Porter Goss’ Op-ed:
‘Ignotum per Ignotius’!
By Sibel Edmonds (a.k.a.
whistleblower)
Dear Mr. Goss, the timing of your recent op-ed in the New York Times interestingly coincides with the upcoming congressional hearing by the House Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats & International Relations on National Security Whistleblowers. Your comments are predictably consistent with the pattern of “preemptive strikes” you and the administration have been keen on maintaining. I do not blame you for your opposition to legislation to protect courageous whistleblowers, which will enable the United States Congress to reclaim some of its authority and oversight that it has given up for the past five years. No sir, you have all the right and reason to be nervous. However, I must take issue with your attempt to mislead the American public - another habit of your heart - by presenting them with false information and misleading statements.
Sir, as you
must very well know after your years in congress as a representative and as a
member of the intelligence committee, there are no meaningful legal protections
for whistleblowers. What is troubling is that while you are well aware of the
fact that there are no meaningful or enforceable laws that provide protection
to national security whistleblowers, you nevertheless state that such workers
are covered by existing laws. That is simply false. You state that “the Intelligence Community Whistleblower
Protection Act was enacted to ensure that current or former employees could
petition Congress, after raising concerns within their respective agency,
consistent with the need to protect classified information.” The
Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act, which appears to be the
legal channel provided to national security employees, turns out on closer
inspection to be toothless. Please refer to the recent independent report
issued by the Congressional Research Service (CRS) on National Security
Whistleblowers on December 30, 2005.
The report concludes that there currently are no protections for
national security whistleblowers - period. Let me provide you with a recent
example illustrating the fallacy of your claim:
In December
2005, Mr. Russ Tice, former National Security Agency (NSA) intelligence analyst
and action officer, sent letters to the chairs of the Senate and House
Intelligence Committees, and requested meetings to brief them on probable
unlawful and unconstitutional acts conducted while he was an intelligence
officer with the NSA and DIA. In his letter Mr. Tice, as a law abiding
and responsible intelligence officer, stated “Due to the highly sensitive
nature of these programs and operations, I will require assurances from your
committee that the staffers and/or congressional members to participate retain
the proper security clearances, and also have the appropriate SAP cleared
facilities available for these discussion.” On January 9, 2006, the NSA sent an official
letter to Mr. Tice stating “neither the
staff nor the members of the House or Senate Intelligence committees are
cleared to receive the information.”
Now, Mr.
Goss, please explain this to the American public: What happened to your
so-called appropriate congressional channels and protections available to
national security whistleblowers? Mr. Goss, what “protected disclosure to
congress”? According to the NSA no one in the United States Congress is “cleared enough” to hear reports from
national security whistleblowers. Please name one whistleblower to date who has
been protected after disclosing information to the United States Congress; can
you name even a single case? Or, is that information considered classified? How
do we expect the United States Congress to conduct its oversight responsibility
and maintain the necessary checks on the Executive Branch, when agencies such
as yours declare the members of congress “not
cleared enough” to receive reports regarding conduct by these agencies?
Where do you suggest employees like Mr. Tice go to report waste, fraud, abuse,
and/or illegal conduct by their agencies? Based on your administration’s
self-declared claim of inherent power and authority of the executive branch
overriding courts and the United States Congress, what other channels are left
to pursue?
Okay, now
let’s move to this notion you and the administration seem to be so very keen
on: Classified & Sensitive
Information. Let’s start by asking how we define “classified &
sensitive information,” and who decides what is classified and sensitive? According to the statement by Thomas S.
Benton, National Security Archive, on March 2, 2005, during the congressional
hearing on “Emerging Threats: Overclassification & Pseudo-Classification,”
the deputy undersecretary of defense for counterintelligence and security
declared that 50% of the Pentagon's
information was over-classified, and the head of the Information Security
Oversight Office said it was even worse, "even beyond 50%." Don’t you find the percentage of falsely
classified information appalling? Well, you should; it is your responsibility, because
the executive branch, under the office of the United States President, is
solely responsible for classification or pseudo-classification of information.
Now, based on this knowledge, what should happen when you tell the public, when
you tell the United States Congress and the media “Oh, you are not allowed to
have this information; this information is highly sensitive and classified”?
This is what should happen: we, the people, the Congress, and the media, should
first ask you for the merits of the classification; have you prove to us that
the information in question should in fact be classified; and you, the
executive branch, have the obligation to truthfully respond.
On the
issue of classification in your op-ed you go further and cite the cost of
unauthorized disclosure to the American taxpayer, “unauthorized disclosures have cost America hundreds of millions of
dollars.” Since you brought up the
issue, let’s explore it fully and give the American people the real facts,
shall we? The Office of Management and Budget report on classification costs to
U.S. agencies (the CIA's are still classified; but of course!), gave us a
benchmark number and some sense of comparative expense to the taxpayer - the
reported dollar figure was over $6.5 billion in fiscal 2003. Now, since the
percentage of falsely classified data has been determined to be in the range of
50%, the cost of our agencies’ pseudo
classification to the American taxpayer amounts to over $3 billion. Mr. Goss, you do the math; do you really want to
attempt to twist and misuse the cost of classification to try to strike a chord
with the taxpayers? It is not going to stick; wouldn’t you agree?
