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October 19, 2005

Judy Miller is not a whistleblower!

First read this:

Whistleblower Protection Bill Inadequate
Does not include National Security employees

by National Security Whistleblowers Coalition

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- 10/19/05 -- On September 29, by a vote of 34–1, the House Government Reform Committee approved H.R. 3097 (formerly H.R. 1317), the Federal Employee Protection of Disclosures Act. The bill is set to strengthen whistleblower protections for federal employees and expand coverage to federal contract employees and airport screeners; however, the bill does not protect employees at intelligence agencies or the FBI.

A proposed amendment to add such protections was struck down, and the bill will go to the full House without this important addition. Committee Chairman Rep. Tom Davis (R-VA) and Rep. Todd Platts (R-PA) led opposition to the amendment, claiming they didn’t know enough about the issue to vote on it. Despite this "lack of knowledge," the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition was repeatedly refused a hearing to explain why national security employees need full whistleblower protections.

Sibel Edmonds, president and founder of the Coalition, has emphasized that the failure to protect national security whistleblowers "damages everyone’s civil liberties because it invites greater repressive action by the government on its employees, which limits effectiveness in the national security area," putting everyone at risk. To learn more, see the Federal Times (October 5, 2005) article and visit the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition website.

What you can do: Contact Congressman Tom Davis, Chairman of the House Government Reform Committee: c/o Jim Moore, Tel: (202) 225-5074; Fax: (202) 225-3971; email: jim.moore@mail.house.gov; contact other members of the Committee, in particular the majority members (contact details may be found here).

Let them know that their failure to protect National security whistleblowers is unacceptable.

Then read this:

In the Times’ front-page account of Miller’s off-again, on-again refusal to testify before Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s grand jury, editor Bill Keller admits some embarrassment.

“I wish it had been a clear-cut whistleblower case,” he said.

I wonder what they’re putting in the water coolers up on West 43 rd Street. It wasn’t a whistleblower case at all. It was the exact opposite : the most powerful people in the United States using the press to damage a whistleblower by endangering his wife, something even the Mob won’t do. Indeed, it’s intriguing to speculate that Wilson, outspoken critic of pre-war propaganda about Iraq’s nuclear weapons programs, wasn’t the leak’s main target. White House apparatchiks may have been more leery of Plame, a specialist in nuclear proliferation, and her CIA colleagues. Here’s why : In a Times interview, “Little Miss Run Amok,” as Miller dubbed herself due to her ability to avoid editorial supervision on her way to fame and glory, admitted what the Times called “serious flaws in her articles on Iraqi weapons.” “ WMD—I got it totally wrong, ” she said. “The analysts, the experts and the journalists who covered them—we were all wrong. If your sources are wrong, you are wrong. I did the best job that I could.”

But that’s simply not so.

“Infighting among U. S. intelligence agencies fuels dispute over Iraq” was the headline of an October 2002 article by Knight Ridder’s Warren P. Strobel and Jonathan S. Landay. The article detailed a “bitter feud over secret intelligence” between the CIA and Bush administration appointees at the Pentagon. “The dispute,” they wrote, “pits hardliners long distrustful of the U. S. intelligence community against professional military and intelligence officers who fear the hawks are shaping intelligence analyses to support their case for invading Iraq.” In an earlier article co-written with John Walcott, the authors quoted an unidentified official who said that “analysts at the working level in the intelligence community are feeling very strong pressure from the Pentagon to cook the intelligence books.” Nobody else they interviewed disagreed.

Any questions?

Posted by Mike at October 19, 2005 04:57 PM

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