Hey y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
Keep all my interview archives at scotthorton.org add slash stress to get to the blog.
Alright, our first guest on the show today is Marcy Wheeler, Empty Wheel, as she's known in the blogosphere, emptywheel.net.
She blogs mostly about civil liberties and national security work, and of course has written for different magazines and newspapers and so forth as well.
Welcome back to the show.
Marcy, how are you doing?
Hey Scott, thanks for having me.
I'm sorry?
Thanks for inviting me on the show.
Oh, you know what?
I'm sorry, I just got to turn my speakers up because they're just down too low.
I don't wear headphones because they make my ears hurt.
But my speakers, they're far away, so I have to make them louder.
Alright, thank you very much for joining me.
I wanted to ask you about the war against the whistleblowers.
I know that, actually I don't even know the number off the top of my head.
Is it seven or ten or something whistleblowers prosecuted by the Obama administration?
And I was hoping that you could kind of just take us through at least some of their stories, and maybe if you prefer, you could sort of start with the degree of change, how much difference it makes from the Bush years to now when it comes to this kind of thing.
I mean, obviously there's Bradley Manning, but there are many others.
Well, Bradley Manning is a big one, but he's in the military system, which is in some ways less surprising.
What is different is that there are a number of people, Thomas Drake is one, to some degree John Kiriakou is another, I'm trying to remember the other ones, that were targeted, that were investigated under the Bush administration, and Bush's DOJ decided that they couldn't or wouldn't take a case.
And then we change administrations, and all of a sudden you see charges.
You see people being charged on espionage charges.
And that, I think, is the most telling aspect, because you're looking at the same people, the same set of facts.
The Bush administration chose not to charge them or probably couldn't for a variety of reasons.
Jeffrey Sterling is another one who was first investigated under Bush and not charged until Obama, but also who the Obama administration was willing to embrace this notion that leaking information, including information about how stupid our government is or how corrupt or how vile or what have you, leaking that information now counts as espionage.
Right.
And now these are really – well, I should ask it this way.
Are there any cases where, oh, yeah, they claim that it's whistleblowing, but it's really not.
It's selfish moneymaking, book writing, betrayal of important confidential information, or in all these cases is it just really black and white whistleblowing, trying to let the public know what they need to know about what the government is doing wrong?
The most – I mean, the government has their claims for each of these people, although they really didn't even try that with Thomas Drake.
But they have claims, for example, that Jeffrey Sterling was trying to get back at the CIA for not responding to his equal employment case.
In other words, he sued because he got different treatment because he's African American, and the CIA says that's why he leaked the information he leaked, not because the CIA was dealing nuclear blueprints to Iran.
I happen to think it was pretty important for him if he did, although I think there's reason to believe other people were providing that information.
But I happen to think it's important information for us to know.
The other thing that sometimes they're claiming is that people leaked information to influence policy.
So in other words, and one of the big ones is always, even going back to Larry Franklin, who's the only person under the Bush administration who kind of fits this pattern, that somebody was either pro or anti-Israel, and they tried to get the information out there so that there would be what they perceived as an even debate.
So Larry Franklin was a DOD person, and he actually pled guilty to leaking information indirectly and directly to AIPAC, so that the Israeli lobby would have information about what we plan to do with Iran.
He says he did it for policy reasons, and he didn't leak it to journalists.
Whereas what we're seeing now is people being charged for leaking stuff to journalists.
And one of the most breathtaking arguments the government has made, the Obama administration made, came in the Jeffrey Sterling case, which is, he's accused of leaking information about this CIA scheme to give Iran nuclear blueprints, right?
And his lawyers said, well, you know what, I didn't leak information to our enemies.
You know, even if he did what he's alleged to have done, he instead leaked it to journalists.
And DOJ came back and said, well, that's warped.
You're leaking to everybody.
How dare you leak to everybody?
And they've repeated that argument now, the government has, in Bradley Manning's case.
So in other words, the government is now saying that journalism constitutes espionage.
Giving information to the entire world is worse, they've argued, than giving information just to our enemies, who can then act on it without the government knowing that they have the information.
Does that make sense?
Right.
Yeah.
In other words, it's an outcome-based prosecution.
And since they've gotten nothing, they have to resort to criminalizing journalism and pure whistleblowing.
