Washington Post: Sen. Charles Grassley Plans New Whistleblower-Protection Caucus
Longtime whistleblower champion Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) is announcing that he will form a new Senate Caucus focusing on whistleblower protection. This significant development, which is expected to take six months, comes on the 25th anniversary of the Whistleblower Protection Act being signed into law. GAP applauds this move by Grassley, and plans to release a statement through the Make It Safe Coalition later today.
Key Quote: “Whistleblowers are often treated like skunks at a picnic,” the lawmaker said. “It takes guts to put your career on the line to expose waste and fraud, and whistleblowers need senators who will listen and advocate for them.”
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Grassley has been active on whistleblower-protection issues throughout much of his career. In 1986, he authored amendments to the False Claims Act that gave private citizens more power to report fraudulent activity by government contractors and to sue in the name of the government. He also sponsored a bill in 2006 that overhauled the IRS whistleblower program to focus more on fighting major tax fraud.
ATVN: Panelists Discuss Government Surveillance and Journalism
Follow-up coverage of GAP’s American Whistleblower Tour stop at USC from earlier this week, featuring multiple video clips. Additionally, NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake sat down for a radio interview at the stop, as did Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg for a piece from an online school-based outlet.
Commonwealth Club of California: War on Whistleblowers – The Snowden Effect
Fresh off her appearance at USC, GAP National Security & Human Rights Director Jesselyn Radack will give a talk at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco today at 3 p.m. EDT, 12:00 p.m. PDT. More information on the event can be found at the link above.
Foreign Policy: We Can’t Say All That We See in Darfur
A former spokesperson for the Africa Union-United Nations mission in Darfur (UNAMID) published an online column asserting that the UNAMID lies to the media about horrific conditions in Sudan and that it fails to protect civilians. While trying for months to discover the root cause of the cover-up, whistleblower Achia Elbasri found that the lies “extended to the Department of Peacekeeping Operations, some U.N. agencies, and all the way up to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.”
Key Quote: The web of lies that various parts of the United Nations has woven about Darfur is vast. Orwellian doublespeak deliberately disguises reality and distorts words. U.N. reports on the region, for instance, typically and euphemistically use “air strikes” for indiscriminate bombing of civilians, “sporadic clashes” for continuous war, and “sexual and gender-based violence” for systematic rape. As for their references to Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir’s “regular forces,” I often wondered how there could be anything “regular” about the hordes of fighters who operate lawlessly and jointly with the Janjaweed death squads. They make no distinction between civilians and combatants, bomb children and terrorize adults, rape women, and loot and burn everything they find to the ground.
Related Article: Slate
Dylan Blaylock is Communications Director for the Government Accountability Project, the nation’s leading whistleblower protection and advocacy organization.