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sibel edmonds
Meditations On Law and Denial While Painting Sibel Edmonds
Editor's note: The artist's essay that follows accompanies the 'online unveiling'--exclusive to Common Dreams--of Shetterly's latest painting in his "Americans Who Tell the Truth" portrait series which present citizens throughout U.S. history who have courageously engaged in the social, environmental, or economic issues of their time. This portrait of FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds* follows one of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden unveiled on these pages in July.
Meditations While Painting Edward Snowden
The day after I read and watched the video of Glenn Greenwald's interview with Edward Snowden in a hotel room in Hong Kong, I began to paint Snowden's portrait for the Americans Who Tell the Truth project.
There were few images of Snowden available--some stills from the video in which the subdued indoor lighting gives his face a bluish cast. And a few snapshots with flash that turn him yellow and obscure detail. His hair seemed different in the two versions, and the video never showed the top of his head. I had to make some assumptions. I began drawing until I thought I had a decent likeness, laid in some medium toned color all over his face, then began painting his eyes. If I can get the eyes right, the painting transforms. It becomes a real presence, looks at me, begins to talk to me about doubt, about vulnerability, about courage, about loneliness, about conscience, about anger. Begins to talk to me about defining moments and no going back. About justice being more important than himself.
* * * * * *
Snowden seemed to me a tiny chunk of the vast, submerged NSA iceberg, a chunk that had chipped itself free and willed itself to drift in the opposite direction. The one lemming that ran the other way.
* * * * * *
The debates about whether Snowden is a traitor or a hero seem wrong to me. He is both. He is traitor to the National Security State, but a hero to the idea of democracy.
He is a hero to the rule of law, but traitor to the rule of legal hypocrisy. Or, put another way, he's a traitor to the selective law of power and privilege. He's a hero to the rule of justice.
The debates about whether Snowden is a traitor or a hero seem wrong to me. He is both. He is traitor to the National Security State, but a hero to the idea of democracy.
I find it curious to hear our media and officials clamor on about the rule of law: Whatever else you may say, he did break the law! Well, of course he did. Haven't many of our heroes broken the law? What did the law say to Rosa Parks about where she could sit on a bus in Montgomery? What did the law say to Susan B. Anthony about her right as a woman to vote? What did the law say to Harriet Tubman about the legality of slavery? It was not for nothing that Thoreau said, "The law will never make men free. Men have got to make the law free." Isn't that what Edward Snowden is doing--saving us from unjust law? What is the law but a lump of self-serving clay in the hands of power? How easily the law can be shaped to make preemptive war legal, or torture, or rendition, or murder without due process, or total surveillance. I think the political philosopher Marcus Raskin says it best:
"Democracy and its operative principle, the rule of law, require a ground on which to stand. That ground is the truth. When the government lies, or is structured like our national security state to promote lies and self-deception, then our official structures have broken faith with the essential precondition for constitutional government in democracy. "
Edward Snowden is a traitor to those who say the law is about looking forward not back.
He's a hero to those who say that the law has to look back, requires a ground to stand on, in order to look forward. A law of convenience is no law at all.
Should Snowden have turned himself in? Confronted his accusers in court? I suspect his reason for not doing that was based in strategy rather than personal safety. He saw whistleblowers like Bradley Manning and John Kiriakou and Sibel Edmonds be denied the right to explain in court why they had to act. They are silenced in court. As a free but stateless man, he can continue to expose the duplicity of our surveillance state.
* * * * * *
In the 1950s and 1960s when I was young, a common Cold War refrain was Better Dead than Red! The slogan's aggressive political and moral content was that it was preferable to blow up the entire world with nuclear weapons than succumb to a totalitarian surveillance state.
And here we are today being asked by our president to weigh our freedom against our security, to decide in favor of security and accept the surveillance of all of us.
This surveillance comes not by a hammer or a sickle, but from the paranoia of our own power. Communist moles have not infiltrated the State Department and the Pentagon--we can do that very well for ourselves, thank you, with the help of corporate true believers. Joe McCarthy was right about the infiltration, but wrong about the perpetrators. So, are we red but not dead? Or, fascist and dead? Should we not resist?
