The Shafeek Nader Trust honored two
whistleblowers at a ceremony on November 12. The ceremony was chaired
by Laura Nader while her brother Ralph watched silently from the edge
of the audience. They chose to honor William Binney, formerly of the
National Security Administration (NSA) and John Kiriakou, formerly
with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Both of these men were
portrayed as whistle-blowers who became targets of Obama's justice
department.
The Trust used this
awards ceremony as a stage to press for the impeachment of President
Obama. They invited an ultra-conservative lawyer, Bruce Fein, to make
their case. Fein has called for the impeachment of the last three
presidents and made his reputation by participating in the
impeachment of Richard Nixon.
Conservatives have abused every part of
the Constitution to keep themselves in power. Impeachment should be a
last resort, as in the case of Nixon. In the case of Clinton,
impeachment was a means to prevent the duly elected president from
fulfilling his promises. Conservatives are now trying to destroy
Obama's second term. No one who believes in democracy should support
this movement.
The Trust chose to honor William Binney
and John Kiriakou at one ceremony. One of them is a whistleblower;
the other is a self-promoter. Both worked for intelligence agencies,
Binney for the NSA and Kiriakou for the CIA. There the similarities
end.
Binney worked as a codebreaker for the
army and then the NSA for 40 years. He kept on doing the job because,
as he says, it was fun. Binney is a tall, nerdy man with a pleasant
voice and a wry sense of humor. He addressed the audience too briefly
to display his humor fully. He was honored, among other things, for
the 2007 New York Times video in which he described “Stellar Wind”,
a top secret computer program of the National Security NSA. The NSA
has been using this program to collect information on all Americans
and then storing this information in a huge repository in Bluffdale,
Utah. Binney, who clearly is knowledgeable on this subject,
calculates that the Utah facility has the capacity to store 100 years
of the entire world's electronic communication.
Binney worked for years as a code
breaker and electronic espionage expert at the NSA. In 2001, the NSA
proposed a new project that would cost billions of dollars. Binney
coded a much more modest program that could be implemented for a
fraction of the price. Binney called this program ThinThread and used it to
sift through the electronic records coming in from overseas. Soon he
noticed that his contractors were drifting away and computers were
being requisitioned for another project. This project was Stellar
Wind. His contractors told Binney they were eavesdropping on the
communications of American citizens. Binney decided this was wrong so
he informed the Congressional oversight committees. Since then, he
has been testifying regularly.
In 2007, Binney agreed to appear in a
7-minute video for the New York Times. In the video, he spoke freely
about Stellar Wind. He related an amusing incident when his home was
raided by the FBI. He was in the shower and an FBI agent interrupted
him while pointing a gun at his head. The FBI wanted to know if he
had knowledge of any crimes. He said he did, and sat down with them
(after first getting dressed) to explain the crime committed by Bush,
Cheney, General Haynes (head of NSA) when they started using Stellar
Wind to spy on the American people.
“I presented them with a problem,”
he said. “Because these FBI agents did not have security
clearance.” The problem for the government was that Binney did give
up top secret information, but he did so at the point of a gun.
Binney knew that the senior officer on the raid did have clearance,
but could say nothing to the others. Binney reminded that officer
that the Nuremberg defense would not work, that the officer could not
claim that he was just following orders. To this date, Binney has not
been charged with any crime. He believes the NSA needs better
oversight: procedures that regulate collection of electronic data or
selection of drone assassination targets need to be publicized, not
executed in secret. The congress needs to act to define and limit the
powers of the president in these areas.
Binney is the prototype of a
whistleblower. He resigned his position with the NSA and began
testifying before every committee of congress that invited him. He
has told everyone who listens that he believes the actions of the NSA
are unconstitutional and illegal. The second honoree at the evening's
ceremony did not act from similar honorable motives.
John Kiriakou, formerly of the CIA.
Kiriakou worked for the CIA for 14 years, beginning in 1990. The CIA
had been directing various covert wars in Central America and the
Caribbean at that time. Its proxies were widely believed to be
involved in illegal activities, including dealing drugs, killing
prisoners, and torture. None of these activities deterred Kiriakou
from joining the CIA.
After 9/11, Kiriakou and the CIA became
involved in covert activities in Afghanistan. Kiriakou says that he
had the opportunity to learn how to torture prisoners using
waterboarding but that he refused to take the course. Again, he was
not bothered by the CIA's sanction of illegal activities. Kiriakou
evidently read top secret agency reports, since he later reported
that Abu Zubaida was waterboarded.
Kiriakou quit the CIA in 2004. He did
not appear to have moral or legal issues with the agency. His motive
was, evidently, to further his career. He immediately went to work in
a series of private industry jobs related to his expertise in
gathering intelligence.
