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April 9, 2013 |
The 9/11 attacks on America did not just launch Washington’s war on
terrorism; they launched a new White House war on whistleblowers, first
under President George W. Bush and then under President Barack Obama,
according to a bold new
documentary directed by filmmaker
Robert Greenwald.
War on Whistleblowers: Free Press and the National Security State
traces how two of the most powerful and secretive Washington power
centers—the Pentagon’s military-industrial complex and Internet era’s
national security state—ran amok after 9/11 and declared war on a
handful of whistleblowers who went to the press to expose lies, fraud
and abuses that meant life or death for troops and spying on millions of
Americans. It explores why Obama, who promised the most transparent
administration, became the most secretive president in recent decades
and even more vindictive to intelligence-related whistleblowers than
George W. Bush.
Whistleblowers are not spies or traitors, as the
Bush and Obama administration’s lawyers have alleged. They are
patriotic and often conservative Americans who work inside the
government and with military contractors, and who find unacceptable—and
often life-threatening—or illegal behavior goes unheeded when they
report it through the traditional chain of command. They worry about
doing nothing and feel compelled to go to the press, even if they
suspect they may lose their jobs. What they don’t realize is that their
lives will never quite be the same again, because they underestimate the
years of government persecution that follows.
The documentary
portrays the whistleblower as a special kind of American hero—one whose
importance is easily forgotten in today’s infotainment-drenched media.
Since the Vietnam War in the 1960s, whistleblowers have been part of
many history-changing events: questioning the war in Vietnam by
releasing the Pentagon Papers on military’s failings; exposing the
Watergate burglary that led to President Richard Nixon's resignation;
exposing the illegal nationwide domestic spying program by the George W.
Bush administration after 9/11; revealing the military’s failure to
replace Humvees in Iraq and Afghanistan with better bomb-deflecting
vehicles, leading to hundreds of deaths and maimings; revealing how the
nation’s largest military contractor was building a new Coast Guard
fleet with ships whose hulls could buckle in rough seas and putting
radios on smaller rescue boats that wouldn’t work when wet.
These
are some of the scandals and issues whose contours are traced by the
documentary, especially the explosive growth of the military-industrial
complex and national security state after 9/11, and how these
institutions sought to silence those who questioned and tried to correct
mistakes or seek accountability. The film also shows how reporters, at
blogs, newspapers and TV networks, have real power to put pressure on
government and force change, and how public-interest activists are a
conduit for that critical exchange of information. A free press very
much matters.
A key element of
War on Whistleblowers
is the number of nationally known journalists who speak out
collectively and for the first time in reaction to the government’s
attacks on their sources and their reporting. The film features many
respected mainstream investigative reporters, including the
Washington Post’s Dana Priest, the
New Yorker'sJane Mayer and Seymour Hersch,
USA Today’sTom Vanden Brook,
New York Times’ media critic David Carr and former
Times editor Bill Keller, among others.
Still,
the documentary leaves a lingering impression that the system—many
government agencies and their embedded codes of secrecy, self-interest
and self-protection—endures in the long run, even if whistleblowers stop
or slow their agenda. Indeed, the film makes a powerful case that Obama
has been seduced by the nation’s spymasters, which is why his
prosecutors have tried to intimidate and punish these messengers more
than all recent presidencies combined.
The Military-Industrial Complex
The
film starts with a modern telling of an old story. President Dwight
Eisenhower’s warned the nation about the "military-industrial complex"
nearly 65 years ago. The film shows what that means in 2006, when the
Marine Corp’s first female officer,
Major Megan McClung, was killed by a roadside bomb while riding in a
Humvee.
At
the Pentagon, Franz Gayl was Marine Corp’s science and technology
advisor and started looking at why there were so many roadside deaths
and injuries. He discovered that Humvees weren’t designed to withstand
the blasts, but the military had other troop carriers that could. “If
not me, then who? If not now, then when? It was one of those
situations,” he tells the filmmakers. “I said, it doesn’t matter what
the consequences are, personal or otherwise.’ I said, this needs to be
fixed."
The film shows how patriotic and selfless impulses like
these collide with Washington’s system: the mix of administrative,
institutional, political and private sector resistance to acknowledging
mistakes, their impact, the cost and doing something about it.
Gayl
discovered that Humvees, made by an Indiana-based company, were never
designed to withstand roadside bombs. As a result, one third of that
war’s casaulties up to that time were in Humvees hit by the buried
bombs. “Hundreds of marines were tragically lost, thousands were
tragically maimed, probably unnecessarily,” he said. “So I said, let’s
replace the Humvees with what are called MRAPs, mine-resistant
ambush-protected vehicles.” These ride higher above the ground and
deflect blasts from below.
Gayl said the Marines had asked for
MRAPs, but somehow that request was sidelined at the Pentagon, causing
“19 months of delay and that had a direct impact on lost lives,
unnecessarily.” He went up the Pentagon chain of command: he told his
supervisors, the agency that was supposed to be providing support, then
systems command, and at every step got nowhere. He then tried to tell
the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s staff, but they looked at his
report. “They said absolutely not, that cannot be allowed to go
forward,” he recounted. That’s when Gayl decided to contact Sharon
Weinberger, a reporter at
Wired’s DangerRoom, a blog dedicated to cutting-edge military technology.