* * * * * *
Secrecy. I'd prefer to be responsible for my own secrets. As well as my endearments, my stupid jokes, my political rants, my plans to meet friends, my birthday greetings, my thank you calls, my favorite lines of poetry, my expletives, my sorrows, my indiscretions, my struggles to understand spirituality, my attempts at solace. They're mine. They are me. I don't want some NSA voyeur collecting what's me and making it his. I empathize with some indigenous people who believe that taking their photo is stealing their soul. A man with a little black box walks away with you inside it. My secrets become his secrets. Who am I then?
* * * * * *
When I paint, I paint mostly with my fingers--more like sculpting, thinning and shaping color, mixing it, making the paint translucent to allow the color to come from underneath. The process is intimate. My fingers blot a highlight on the iris, smooth the pinkness at the inner edge of a nostril, rub a bluish shadow into the cheek, smudge the eyebrows into the occipital ridge, round a shadow to shape the lower lip. It's all about the intensity of seeing but accomplished as though I am blind and learning the contours of the face with my fingers.
* * * * * *
While I was working on the portrait, the US revoked Snowden's passport. He was in Russia, apparently sequestered in the airport, having one possible refuge after another cave to US pressure. He was now stateless. How strange! The man who believes so deeply in the purported values of his state that he risks everything for those values is then disowned by that state. In effect, by being disowned, he becomes the state. By disowning him, the state disowns its own values. He becomes the remnant of those values in exile. One person becomes bigger--morally, legally, courageously, spiritually--than the hypocritical state that denounced him. He's like Jonathan Swift's Gulliver being staked out and tied to the ground by the swarm of ant-like Lilliputians.
* * * * * *
While Snowden was tied down in Russia, I had to leave the portrait to attend a conference in Jordan about civic engagement and democracy in the Middle-East and North Africa. I bought a book there of the great Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish, Absent Presence. In a section describing how it feels to live under Israeli occupation and surveillance, Darwish says, 'They interpreted your dreams before you had them.' Oh, I thought, exactly the goal of the NSA as they decipher metadata and comb emails to predict my actions before I have formulated them myself. An invasion of the privacy of the future as well as the present.
* * * * * *
An Aside: We hear apologists for the NSA say, Well, hell, we've got the technology; it's going to be used! As if there is no escaping the destiny of the invention. We also hear: We have the technology for hydraulic fracturing, so it will be used. And: Because the tar sands are there, we will use the oil. So, should I get used to the fact that because I have a big knife in my kitchen, I will have to stab myself in the back? Are we a species with conscious choice, or is our only option an inventive determinism leading to suicide?
* * * * * *
In his essay in the New Yorker about the NSA, Hendrik Hertzberg makes the good point that even if millions of people the world over are not being bugged except in terms of "metadata," maybe the intrusion is not so great for any one person, "But that does not mean no harm has been done. The harm is civic. The harm is collective. The harm is to the architecture of trust and accountability that supports an open society and democratic polity. The harm is to the reputation and, perhaps, the reality of the United States as such a society, such a polity."
Hertzberg's sentiments are fine and correct. But I am deeply bothered when anyone presents an argument based on the assumption that a viable "architecture of trust and accountability" is still standing in this country. As surely as the World Trade Towers, that building of civic faith was knocked down a long time ago and it serves none of us any good to act as though its mirage is still standing. To comfort ourselves with the belief that it does exist only plays into the hands of the powerful dissemblers who have taken it down. If you think you can see it, they can still pretend it's there for the good of us all. Of course, we can't survive as a polity without that architecture of trust and accountability. Which is why, first, we must drain the swamp of special interest money from our politics.
* * * * * *
An aside on "service": While tediously scratching in Snowden's hair and stippling his short mustache and goatee, my mind wanders. I think about the service he has tried to perform for the people of this country through his sacrifice. It's an unpaid and un-honored service. His service has some similarities to the service of our military. Their charge is to protect the Constitution. He took that oath and ordered himself to do that, too. But there are some vast differences. Our servicemen and women were betrayed by their government when they were sent to Iraq and required to risk their lives while killing people who were not a danger--nor intended to be--to this country or our Constitution. They are praised highly for their service--for the obvious reason that the praise obscures the crimes. Snowden is condemned for his service because it exposes crime and hypocrisy.
