On a more cerebral and policy level, Salon commentator Glenn Greenwald has repeatedly reported the astonishing implications of Obama's 2009 vow to "look forward, not backward," thus sending a message to Obama appointees to ignore legal abuses by the Bush administration. Also, Greenwald published, "Obama Confidant's Spine-Chilling Proposal," about Obama's White House regulatory czar, Cass Sunstein, portrayed above. Sunstein has long been a constitutional law scholar at the University of Chicago and Harvard University in influential circles that include the president and Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan. Sunstein's wife, Samatha Power, holds an important political post at the State Department.
Sunstein published a "working paper" (available here) during the 2008 presidential campaign. In it, he described the government's problem when millions of citizens believe in conspiracies. Sunstein then floated the idea that the U.S. government forbid conspiracy theories, or tax them -- or at least secretly hire agents, perhaps posing as reporters or academics, who could infiltrate suspicious circles where bad ideas flourish and work to thwart their spread.
For such reasons, it's reasonable to fear the president not simply for his administration's prosecutions against whistleblowers. Far worse, Obama and his team are creating a scholarly framework to justify monumental Executive Branch power-grabs that distort, perhaps forever, our nation's historic First Amendment and other civil rights.
These disputes are seldom discussed in mainstream political discourse. So, we provide this recap of the week's developments and the looming drama of Drake's trial next month. Drake, in his award-acceptance speech, said:
The government made my cooperation with official investigations a criminal act. It is now apparently a federal crime to report illegalities, malfeasance, fraud, waste and abuse perpetrated by our own government. The government is making whistleblowing a crime. They are making dissent a crime, especially when it embarrasses the government and calls the government to account. What is the difference between my situation and that of the Chinese artist who was detained when trying to leave his country because Chinese authorities deemed him a threat to national security?
More generally, Jane Mayer closed her New Yorker article by quoting Mark Klein, the former AT&T technician who exposed how the NSA was working with AT&T (and presumably other carriers) illegally to intercept, monitor and store in searchable databases billions of American consumer emails and phone calls. Klein has told me he had great difficulty persuading any news organization to cover the story because of their fears of antagonizing authorities on a so-called national security issue. Ultimately, the New York Times published it in 2005, but at least partly because Risen, the Times reporter, was planning to disclose the story in a book. Regarding Drake, Klein told Mayer:
I think it's outrageous. The Bush people have been let off. The telecom companies got immunity. The only people Obama has prosecuted are the whistle-blowers.
The Justice Integrity Project site provides an appendix to this column of links to more articles about whistleblowers
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
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