US intelligence oversight office pulls report finding universal retaliation against whistleblowers

One argument that critics of Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning and other whistleblowers like to throw at them is that rather than leak to the media, they should have gone through the “proper channels” and reported their concerns to whatever authorities oversee their station. That this is a garbage argument apparently isn’t self-evident enough, so here are 190 examples to illustrate why:

The nation’s top intelligence watchdog put the brakes on a report last year that uncovered whistleblower reprisal issues within America’s spy agencies, The Daily Beast has learned. The move concealed a finding that the agencies—including the CIA and the NSA—were failing to protect intelligence workers who report waste, fraud, abuse, or criminality up the chain of command.

The investigators looked into 190 cases of alleged reprisal in six agencies, and uncovered a shocking pattern. In only one case out of the 190 did the agencies find in favor of the whistleblower—and that case took 742 days to complete. Other cases remained open longer. One complaint from 2010 was still waiting for a ruling. But the framework was remarkably consistent: Over and over and over again, intelligence inspectors ruled that the agency was in the right, and the whistleblowers were almost always wrong.

It gets even better: The oversight office itself is hopelessly fucked.

The report was near completion following a six-month-long inspection run out of the Intelligence Community Inspector General office. It was aborted in April by the new acting head of the office, Wayne Stone, following the discovery that one of the inspectors was himself a whistleblower in the middle of a federal lawsuit against the CIA, according to former IC IG officials.

There’s a reason whistleblowers don’t report their concerns to their bosses, and cowardice isn’t it. It’s that they recognize the system is set up to crush them the moment they think about making waves. Anyone who thinks otherwise is deluded, as this report makes starkly clear.

(via @bartongellman)