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)

Dumb tweet of the day: Fox contributor compares Arpaio pardon to Manning commutation

From Fox News contributor Katie Pavlich, joining in the chorus of Right-wingers (and some Leftists) defending Trump’s pardon of his racist pal, former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, by pointing at things President Obama did that they didn’t like:

Your boss pardoned a traitor who gave U.S. enemies state secrets, he also pardoned a terrorist who killed Americans. Spare us the lecture. https://t.co/90jZcPXYqx

— Katie Pavlich (@KatiePavlich) August 27, 2017

That’s a lot of bullshit for 140 characters, especially since it’s all predicated on an obvious falsehood: Obama didn’t pardon either Manning nor the “terrorist”, Oscar López Rivera. He commuted their sentences, cutting their remaining time in prison without clearing their convictions. Here’s how the Justice Department website explains the difference:

A commutation of sentence reduces a sentence, either totally or partially, that is then being served, but it does not change the fact of conviction, imply innocence, or remove civil disabilities that apply to the convicted person as a result of the criminal conviction. […]

A pardon is an expression of the President’s forgiveness and ordinarily is granted in recognition of the applicant’s acceptance of responsibility for the crime and established good conduct for a significant period of time after conviction or completion of sentence.

Incidentally, the above explains perfectly why Trump’s pardon of Arpaio, whilst legal, symbolizes a massive middle-finger aimed at the federal judiciary and the intent behind presidential clemency. Arpaio didn’t remotely “accept responsibility” for his crimes; he routinely bragged about his inhumane treatment of suspected undocumented immigrants, and his open defiance of a federal court order is what earned him a criminal contempt conviction in the first place. Further, Trump didn’t even wait for the court to pass a sentence before jumping in with his pardon, which is the literal opposite of waiting for Arpaio to “establish good conduct for a significant period of time after conviction”. Trump just wanted to make sure his buddy and long-time supporter didn’t get punished for acts that Trump evidently doesn’t consider wrong.

The rest of Pavlich’s tweet is also nonsense. Manning isn’t a traitor, either legally or morally; she didn’t levy war against the US nor aid any enemies, as even the US government has been forced to concede several times. She instead leaked evidence of government wrongdoing to the press in the explicit purpose of educating people about what their government gets up to in their name. Some might call that a necessary right in a free society, though I understand many conservatives take the opposing view.

Then again, many on the Right do consider the media to be the “enemy of the people” nowadays, including the fucking President himself, so maybe anyone who leaks to them now is “aiding the enemy”. Because words don’t mean anything anymore.

As for the “terrorist who killed Americans”, that one’s more complicated. I freely admit my ignorance about the details of Oscar López Rivera’s history. That said, he did spend 32 years in prison, with twelve of them in solitary confinement, for being a member of a group that committed acts of political violence, though he was never evidentially tied to any of their attacks. Human rights advocates claim his sentence was disproportionate to his charges and that he was essentially a political prisoner; and President Clinton even offered him clemency in 1999, though Rivera turned it down.

Regardless, conservatives who once again engage in empty whataboutism to try and defend their dear President’s latest unpopular move are, once again, on the wrong side of things, both ethically and factually. Imagine that.

(via @ggreenwald & @radleybalko)

Secret US gov’t report confirms Manning leaks did no real damage

Chelsea Manning

Whenever a whistleblower exposes government wrongdoing, the first refrain we hear from defenders is that such leaks put lives in danger, by exposing troops and undercover agents or by damaging the country’s intelligence-gathering apparatus. This happened with Edward Snowden, who was accused of causing “profound damage” with “lethal consequences”, claims that were undermined by the lack of any evidence to support them and further refuted by the new NSA director, who said the fallout was manageable.

Before that, Chelsea Manning received the same treatment over her disclosures through Wiki­Leaks in 2010. Throughout her trial, the government argued that Manning’s disclosures would destroy the US’s ability to conduct its foreign policy and, of course, lead to a pile of dead troops and informants. But even then, it was obvious that this was little more than empty bluster. Nonetheless, the prosecution harped on about grave damage assuredly caused, basing this on a classified Department of Defense report that Manning’s defense lawyers weren’t allowed to view.

Well, surprise, surprise. BuzzFeed got a hold of that same document, and it turns out it doesn’t claim quite what the government said it did.

In the seven years since WikiLeaks published the largest leak of classified documents in history, the federal government has said they caused enormous damage to national security.

But a secret, 107-page report, prepared by a Department of Defense task force and newly obtained by BuzzFeed News, tells a starkly different story: It says the disclosures were largely insignificant and did not cause any real harm to US interests.

Regarding the hundreds of thousands of Iraq-related military documents and State Department cables provided by the Army private Chelsea Manning, the report assessed “with high confidence that disclosure of the Iraq data set will have no direct personal impact on current and former U.S. leadership in Iraq.”

The heavily redacted report also determined that a different set of documents published the same year, relating to the US war in Afghanistan, would not result in “significant impact” to US operations. It did, however, have the potential to cause “serious damage” to “intelligence sources, informants and the Afghan population,” and US and NATO intelligence collection efforts. The most significant impact of the leaks, the report concluded, would likely be on the lives of “cooperative Afghans, Iraqis, and other foreign interlocutors.”

It turns out the gravest consequences of Manning’s actions were that other countries were less keen on working with a foreign government that had lied about the crimes and atrocities they’d committed in their countries, and that knowledge of said crimes and atrocities might put their contacts at risk.

Call me crazy, but I’d say the blame for that goes to the government committing crimes and atrocities in the first place, not whomever blew the lid on their lies.

(via Techdirt)