Flashback: Whistleblowers Panel at Ron Paul Institute Conference 2017
In a free society, the government is transparent in all its actions and kept on a short leash. The citizens have a natural right to their privacy. Today, it's the exact opposite. The government is totally secretive, ignores its Constitutional leash, and seeks to place every citizen in a constant state of surveillance. Whistleblowers heroically put their lives on the line to tell Americans the truth about government. We hope you enjoy this flashback from Ron Paul Institute Conference 2017. Please don't forget to donate to the Ron Paul Institute: RonPaulInstitute.org/support
In a free society, the government is transparent in all its actions and kept on a short leash. The citizens have a natural right to their privacy. Today, it's the exact opposite. The government is totally secretive, ignores its Constitutional leash, and seeks to place every citizen in a constant state of surveillance. Whistleblowers heroically put their lives on the line to tell Americans the truth about government. We hope you enjoy this flashback from Ron Paul Institute Conference 2017. Please don't forget to donate to the Ron Paul Institute: RonPaulInstitute.org/support
In a free society, the government is transparent in all its actions and kept on a short leash. The citizens have a natural right to their privacy. Today, it's the exact opposite. The government is totally secretive, ignores its Constitutional leash, and seeks to place every citizen in a constant state of surveillance. Whistleblowers heroically put their lives on the line to tell Americans the truth about government. We hope you enjoy this flashback from Ron Paul Institute Conference 2017. Please don't forget to donate to the Ron Paul Institute: RonPaulInstitute.org/support
We will have an hour for lunch, so we can visit a little bit during the beginning of that.
But I thought it was appropriate to kick off our whistleblowers roundtable with a little address from Julian Assange, who is really responsible for us knowing what a lot of the whistleblowers have done, and there are so many of them.
But these are five of my favorites.
So these are the ones we want to have join us.
And I won't go for long introductions because there's so much ground to cover.
The bios are in your agenda.
There's a lot more that should be said about them that we couldn't fit in the bios.
But I think all five of these people really are American heroes, and we owe them a great debt of gratitude for the sacrifices they've made to let us know what our government is doing in our name.
So I'm going to give them a round of applause.
And we are going to kick this off with an attorney who knows probably the best of anyone in the country about the state of national security whistleblowing law, who's represented Tom Drake.
John Kiriaku in their cases.
If you haven't seen National Bird, a phenomenal film about the drone program and how it causes what Peter Van Buren has termed moral injury to those who participate in it, it's a devastating film.
You'll be angry, and like me, you'll probably shed a tear.
But Jesslyn is in that movie, and she's been in others as well.
But I'm going to hand it to Jesslyn, and I think what the members of the panel will do is speak for as long as they like about their experiences, their perceptions.
We have a good hour and a half, so we can really kind of delve into it.
And I'm going to turn it over mostly to you guys.
So, Jesslyn.
Thank you, and thank you so much.
It's an honor to be here and be among so many kindred spirits, and especially the people on this panel, many of whom I've had the pleasure of representing and or working with professionally.
Saved by Whistleblowers' Efforts00:12:10
A lot of people wonder, well, what exactly is a whistleblower?
Because the term's been used and overused and appropriated a lot recently, and our country has a sort of love-hate relationship with whistleblowers.
But in a nutshell, a whistleblower is someone who has a reasonable belief that what they've seen evidences fraud, waste, abuse, illegality, or dangers to public health and safety.
And in theory, according to the law, we want people like that to come forward.
But then, when they do, unfortunately, they have been met with all sorts of retaliation, from being blacklisted at work to a worst case scenario of getting fired, to an even worse case scenario of being investigated for espionage, to even a worse case scenario of being being put in jail for a very long time.
long time.
And it is a tragic legacy.
I mean, we wouldn't know about the biggest scandals of our time, like torture, like secret domestic surveillance, and war crimes.
We wouldn't know about any of that without whistleblowers.
Yet, we had presidential candidates on both sides of the aisle who said they wanted to go after and even execute whistleblowers like Edward Snowden.
And I mean, to have to pay such a large price for telling the truth is tragic.
And when people are critical of Trump for going after whistleblowers with the Espionage Act, for example, reality winner, people need to remember that he got that idea from Obama.
So this is not a partisan issue.
Whistleblowers come in every political stripe.