Gayl,
notably, is an insider in the military-industrial complex. But he says
the military is supposed to drive industry to meet its needs, not the
other way around. DangerRoom’s report got the attention of then senator
Joe Biden’s staff. They arranged for him to talk to
USA Today’sTom
Vanden Brook to give the issue more prominence. “I provided him
unclassified information which was key to understanding the issue,” Gayl
said. It was obviously a front-page story in July 2007, with thousands
of lives at stake and questions about why the Pentagon was resisting an
immediate and obvious solution.
But getting results dragged on.
Two years after deciding he had to act, Gayl testified in Congress in
2009. “Now it is in the press and the [Marine Corps] Commandant is
getting asked about it during House Armed Service Committee testimony,”
Gayl recounted, to which the nation’s top marine told the committee, “We
don’t have an answer right now to how long-term the MRAP is going to
be.”
Then the backlash began.
Vanden Brook was told his
Pentagon access was going to end. Gayl received performance reviews
saying he was a substandard employee, “bottom 3 percent,” unreliable,
untrustworthy, and was put on administrative leave. “The MRAPs are
starting to get media attention, but the guy who makes it happen, Franz
Gayl, is losing his security clearance and is getting pounded on in his
own job,” said Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on
Government Oversight (POGO). Losing a security clearance meant Gayl
could not get military work in Washington.
Gayl, it turns out, was
lucky as far as whistleblowers go. After Robert Gates became Secretary
of Defense, he publically backed the MRAPs. Soon, more than 24,000 were
being built 'round the clock and sent to Iraq and Afghanistan. Soldiers
said they started saving American lives. “The number of deaths and
maimings just plummeted,” Gayl said. But he was still “losing his job,
even as the right thing was happening,” POGO’s Brian said. So POGO and
other advocates launched a media and legal campaign, which got Gayl his
Pentagon job back. “But why didn’t they do the right thing?” he asked.
The
answer is the profits for Humvee contracts. There are hundreds of
millions of dollars at stake, the film points out. The Iraq and
Afghanistan wars were more than an economic boom for defense
contractors. “It is the military industrial complex,” Gayl said. “I’m
not some left-wing guy who grabbed onto that concept. I consider myself a
conservative, a patriotic American. But it’s real. And there are so
many conflicts of interest. This is the beast that we have in
industrialized society. This problem is real.”
The National Security State
The
documentary then jumps to an even deeper problem. Washington’s lobbying
world revolves around money, power and influence. To some extent,
Gayl’s story is more about the money side of this equation than the
power side. But the obsession with power cuts deeper.
If the
military-industrial complex is a 20th-century creation formed after
WWII, the 21st century’s behemoth is national-security state, formed
after 9/11. This data-driven world includes federal monitoring of
virtually every electronic transaction or message by all Americans,
regardless of constitutional protections and legal procedures written in
the age of paper documents and search warrants.
“What we
discovered… was there are over 1,200 government organizations working at
the top-secret level on counterterrorism,” said the
Washington Post’s
Priest. “There are another close to 2,000 companies that work for the
government on top-secret matters. And they’re all located in about
10,000 locations throughout the country. There are close to 1 million
people who have top-secret clearance.”
Calling it a "state within
the state" is not an exaggeration. The national security state is a vast
convergence of government agencies and private interests that are as
determined to preserve its power and influence and do whatever it takes
to achieve its goals. “We talk about a national security state that
pretends that it is interested in national security," said Daniel
Ellsberg, the Vietnam War whistleblower. “But in fact, it is interested
in the security of corporate interests, of agency interests, of
politicians keeping their jobs.”
The film says that whistleblowers
are needed more than ever to hold this secret segment of government and
industry accountable. And what’s most surprising is that the Obama
administration has been cracking down on a handful of federal
employees-turned-whistleblowers in a way that makes what happened to
Gayl seem like child’s play.
The documentary goes on to profile
Thomas Drake, the former senior executive of the National Security
Agency, whose first day on the job was Sept. 11, 2001. His job was to
oversee electronic intelligence gathering by all federal agencies and to
sift through it to identify threats. The NSA’s longtime mandate was not
to spy on Americans, but as Drake learned, that’s exactly what certain
corners of the agency was doing on a scale that was unprecedented:
sifting through tens of millions of emails, phone calls and other data
to try to find and stop terrorists. There were no controls, no
accountability and no oversight, he discovered. It was electronic
warfare without battlefield rules. When he voiced his concerns to his
boss, Drake was told, “It’s all been approved. Don’t worry about it.”
The
documentary also profiles Michael DeKort, a former lead systems
engineer for the Deepwater Program, where the nation’s largest defense
contractors, Lockeed-Martin, had a $24 billion contract to build a new
generation of Coast Guard cutters and outfit smaller rescue boats.
