never be forgiven for insisting that his subordinates in the analytic cadre of the CIA be similarly wrong.
The negative connotations of the word “whistleblower” are worrisome. Until consumer advocate Ralph Nader popularized it in the 1970s, the term had a negative meaning. According to the Wall Street Journal, the idiomatic “blowing the whistle” emerged in the American vernacular in the early 20th century to describe a boxing referee ending a bout or a football official stopping play to announce a penalty.8 In a 1909 story by Sewell Ford, the earthy protagonist Shorty McCabe cuts off the garrulous Sadie Sullivan by saying, “Blow the whistle on that, can’t you?” By the 1930s, “blowing the whistle” on someone could imply the dramatic revelation of something illicit, and in certain walks of life that meant getting painted as a “rat” or a “snitch.” In 1936, a New York sports-writer referred to someone who had exposed the fakery of professional wrestling as a “whistleblower, which is unforgivable.”9
Nader rescued the term in the 1970s, acknowledging that the term whistleblower was not appreciated, but asserting that it was not a synonym for “fink or stool pigeon, a squealer or an informer, who rats on his employer.” Ironically, when Nader raised the issue he was speaking to the annual convention of the Association of Computing Machinery, warning that the collection of huge “data banks” might prevent people from “speaking out and blowing the whistle against the system.” By exposing the National Security Agency’s large-scale surveillance of the American people, that’s what Edward Snowden has done, and continues to do.
Whistleblowing begs the question of loyalty to government and country. Whistleblowers must decide whether they owe loyalty to the government agency or military service they represent or to the U.S. Constitution they are sworn to honor. Leaks of classified information in the field of national security are particularly complicated, because laws protect such information. Whistleblowers may be naïve about the consequences of their actions, particularly the risk of lifting the veil on secrecy. Nevertheless, they deserve recognition as dissenters or contrarians who want to bring some semblance of truth to the American people.
Legitimate whistleblowing within the government typically follows a breakdown in the moral compass of some department or agency. In my case, it was the intentional and systematic manipulation of intelligence within the CIA; in the case of Daniel Ellsberg, it was an unnecessary war; in the case of Thomas Drake, it was a constitutional breakdown at the National Security Agency; and in the case of Chelsea Manning, it involved war crimes being committed by the United States. A decade after my exposure of chronic corruption at the CIA, the deliberate and systematic falsification of intelligence to coerce the nation to launch an unprovoked war demonstrated that the problem had metastasized. A decade after that, we learned about the CIA’s role in the Terror Wars, which involved secret prisons, torture, and the targeted killing of people only suspected of crimes.
In 2014, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence under the chairmanship of Senator Feinstein produced the 6,300-page report on CIA torture that revealed that even innocent individuals had been held in secret prisons and tortured. The Senate report was validated by a review ordered by then CIA director Leon Panetta. The Senate report and the Panetta Review recorded the sadistic interrogation of more than 100 al Qaeda members and suspects under the euphemism “enhanced interrogation techniques.” The report and review confirmed that no significant intelligence was produced by torture, and that the CIA lied to the White House and the Congress about the true nature of the interrogations and the intelligence that was (or, in this case, was not) obtained. Former CIA officials (including Directors Tenet, Goss, and Hayden) and CIA apologists, including journalists, maintained that torture gets results and that the interrogations were valuable. The immorality of the CIA’s use of violence, humiliation, and coercion was never a factor for these individuals.
CIA director John Brennan was critical of torture and abuse in 2009, when he was serving on President Obama’s staff, but he referred to interrogators as “patriots” when he became director. As director, he went to unusual lengths to block the release of the report, lying to the committee chair and even threatening a constitutional crisis over the separation of powers by sanctioning the hacking of Senate computers and the emails of Senate staffers.
When former CIA director William Colby was faced with evidence of CIA crimes during the Vietnam War, he released the dispositive documents to the Senate. Brennan was neither courageous enough nor independent enough to do this. Instead, Brennan permitted the CIA to conduct electronic searches of Senate computer programs in order to learn what documents the Senate staffers had obtained, even hacking into the emails of key committee staffers. The CIA ran this program like any covert operation aimed at an adversary, but the target was the Senate Intelligence Committee of the United States of America and there could be no “plausible denial.”
In an unusual attack, Senator Feinstein charged the CIA with secretly withdrawing hundreds of documents from the Senate staff’s archives, including the authoritative Panetta Review that corroborated the charges in the Senate report. The CIA falsely claimed that the White House had ordered the withdrawal of the documents, which led to a CIA apology. Senator Feinstein called for additional CIA apologies, but what was needed was the release of the full report and the Panetta Review. The most tantalizing aspect of Feinstein’s remarks was her view that the Panetta Review may have been placed in the Senate’s documents by a CIA whistleblower.
As soon as the Republicans took over control of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence as a result of their election victory in November 2014, they reclassified the Panetta Review and ordered it returned to the CIA. The chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Richard Burr (R-NC), even blocked the confirmation of a former staffer of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Alissa Starzak, as general counsel for the United States Army. Burr’s reason for blocking the confirmation? Starzak was the lead investigator in the writing of the torture report. The deceit never stops.
At least 200 CIA officers who took part in illegal activities relating to the Terror Wars continue to work at the Counterterrorism Center, which probably explains why the Obama administration refused to seek accountability. Any serious accountability would discover that a small group of CIA officials, including lawyers, were acting as both judge and jury in deciding who was guilty of terrorism and who would be detained and tortured. The CIA is deeply damaged, but no one appears to want to fix it or even knows how, including the congressional intelligence committees charged with oversight.
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In view of the catastrophic losses in terms of death and destruction, it is appalling that so few whistleblowers have emerged during the Terror Wars. It takes an unusual personality to challenge the government, in part due to the lack of protection and the likelihood of retribution. One of the reasons why so few are “doing what comes naturally” is the lack of trust in the system. People of conscience contemplating whistleblowing fear retaliation and punishment for reporting even illegalities. The fear is real and documented; it was particularly obvious during the scandal at the Department of Veterans Affairs in 2014 over the cover-up of terrible abuses. The series of abuses at the Secret Service from 2011 to 2014 revealed that there were agents who would not step forward to report security concerns because they didn’t trust the system or their supervisors. At the CIA, I was aware of numerous individuals who wouldn’t go to the Office of the Inspector General, let alone the Congress, and believed that it would be a career-ending move to do so.
There is no protection for whistleblowers in the intelligence community, and intelligence officers face the possible loss of a security clearance for going public regarding abuses. Any individual with a security clearance who goes to the media is subject to loss of security clearance, which is the same as being fired. The system for oversight, moreover, is broken in the Congress and at the CIA.
Federal
