A surprising war on leaks under Obama

By Thomas Drake

and Jesselyn Radack

When President Obama took office, federal employees who had exposed wrongdoing or were considering doing so had reason for hope. Eight years of the Bush administration's relentless retaliation against whistle-blowers had ended, and Obama spoke encouragingly of transparency and due process.

Since then, the administration has taken some positive steps for whistle-blowers, most notably in (unsuccessfully) advocating legislation to protect them and in loosening the government's grip on public information. However, its treatment of national-security and intelligence whistle-blowers - arguably the ones we need most - has been brutal. It has pursued multiple prosecutions of such whistle-blowers on espionage charges.

As prominent whistle-blowers on matters of national security, we have experienced the crackdown firsthand.

Each of our cases began shortly after 9/11. One of us (Radack) warned the Justice Department against interrogating "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh without an attorney. She later exposed the FBI's ethics violations in deciding to proceed, its barbaric treatment of him, and the mysterious disappearance of evidence of the warning from DOJ files.

The other (Drake) exposed billions of dollars in waste, mismanagement, and malfeasance at the National Security Agency, epitomized by an expensive surveillance program that was ultimately canceled.

Neither of us knew we had stumbled on and disrupted the embryonic stages of two of the most controversial policies of George W. Bush's administration: torture and secret surveillance. The government attempted to justify both through a theory of expansive presidential power, enabled by a state-secrets doctrine that was used to evade judicial review.

We both complained through internal channels - our supervisors and respective inspectors general - and, when that failed, made the difficult choice to go to the press. Then we became targets of federal criminal investigations into the leaks. In effect, for exercising our First Amendment right to speak to reporters about issues of public concern - revealing only unclassified information - we were designated traitors and enemies of the state.

Our "crimes" amounted to embarrassing the government by exposing high-level corruption, incompetence, and illegality. Neither of us was ever even alleged to have harmed national security.