My clients are not just Democrats or Republicans or Libertarians.
They're the gamut because whistleblowers are normal people who are trying to do the reasonable thing and they're trying to do their jobs most of the time, which is supposed to be calling out problems.
And certainly if your agency is involved in tremendous abuses, this is what you're taught to do.
So our government, in terms, I mean, it should really be focused on protecting and not prosecuting whistleblowers.
And if the government was really concerned about whistleblowers, it would provide meaningful protection.
And the ones who are completely unprotected are the national security and intelligence whistleblowers, who I would argue we need to hear from the most because they're involved in the most serious issues in our country.
So with that, I want to hand it off to my co-panelists because their histories are fascinating.
They've all paid tremendous prices personally and professionally for trying to do the right thing.
And yet they still continue to do stuff like this and speaking out years after their own personal traumas and odysseys and whistleblowing have ended.
They could just go their merry way and move on with their lives.
And they have moved on in their lives, but they've also been willing to talk about what they went through in the hopes that people don't have to keep going through the same thing.
I've been elected to get money on Peter Van Buren.
I really don't belong up here with people of this caliber.
This is kind of like the Beatles.
You know, you've got the good-looking one, you've got the smart one, you've got the philosophical one, and then you've got the funny one named Ringo.
So I'm kind of in the Ringo mold here.
And I say that because I never, I didn't even realize I was a whistleblower.
I was in fact.
Pardon?
The mic is not working.
I just said some jokes, and they were very, very funny.
And if you wanted to just chuckle now that the sound is reaching you, that'd be fine.
We can move on.
I was not a never intended to be a whistleblower.
I was a remarkably mediocre bureaucrat at the U.S. Department of State.
And I say that quite purposely, because as I got to know these fine people and other people who risked their lives, their fortunes, their sacred honors, if you'll allow me, to tell the American people what their own government was doing, these were not people I would think of as radicals.
None of us have long gray ponytails.
And all of us joined in many cases, in Tom's case, what, three times, took the oath to the Constitution and were, in fact, remarkably mediocre bureaucrats.
In my case, things changed when I was sent to Iraq.
I worked for the U.S. Department of State for 24 years.
And I was sent to Iraq to be in charge of spending taxpayers' money on the reconstruction projects there.
Many of you may be familiar with the idea that we were going to nation-build Iraq, that we were going to build schools and roads and bridges and bakeries and 4-H clubs and chicken farms and all these wonderful things that was going to turn Iraq into a very large Home Depot parking lot of democracy.
And I was in charge of this.
I mentioned Home Depot only because that was my entire background in constructing or reconstructing anything with those little pamphlets there.
And I kind of approached this in, if I said a light-hearted way, that's not fair to that.
But I approached it as I did a lot of my State Department career.
I joined the State Department, Ronald Reagan was president, I left, Barack Obama was president.
Say what you want about all the people in between those two, but there was quite a variety of opinion.
And my thought was that my obligation was to serve the people of the United States, not a particular president or administration.
And so if the job was to reconstruct Iraq, then darn it, I'm going to learn about ducks and chickens and do the best I can.
What I found, however, very soon after I arrived, was that no one was particularly serious about doing this.
There was unseriousness in every possible dimension.
An awful lot of folks were part of what was described by people earlier here as the racket, a way to make money.
Other people had their own kind of weird ideological Colonel Kurtz things going on.
And other people were simply grossly incompetent, which would be hilarious enough inside the beltway.
But once you started talking about putting soldiers' lives online in return for that incompetence becomes something much more dark and twisted.
And this voice in the back of my head started talking to me.
And over the course of my year in Iraq, I realized that I needed to tell, well, you, what was going on because the media was not doing it, the politicians were not doing it.
And it was happening in plain sight.
Unlike my colleagues who work deep in the world of classified information, I was overtly unclassified.
I had all sorts of journalists coming through looking and seeing and observing and taking pictures of exactly what I was looking and seeing at.
The difference was that they were interested in a story and not the story.
And that's where conscience took over.
And I decided to become a whistleblower.
No one in Iraq was particularly interested in hearing my insights.
My boss passed me off to his boss who said I couldn't talk to his boss.
And after a while, I eventually found my way back home.
Nobody in Washington was particularly interested.
I tried to talk to the State Department, Iraqi people.
