Obama’s War on Whistleblowers by Scott Horton

[Jefferson23]

August 31, 2010

As a young lawyer, Obama represented a whistleblower; as a presidential candidate, he pledged to “strengthen whistleblower laws to protect federal workers who expose waste, fraud, and abuse of authority in government.” But as president, Obama has unleashed the most aggressive assault on whistleblowers Washington has ever seen—surpassing even George W. Bush. The latest example comes in a remarkable prosecution of Steven Kim, a well-known scholar of North Korea’s nuclear program.

Like most area experts at the top of the game, Kim does consulting for the State Department. He works for Lawrence Livermore Labs and was on secondment to the State Department at the time of the events in question. Now, however, Kim finds himself under indictment by the Justice Department. His crime? He spoke to Fox News about how the North Koreans were likely to react to proposed sanction measures. Former prosecutor and Johns Hopkins professor Ruth Wedgwood says that the Fox News report “contains completely unremarkable observations about what a country would do if it was sanctioned for its poor behavior. These kinds of observations were well known to anyone paying attention to public sources and ought not be the basis for making someone a federal felon.” I couldn’t agree more.

Assistant Attorney General David Kris brought the charges. The Kim prosecution is portrayed by him as a “warning to anyone who is entrusted with sensitive national security information and would consider compromising it.” To prohibit discussing such “sensitive” information is effectively to censor public debate about vital facts relating to international affairs and possibly to war. As Kris and his friends would have it, we’re supposed to be kept ignorant while the national-security state cares for us all. It’s also noteworthy that the Obama Justice Department gets worked up when the “leaks” benefit media with a critical attitude towards the administration, Fox News.


http://www.harpers.org/archive/2010/08/hbc-90007562

[xchrom]

1. Recommend

[leveymg]

2. Time to update that resume: Lead Corporate Counsel (2008-present), former constitutional lawyer.

[Hawkowl]

3. Meet the new boss, Same as the old boss.. nt

[awoke_in_2003]

8. Truthfully, it is the same boss...

the scene in DC is a sideshow to keep us distracted. DC is not in charge, wall street is.

[Nuclear Unicorn]

4. Oy. I honestly don't know what to believe anymore

I'm hoping this is just something not brought to the attention of more sensible minds but as soon as Obama and Holder catch wind of it they'll see the prosecution dropped.

Any transcript of what was supposed to be so sensitive?

Any word on whether the prosecuter initiated the action on his own or was directed from higher up?

I'm not in the excuse-making business but I am willing to give the president the benefit of the doubt but I also admit that this looks like a horrible miscarriage of justice (unless dude actually blabbed sensitive info).

[Jefferson23]

6. From Ruth Wedgwood:

In a written statement, Lowell and co-defense counsel Ruth Wedgwood said Kim was pleading not guilty because the news report that led to the charges "contains completely unremarkable observations about what a country would do if it was sanctioned for its poor behavior. These kinds of observations were well known to anyone paying attention to public sources and ought not be the basis for making someone a federal felon."

"In its obsession to clamp down on perfectly appropriate conversations between government employees and the press, the Obama administration has forgotten that wise foreign policy must be founded on a two-way conversation between government and the public," Lowell and Wedgwood wrote. "The Justice Department has chosen to stretch the espionage laws to cover ordinary and normal conversations between government officials and the press and, in doing so, destroy the career of a loyal civil servant and brilliant foreign policy analyst."

The administration recently arrested an Army official for leaking classified documents to the website WikiLeaks, charged a former National Security Agency official with leaking information about NSA mismanagement to The Baltimore Sun, and renewed an investigation into who leaked classified information to New York Times reporter James Risen for one of his books.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/08/27/steven-kim-state-department-contractor-charged-leak_n_697734.html

If I can locate the transcript, I'll post it for you.

[RaleighNCDUer]

5. The only people allowed to talk about national security

are those who know nothing about it.

Now THAT is a national security measure.

[Tutankhamun]

7. What campaign promise or pledge ISN'T Obama going to break?

Oh that's right, we're reminded. He did promise to escalate the war in Afghanistan, and he's definitely done that.

Funny how he and his apologists like to point out that he told us during the campaign he would escalate Afghanistan. Somehow, THAT particular promise was important enough to keep.