If the United States is willing to give up an iron-clad classic espionage prosecution to get justice for Russian Igor Sutyagin--jailed for allegedly selling information about nuclear submarines and missile warning systems to a firm fronting for the CIA--then why is our government throwing the full weight of the criminal justice system on our own citizen for revealing gross waste, abuse and illegality by the National Security Agency (NSA)?
We don't tolerate it when Russia imprisons unjustly; in fact, we fight to get their citizens out. But when it comes to our own citizen speaking out against government abuses, the United States will do everything in its power to put him in jail.
It's a good thing we don't have a prison camp near the Arctic Circle.
The Washington Post front-page, top-of-the-fold article on the U.S. and Russia negotiating the swap of spy suspects is just further evidence of the upside-down nightmare facing whistleblower Tom Drake.
Igor Sutyagin, a Russian disarmament researcher, is Russia's biggest bargaining chip in a possible spy swap with the United States. Granted, it sounds like a gross injustice and human rights violation that Sutyagin, who was working for the "Institute for the Study of the United States and Canada" in Moscow, was imprisoned 11 years ago for allegedly selling information about nuclear submarines and missile warning systems to a British firm that was supposedly a front for the CIA.
Although Sutyagin's and Drake's predicaments are factually different, the lessons are chillingly the same. According to the Post article, Sutyagin's lawyer said
He has never been a spy, and he had to sign the paper [guilty plea] because he did not have any other choice . . . He thinks that if they exchange him for the so-called spies, everyone will think that he is a spy also, and he is not.
Tom Drake is in the same boat. He has never been a spy and has never spied on the United States. He is also desperate to get out from under the years of government criminal investigation and now indictment that hang over his head, but he steadfastly refuses to plea bargain with the truth.
The article elaborates that
After [Sutyagin] was found guilty in 2004--and sentenced to 15 years in prison--commentators and analysts decried the verdict and said an overzealous government in Moscow was simply seeking to discourage others from sharing sensitive information with other countries.
That's exactly what our government is doing to Thomas Drake--but its trying to discourage others from sharing information of illegalities with their OWN country: with you, the citizenry, who constitute the core of a free and democratic society.
In a prescient Op-Ed piece in the Washington Post, Masha Lipman, an expert on Russia, described Sutyagin's conviction as offering
more evidence of how Russia's judicial system is falling under the control of the executive branch.
Sound familiar?
I make an impassioned plea to take 10 seconds and "like" this page to show your support for whistleblower Thomas Drake.
Jesselyn Radack is the Homeland Security & Human Rights Director for the Government Accountability Project, a whistleblower protection organization. This article was cross-posted from her Daily Kos diary.