Kiriakou gave an interview to ABC News
in 2007 in which he claimed that waterboarding was effective in
extracting data from Abu Zubaydah. After
his ABC interview revealed Kiriakou as a whistle-blower, the former
CIA agent gave interviews for other media organizations repeating his
position that waterboarding was effective and necessary.
In
2009 the Obama administration ordered four secret memos released to
the press. These memos disclosed to the first time that Abu Zubaydah
had been waterboarded not once but 83 times, and that he stopped
giving valuable information after his captors started mistreating
him. In his 2009 book, Reluctant
Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA's War on Terror, Kiriakou
admitted that he had not been present at Abu Zubaydah's interrogation
but instead relied had on internal CIA cables for his information.
In
2012 the Justice Department brought charges against Kiriakou for four
violations of US official secrecy law, primarily based on email
communications with the co-author of his book. The Attorney General
had failed in its attempt to prosecute
In
a question and answer period after his statement for the award
ceremony, Kiriakou was asked why he was being prosecuted at this
time. He avoided answering the question, but the answer is obvious
from the charges against him. Three of the charges relate to
revealing the name of a covert operative. In 2008, Kiriakou revealed
to two journalists the name and telephone number of a covert CIA
officer who had directed the waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah. The
evidence for this was an email correspondence between Kiriakou and
the journalists. Kiriakou's defense was that the journalist already
knew the covert officer's name from another source. The evidence in
the emails included in the court record did not support this.
The
fourth charge against Kiriakou was that he lied to the Publications
Review Board about the book he published in 2009. In the book,
Kiriakou gave detailed descriptions of waterboarding, which at the
time was a classified procedure. He told the Review Board, however,
that this was a fictionalized account. He confided to his co-author
in emails that the board would not probably not bother to check his
story and that maybe they could get some classified material into the
book. Kiriakou walked into a trap there. The most common charge used
by the government against defendants is lying to a federal agent, a
felony. The lying generally occurs during an investigatory interview,
so defendants frequently avoid such interviews. Kiriakou could not
avoid the interview because he had written a book. He should have
taken care to tell the truth at the interview, but instead chose to
deceive the FBI about the contents of his book. His hubris betrayed
him.
The
true whistle-blower acts selflessly. His moral sense is offended by
the actions of his organization. He code of honor leaves him choice
but to reveal company or government secrets to the public. William
Binney expressed this by saying that he knew that spying on American
citizens was wrong and he could take no part in it. But he never
exposed individual operatives to danger, nor did he give details of
his project away that would have permitted enemies to counteract them
or use his inventions against the United States. His actions did not
break any laws and he has never been charged with a crime.
Kiriakou,
by contrast, did not take a personal risk by telling what he knew
about waterboarding in the CIA. At the time he spoke, Kiriakou had
already been out of the CIA for five years, so he did not fear
dismissal. He did not oppose waterboarding on moral grounds. He
argued that waterboarding was effective and almost painless, since
it only took 30 seconds to elicit a confession from the most hardened
Qaida soldier. Kiriakou revealed this information at least in part
because he was contemplating writing a book about his experience and
he needed to raise his public profile to sell the book.
Barack
Obama became president in 2009. One of his first acts as president
was to release four classified documents that described waterboarding
by the CIA, as well as two Justice Department documents that were
written at the request of the Bush administration to provide a legal
opinion that waterboarding was legal, despite historical evidence
that it had always been torture and therefore banned by the Geneva
protocols. When Obama released these documents, Kiriakou could no
longer be prosecuted for divulging classified material.
After
Kiriakou disingenuously prayed that Obama might commute his sentence,
Bruce Fein gave a speech calling for the impeachment of Barack Obama.
Fein was a member of the team that brought impeachment charges
against Richard Nixon. After serving as an assistant Attorney General
in the Reagan administration, Fein also called for the impeachment of
Bill Clinton and George Bush. His charges coincided with the charges
that Ralph Nader has made against Obama, that Obama has
unconstitutionally waged war against Libya and killed US citizens
without a trial using drones.
Bruce
Fein spoke for about five minutes giving as fine a jury summation as
you will ever hear. Following his speech, Laura Nader, the
chairwoman, called for those in attendance to sign a petition calling
for President Obama to pardon Kiriakou. This petition made no sense.
Kiriakou was caught by the justice department while making a series
of blunders, not because he was exposing wrongdoing by the CIA but
because he was marketing himself as a security consultant. The
Justice department was doing its job by protecting CIA agents from
having their identities compromised. The chances that President Obama
would help Kiriakou were almost nil.
