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How the Pentagon Punished NSA Whistleblowers (theguardian.com)
10 years before Edward Snowden's leak, an earlier whistle-blower on NSA spying "was fired, arrested at dawn by gun-wielding FBI agents, stripped of his security clearance, charged with crimes that could have sent him to prison for the rest of his life, and all but ruined financially and professionally," according to a new article in The Guardian. "The only job he could find afterwards was working in an Apple store in suburban Washington, where he remains today... The supreme irony? In their zeal to punish Drake, these Pentagon officials unwittingly taught Snowden how to evade their clutches when the 29-year-old NSA contract employee blew the whistle himself."
But today The Guardian reveals a new story about John Crane, a senior official at the Department of Defense "who fought to provide fair treatment for whistleblowers such as Thomas Drake -- until Crane himself was forced out of his job and became a whistleblower as well..." Crane told me how senior Defense Department officials repeatedly broke the law to persecute whistleblower Thomas Drake. First, he alleged, they revealed Drake's identity to the Justice Department; then they withheld (and perhaps destroyed) evidence after Drake was indicted; finally, they lied about all this to a federal judge...
Crane's failed battle to protect earlier whistleblowers should now make it very clear that Snowden had good reasons to go public with his revelations... if [Crane's] allegations are confirmed in court, they could put current and former senior Pentagon officials in jail. (Official investigations are quietly under way.)
Meanwhile, George Maschke writes: In a presentation to a group of Texas law students, a polygraph examiner for the U.S. Department of Defense revealed that in the aftermath of Edward Snowden's revelations, the number of polygraphs conducted annually by the department tripled (to over 120,000). Morris also conceded that mental countermeasures to the polygraph are a "tough thing."
But today The Guardian reveals a new story about John Crane, a senior official at the Department of Defense "who fought to provide fair treatment for whistleblowers such as Thomas Drake -- until Crane himself was forced out of his job and became a whistleblower as well..." Crane told me how senior Defense Department officials repeatedly broke the law to persecute whistleblower Thomas Drake. First, he alleged, they revealed Drake's identity to the Justice Department; then they withheld (and perhaps destroyed) evidence after Drake was indicted; finally, they lied about all this to a federal judge...
Crane's failed battle to protect earlier whistleblowers should now make it very clear that Snowden had good reasons to go public with his revelations... if [Crane's] allegations are confirmed in court, they could put current and former senior Pentagon officials in jail. (Official investigations are quietly under way.)
Meanwhile, George Maschke writes: In a presentation to a group of Texas law students, a polygraph examiner for the U.S. Department of Defense revealed that in the aftermath of Edward Snowden's revelations, the number of polygraphs conducted annually by the department tripled (to over 120,000). Morris also conceded that mental countermeasures to the polygraph are a "tough thing."
I disagree. The FBI has been a corrupt organization from the top (J. E. Hoover) on down, but because they were breaking the law for a "good cause", they were allowed to get away with it by both Democrat and Republican administrations. It wasn't until the release of the COINTEL papers and the fact that Nixon was in office, that Congress suddenly grew a spine, and investigated the FBI under the Church committee. But it never would have happened without the "illegal" release of the FBI's wrong doing.
As a follow-on, the FBI claims to have stopped the illegal COINTEL operations, but Parallel Construction leads me to believe it still goes on, under another name.
But see: http://www.usnews.com/opinion/...
is obviously Lynne Halbrooks. She got a promotion for this...per TFA "had recently been named the principal deputy inspector general". She now works for the lobbying law firm of Holland & Knight. Seems like she's also involved in helping cover-up the leaked info about a SEAL team member involved in the making of the movie "Zero Dark Thirty". A true PARTIOT (ACT), all-around. Hopefully for her she's got her thirty pieces of silver stashed away outside of US jurisdiction.
Nope. Snowden was not an employee he had no "whistle blower protection".
because they were breaking the law for a "good cause" [wikipedia.org], they were allowed to get away with it by both Democrat and Republican administrations
No, they got away with it because Hoover and his minions had dirt on every president since Calvin Coolidge. JFK and RFK despised him, but they didn't dare make a move against him.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Apples bushel together, grapes and bananas bunch.
A bushel is a unit of volume. A 'bushel of apples' refers to a box of picked apples. The olde timey phrase refers to a 'barrel of apples,' because that's how they were stored and shipped. A bunch of grapes refers to be biological growth of grapes in clusters. Bananas also grow in biological clusters, but those clusters are called 'hands.'
In any case, the spoilage of apples really only happens after they're picked and stored together, especially in an airtight space where the ethylene can concentrate.
How did the agencies get that way ?
The most likely answer, is Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy.
To wit:
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people":
First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.
Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.
The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.
It still saddens me deeply that a majority of people assume that it's only the governments of OTHER countries that are doing horrible, horrible things. I want to take everyone who has ever said "No, the U.S. government would never do something like that" and put them in a room and force them to watch documentaries on the CIA and all the horrific shit they did, and are still doing, in South America and many other regions. And they did it all with our tax money. And they're STILL DOING IT, right now.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.