I have the funniest feeling President Obama has suddenly remembered us—the loyal imposition, you know, who don't have any objection to a bit of socialism, or to Reverend Wright and Bill Ayres (in his post-terrorist aspect), or to spending a few years per century without a war being on—and is sending us faint signals from his Fortress of Solitude, if we listen carefully.
One of these was last Wednesday's Times article (by Scott Shane and Charlie Savage) trying to explain how the Obama administration found itself prosecuting six different cases of leaks under the Espionage Act, which, as you've heard, is twice as many as the number of prosecutions under all previous US presidents put together. In the first place Obama is said to have had nothing to do with it: [jump]
There was an exchange between Josh Gerstein of Politico and Matthew Miller, former spokesman for the Holder Department of Justice on the question of whether the Obama administration has a policy of prosecuting government whistleblowers, or just leakers of classified information, mentioning Thomas Drake of the National Security Agency, who was certainly a whistleblower and certainly got prosecuted; Miller explained that it was now fairly clear that Drake was a bona fide whistleblower, because the prosecution failed to convict him of anything but a technical violation.
Drake, who certainly did not get off scot-free—he lost his job and his pension—responded at the Daily Kos with a number of comments, including this:
So under the Miller theory, if a defendant wins, they are a whistleblower, but until the government loses they are 'leakers' endangering the lives of soldiers and national security?
That's the point, isn't it? The "system worked" as they like to say, but it wasted an awful lot of DOJ time and money, not to mention a lot of the life of an authentic American hero. Why couldn't the prosecutors have known in advance that this was a bad case to bring?
Why couldn't they have seen, on the one hand, that his disclosures (of the NSA's illegal warrantless wiretapping and data mining programs) were made in the public interest, and on the other that the disclosures, made to congressional committees and government officials, were in any case protected communications under the Whistleblower Protection Act?
What do they think is the purpose of prosecuting leakers of government information, and how did they imagine it would apply in this case? I'll be getting back to this question and other areas in which the National Security State seems able to overrule the expressed convictions of that great presidential candidate Barack Obama in subsequent posts, but for the moment I just wanted to vent.