* * * * * *
A further aside: I travel a lot. Those of you who do, too, know that our domestic airlines offer a thank you to our military service personnel by letting them board planes first, sometimes upgrading them to first class, sometimes asking fellow passengers to applaud their service. This irritates me--not because these soldiers are not courageous & patriotic, but because it enforces the idea that the cause is just. I would love to hear--just once!--a flight attendant ask the passengers to acknowledge the peacemakers on board, to see a social justice activist be offered an upgrade to first class (and refuse it, of course).
* * * * * *
I decided to paint the background of Snowden's portrait a deep brown/black. No other color seemed right.
* * * * * *
Somebody asked me if I was going to paint Snowden's moles on his left cheek & neck. Of course, I said, my obligation is not to be a cosmetic surgeon. Quite the opposite. Part of my obligation as an artist is to paint whatever I see in people however it varies from the aesthetic ideal--the lopsided nose, the differently sized eyes, their blue-gray circles, a protruding ear, the thinning hair, crooked teeth. Nor is my task to judge what might be seen as character flaws in my subjects. We all have flaws. We all don't have courage. Part of my obligation is to make visible the courageous integrity that informs the face, how it radiates as beauty.
* * * * * *
One metric by which to measure Snowden's action: did it take courage or cowardice? The answer to this reminds me of Camilo Mejia, the first US soldier who, for refusing to go back to Iraq spent 9 months in prison. From prison Mejia wrote: "I was a coward, not for leaving the war, but for having been a part of it in the first place. I failed to fulfill my moral duty as a human being, and instead I chose to fulfill my duty as a soldier. What good is freedom if we are not able to live with our own actions? I am confined to a prison, but I feel, today more than ever, connected to all humanity. Behind these bars I sit a free man because I listened to a higher power, the voice of my conscience." He went on to say that he was also a hero--not because he led men into battle, but because he refused to do it anymore in that immoral war.
Edward Snowden was a traitor to the kind of duty that can make one feel part of something, but simultaneously rob one of humanity. He was a hero for following his conscience which required of him a profound and deeper duty.
In a recent essay in the New York Times, Roger Berkowitz, writing about Hannah Arendt, wrote,
"Arendt concluded that evil in the modern world is done neither by monsters nor by bureaucrats, but by joiners... Such joiners are not stupid; they are not robots. But they are thoughtless in the sense that they abandon their independence, their capacity to think for themselves, and instead commit themselves absolutely to the fictional truth of the movement. It is futile to reason with them. They inhabit an echo chamber, having no interest in learning what others believe. It is this thoughtless commitment that... makes them willing to employ technological implements of violence in the name of saving the world."
This quote may explain the deafening silence from others in the NSA to Snowden's action. Two of the only NSA employees to support Snowden have been Tom Drake and William Binney, fellow NSA apostates and courageous whistleblowers who tried years ago to make the same warning.
* * * * * *
My last task was to scratch a quote from Snowden into the surface of the portrait. As anyone who has listened to him knows, Snowden is articulate, measured, thoughtful and philosophically accurate about the ideas that support democracy and that impelled him to act. After considering many possible quotes, I chose one of the simplest and most obvious, one which the NSA with all of its super computers, eavesdropping equipment, and secrecy could not begin to understand:
"...the public needs to know the kinds of things a government does in its name, or the "consent of the governed" is meaningless.... The consent of the governed is not consent if it is not informed." --Edward Snowden
Another Truth-Teller Steps Forward
If what he did sounds weird, this is only because there are so precious few like him who will stand on principle and risk everything. Snowden explained that if the public does not know about these intrusive programs, there is no room for citizen input regarding how they square with our constitutional rights.
Snowden, who was living in Hawaii with a promising career and a salary said to be about $200,000 a year, told the London Guardian: "I'm willing to sacrifice all of that because I can't in good conscience allow the U.S. government to destroy privacy, Internet freedom, and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they're now building."
He added that he wanted to reveal the "federation of secret law, unequal pardon, and irresistible executive powers that rule the world I love. ... What they're doing poses an existential threat to democracy."