They just said, wow, you have like PTSD or like something.
If you don't have a drinking problem, we recommend it because you're really tense.
I tried to get in to see approximately 535 members of Congress to talk about this and actually was welcomed only by one.
And at some point I realized it was my obligation to tell the story.
And I wrote a book called We Meant Well, and FYI, the title is sarcastic.
I get about a death threat a week from someone saying, we didn't mean well at all, you know.
And you guys are all want to write books, so just make a note, make the titles very clear.
I wrote a book, and in return for bringing the waste, fraud, and mismanagement of the Iraq war, which in fact we now understand as an underlying key to many of the failures there that have given us ISIS that have given us the current crisis, in return for bringing that to people's attention, the U.S. Department of State unleashed its full resources against me.
They persecuted me, tried to prosecute me, referred my case to the Justice Department, sent people into the neighborhood looking for information, had guys knocking in black cars, knocking on the neighbors' doors wanting to know if I might be a pedophile or smoke marijuana or if I have financial problems.
I found that my emails were being monitored, and this was all pre-Snowden, when people, at least like me, who worked largely on the unclassified side of American government, were shocked to find out that our government, my government, would act this way.
In the end, what the State Department decided to settle on doing was to attempt to take away my First Amendment rights to speak to you.
They tried to block publication of my book.
They falsely claimed there was classified material in there.
They threatened the publisher.
They tried to make sure that I couldn't speak.
They tried to fire me.
They put me on the watch list for the Secret Service.
At one point, I was prohibited from coming within 100 yards of the White House because Hillary Clinton had formerly been Secretary of State and Secretary, and the Secret Service still maintained jurisdiction.
So supposedly I couldn't get within 100 yards of the White House, but I'm bad at distance, so I went and see the Christmas tree.
And the idea is that they tried to take away all these rights.
They failed to do that.
They then turned and looked at ways to try to bankrupt me through the legal processes.
They finally decided that the best worst they were going to do was fire me, which would have taken away the things that I had earned.
It would have made it impossible for me and my family to basically go on government salaries and things what they are.
We would have been destroyed as a family.
And I was saved by the efforts of Jesslyn Raddick and the organization that she worked with.
I was saved by the efforts of the American Civil Liberties Union.
CIA Review Reignited00:08:26
I was saved by the effort of people like you talking through certain representatives who were willing to stick their necks out for a guy who simply wanted to tell the truth.
And I am here today, and I am here today.
My story is a little bit different than, I suspect, the stories of the others because, well, first of all, I should say that after Julian's comments about the CIA, I was going to sneak out the back door rather than put up with this and have to hear more about the CIA.
But I'll tell you a little bit about the CIA.
I served for 20 years as a case officer, first for the United States Army during the Vietnam War, and then for the CIA with a concentration on counterterrorism.
I worked in Europe and the Middle East, picked up a few languages on the way, and I was not particularly unhappy with what I was doing.
Now, bear in mind that working as a CIA case officer, an Army case officer, what you're doing wherever you are is illegal.
Many people would say it's also immoral, recruiting agents among people that are from another country and getting them to do things for you and for the United States.
Obviously, it raises some ethical issues.
But I was not terribly disturbed by this, and apart from one or two serious incidents towards the end of my time, I basically was comfortable with doing the job.
My problems with the CIA started pretty much after I left it.
I finally left the agency in 2002, late in the year, as the preparations for the Iraq War were cranking up.
And at that point, I knew from my classmates in the agency and from what access I had to their thoughts that we were pretty much all agreeing that there was no basis for invading Iraq, in spite of the fact that George Tennant was appearing on television and at the United Nations and poor Colin Powell was having to lie to the public.
We all knew this was not true.
About six months or so after I left the government finally, I bumped into Scott McConnell, who was the editor and founder of the American Conservative magazine, and he asked me to start writing a regular column.
My first article was on the Iraq War, which had not started at that point, and I basically predicted that it was going to be a disaster.
Within three days, I received a letter from the CIA Publications Review Board informing me that I had not cleared the article.
The article had absolutely nothing classified in it, or even plausibly classified in it, but that was their insistence.
So I went along with the charade for a while.
I would send over my articles, my columns to them, and they would sometimes request that I change a word or so on and so forth.
