This post also appears on GAP Homeland Security Director Jesselyn Radack's Daily Kos blog.

This weekend Attorney General Holder and Obama Counterterrorism Advisor - and former head of the National Counterterrorism Center under G.W. Bush - John Brennan were hitting the Sunday shows floating an expanded exception to the requirement to read Miranda warnings to American citizens suspected of terrorism crimes, such as would-be Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad.

Giving Miranda warnings in custodial interrogation is a long-standing workable process, and is required to protect the Constitutional Rights of ALL suspects. It does not need a fix.

It is unacceptable that we continue to buy into the paradigm that the established, fair, and practical U.S. justice system and constitutionally-sound effective law enforcement techniques are somehow inadequate for a certain class of crimes. Since when does the crime someone is accused of determine whether the Constitution is applicable?

This post was written by GAP Homeland Security Director Jesselyn Radack for her Daily Kos Blog.

This morning, whistleblower advocacy groups called for Attorney General Holder to personally consider whether DOJ should be locking up whistleblower Brad Birkenfeld.  Birkenfeld took immense professional and personal risks to voluntarily disclose UBS's multi-billion dollar tax fraud conspiracy to law enforcement officials, handing DOJ its case against UBS on a silver platter.

What was Birkenfeld's reward for blowing the whistle? He is facing jail time while his colleagues who did nothing to cooperate have gotten off practically scot-free.  Holder should review this case and protect Birkenfeld, lest Holder plans to give up on any possible future financial whistleblowers who will learn that a "whistleblower reward" is a prison jumpsuit.

Today's letter from the National Whistleblower Center (NWC), the Government Accountability Project (GAP) and the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) points out the tragic consequences of DOJ punishing rather than protecting financial whistleblowers and should spur Holder to personally review Birkenfeld's case.

With $5-7 trillion U.S. dollars hidden in offshore accounts causing $100 billion in treasury revenue losses, the harm in sending Birkenfeld to jail is astronomical.  Holder ought to pay attention when he reads the consequences the letter points out:

Denying Mr. Birkenfeld whistleblower status, and sending him off to a long prison term, radically undermines the ability of the U.S. government to detect, prosecute and prevent illegal off-shore banking practices.  Without exaggeration, on the day Mr. Birkenfeld enters a federal penitentiary, every criminal using offshore secret banks to hide their ill-gotten gain will celebrate.  The Department of Justice will, unintentionally, be party to a well-publicized worldwide event that will send a chill down the spine of any international banker who, like Mr. Birkenfeld, feels guilty about the practices they participate in and wants to help stop these insidious practices that undermine the rule of law.

Due to the destructive impact of Mr. Birkenfeld’s sentencing, honest U.S. taxpayers will continue to bear the burden of the $100 billion lost to the Treasury annually because of secret banking. Victims of crimes funded by laundered funds, often funneled through secret banks, will shudder. These secret accounts are used to hide "blood money": money stolen from development projects designed for the most impoverished; bribe money obtained by crooked politicians, undermining the rule of law; profits from illegal arms deals to terrorist organizations.

At Birkenfeld's sentencing in August, DOJ itself fully acknowledged Birkenfeld's voluntary disclosures and made clear that DOJ would not have opened the UBS case without his information:

The United States opened an investigation based on information provided by Birkenfeld...This substantial assistance has been timely, significant, useful, truthful, complete and reliable.

Birkenfeld's information didn't just serve to expose thousands of illegal accounts; the case has yielded fines and penalties of $780 million. Yet, after taking and using all of the information he provided, DOJ still prosecuted Birkenfeld.  And, while Birkenfeld's reward is a jail sentence, Birkenfeld's criminal colleagues - like Martin Leichti, Birkenfeld's ex-boss, who was allowed to return to Switzerland - are enjoying the benefits of hiding their criminal behavior: freedom and wealth.

So, as the letter asks, so do I:

Will the Department of Justice imprison the international banker who had the courage to voluntarily step forward and blow the whistle on one of the world’s most powerful corporations? Or will the Department of Justice use the Bradley Birkenfeld case as an historic opportunity to promote whistleblowing in the fight against corrupt international banks?

by Brett Kendall

Three advocacy groups asked U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder Thursday to personally review the case of the prison-bound banker who helped U.S. tax authorities build their groundbreaking case against UBS AG (UBS).

The groups said in a letter to Holder that former UBS private banker Bradley Birkenfeld, who was sentenced in August to 40 months in prison for helping the Swiss bank's clients evade taxes, should have been given protections as a whistleblower and granted immunity from prosecution.

This post was written by GAP Homeland Security Director Jesselyn Radack for her Daily Kos Blog.

I blogged about Attorney General Holder's memo introducing new state secrets privilege guidelines last week. I'm glad to see the New York Times has agreed. An editorial in today's New York Times expresses exactly the same sentiment I expressed last week: that while internal Executive Branch controls on state secrets are a welcome step, the Executive Branch cannot be trusted to police itself.

Keeping control of the state secrets privilege entirely within the Executive Branch, with no meaningful Congressional or court oversight, will allow the government to continue to abuse the privilege by claiming evidence contains state secrets in order to cover embarrassing or illegal behavior instead of to protect national security.

There's no better example of this kind of cover-up than the very first time the government asserted the state secrets privilege in U.S. v. Reynolds.  In Reynolds, families of civilian victims of a military plane crash sued the government.  The government refused to release the accident report, claiming it contained a "state secret" about military equipment.  The Supreme Court upheld the government's claim of secrecy and formally established the state secrets privilege.  In later years, the accident report was made public.  Not only did the report lack any information on secret military equipment, but it contained irrefutable evidence of the government's negligence.

Our country's national security is too important to be used as an excuse to hide government incompetence, much less intentional wrongdoing

If the government wants hide evidence, the government ought to be required to show a court how revealing the evidence would cause significant harm to the national defense or diplomatic relations.  Anything less would allow state secrets to be used as it has too often been used since its inception: to stop accountability for government misbehavior.  Conspicuously missing from the Obama Administration's "state secrets reform" guidelines is court oversight or support for the legislation that would implement it, the State Secrets Protection Act (H.R. 984, S. 417).

The New York Times got it right today:

In any event, while more stringent self-policing of executive branch secrecy claims is welcome, it is hardly a total fix. Senator Russ Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat, noted that without a clear, permanent mandate for independent court review of the administration’s judgment calls, Mr. Holder’s policy "still amounts to an approach of ‘just trust us.'

I reiterate my point from last week: if the past nine years has taught us anything, it's not to trust the Executive Branch to protect our civil liberties.

Jesselyn Radack discusses the latest news regarding how taxpayers are footing the bill for former DOJ OLC attorney John Yoo's legal defense.