DeKort discovered that the radios Lockheed-Martin planned to install on
the smaller rescue boats were not waterproof, and that the hulls of the
new boats were prone to bending and buckling under pressure—which is
exactly what happens in stormy seas. “Like most people, maybe they tell
their boss and they drop it. That wasn’t good enough,” he said.
The
film also profiles Thomas Tamm, a former Department of Justice attorney
at what was then called the Office of Intelligence Policy and Review.
When a suspected terrorist was arrested abroad, if his cellphone or
computer had U.S. phone numbers on it, Tamm was part of a team that
would go before a secret court to get permission to monitor those
numbers and emails for 90 days. Tamm discovered that there was a
separate initiative, simply called the “program,” where monitoring
occurred without going through any court. Some of his colleagues thought
it was illegal, he said, but they were told to overlook it.
All
of these people went up their chain of command—in their agencies, to
Congress’ oversight committees, or up the corporate ladder to the
executive suite—and got nowhere.
“I came to the decision that I
thought the American people should know, and let the American people
decide if the government was doing what they considered legal or not,”
Tamm said, echoing sentiments held by Drake and DeKort. And all of these
people came to the unavoidable conclusions that they had to speak to
the press, even if it put their jobs at risk and upended their lives. “I
remember picking up the cradle of the [pay]phone and calling a reporter
by the name of Eric Lichtblau at the
New York Times,” Tamm
said. “Once I put the phone down, I knew I was committed to the path I
decided to take. I was pretty confident that my life would not be the
same.”
Tamm and Drake became whistleblowers during the Bush
administration. But they did not anticipate that the Obama
administration would take up Bush’s anti-whistleblower vendetta,
especially because they were involved in intelligence-gathering. When
Obama took office, he promised his administration would be the most
transparent ever. But that’s not what happened. “In 2011, there were 92
million classification decisions, four times the number of decisions as
the last year of George W. Bush,” said Ellsberg, talking about the
government’s warehouses of secret files. “That’s not increased
transparency, of course. That’s closing the curtains.”
When
it came to Tamm and Drake, the legal hammer that fell on them got far
worse—until both men had their day in court. “I never imagined that he
[Obama] would just run with it, and take it far beyond what the Bush
administration had implemented,” Drake said. “They have indicted more
people for violating secrecy than all of the prior administrations put
together,” said ex-
New York Times editor Keller.
Eventually,
these men also found relief from federal judges who rejected these sham
prosecutions and reprimanded the government’s prosecutors. In June
2011, the DOJ, after four years of accusing Drake of a dozen felonies
that could have meant 35 years in jail, dropped all but one charge: a
misdemeanor count of unauthorized use of a computer. That is the
electronic equivalent of a parking ticket.
That same spring, after
seven years, the government also dropped its investigation of Tamm,
without explanation, apology or offering him his job back. Drake is now
working at an Apple store while he completes a PhD in advanced public
administration. Tamm is strugging as a private defense attorney and
seeking speaking engagements to talk about this experience. Their
careers, like DeKort’s, were derailed if not ruined.
Last fall,
Congress passed and Obama signed the Whistleblower Enhancement
Protection Act. But laws governing whistleblowers in the intelligence
sphere remain weaker than in other areas, the film notes, saying that
discrepancy prompted Obama to issue a directive
protecting
intelligence agency whistleblowers, but only to talk to superiors within
the government—not to the press. That is a key distinction, because in
all of the film’s examples, corrective action only came after
whistleblowers spoke with reporters and a handful of government
oversight advocacy groups launched media campaigns.
Meanwhile, the
Obama administration hasn’t dropped charges against former Private
Bradley Manning, Wikileak’s source. And the FBI’s investigation into who
leaked information about a computer worm created to dismantle Iran’s
nuclear program, is continuing. Indeed, some of the news organizations
whose reporters and editors are interviewed in the documentary are still
fighting the federal government in court.
America’s founders
understood that the worst of human nature had to be kept in check by
limiting how political power was held and shared. That’s why they
created branches of government with checks and balances, and protected
the press in the First Amendment. As
War on Whistleblowers: Free Press and the National Security Statereminds
us, the men and women who dare to speak out have a unique role in this
democratic process—as does a free press—and should be seen as patriots.
They sacrifice their careers, all because they believed that American
govermment could do better to serve its soldiers overseas and its
citizenry at home.
Brave New Films seeks to distribute the film as widely as possible, using traditional and digital platforms including Netflix, iTunes, Hulu, Amazon and Time-Warner.New York Times
reporter Scott Shane and Public Editor Margaret Sullivan,Rolling Stone
’s Michael Hastings and MSNBC’s Mike Isikoffwill participate in panel discussions of the documentary atpremieres in New York City (April 17), Los Angeles (April 23)and Washington (April 16).Screenings are also being scheduled on university campuses across the country.For more information, contact Linsey Pecikonis at Brave New Films.
Steven Rosenfeld covers
democracy issues for AlterNet and is the author of "Count My Vote: A
Citizen's Guide to Voting" (AlterNet Books, 2008).
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