Well, you know, there's a part of me that actually believes it.
And this is why it's important that these are whistleblowers.
I mean, believes that they believe it.
So in other words, what they're arguing is that it is more dangerous for the American public to learn what our government is doing than for, say, China to learn what our government is doing.
And if you look at their behavior, if you look at the Bradley Manning case, for example, you see that their behavior sustains that argument.
Because what happened before Bradley Manning was accused is that, and actually still is in place now, is that our computer networks were an open sieve.
And anybody with a very good hacking program, which China is believed to have, could basically take what they wanted at will.
And China is believed to have gone into our defense contractors and taken our most up-to-date military secrets, they've been able to get into some of our operational databases.
China's been able to get what they want.
And so Bradley Manning comes along and he's accused to have leaked the same stuff that China can get at will to us.
And that's when they all of a sudden start pulling out the espionage charges.
And it's really important for people to understand that, because it's not even just among whistleblowers where the government has maintained that.
We, the American people, aren't allowed to know what our enemies are allowed to know.
Right.
Well, and even if you took the pro-security, because you can't have Americans knowing this stuff, they might one day begin to care at all about it or something.
Even if you took that attitude, a leak like Bradley Manning's leak is really sort of a good way to help them improve their security and figure out where are the holes in the thing.
I remember way back when the Internet was brand new.
They talked about in the media how some hacker had made this horrible virus.
But its only purpose was to expose network flaws so that people could seal them up.
So really, Bradley Manning was doing us a favor and he was doing them a favor, too.
Right.
I mean, what's interesting is the year before, actually two years before Bradley Manning was actually arrested, was actually taken into custody, DOD computers in Iraq were, somebody put a malware in them and they got the malware into the computers in Iraq via a thumb drive, you know, so via removable media.
And after that happened, DOD was like, no more removable media, we can't have any more removable media.
Well, Bradley Manning is alleged to have gotten all of these files off of DOD's super net by basically downloading them onto a CD labeled with Lady Gaga.
That's removable media.
And that's, you know, up to two years after DOD swore that they weren't going to let this happen anymore.
I'm sorry, Marcia, to interrupt you.
We've got to go out to this break.
When we get back, we'll talk more about the criminalization of American journalism.
Marcy Wheeler, the Empty Wheel, EmptyWheel.net, right after this.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, website ScottHorton.org.
We've got 2,500 interviews going back to 2003 there.
I'm talking with Empty Wheel, Marcy Wheeler.
And we're talking about the Obama administration's unprecedented war on whistleblowers.
And, well, at this part, we're talking about how they are really in court, military and civilian court.
They're repeatedly, this government is repeatedly arguing that if someone leaks to a newspaper, that's just like leaking to the Soviets, only worse.
Because you're not just telling them, you traitor, you're telling everyone.
Whereas you would think with your common sense, if you have some, that no, if you're telling the newspaper and you're trying to tell everyone, then some foreign country learning about it is just, hey, an unhappy consequence, maybe.
But damn, this is a democracy and all of that stuff.
And so we need this information so that we can give our consent to be governed right and all of that, right?
Right.
I mean, and the Bradley Manning case is the most extreme example of that.
Because they're basically saying, by leaking the information he's alleged to have leaked, his intent was to help outside us.
When it's very clear from his chat log, assuming that they are in fact accurate, it's very clear that his intent was to get people to think seriously about what our government is doing, which is a fundamentally democratic motive.
So that amounts to helping outside of us.
Well, look, I guess I'm sure you remember very well, right?
Say, eight, nine years ago, where any disagreement with the government at all was considered at least by the Fox News-led part of the media and AM radio part of the media as all that is pro-terrorist treason.
And your entire argument could be that Dick Cheney's policy is exactly what Osama bin Laden wanted, stupid, and that actually not waging war is the best way to protect America, and that you're more patriotic.
That doesn't matter.
If you disagree with George Bush's policy, then you therefore only disagree with it because you are in line with Osama bin Laden's policy.
You're a traitor to America.
And at that point, you know, what difference is it if I'm hosting a radio show disagreeing with the policy that, you know, for whatever reason, that they say is our only hope against al-Qaeda, what makes me any less of a traitor than Bradley Manning then, who's only, you know, leaking to WikiLeaks so that you and I can have it to blog about it and talk about it on the radio and know the truth about it?
