http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/16/us/16indict.html
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/04/16/prosecutions/index.html
It all makes sense when you realise that any whistleblowing or criminal prosecution of the illegal NSA domestic spying would harm the interests of the companies chiefly involved in the NSA domestic spying project, which include Boeing and Northrop Grumman.
Priorities, guys? This is what we in the civilised world usually call 'raging corruption.'
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/04/16/prosecutions/index.html
In a rare legal action against a government employee accused of leaking secrets, a grand jury has indicted a former senior National Security Agency official on charges of providing classified information to a newspaper reporter in hundreds of e-mail messages in 2006 and 2007.
The official, Thomas A. Drake, 52, was also accused of obstructing justice by shredding documents, deleting computer records and lying to investigators who were looking into the reporter’s sources.
“Our national security demands that the sort of conduct alleged here — violating the government’s trust by illegally retaining and disclosing classified information — be prosecuted and prosecuted vigorously,” Lanny A. Breuer, the assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department’s criminal division, said in a statement.
The indictment, approved Wednesday by a grand jury in Baltimore and made public on Thursday, does not name either the reporter or the newspaper that received the information.
But the description applies to articles written by Siobhan Gorman, then a reporter for The Baltimore Sun, that examined in detail the failings of several major N.S.A. programs, costing billions of dollars, using computers to collect and sort electronic intelligence. The efforts were plagued with technical flaws and cost overruns.
Only a small number of prosecutions have been brought against government officials in recent decades for improperly disclosing information. Such cases often provoke a public debate over the tradeoff between protecting government secrets and covering up government wrongdoing or incompetence.
The indictment suggests the Obama administration may be no less aggressive than the Bush administration in pursuing whistleblowers and reporters’ sources who disclose government secrets. In a little-noticed case last December, a former contract linguist for the F.B.I., Shamai Kedem Leibowitz, pleaded guilty to leaking five classified documents to a blogger.
In the Bush administration, the Justice Department spent several years investigating The New York Times’s sources for a 2005 article that revealed the existence of the N.S.A. program of eavesdropping without warrants. No one has been charged in that case.
Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, a press advocacy group, called the indictment of Mr. Drake unfortunate. “The whole point of the prosecution is to have a chilling effect on reporters and sources, and it will,” Ms. Dalglish said.
Greenwald said:Under the Obama DOJ's two-tiered justice system (and it's an Obama political appointee, Lanny Breuer, trumpeting the indictment), engaging in serious wrongdoing entitles you to immunity (Look Forward, Not Backward), whereas exposing it to the public merits a lengthy prison term.
It all makes sense when you realise that any whistleblowing or criminal prosecution of the illegal NSA domestic spying would harm the interests of the companies chiefly involved in the NSA domestic spying project, which include Boeing and Northrop Grumman.
Priorities, guys? This is what we in the civilised world usually call 'raging corruption.'