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How Government Hides
Misconduct
The FBI’s
COINTELPRO program that existed from 1956 until 1971 was finally exposed when
an FBI field office was burglarized and files were stolen and given to news
agencies proving it existed. Would
a new COINTELPRO today go undetected for fifteen years as the first COINTELPRO
program did? The Obama
Administration is following practices used in the Bush Administration that make
that very likely to happen. The
Chief Counsel for the Church Committee highlighted one such practice – invocation
of the state secrets privilege – at Senator Feingold’s Restoring the Rule of
Law hearing by saying: “The Court first articulated a ‘state secrets privilege
in 1953. Between 1953 and 1976,
the government invoked the privilege in four law suits; between 1977 and 2001,
the courts were asked to adjudicate claims of ‘state secrets’ 51 times. Since 2001, however, the government has
invoked the privilege vigorously in cases said to concern national security in
order to block judicial scrutiny of wrongdoing, to seek ‘blanket dismissal of
cases challenging the constitutionality of specific, ongoing government
programs,’ and to prevent oversight of allegations of civil liberties
violations.”
Constitution lawyer,
Glenn Greenwald in an article on “The 180-degree reversal of Obama’s State
Secrets position” points out that since becoming President what the Obama’s
Administration’s implementation of the State Secret privilege has done is “that
it was used not (as originally intended) to argue that specific pieces of
evidence or documents were secret and therefore shouldn’t be allowed in a court
case, but instead, to compel dismissal of entire lawsuits in advance based on
the claim that any judicial adjudication of even the most illegal secret
government programs would harm national security" just as was done in the
Bush Administration before it. As
a consequence programs of the executive branch are being shielded from “any
judicial scrutiny.” The Obama Administration is just like the Bush
Administration in using the State Secret Privilege “to force courts to dismiss
entire lawsuits from the start without any proceedings being held, rather than
as a focused instrument for protecting specific pieces of classified
information from disclosure.” This
applies even in cases where the case alleges that the secret the government is
shielding is illegal activity on the part of the government.
Glenn Greenwald put the way the State
Secret Privilege is being used this way: “It enables a Government to break the
law—repeatedly and deliberately—and then block courts from subjecting its
behavior to any judicial accountability, and prevent the public from learning
about the lawbreaking, by claiming that this conduct generally is too secret to
allow any judicial review.”
A related problem that is allowing the government to
also hide its misconduct is overclassification. The Project on Government Oversight has written that in 2001
the “number of classification decisions made by the federal government” was
eight million. In 2005 that number
had jumped to over fourteen million.
It also said, “In many cases, POGO finds that the decision to remove a
document from public access has less to do with matters of national security,
and more to do with hiding corruption, intentional wrongdoing, or gross
mismanagement.”
It seems
one of the only ways left of exposing government wrongdoing is through the
actions of whistleblowers, but the Obama Administration has been fierce in
going after whistleblowers to make sure that doesn’t happen. One of the news agencies that has been
especially good at exposing stories the government would like to keep secret is
Wikileaks. It was Wikileaks that
showed the shooting of Baghdad civilians by U.S. soldiers by a helicopter
gunship on July 12, 2007. The
founder of Wikileaks, Julian Assange, said Wikileaks had more material that it
would release that would expose human rights abuses by our government. But when Bradley Manning, the
analyst who leaked material to Wikileaks was arrested, Assange went into
hiding.
Bradley Manning, the U.S. Army intelligence Analyst,
who is accused of leaking videos and documents to Wikileaks has been charged
with eight violations of federal criminal law. He could spend 52 years in prison if convicted of all charges. Jesselyn Radack, also a government
whistelblower, said on her blog before the charges against Manning came down,
“In many cases, like that of Bradley Manning, we end up slamming ‘leakers’ for
going to Wikileaks instead of questioning why American soldiers used an Apache
helicopter to shoot unarmed Iraqi civilians, journalists, and children, while
egging each other on like they were playing Call of Duty. If the Obama administration so despises
disclosures to the media or Wikileaks, giving protections and options to
national security whistleblowers should be priority one. In the meantime, I submit that it is
the government officials who engaged in torture, warrantless wiretapping, and
‘collateral murder’ who have endangered our national security, and not those
who exposed the wrongdoing.”
Ms. Radack was an ethics adviser to the Department of
Justice who disclosed an ethics violation by the FBI in the interrogation of
John Walker Lindh who was being prosecuted for terrorism. As a consequence she was given a
“blistering” performance evaluation that she was told would be placed in her
file if she didn’t find another job.
When the government suppressed what had transpired in internal
correspondence concerning the Lindh interrogation, Radack made disclosures
about what really happened to Michael Isikoff of Newsweek. The Justice Department using an
instruction from the Judge in the Lindh case which pertained to documents
ordered protected by the Court launched a fifteen month investigation into Radack’s
disclosures. Even when the court
decided her disclosures did not violate any order of the court, Radack was not
informed of that decision until two years later. The Justice Department
continued its vendetta against Radack by warning the legal firm where Radack
had found new employment that she was under a criminal leak investigation even
though Ms. Radack was never herself informed of that fact and leaking is not a
crime. She was placed on
indefinite leave as a result of that by her new employer. The retaliation against Radack
continued as she was referred for discipline to different bar associations in
an attempt to take away her license to practice law.
National Security Agency official Thomas Drake was
indicted for misuse of classified documents when he tried to blow the “whistle
on NSA mismanagement and its disregard for citizens’ privacy rights.” A former FBI linguist, Shami Leibowitz
was sentenced to twenty months in prison when he leaked documents he believed
to be evidence of lawbreaking.
Journalists who receive disclosures by whistleblowers are also being
targeted.
Without
whistleblower protection, with the use of the State Secret Privilege we have
seen, with overclassification, it likely the government will be able to
continue hiding its wrongdoing.
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