Snowden enlisted in the Army in 2003 and began training to join the Special Forces. He told the Guardian: "I wanted to fight in the Iraq war because I felt like I had an obligation as a human being to help free people from oppression." He quickly found, though, that, in his words, "Most of the people training us seemed pumped up about killing Arabs, not helping anyone." Snowden broke both legs in a training accident and was discharged.
In several key respects, the experiences of Snowden resemble those of Bradley Manning. Both took the enlisted person's oath to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic." As a condition of employment, both signed a promise not to disclose classified information; and both witnessed at close hand flagrant abuses that their consciences told them they needed to expose.
All this required them to go back on their secrecy promise, in order to achieve a greater good. What they were able to understand, and act on, is what ethicists call a "supervening value." [See Daniel C. Maguire's The Manning Trial's Real Defendant" regarding the moral balancing act between democracy's need for information and government insistence on secrecy.]
It didn't require a law degree for Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden to understand how the Bush and Obama administrations were playing fast and loose with key provisions of the Constitution of the United States.
'Safety' Before Constitution
As for the current President, he seems to have been editing the oath he took to "preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States." Few caught it when he preached on national security on May 23, but Greg Sargent noted in the Washington Post that Obama defined his commander-in-chief role as requiring him to tilt toward national security and away from civil liberties - clearly prioritizing the latter out of a warped zero-sum mindset.
Obama said "constitutional issues" must be "weighed" against "my responsibility to protect the American people." Got that? He was even more explicit last Friday about how he sees these choices. "You can't have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience," Obama said. "We're going to have to make some choices as a society. ... There are trade-offs involved."
Regarding his priorities, he said: "When I came into this office I made two commitments ... Number one, to keep the American people safe; and Number two, to uphold the Constitution. And that includes what I consider to be a constitutional right to privacy and an observance of civil liberties."
Thanks for tacking on that last sentence, Mr. President, but your defense of the incredibly wide and intrusive programs - alien to Fourth Amendment protections - strain credulity well beyond the breaking point. You lost me when you described the recently revealed eavesdropping programs that suck up data on billions of our communications daily as "very narrowly circumscribed" and "very focused."
In July 2008, when Congress passed and President Bush signed a law making government eavesdropping easier and granting immunity to telecommunications companies, which had already violated, together with the Bush administration, our Fourth Amendment rights, this seemed to me a watershed. What possible incentive would the telecoms now have for abiding by the Constitution, I asked myself.
When I heard that then-Sen. Barack Obama had flip-flopped on this vote - as he was burnishing his national security "cred" for his White House run - I wrote him an open letter. He had said he would vote against the bill, before he decided to vote for this major revision of the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978.
I gave my open letter the title "It's a Deal Breaker for This Intelligence Officer." Here's the main part:
"July 3, 2008
"Dear Senator Obama,
"I speak from 30 years of experience in intelligence work. I don't know who actually briefed you on the eavesdropping legislation, but the bill is unnecessary for intelligence collection and POISON for our civil liberties -- not even to mention the unconscionable retroactive immunity provision.
"You have made a big mistake, Senator, in indicating you intend to vote for it. There is still time to change your mind. That's what big people do. Your 'explanation' was unworthy of one who has sworn to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States (including the Fourth Amendment)."
'Turnkey Tyranny'
The consequences of this law are what Snowden ended up warning us against in the video arranged by the Guardian, after he reviewed some of what he had seen from his vantage point. His window into the National Security Agency and its management no doubt provided unflattering insight into the behavior of its leaders and their nodding, dismissive acquaintance with any limitations in existing law.
Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden who saluted smartly when ordered by President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney to discard what had been known as NSA's "First Commandment - Thou shalt not eavesdrop on Americans without a warrant." The rubric-justification was: "After 9/11, everything changed" - including any need to pay much attention to the law. Like the telecom corporations, Hayden was not only held harmless and forgiven but lauded for his patriotism
And if you think his successor, Army General Keith Alexander, feels constrained by his own oath of office, think again. It is a felony to lie to Congress. He did. In olden days it would have been an embarrassing, career-ending story. Not for Alexander. The "mainstream media" has lionized him rather than holding him accountable. And he now sports four stars and not only directs NSA but also is Commander of the U.S. Cyber Command.
