Whistle blowing 032411

It happens but some times a backlog of information accumulates which demands comment.  Unfortunately the backlog is so great that there isn’t sufficient time to give adequate perspective to commentary, so readers are given only tidbits of stories, sorry about that, but I’m old.  These tidbits will have little impact on me whatever the stories’ eventual outcomes. Current generations will have to deal with these issues and their actions or lack of action will impact their children.
Although Congress passed a Whistle Blower protection act, it seems that no one likes a whistle blower less than government bureaucrats and policy makers.  Late in 2010 the electronic release of masses of U.S. government documents set off a bureaucratic firestorm that made the bombing of Dresden, Germany seem like a campfire.

Homeland Security immediately declared the Internet editor of WikiLeaks a traitor and started to build a rhetorical gallows on the Washington Mall.  Department of Defense declared the papers nation security secrets and piled brush around the gallows to incinerate his dangling body.  Isn’t there something about cruel and unusable punishment in the Bill of Rights?  The intelligence community set a “honey trap” for him in a foreign country.  The State department declared irreparable harm to American Foreign policy.

As the firestorm ragged some officials, probably fearful that they might be thrown in the fire, reviewed the documents and discovered lots of embarrassment from ancient to modern, but no real secrets.  However, the bureaucracy was on a downhill roll and there was no stopping.  Intelligence twisted foreign arms for an arrest and rendition of the editor.  The military grabbed an Army private charged him with releasing the government’s “secrets”, branded him a traitor and threw him into a military dungeon.   Always seeking the lime light the Air Force declared  "If a family member of an Air Force employee accesses WikiLeaks on a home computer, the family member may be subject to prosecution for espionage under U.S. Code Title 18 Section 793."  U.S. officials issued secret subpoenas for Wikileaks’ electronic accounts and credit card receipts apparently seeking names of readers.  The government went after foreign officials on suspicion that they may have approved the release of documents.

The Pentagon and other government agencies have taken the position that even though the open source documents are freely available on the Internet, the government must treat them as classified.   After all it is American Citizens who are the real enemy for Government abuse.

As the affair grinds along, now out of the public’s spotlight the Army private still sits degraded in naked isolation in a military dungeon, probably expecting eventual rendition to some foreign torture chamber out of view of justice and restraint.  

Remember we are trying to sell the American rule of law globally, in a world more aware of American abuse and hypocrisy than its own citizens.