Let’s try
your security angle on the subject of classification, where you state “disclosure of classified intelligence
inhibits our ability to carry out our mission and protect the nation.” The
entire 9/11 Commission report includes only one finding that the attacks might
have been prevented (Page 247 & 376). They quote the interrogation of the
hijackers' paymaster, Ramzi Binalshibh, who commented that if the organizers,
particularly Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, had known that the so-called 20th
hijacker, Zacarias Moussaoui, had been arrested at his Minnesota flight school
on immigration charges, then Bin Laden and KSM would have called off the 9/11
attacks, because news of that arrest would have alerted the FBI agent in
Phoenix who warned of Islamic militants in flight schools in a July 2001 memo;
a memo that vanished into the FBI's vaults in Washington. The Commission's
wording is important here: only "publicity"
could have derailed the attacks. Classification is indeed a very important
mechanism, if it is applied diligently and wisely; however, as illustrated
above, in certain circumstances, even with respect to national security
information, classification can run counter to our national interests.
Mr. Steven
Aftergood, the Director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation
of American Scientists, so very eloquently stated “the information blackout may serve the short-term interests of the
present administration, which is allergic to criticism or even to probing
questions. But it is a disservice to the country. Worst of all, the Bush
administration's information policies are conditioning Americans to lower their
expectations of government accountability and to doubt their own ability to
challenge their political leaders. Information is the oxygen of democracy. Day
by day, the Bush administration is cutting off the supply.”
Mr. Goss,
since you proudly quoted from the Rob-Silberman Report released in March 2005,
let me do the same and present you with another quote from the same report: “In just the past 20 years the CIA, FBI,
NSA, DIA, NRO, and the Departments of Defense, State, and Energy have all been
penetrated. Secrets stolen include nuclear weapons data, U.S. cryptographic
codes and procedures, identification of U.S. intelligence sources and methods
(human and technical), and war plans. Indeed, it would be difficult to
exaggerate the damage that foreign intelligence penetrations have caused.”
It appears that the only ones not privy to our so-called sensitive government
and intelligence information are the American citizens, since our enemies and
allies have been successfully penetrating all our intelligence agencies
(including yours sir) and nuclear labs and facilities. Sir, with all due
respect, you have not even succeeded in protecting your own agencies, offices
and facilities against foreign penetration; you seem to be incapable of
conducting appropriate background checks on your own employees; you failed to
protect us against the 9/11 attacks; and you have failed in gathering
intelligence and reporting it accurately on the Weapons of Mass Destruction in
Iraq. With this kind of record how can you go on lecturing the Congress and the
American people on your superiority and inherent authority to do whatever you
wish, however you wish, and without having to provide any report or any answer
to anybody, including the United States Congress?
Last year, the
CIA, your agency, classified the entire findings of the Inspector General’s
investigation into the failures of CIA managers prior to 9/11. Sir, I believe
you made the case for this classification based on your intention to protect
the wrongdoers within the CIA bureaucracy from being “stigmatized.” Is this what your op-ed intended to say? Did you mean
to say that these national security whistleblowers may end up stigmatizing the
wrongdoers and incompetents within the rank and file of the CIA by divulging
information that you decided to classify to prevent exposure of embarrassing
and criminal activity? Was that a Freudian slip, since nowadays the lines get
blurry between classification for national security purposes and classification
to protect the agency’s bureaucrats?
Mr. Goss, I
cannot attribute this misleading op-ed to your ignorance, since you were a
member of Congress until recently and are surely aware of the lack of
meaningful protection for national security whistleblowers; so I won't. I will not
attribute it to your stupidity, since obviously our Congress confirmed your
position and I do not intend to insult their wisdom and intelligence. Thus, it
must be your arrogance, nurtured and fed by your boss on your purported
inherent and limitless authority and power, leading you to treat us, the
American Public, as stupid.
Sincerely,
Sibel
Edmonds
A Proud
National Security Whistleblower
Sibel Edmonds is the founder and
director of National Security Whistleblowers Coalition (NSWBC), a nonprofit organization
dedicated to aiding national security whistleblowers. Ms. Edmonds worked as a
language specialist for the FBI’s Washington Field Office. During her work with
the bureau, she discovered and reported serious acts of security breaches,
cover-ups, and intentional blocking of intelligence that had national security
implications. After she reported these acts to FBI management, she was
retaliated against by the FBI and ultimately fired in March 2002. Since that
time, court proceedings on her issues have been blocked by the assertion of
“State Secret Privilege” by Attorney General Ashcroft; the Congress of the
United States has been gagged and prevented from any discussion of her case
through retroactive re-classification by the Department of Justice. Ms. Edmonds
is fluent in Turkish, Farsi and Azerbaijani; and has a MA in Public Policy and
International Commerce from George Mason University, and a BA in Criminal
Justice and Psychology from George Washington University. www.nswbc.org