It's a long but instructive story: In December 2005, top New York Times executives belatedly decided to let the rest of us in on the fact that the George W. Bush administration had been eavesdropping on American citizens without the court warrants required by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978.
The Times had learned of this several months before the presidential election of 2004 but acquiesced to White House entreaties to suppress the damaging information. However, in late fall 2005, Times correspondent James Risen prepared to publish a book, State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration," revealing the warrantless eavesdropping anyway. Times publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., recognized that he could procrastinate no longer.
It would simply be too embarrassing to have Risen's book on the street with Sulzberger and his associates pretending that this explosive eavesdropping story did not fit Adolph Ochs's trademark criterion: All The News That's Fit To Print. (The Times' own ombudsman, Public Editor Byron Calame, later branded the newspaper's explanation for the long delay in publishing this story "woefully inadequate.")
When Sulzberger told his friends in the White House that he could no longer hold off on publishing in the newspaper, he was summoned to the Oval Office for a counseling session with President Bush on Dec. 5, 2005. Bush tried in vain to talk him out of putting the story in the Times. The truth would out; part of it, at least - in 11 days.
Gen. Alexander Out of the Loop
Unfortunately for National Security Agency Director Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander, the White House neglected to tell him that the cat would soon be out of the bag. So on Dec. 6, Alexander spoke from the old dishonest talking points in assuring visiting House Intelligence Committee member Rush Holt, D-New Jersey, that the NSA did not eavesdrop on Americans without a court order.
Still possessed of the quaint notion that generals and other senior officials are not supposed to lie brazenly to congressional oversight committees, Holt wrote a blistering letter to Gen. Alexander after the Times, on Dec. 16, front-paged a feature by Risen and Eric Lichtblau, "Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts."
But House Intelligence Committee chair Pete Hoekstra, R-Michigan, apparently found Holt's scruples benighted; Hoekstra did nothing to hold Alexander accountable for misleading Holt, his most experienced committee member, who had served as an intelligence analyst at the State Department.
What followed struck me as bizarre. The day after the Dec. 16 Times feature article, the President of the United States publicly admitted to a demonstrably impeachable offense. Authorizing illegal electronic surveillance was a key provision of the second article of impeachment against President Richard Nixon. On July 27, 1974, this and two other articles of impeachment were approved by bipartisan votes in the House Judiciary Committee and likely would have passed the House if Nixon had not chosen to resign on Aug. 9, 1974.
Yet, far from expressing remorse or regret about his warrantless wiretaps, President Bush bragged about having authorized the surveillance "more than 30 times since the September the 11th attacks," and said he would continue to do so. The President also said: "Leaders in Congress have been briefed more than a dozen times on this authorization and the activities conducted under it."
On Dec. 19, 2005, then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and then-NSA Director Michael Hayden held a press conference to answer questions about the surveillance program. Gonzales was asked why the White House decided to flout FISA rather than attempt to amend it, choosing instead a "backdoor approach." He answered:
"We have had discussions with Congress ... as to whether or not FISA could be amended to allow us to adequately deal with this kind of threat, and we were advised that that would be difficult, if not impossible." Impossible? Regarding that time, James Risen quipped: "In October 2001, you could have set up guillotines on the public streets of America."
It was not difficult to infer that the surveillance program, soon to be given the respectable label of the "Terrorist Surveillance Program," was of such scope and intrusiveness that, even amid highly stoked fear, it would have elicited public outrage.
Almost All the News Fit to Print
Like the giant telecoms, the New York Times never had to issue a mea culpa for hiding the crass violations of our Fourth Amendment rights until after the 2004 election and another year for good measure.
The issue arose again in a curious way on Sept. 13, 2010, at a large event at the New York Times hosted by then-Managing Editor Jill Abramson in honor of Daniel Ellsberg for his release of the Pentagon Papers, which the Times and others published in June 1971. (Dan invited me to come along; better late than never, we thought.)
Abramson alluded in a matter-of-fact way to a particularly egregious episode in which the Times did not cover itself in glory. But one would not have gleaned the latter from Abramson's casual mention of how the Times had published "the story about the NSA's eavesdropping program."
