By JACK FLYNN
Three prominent whistleblowers appearing at Mount Holyoke College Wednesday said exposing government misconduct has become more daunting during the Obama administration, despite the president’s assurances to the contrary.
The speakers – Daniel Ellsberg, best known for leaking the Pentagon Papers in 1971; Jesselyn Radack, author and former U.S. Justice Department lawyer; and Thomas Drake, former National Security Agency official targeted in an aborted espionage prosecution – said the government has become increasingly aggressive in protecting disclosure of embarrassing or illegal activities.
“This is the most aggressively secretive administration we’ve seen,” said Ellsberg, the first American to be prosecuted under the Espionage Act for leaking the 7,000-page Pentagon Papers to the New York Times in 1971.
In addition to charges against Ellsberg and a co-defendant, which were dismissed in 1973, two others individuals were prosecuted for leaking secrets before Obama took office in 2008, Ellsberg said. Since then, six whistleblower cases have been filed under the Espionage Act, representing a dramatic, if largely unheralded, shift in national policy, Ellsberg said.
“This is the first president to essentially use the Espionage Act as an unofficial national secrecy act,” Ellsberg, 80, said.
“It’s an Orwellian environment,” said Drake, a former National Security Agency official who pleaded guilty to one misdemeanor count last year for giving unclassified information about contractor fraud and government surveillance to a reporter for The Baltimore Sun.
The government opted for a plea deal to avoid making classified evidence public for the trial, according to published reports. The prosecutor was Assistant U.S. Attorney William M. Welch II, who led a public corruption probe in Springfield from 2001 to 2006.
In a response to The Republican, a Justice Department spokesman said federal employees wishing to expose waste or wrongdoing have “well established mechanisms” available to them.
“We cannot sanction or condone federal employees who knowingly and willfully disclose classified information to the media or others not entitled to receive such information,” the spokesman, Dean Boyd, said.
“As a general matter, prosecutions of those who leaked classified information to reporters have been rare,” Boyd said, adding the department tries to strike a balance between constitutionally-guaranteed rights and the interests of law enforcement and national security.
Still, the new secrecy prosecutions not only reflect public fears over terrorism, but also the Obama administration’s fear of appearing weak on national security, according to Drake, who said former members of George W. Bush’s administration are surprised by the crackdown.
“I’ve had people who worked in the Bush administration tell me, ‘Whoa, we never imagined he would have gone this far; we would have been lambasted for it, and we (went) pretty far,’ ” Drake said.
Radack, who represented Drake in his case, resigned in 2002 as ethics adviser with the Justice Department after clashing with superiors over the treatment of John Walker Lindh, the so-called “American Taliban” captured in Afghanistan, and public statements on the case by then-Attorney General John Ashcroft.
After learning that emails detailing her objections to Lindh’s treatment were not turned over for his trial, Radack gave copies to Newsweek; initially, the emails had been purged from her computer, but with technical support, she was able to recover them.
Once she left the Justice Department, Radack said she was harassed in a variety of ways and accused of being a traitor.
Her experience is chronicled in new book, “Canary in the Coalmine: Blowing the Whistle in the Case of American Taliban” John Walker Lindh.”
Currently, she works as homeland security director of the Government Accountability Project, a whistleblower organization.
The trio appeared for a panel discussion on whistleblowing and government secrecy sponsored by Mount Holyoke College and the Five College Consortium.