Jesselyn
Radack from The Government Accountability Project (GAP) sat beside
Kiriakou during the awards ceremony. Radack had already written a
couple of articles, one on the Daily Kos and another in Salon, in
which she declared her support for Kiriakou and denounced the Obama
administration. The Obama administration deserves some criticism in
other cases, but its behavior in this case seems appropriate.
Kiriakou was a whistle-blower who acted in his own interest. Radack
would have us ignore the facts of the matter (she never mentions that
he publicly approved waterboarding) and also ignore the fact that
Obama acted almost immediately upon his election to ban waterboarding
and released previously classified documents that showed the extent
of the problem.
Radack
claims that the Obama administration is waging war against reporters.
Not a single reporter was arrested or charged. The government charged
insiders who revealed classified material to the press. The issue of
protecting classified information should be entirely separate from
the issue of whistle-blowing. Binney was a whistle-blower. He
testified before congressional oversight committees. When they
ignored him, he spoke to the press. He never revealed the identity of
any NSA and he never revealed details of the classified projects he
was working on. Binney wanted the leaders in the Bush administration
to take the blame for breaking the law, not the low-level programmers
who carried out the orders of others.
According
to the indictment, Kiriakou specifically named a low-level CIA
operative to three reporters. The information he gave them was
forwarded to attorneys for inmates in Guantanamo, along with
pictures, which were found by the jailers at Guantanamo. Kiriakou
therefore endangered the life of a CIA operative, the crime with
which he was charged and the one to which he pleaded guilty.
The
awards ceremony had elements of a trial. The defendant, Kiriakou,
could not testify fully because he had already signed an agreement
with the court not to claim innocence of the crime to which he was
pleading guilty. So he said he believed in his heart that he was
innocent, then refused to proceed any further because, he claimed, he
might have said too much already. Kiriakou pretended that he had no
idea why the government had decided to prosecute him 5 years after he
had given the interview to ABC. He knew very well that he was not
being prosecuted for leaking information about torture. That was not
one of the charges against him. The government was charging him with
crimes committed after that interview and unrelated to it.
Radack
took the part of his attorney in this drama. She said the only reason
he was pleading guilty was so that he could be with his children
while they were growing up. If Kiriakou had said that, he would have
violated his plea bargain, but the substance of the plea bargain was
not revealed to the audience. Just as in a criminal trial, the quasi
lawyer, Radack, withheld information that made her quasi client,
Kiriakou, look bad.
Radack
was not Kiriakou's lawyer during his trial. She pleaded his case in
the press, always arguing in ways calculated to minimize his guilt.
Kiriakou pled guilty to only one count, that he lied to the FBI in an
effort to get classified material into his book. Radack argued that
the classified material was not published. She concealed the actual
indictment from her readers. The crime he pled guilty to was lying to
a federal investigator, not making classified material public.
The
groups involved in this awards ceremony, the Shafeek Nader Trust and the Government Accountability Project, as well as the individuals
who assisted them in this enterprise, Jesselyn Radack and Bruce Fein,
should have chosen a better subject for their efforts. Everyone who
leaks information is not a whistle-blower. Kiriakou leaked some
information (the habitual use of waterboarding) while maintaining
falsely that waterboarding was effective. Binney and Thomas Drake are
principled men who speak the truth at great personal risk. Drake has
lost his job and pension. Radack also made a difficult decision to
publicly expose the lies of the Bush Justice Department. True
whistle-blowers deserve our support. Self-promoters do not.
Other
progressives have called for Obama's impeachment. Ralph Nader has
accused Obama of committing war crimes that amounted to impeachable
offenses. Glenn Greenwald believes that Obama could be impeached over
the invasion of Libya. These people want to destroy the progressive
agenda by attacking Obama on constitutional grounds. We are at war
now, a war between the one per cent and the ninety-nine percent. This
is an all-out, no holds barred battle. Progressives need to decide
which side they support and not play intellectual games as if they
are lecturing on a college campus.
Sources (partial list)
Brian Ross interview with John
Kiriakou, Oct 12 2007, ABC News,
http://abcnews.go.com/images/Blotter/brianross_kiriakou_transcript2_blotter071210.pdf
Scott Shane, Waterboarding used 266
times on two suspects, New York
Times,http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/20/world/20detain.html?_r=0,(Shane
was one of the two journalists referred to in the Kiriakou
indictment).
Jessylen
Radack, The Truth about the Espionnage Act Prosecution of John
Kiriakou, Government Accountability Project,
http://www.whistleblower.org/blog/42-2012/1894-the-truth-about-the-espionage-act-prosecution-against-whistleblower-john-kiriakou