Right, and a bunch of mainstream journalists as well.
Right.
I want to talk for a second about, I'm going to jump in, because I think it's important for your listeners to know this.
The government has decided to pass a bunch of new laws and new procedures to make it harder for people to leak to journalists.
And I think in that process they're really betraying that what this is fundamentally about is power.
Information is power.
And players in D.C. are realizing they're losing control of the narrative, of the information they have, of the secrecy about what they're actually doing in D.C.
And so, for example, the Director of National Intelligence passed a new rule which said anybody within the government who has a security clearance has to, you know, they have to take their, I mean, people in certain agencies, like CIA, have to take lie detector tests on, you know, every year on a certain kind of regularity.
Adding a question to that about whether or not the person has taken part in, quote, unauthorized leaks.
And that to me is one of the most telling phrases that you get out of this whole war on whistleblowers in D.C. right now, which is that there are authorized leaks in D.C. and there are unauthorized leaks in D.C.
And what they're trying to stop is not the authorized leaks, so not the Judy Miller leaks, not the, oh, I killed Osama bin Laden leaks.
What they're trying to stop is the leaks that come from some middle-level bureaucrat who is being wrongdoing or fraud or something terribly scandalous.
What they're trying to do is, you know, get control of the information so that only the very top in our government, only the most powerful people in our government, can decide what American citizens are allowed to know and what they're not allowed to know.
Yeah, it's amazing when, you know, such a big part of the kind of civic religion and myth of America and everything is this vibrant independent press and Woodward and Bernstein and all these kinds of things that we know we can't trust those politicians.
We need reporters to be able to do their job and, you know, there's, what, hundreds and hundreds of even famous stories of the truth getting out to some good journalists and that's what made the difference in people's lives, you know, stories about what their government was doing wrong, I mean.
Right, and so go back to Thomas Drake.
So he, again, is this NSA guy.
He was a top, you know, fairly high-level person in NSA, and he went to an inspector general saying, look, Michael Hayden has chosen not to use this $4 million program that actually gives Americans some privacy when we wiretap.
He's chosen instead to outsource it to SAIC for $3 billion or for a couple billion dollars, and what SAIC is doing for, you know, many, many times the amount of money doesn't offer Americans the same kind of privacy that what we could do in-house for a fraction of the cost does.
That's what he was accused of weakening.
But one of the reasons the government went after him is because they believe he was the source or one of the sources for James Rison's story and Eric Lipkow's story on the illegal wiretapping that our government was doing on Americans.
So in other words, they came up with a kind of very neutral thing that they could prosecute him for so that they could retaliate against him because they believed but couldn't prove that he was behind this leak about massive illegal wrongdoing on the part of our government.
And whether or not he was, I mean, he says he wasn't the source, but one of the things that's really important to remember about this is what they were so worried about leaking out, same thing with John Kiriakou.
I mean, he's one of the few CIA people to talk on the record about torture.
What they are so afraid about leaking out, first of all, is illegal.
And second of all, any time a citizen tries to go to court to hold the government responsible, they invoke state secrets.
So in other words, the government is carving up this whole area of illegal activity that they say, you know, can't be tried in the court, and that's precisely the kind of whistleblowing that they're most actively cracking down on.
And now, when Kiriakou, or I'm not sure if I'm saying it right, when he was mistakenly, and I think he apologized for this later or something like that, took it back, but he had, he originally became news when he was saying, oh, only two guys or maybe three guys were waterboarded in just a few times each, and it was no big deal, minimize the whole thing.
He never got in trouble for that.
That was classified, but he never got in trouble for that, right?
It was other things, I guess, later when he started actually telling the truth about the torture.
Yeah, what they've actually charged him for is basically letting the lawyers for people who have been tortured, indirectly helping them figure out who their torturers were.
Oh, wow, you can see how that would harm national security.
Right, right.
And not even, I mean, he didn't go to a journalist with it.
He went to people who have security clearances and who kept it secret, you know, so that's illegal now, too.
All right.
More like this at EmptyWheel.net.
Thank you very much, Marcy.
Appreciate it.
Take care, Scott.
