Legitimate whistleblowing within the government typically follows a breakdown in the moral compass of some department or agency. In my case, it was the intentional and systematic manipulation of intelligence within the CIA; in the case of Daniel Ellsberg, it was an unnecessary war; in the case of Thomas Drake, it was a constitutional breakdown at the National Security Agency; and in the case of Chelsea Manning, it involved war crimes being committed by the United States. A decade after my exposure of chronic corruption at the CIA, the deliberate and systematic falsification of intelligence to coerce the nation to launch an unprovoked war demonstrated that the problem had metastasized. A decade after that, we learned about the CIA’s role in the Terror Wars, which involved secret prisons, torture, and the targeted killing of people only suspected of crimes.
In 2014, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence under the chairmanship of Senator Feinstein produced the 6,300-page report on CIA torture that revealed that even innocent individuals had been held in secret prisons and tortured. The Senate report was validated by a review ordered by then CIA director Leon Panetta. The Senate report and the Panetta Review recorded the sadistic interrogation of more than 100 al Qaeda members and suspects under the euphemism “enhanced interrogation techniques.” The report and review confirmed that no significant intelligence was produced by torture, and that the CIA lied to the White House and the Congress about the true nature of the interrogations and the intelligence that was (or, in this case, was not) obtained. Former CIA officials (including Directors Tenet, Goss, and Hayden) and CIA apologists, including journalists, maintained that torture gets results and that the interrogations were valuable. The immorality of the CIA’s use of violence, humiliation, and coercion was never a factor for these individuals.
CIA director John Brennan was critical of torture and abuse in 2009, when he was serving on President Obama’s staff, but he referred to interrogators as “patriots” when he became director. As director, he went to unusual lengths to block the release of the report, lying to the committee chair and even threatening a constitutional crisis over the separation of powers by sanctioning the hacking of Senate computers and the emails of Senate staffers.
When former CIA director William Colby was faced with evidence of CIA crimes during the Vietnam War, he released the dispositive documents to the Senate. Brennan was neither courageous enough nor independent enough to do this. Instead, Brennan permitted the CIA to conduct electronic searches of Senate computer programs in order to learn what documents the Senate staffers had obtained, even hacking into the emails of key committee staffers. The CIA ran this program like any covert operation aimed at an adversary, but the target was the Senate Intelligence Committee of the United States of America and there could be no “plausible denial.”
In an unusual attack, Senator Feinstein charged the CIA with secretly withdrawing hundreds of documents from the Senate staff’s archives, including the authoritative Panetta Review that corroborated the charges in the Senate report. The CIA falsely claimed that the White House had ordered the withdrawal of the documents, which led to a CIA apology. Senator Feinstein called for additional CIA apologies, but what was needed was the release of the full report and the Panetta Review. The most tantalizing aspect of Feinstein’s remarks was her view that the Panetta Review may have been placed in the Senate’s documents by a CIA whistleblower.
As soon as the Republicans took over control of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence as a result of their election victory in November 2014, they reclassified the Panetta Review and ordered it returned to the CIA. The chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Richard Burr (R-NC), even blocked the confirmation of a former staffer of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Alissa Starzak, as general counsel for the United States Army. Burr’s reason for blocking the confirmation? Starzak was the lead investigator in the writing of the torture report. The deceit never stops.
At least 200 CIA officers who took part in illegal activities relating to the Terror Wars continue to work at the Counterterrorism Center, which probably explains why the Obama administration refused to seek accountability. Any serious accountability would discover that a small group of CIA officials, including lawyers, were acting as both judge and jury in deciding who was guilty of terrorism and who would be detained and tortured. The CIA is deeply damaged, but no one appears to want to fix it or even knows how, including the congressional intelligence committees charged with oversight.
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In view of the catastrophic losses in terms of death and destruction, it is appalling that so few whistleblowers have emerged during the Terror Wars. It takes an unusual personality to challenge the government, in part due to the lack of protection and the likelihood of retribution. One of the reasons why so few are “doing what comes naturally” is the lack of trust in the system. People of conscience contemplating whistleblowing fear retaliation and punishment for reporting even illegalities. The fear is real and documented; it was particularly obvious during the scandal at the Department of Veterans Affairs in 2014 over the cover-up of terrible abuses. The series of abuses at the Secret Service from 2011 to 2014 revealed that there were agents who would not step forward to report security concerns because they didn’t trust the system or their supervisors. At the CIA, I was aware of numerous individuals who wouldn’t go to the Office of the Inspector General, let alone the Congress, and believed that it would be a career-ending move to do so.
There is no protection for whistleblowers in the intelligence community, and intelligence officers face the possible loss of a security clearance for going public regarding abuses. Any individual with a security clearance who goes to the media is subject to loss of security clearance, which is the same as being fired. The system for oversight, moreover, is broken in the Congress and at the CIA.
Federal employees fear that they can not disclose violations of law without reprisal.10 There has been a lack of accountability at the Department of Veteran’s Affairs, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Department of Health and Human Services. The Obama administration used the Espionage Act of 1917 to pursue whistleblowers and prevented legitimate oversight by not naming inspectors general to national security agencies. The State Department lacked an inspector general during Clinton’s stewardship; the CIA was without an inspector general for nearly two years in President Barack Obama’s first term until an extremely weak appointment was made; the Pentagon wouldn’t permit the inspector general to act independently. The CIA lacked a statutory inspector general (one appointed by the president) during most of Obama’s second term as well.
The worst abuses took place during times of warfare, and since September 11, 2001, the U.S. has been in a constant state of war. Countless civilians have been killed by U.S. operations and drone attacks in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and beyond. In April 2015, a disconsolate President Obama had to tell the American people that a U.S. strike in the Afghan-Pakistan border region killed a U.S. aid worker held hostage. In October 2015 the U.S. bombed a Doctors Without Borders hospital in the city of Kunduz, Afghanistan, killing 22 people, mostly doctors and staff.
Meanwhile, America’s vast national security apparatus continues to grow like Topsy. The USA PATRIOT Act permits wholesale use of national security letters from the FBI to compel financial officers, librarians, and physicians to turn over vast amounts of data about American citizens without a court order. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) allows intelligence agencies to eavesdrop on communications between Americans and people overseas without a probable-cause warrant. FISA investigations require an order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which meets in secret, but from 1979 to 2013 it rejected only 11 applications out of more than 30,000 requests from federal