What the Whistleblower Prosecution Says About the Obama DOJ

The more I think and read about the Obama DOJ's
prosecution of NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake, the more I think this
might actually be one of the worst steps the Obama administration has
taken yet, if not the single worst step -- and that's obviously saying a
lot. 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 Drake.

Aside from the indefensible fact that only crimes committed by
high-level Bush officials -- but nobody else -- enjoy
the benefits of Obama's "Look Forward, Not Backward" decree,
think about the interests being served by this prosecution. Most
discussions yesterday suggested that Drake's leaks to The Baltimore
Sun's Sibohan Gorman were about waste and mismanagement in the
"Trailblazer" project rather than controversial NSA spying activities,
but that's not entirely accurate.

Just consider this May 18,
2006, article by Gorman, describing how and why the NSA opted for
the "Trailblazer" proposal over the privacy-protecting "Thin
Thread" program, in the process discarding key privacy protections
designed to ensure that the NSA would not eavesdrop on the
domestic calls of U.S. citizens (h/t ondelette).
In that article -- which really should be read to get a sense for the
whistle-blowing that is being punished by the DOJ -- Gorman described at
length how then-NSA head Michael Hayden rejected technologies that
could "rapidly separate and encrypt U.S.-related communications to
ensure privacy" and "that monitored potential abuse of the records." As
she put it: "Once President Bush gave the go-ahead for the NSA to
secretly gather and analyze domestic phone records -- an authorization
that carried no stipulations about identity protection -- agency
officials regarded the encryption as an unnecessary step and rejected
it."

It's not hyperbole to say that Bush's decision to use the NSA to
spy domestically on American citizens was one of the most significant
stories of this generation. It was long recognized that turning the NSA
inward was one of the greatest dangers to freedom, as
Sen. Frank Church warned back in 1975, after he investigated
America's secret surveillance apparatus: "That capability at any time
could be turned around on the American people and no American would have
any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything:
telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter. There would be no
place to hide." It was, of course, the December
16, 2005, New York Times article by Jim Risen and Eric
Lichtblau which first disclosed that the Bush NSA was illegally
eavesdropping on American citizens inside the U.S., but Gorman's
articles regarding the Trailblazer program -- in the time period covered
by the indictment, using NSA sources (almost certainly including Drake)
-- provided crucial details about how and why the Bush NSA dispensed
with key safeguards to protect innocent Americans from such invasive
domestic surveillance.

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. But look at the coalition
of corporations which was contracted to develop this Trailblazer
project, the familiar cast of Surveillance State interests who were
the recipients of the "boondoggle" which Gorman and Drake exposed:

Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) today
announced a contract award from the National Security Agency to be the
provider of the technology demonstration platform phase of the
TRAILBLAZER program.

The TDP phase of the TRAILBLAZER program is currently estimated
at $280 million and will be performed over a period of 26 months.

The NSA selected the SAIC-led Digital Network Intelligence
Enterprise team that includes Northrop Grumman, Booz Allen
Hamilton, The Boeing Company, Computer Sciences Corporation and
SAIC wholly-owned subsidiary Telcordia Technologies to contribute to
the modernization of the NSA's signals intelligence capabilities.

SAIC itself is, by
its own description, an enormous defense contractor devoted
to "customers in the U.S. Department of Defense, the intelligence
community, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, other U.S.
Government civil agencies and selected commercial markets." Just like
its Trailblazer partners -- Boeing, Booz Allen and Northrop Grumman --
SAIC feeds off
the massive Pentagon and intelligence
budgets. In other words, Drake's leaks to Gorman exposed serious
wrongdoing on the part of (a) the NSA and its illegal
domestic spying activities and (b) the vast private
intelligence and defense industry that has all
but formally merged with the CIA, NSA and Pentagon to become the
public-private National Security and Surveillance State that exercises
more power, by far, than any single faction in the country.

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. Anyone who doubts that whistle-blower prosecutions
like this are intended to prevent any further
disclosures of wrongdoing should simply review the 2008
Pentagon report which identified WikiLeaks as a major threat to the
U.S. and proposed that exposure and prosecution of their sources would
crush their ability to obtain further leaks.

It's true that leaking classified information is a crime. That's
what makes whistleblowers like Drake so courageous. That's why Daniel
Ellsberg -- who literally risked his liberty in an effort to help end
the Vietnam War -- is one of the 20th Century's genuine American
heroes. And if political-related crimes were punished equally, one
could accept whistle-blower prosecutions even while questioning the
motives behind them and the priorities they reflect. But that's not the
situation that prevails.

Instead, here you have the Obama DOJ in all its glory: no
prosecutions (but rather full-scale immunity extended) for war crimes,
torture, and illegal spying. For those crimes, we must Look
Forward, Not Backward. But for those poor individuals who
courageously blow the whistle on oozing corruption, waste and illegal
surveillance by the omnipotent public-private Surveillance State: the
full weight of the "justice system" comes crashing down upon them with
threats of many years in prison.

UPDATE: John Cole, proving once again that
one can be an enthusiastic Obama admirer without reflexively excusing
and justifying everything he does, writes
today:

The message is clear- you torture people and then destroy the
evidence, and you get off without so much as a sternly worded letter.

If you are a whistle blower outlining criminal behavior by the
government, [] you get prosecuted.

Cole is referring to the revelation
today that, once he learned it was done, then-CIA-Director Porter
Goss approved of the destruction of CIA interrogation videos (an act
which the co-Chair
of the 9/11 Commissions said constituted an obstruction of
justice), and the message Cole describes is exactly the one being sent
by the Drake prosecution.