Author: Marcy Wheeler

In the last few weeks, there have been several reports that senior intelligence officials were skewing the intelligence on how (un)successful the military campaign against ISIS has been. “Officials at United States Central Command – the military headquarters overseeing the American bombing campaign and other efforts against the Islamic State – were improperly reworking the conclusions of intelligence assessments prepared for policy makers, including President Obama, the government officials said,” the New York Times was the first to report.

Patrick Eddington – himself a former CIA whistleblower – put that allegation into historical context, reminding how intelligence agencies have focused on good news going back to the Vietnam War and repeating in the lead-up to the Iraq War.

While the history lesson is worthwhile by itself, Eddington makes another important point. He notes that Department of Defense’s Inspector General, which is investigating the claims, can’t be trusted to carry out such an investigation. “The allegations reported by the Times and the Daily Beast are too serious a matter to be left to the DOD IG, particularly given the DOD IG’s recent track record in dealing with high-profile whistleblower complaints.” Eddington focuses on the treatment that Thomas Drake and other NSA whistleblowers experienced when they alerted DOD’s IG to an ineffective boondoggle designed to make SAIC rich, and argues the Intelligence Community and Source Protection Office should conduct the investigation, particularly since other intelligence agencies may also be politicizing intelligence about Syria.

But there’s an even more important example why DOD’s IG should not be investigating this allegation: as became clear during the investigation into leaks about the Osama bin Laden raid to the makers of Zero Dark Thirty, DOD’s IG may not issue reports on senior DOD officials and will not on people who work in other agencies (as Leon Panetta did when he disclosed classified information). “Due to ‘a longstanding Department policy,’ … referrals of alleged misconduct by senior officials would have to be removed before [the Zero Dark Thirty report] could be published,” Senator Chuck Grassley learned when investigating whistleblower complaints of that investigation.

That’s a problem given that reports blame “senior officials” for the politicization of this intelligence.

DOD’s policy of suppressing information on top officials may only pertain to leaks and not all misconduct. Indeed, DOD’s IG has referred a number of generals for misconduct in recent years.

Yet given how closely this issue – spinning happy stories about our operations in Syria – relates to the prior example – spinning the most positive stories about the Osama bin Laden killing – there’s good reason to worry that DOD IG won’t implicate any senior officials even if they are politicizing the intelligence on Syria.

Investigative journalist Marcy Wheeler writes the “Right to Know” column for ExposeFacts. She is best known for providing in-depth analysis of legal documents related to “war on terrorism” programs and civil liberties. Wheeler blogs at emptywheel.net and publishes at outlets including the Guardian, Salon, and the Progressive. She is the author of Anatomy of Deceit: How the Bush Administration Used the Media to Sell the Iraq War and Out a Spy. Wheeler won the 2009 Hillman Award for blog.

Reprinted from Expose Facts.

As a number of outlets have reported, Chelsea Manning faces a disciplinary board on Tuesday for four alleged violations, including brushing crumbs on the floor, disrespecting an officer, keeping toothpaste past its expiry date, and keeping items deemed contraband, including the Vanity Fair issue on Caitlyn Jenner.

Manning will not have a lawyer at the hearing, and over the weekend authorities refused her access to the prison law library. She may receive indefinite solitary confinement as punishment for these absurd alleged offenses.

Along with that list of seemingly trivial items, Leavenworth officials also confiscated an item that goes to the core of the whistleblowing that landed Manning in prison in the first place: the Senate Torture Report.

Chelsea Manning faces the threat of solitary confinement, which most countries and many psychologists consider torture, because she was reading the Senate Torture Report.

Recall that among the events that led Manning to provide information to WikiLeaks was when she was ordered to “assist the Baghdad Federal Police in identifying the political opponents of Prime Minister al-Maliki” – people who Manning discovered were actually criticizing Maliki’s corruption. Manning realized that by helping the Baghdad Police, US forces would be helping put them “in the custody of the Special Unit of the Baghdad Federal Police [where they would be] very likely tortured.” In an effort to thwart US complicity in torture, Manning leaked classified materials to WikiLeaks, including information on Iraq’s Wolf Brigade, a unit that conducted torture the official US policy on which was to ignore.

Continue reading “Declaring Chelsea Manning’s Voice Against Torture Contraband”

Last week, McClatchy’s Marisa Taylor reported on two cases showing the new appeals process for whistleblower retaliation claims ordered by President Obama is now operational; in the cases of Army whistleblower Michael Helms and CIA whistleblower John Reidy, the Intelligence Community Inspector General, Charles McCullough, has bounced the appeals back to the agencies in question for re-review.

That McCullough has chosen to bounce these two appeals back to the agencies is notable enough, because his commitment to whistleblower issues has never been apparent. Instead, McCullough has spent his time as IG conducting leak investigations. And last year, a complaint email sent to Daniel Meyer, who oversees whistleblower issues for the intelligence community, somehow got shared with the subject of the complaint. So McCullough’s record on these issues is less than stellar.