Abramson: The issue [of government pressure] became salient once again after 9/11, when the Times and other publications were the recipients of requests from the Bush White House to occasionally withhold publication of stories that involved secrets and national security issues. Probably the most famous one involved our publication of the story about the NSA's eavesdropping program.
Ellsberg: By the way, as the only non-Times person up here, I shouldn't refrain from saying, I've been very publicly very critical of the Times' decision to withhold the NSA wiretap story -- not only, for a whole year, but very critically, past the election of 2004. I think it's quite possible that the revelation that the president had, for three years, been blatantly violating the law ...
Abramson (interrupting): Although in truth, it wasn't known in real time at the election, the gravity of the legal issue was not.
Ellsberg: The legal issue, perhaps. ...
Abramson: So --
Ellsberg: The -- a whole year. I think that did make a difference.
Abramson: The thing is when the government says -- you know, by publishing a story you're harming the national security, you're helping the terrorists. I mean there are still people today who argue that the NSA program was the crown jewel, the most valuable anti-terrorism program that the Bush administration had going, and that it was terribly wrong of the Times to --
Ellsberg: And the Times went ahead.
Abramson: -- publish.
Ellsberg: In the end, that's what I'm saying.
Abramson: In the end, we did go ahead. But I'm saying these are not cavalier decisions.
Anyone want to guess why Ed Snowden chose the Guardian of London (and also the Washington Post) over the "paper of record" for his disclosures?
The Need for Truth-Tellers
In September 2004 Daniel Ellsberg and I drafted an appeal to those who might have been thinking of what Bradley Manning and now Ed Snowden have had the courage to do. It is included below as a reminder that blowing the whistle on war crimes and on gross violations of the U.S. Constitution is a laudable form of patriotism. The last time I checked the professional help promised in 2004 was reaffirmed.
September 9, 2004
APPEAL TO: Current Government Officials
FROM: The Truth-Telling Coalition
It is time for unauthorized truth telling.
Citizens cannot make informed choices if they do not have the facts--for example, the facts that have been wrongly concealed about the ongoing war in Iraq: the real reasons behind it, the prospective costs in blood and treasure, and the setback it has dealt to efforts to stem terrorism. Administration deception and cover-up on these vital matters has so far been all too successful in misleading the public.
Many Americans are too young to remember Vietnam. Then, as now, senior government officials did not tell the American people the truth. Now, as then, insiders who know better have kept their silence, as the country was misled into the most serious foreign policy disaster since Vietnam.
Some of you have documentation of wrongly concealed facts and analyses that--if brought to light--would impact heavily on public debate regarding crucial matters of national security, both foreign and domestic. We urge you to provide that information now, both to Congress and, through the media, to the public. ...
There is a growing network of support for whistleblowers. In particular, for anyone who wishes to know the legal implications of disclosures they may be contemplating, the ACLU stands ready to provide pro bono legal counsel, with lawyer-client privilege. The Project on Government Oversight (POGO) will offer advice on whistle blowing, dissemination and relations with the media.
Needless to say, any unauthorized disclosure that exposes your superiors to embarrassment entails personal risk. Should you be identified as the source, the price could be considerable, including loss of career and possibly even prosecution. Some of us know from experience how difficult it is to countenance such costs. But continued silence brings an even more terrible cost, as our leaders persist in a disastrous course and young Americans come home in coffins or with missing limbs. ...
We know how misplaced loyalty to bosses, agencies, and careers can obscure the higher allegiance all government officials owe the Constitution, the sovereign public, and the young men and women put in harm's way. We urge you to act on those higher loyalties. ... Truth telling is a patriotic and effective way to serve the nation. The time for speaking out is now.
