critique of the Bush administration's use of executive power, and "A Tragic
Legacy" (June, 2007), which examines the Bush legacy. My most recent book, "Great
American Hypocrites", examines the manipulative electoral tactics used by the GOP
and propagated by the establishment press, and was released in April, 2008, by
Random House/Crown.