But McCullough’s move is particularly interesting when you consider the details of the appeal of the second complainant, John Reidy.

Reidy was not a CIA employee – his complaint spans the time from 2005 to he 2011, during which he was a subcontractor to SAIC and then, after he lost his contract with them, with Mantech, although another CIA contractor, Raytheon, got involved in alleged retaliatory actions leading to his firing from Mantech in 2011. In addition, Reidy’s whistleblowing appears to have led to an adjudication flag that has held up his security clearance renewal, which prevents him from getting any more contracts going forward.

Continue reading “Is the Intelligence Community Inspector General Trying To Give Contractors Whistleblower Protections?”

An appellate decision on the long-running dispute between a former prosecutor and the Department of Justice may provide a new way for journalists to protect their government sources.

The decision came as a result of former prosecutor Richard Convertino’s effort to sue DOJ for Privacy Act violations tied to a 2004 leak to Detroit Free Press reporter David Ashenfelter. Ashenfelter reported that Convertino was under investigation by DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility for misconduct on a terrorism trial.

There are no heroes in the underlying suit. Convertino claims DOJ investigated him not for prosecutorial misconduct, but instead to retaliate for criticism of their conduct under the War on Terror and testimony provided under subpoena to Congress. The claim deserves consideration given the lenient treatment DOJ has given to egregious prosecutorial misconduct in other cases (such as Ted Stevens), not to mention other failures to comply with discovery obligations, especially on terrorism trials. But Convertino’s alleged conduct – withholding evidence from defense attorneys – was also inexcusable.

The dispute has sucked Ashenfelter up in a long running fight over whether he should have to testify about his sources. He first tried to refuse by invoking reporter’s privilege, which a judge rejected. But when, in 2008, Convertino tried to depose the reporter, Ashenfelter invoked the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination in response to each question. To defend doing so, Ashenfelter pointed to Convertino’s own claims that he had conspired with criminals at DOJ, as well as to a series of cases (including those under the Espionage Act) and public statements suggesting DOJ might prosecute someone for using documents illegally obtained from the government to do reporting.

Continue reading “The Sixth Circuit Upholds Journalist’s Right To Invoke the Fifth Amendment”

Today marks the two year anniversary of the first Snowden disclosures. The anniversary was marked not just with a Snowden op-ed published by the New York Times titled “The World Says No to Surveillance,” but also a major new Vice story on the government’s damage assessment based on documents FOIAed by Jason Leopold.

As Vice notes, the FOIAed documents show how the government provided talking points to members of Congress – some of whom emphasized in briefings they were looking to discredit Snowden – which were then leaked to the press.

After the DIA completed a damage assessment report about how Snowden apparently compromised US counterterrorism operations and threatened national security on December 18, 2013, leaks from the classified report immediately started to surface in the media. They were sourced to members of Congress and unnamed officials who cast Snowden as a “traitor.”

On December 18, the Washington Post’s Walter Pincus published a column, citing anonymous sources, that contained details from the Snowden damage assessment. Three days earlier, 60 Minutes had broadcast a report that was widely condemned as overly sympathetic to the NSA. Foreign Policy and Bloomberg published news stories on January 9, 2014, three days after the damage assessment report was turned over to six congressional oversight committees. Both of those reports quoted a statement from Republican congressional leaders who cited the DIA’s classified damage assessment report and asserted that Snowden’s leaks endangered the lives of US military personnel.

The documents also show that these assessment reports had really basic errors, in one report even getting the date of the first leaks wrong, dating them to June 7 rather than June 5, 2013.

Such errors ought to raise questions about the other claims from the report, such as that Snowden took 900,000 documents pertaining to DOD issues. After all, if analysts can’t even copy a public date from a newspaper correctly, how accurate are their more difficult calculations?

Continue reading “Congressional Priorities for Defense Intelligence Agency: Take More Money, Discredit Snowden”

On Monday, Judge Leonie Brinkema sentenced Jeffrey Sterling to 42 months in prison for leaking information about a dubious CIA plot to deal nuclear blueprints to Iran to New York Times journalist James Risen.

Given how circumstantial the case against Sterling was – consisting largely of metadata – not to mention the hand slap David Petraeus got weeks ago for leaking far more sensitive information and then lying about it to the FBI, that’s a tough sentence.

But given the government’s call, in sentencing memoranda, that Sterling spend up to 24 years in prison, it was, as Government Accountability Project lawyer Jesselyn Raddack said, the least worst outcome.

The sentence should also be seen as a rebuke to the government and its frenzied claims about secrecy, most notably the claim they made in this case that leaking information to a journalist is worse than leaking it directly to our adversaries.

Continue reading “Sterling Verdict Another Measure of Declining Government Credibility on Secrets”