SIGNATORIES
Appeal from the Truth-Telling Coalition
Edward Costello, Former Special Agent (Counterintelligence), Federal Bureau of Investigation
Sibel Edmonds, Former Language Specialist, Federal Bureau of Investigation
Daniel Ellsberg, Former official, U.S. Departments of Defense and State
John D. Heinberg, Former Economist, Employment and Training Administration, U.S. Department of Labor
Larry C. Johnson, Former Deputy Director for Anti-Terrorism Assistance, Transportation Security, and Special Operations, Department of State, Office of the Coordinator for Counter Terrorism
Lt. Col Karen Kwiatowski, USAF (ret.), who served in the Pentagon's Office of Near East Planning
John Brady Kiesling, Former Political Counselor, U.S. Embassy, Athens, Department of State
David MacMichael, Former Senior Estimates Officer, National Intelligence Council, Central Intelligence Agency
Ray McGovern, Former Analyst, Central Intelligence Agency
Philip G. Vargas, Ph.D., J.D., Dir. Privacy & Confidentiality Study, Commission on Federal Paperwork (Author/Director: "The Vargas Report on Government Secrecy" -- CENSORED)
Ann Wright, Retired U.S. Army Reserve Colonel and U.S. Foreign Service Officer
An earlier version of this article first appeared at Consortiumnews.com
Post-Iraq-War US Intel Chief Praised
Thomas Fingar, former Director of the National Intelligence Council, will receive the annual award from Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence in recognition of Fingar's work from 2005 to 2008 restoring respect for the battered discipline of U.S. intelligence analysis after the fraudulent assessments on Iraq's non-existent WMD.
FDA & GE: Extra Radiation? Who Cares?
As the Times reported, the F.D.A. spying focused on doctors who believed the agency gave shortshrift to concerns about excessive radiation coming from medical imaging devices. Lichtblau and Shane wrote:
"The extraordinary surveillance effort grew out of a bitter dispute lasting years between the scientists and their bosses at the F.D.A. over the scientists' claims that faulty review procedures at the agency had led to the approval of medical imaging devices for mammograms and colonoscopies that exposed patients to dangerous levels of radiation.
"A confidential government review in May by the Office of Special Counsel, which deals with the grievances of government workers, found that the scientists' medical claims were valid enough to warrant a full investigation into what it termed 'a substantial and specific danger to public safety.'"
During the first few decades of my life, there were no such scan scams to worry about. The influence of the pharmaceutical corporations, however, was already huge -- and dangerous. Often, it took courageous whistleblowers -- people of integrity unwilling to betray the public trust -- to prevent disaster.
Thalidomide
It has been more than 50 years since my first extended visit to Europe as a university student. Most readers will be too young to remember, but a "wonder-drug," Thalidomide, had just come on the market. This drug gave temporary rest and relief to millions, especially prospective mothers with morning sickness and problems sleeping. It was very popular in Germany.
Stationed in Germany more than a decade later, I witnessed the human results of the horrible side effects of Thalidomide, which had become available all over Europe, and beyond. Over 10,000 babies in 46 countries were born without limbs or otherwise disfigured and disabled. Those still alive would be in their late forties/early fifties now.
How did the United States escape this plague? One whistleblower, a woman named Frances Kelsey of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration saw through the charade of the drug company swindlers and stood up to it.
Although Dr. Kelsey came under extreme pressure to fall in step and approve Thalidomide, she scorned the testing that had been done by the Thalidomide manufacturer and blocked introduction of the drug into America.
For her unusual courage and integrity, President John Kennedy gave her the President's Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Serivce in 1962, after it became clear that she had singlehandedly prevented a public health disaster from befalling us in the United States.
Dr. Kelsey will be 98 on July 24; her courage should be celebrated -- particularly in the light of the behavior of our present-day F.D.A. The F.D.A.'s current commissioner, Dr. Margaret Hamburg, should be put on the griddle -- and sooner rather than later.
As the Sixties and Seventies wore on, the horrible damage caused by the drug made itself known. And what also became clear was the reality that a decade of American babies born whole, with all their limbs, owed a debt of gratitude to Frances Kelsey, whistleblower par excellence!
A close friend of mine, Tom Clark, tells me that he is of that generation. Tom added that his mother suffered miserably from morning sickness in bearing him. He is gratefully aware that he might well be missing a limb or two today, had his mother been able to acquire Thalidomide in the United States.
What happens to the likes of Dr. Kelsey at the F.D.A. today? Sadly, modern-day whistleblowers - whether in government, industry or even the press - more often than not face severe career reprisals, legal action and sometimes imprisonment, like Pvt. Bradley Manning jailed for allegedly leaking classified government documents to WikiLeaks. Rarely do truth-tellers get presidential awards.
