Obama's
abuse of the Espionage Act is modern-day McCarthyism
Shame on this president for persecuting whistleblowers with
a legal relic, while administration officials leak with impunity
Senator Joseph McCarthy, chief ideologue of the cold war
witch-hunts, takes the pledge as a witness in 1954 hearings about alleged
communist infiltration of the US army. Photograph: Associated Press
The conviction of Bradley Manning under the
1917 Espionage Act, and the US Justice Department's
decision to file espionage charges against NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden under the same act, are yet further examples
of the Obama administration's policy of using an iron fist against human rights and civil liberties activists.
President Obama has been unprecedented in his
use of the Espionage Act to prosecute those whose whistleblowing he wants to
curtail. The purpose of an Espionage Act prosecution, however, is not to punish
a person for spying for the enemy, selling secrets for personal gain, or trying
to undermine our way of life. It is to ruin the whistleblower personally,
professionally and financially. It is meant to send a message to anybody else
considering speaking truth to power: challenge us and we will destroy you.
Only ten people in American history have been
charged with espionage for leaking classified information, seven of them under
Barack Obama. The effect of the charge on a person's life – being viewed as a
traitor, being shunned by family and friends, incurring massive legal bills –
is all a part of the plan to force the whistleblower into personal ruin, to
weaken him to the point where he will plead guilty to just about anything to make
the case go away. I know. The three espionage charges against me made me one of
"the Obama Seven".
In early 2012, I was arrested and charged
with three counts of espionage and one count of violating the Intelligence
Identities Protection Act (IIPA). (I was only the second person in US history
to be charged with violating the IIPA, a law that was written to be used
against rogues like Philip Agee.)
Two of my espionage charges were the result
of a conversation I had with a New York Times reporter about torture. I gave him no classified information – only
the business card of a former CIA colleague who had never been undercover. The
other espionage charge was for giving the same unclassified business card to a
reporter for ABC News. All three espionage charges were eventually dropped.
So, why charge me in the first place?
It was my punishment for blowing the whistle
on the CIA's torture program and for confirming to the press, despite
government protestations to the contrary, that the US government was, indeed,
in the business of torture.
At the CIA, employees are trained to believe
that nearly every moral issue is a shade of grey. But this is simply not true.
Some issues are black-and-white – and torture is one of them. Many of us
believed that the torture policy was solely a Bush-era perversion. But many of
these perversions, or at least efforts to cover them up or justify them, have
continued under President Obama.
Obama and his attorney general, Eric Holder,
declared a war on whistleblowers virtually as soon as they assumed office. Some
of the investigations began during the Bush administration, as was the case
with NSA whistleblower Thomas
Drake,
but Espionage Act cases have been prosecuted only under Obama. The president
has chosen to ignore the legal definition of whistleblower – any person who
brings to light evidence of waste, fraud, abuse or illegality – and has
prosecuted truthtellers.
This policy decision smacks of modern-day
McCarthyism. Washington has always needed an "ism" to fight against,
an idea against which it could rally its citizens like lemmings. First, it was
anarchism, then socialism, then communism. Now, it's terrorism. Any
whistleblower who goes public in the name of protecting human rights or civil
liberties is accused of helping the terrorists.
That the whistleblower has the support of
groups like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, or the American Civil
Liberties Union matters not a whit. The administration simply presses forward
with wild accusations against the whistleblower: "He's aiding the
enemy!" "He put our soldiers lives in danger!" "He has
blood on his hands!" Then, when it comes time for trial, the espionage
charges invariably are either dropped or thrown out.
The administration and its national security
sycophants in both parties in Congress argue that governmental actions exposed
by the whistleblower are legal. The Justice Department approved the torture,
after all, and the US supreme court said that the NSA's eavesdropping program
was constitutional. But this is the same Justice Department that harassed, surveilled,
wiretapped and threatened Martin Luther King Jr, and that recently allowed
weapons to be sold to Mexican drug gangs in the Fast and Furious scandal. Just because they're in power
doesn't mean they're right.
Yet another problem with the Espionage Act is
that it has never been applied uniformly. Immediately after its passage in
1917, American socialist leader Eugene V Debs was arrested and imprisoned under
the Espionage Act – simply for criticizing the US decision to enter the first
world war. He ran for president from his prison cell.
Nearly a century later, when the deputy director for national
intelligence revealed the amount of the highly-classified intelligence budget
in an ill-conceived speech, she was not even sent a letter of reprimand –
despite the fact the Russians, Chinese, and others had sought the figure for decades.
When former Defense Secretary and CIA Director Leon Panetta
boastfully revealed the identity of the Seal Team member who killed Osama bin Laden in a speech to an
audience that included uncleared individuals, the Pentagon and the CIA simply
called the disclosure "inadvertent".
The Obama administration's espionage
prosecutions are political actions for political reasons, and are carried out
by political appointees. The only way to end this or any administration's abuse
of the Espionage Act is to rewrite the law. It is so antiquated that it doesn't
even mention classified information; the classification system hadn't yet been
invented. The law was written a century ago to prosecute German saboteurs. Its
only update came in 1950, at the height of the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg case.
The law is still so broad and vague that many legal scholars argue that it is
unconstitutional.
The only hope of ending this travesty of
justice is to scrap the Espionage Act and to enact new legislation that would
protect whistleblowers while allowing the government to prosecute traitors and
spies. This would require congressional leadership, however, and that is
something that is very difficult to come by. Giants like the late Senators
Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Frank Church, and the late Representative Otis
Pike, who boldly took on and reformed the intelligence community in the 1970s,
are long-gone. Until someone on Capitol Hill begins to understand the concept
of justice for national security whistleblowers, very little is likely to
change.
The press also has a role to play, one that,
so far, it has largely ignored. That role is to report on and investigate the
whistleblower's revelations of illegality, not on the kind of car he drives,
the brand of eyeglasses he wears, where he went to college, or what his
nextdoor neighbor has to say about their childhood.
The attacks on our civil liberties that the
whistleblower reports are far too important to move off-message into
trivialities. After all, the government is spying on all of us. That should be the story.
1 comment:
McCarthy was right. Oasshole is wrong and a criminal.
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