Which reminds me of an open letter that ten other veterans of government service and I signed nearly eight years ago, on Sept. 9, 2004. Our "Truth-Telling Coalition" directed an appeal to "Current Government Officials." We wrote:
It is time for unauthorized truth telling.
Citizens cannot make informed choices if they do not have the facts -- for example, the facts that have been wrongly concealed about the ongoing war in Iraq: the real reasons behind it, the prospective costs in blood and treasure, and the setback it has dealt to efforts to stem terrorism. Administration deception and cover-up on these vital matters has so far been all too successful in misleading the public.
Many Americans are too young to remember Vietnam. Then, as now, senior government officials did not tell the American people the truth. Now, as then, insiders who know better have kept their silence, as the country was misled into the most serious foreign policy disaster since Vietnam.
Some of you have documentation of wrongly concealed facts and analyses that -- if brought to light -- would impact heavily on public debate regarding crucial matters of national security, both foreign and domestic. We urge you to provide that information now, both to Congress and, through the media, to the public.
Thanks to our First Amendment, there is in America no broad Officials Secrets Act, nor even a statutory basis for the classification system. Only very rarely would it be appropriate to reveal information of the three types whose disclosure has been expressly criminalized by Congress: communications intelligence, nuclear data, and the identity of U.S. intelligence operatives. However, this administration has stretched existing criminal laws to cover other disclosures in ways never contemplated by Congress.
There is a growing network of support for whistleblowers. In particular, for anyone who wishes to know the legal implications of disclosures they may be contemplating, the ACLU stands ready to provide pro bono legal counsel, with lawyer-client privilege. The Project on Government Oversight (POGO) will offer advice on whistle blowing, dissemination and relations with the media.
Needless to say, any unauthorized disclosure that exposes your superiors to embarrassment entails personal risk. Should you be identified as the source, the price could be considerable, including loss of career and possibly even prosecution. Some of us know from experience how difficult it is to countenance such costs. But continued silence brings an even more terrible cost, as our leaders persist in a disastrous course and young Americans come home in coffins or with missing limbs.
This is precisely what happened at this comparable stage in the Vietnam War. Some of us live with profound regret that we did not at that point expose the administration's dishonesty and perhaps prevent the needless slaughter of 50,000 more American troops and some 2 to 3 million Vietnamese over the next ten years.
We know how misplaced loyalty to bosses, agencies, and careers can obscure the higher allegiance all government officials owe the Constitution, the sovereign public, and the young men and women put in harm's way. We urge you to act on those higher loyalties.
A hundred forty thousand young Americans are risking their lives every day in Iraq for dubious purpose. Our country has urgent need of comparable moral courage from its public officials. Truth telling is a patriotic and effective way to serve the nation. The time for speaking out is now.
SIGNATORIES
Appeal from the Truth-Telling Coalition
Edward Costello, Former Special Agent (Counterintelligence), Federal Bureau of Investigation
Sibel Edmonds, Former Language Specialist, Federal Bureau of Investigation
Daniel Ellsberg, Former official, U.S. Departments of Defense and State
John D. Heinberg, Former Economist, Employment and Training Administration, U.S. Department of Labor
Larry C. Johnson, Former Deputy Director for Anti-Terrorism Assistance, Transportation Security, and Special Operations, Department of State, Office of the Coordinator for Counter Terrorism
Lt. Col Karen Kwiatowski, USAF (ret.), who served in the Pentagon's Office of Near East Planning
John Brady Kiesling, Former Political Counselor, U.S. Embassy, Athens, Department of State
David MacMichael, Former Senior Estimates Officer, National Intelligence Council, Central Intelligence Agency
Ray McGovern, Former Analyst, Central Intelligence Agency
Philip G. Vargas, Ph.D., J.D., Dir. Privacy & Confidentiality Study, Commission on Federal Paperwork (Author/Director: "The Vargas Report on Government Secrecy" -- CENSORED)
Ann Wright, Retired U.S. Army Reserve Colonel and U.S. Foreign Service Officer
An earlier version of this article appeared at Consortiumnews.com
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