But as my own intensity in terms of my hostility towards what was going on in Iraq and continuing to go on in Afghanistan, and more particularly against the global war on terror, which I knew was a farce.
Having been a CIA case officer overseas working on terrorism, I kind of was an expert on the issue.
And I knew this whole thing was a joke.
It was a money mill to support jobs and people doing things that weren't necessary, that were not linked to national security in any way.
As I started to write that kind of thing, they got mad.
And the letters kept coming in.
The letters, of course, they first of all, they say, you've revealed classified information, and the penalty for this is fine or imprisonment.
And in the beginning, I would respond.
I'd say, well, I can't even fathom what you're describing as classified information because I'm writing the same sort of stuff a journalist might write.
And so what is the classified information?
And of course they would come back and say, well, it's secret, so we can't tell you.
At one point, you won't believe this, but I swear it's true.
I wrote an article for a completely different publication on the Venetian Republic's government in the 16th century.
And I got a letter from CIA telling me I had revealed classified information.
The problem was that the Publications Review Board has had and has a completely elastic definition of what constitutes a security violation.
If you use the word intelligence anywhere in a publication, in an article, they want to review it.
If you use the word spy anywhere in an article, they want to review it.
The existence of the CIA's training center near Williamsburg, Virginia, which has been publicized 500 times, is top secret.
The fact that CIA stations are located in embassies overseas, which has been attested to in hundreds of books by CIA people, is a secret.
So it's this kind of thing.
No matter what you do, no matter how you play the game, they're going to come after you, because the idea is really to shut you down.
And towards the end, they even changed the rules on me.
They basically said, look, you're no longer allowed to send an article over for us to do a quick review and send it back to you.
We are now going to send whatever you write to the desk.
The desk would be a country desk of the CIA.
You have an Italian desk, you have a German desk, you have a, so on and so forth.
So I said, we are going to send it to every place you ever served, of which there were like seven or eight, with the intention here of being that I could never meet a deadline, I could never write anything, and basically at that point I told them to go to hell.
Now, the result of that, of course, was they got mad, er.
And the next thing I know, I'm getting letters saying, well, from the Office of Security, not from the publications people, telling me that, you know, you're looking at prison, buddy.
And I ignored them.
And then I started getting visits from the FBI, where a nice young couple from FBI would call me up and say they wanted to talk about something.
They'd come out to my house.
We'd have a cup of coffee and sit around and talk.
They never actually asked me anything.
I never knew why they were there.
I don't think they knew why they were there.
And so this kind of process is still playing out.
But as far as I'm concerned, to hell with them.
I'm going to keep writing what I write, and I take these threats seriously.
Jeffrey Sterling, for example, a CIA officer, recently was sent to prison even though the government could not prove that he had done anything.
The Espionage Act is so flexible that they can charge you with anything and the courts buy it.
And so these things are serious, and it's something we're all confronted with, which is why basically I'm telling my story, and something that we all have to be aware of.
The government is not your friend.
Government Not Your Friend00:14:59
Thank you.
Hello, everybody.
I'm John Kiriaku.
And first I want to say How honored I am to be here and to be associated with both Congressman Ron Paul and with this organization.
I've had kind of an odyssey.
As Jesslyn Radak said a few minutes ago, many whistleblowers don't believe they're whistleblowers.
And indeed, in our first conversation, when I thanked her for taking my case, I said how important it was to me because I was not a whistleblower.
And she said that I was the poster boy for whistleblowers.
Do you remember that?
Even still, after all these years in my mind, I'm just a guy who said something.
I had been the chief of counterterrorism operations in Pakistan for the CIA immediately after the September 11th attacks.
And in that capacity, I led a series of raids that resulted in the capture of an al-Qaeda logistician by the name of Abu Zubaydah.
The CIA believed at the time that Abu Zubaydah was the number three in Al-Qaeda.
That turned out to not be true.
But we thought that it was true at the time.
And so we captured him.
He had been shot during the capture.
And my instructions were to tie him to a hospital bed and to sit there until the CIA could send in a plane to pick him up and take him to a place that I was not cleared to know about.
And so I did.
I tore up a sheet, I tied him to the bed.
He came out of his coma about 24 hours into it.
And I sat with him for 56 hours, and we talked.
And I told him that I was the nicest guy that he was going to meet in this experience.
I said, my colleagues are not as nice as I am.
So if there's just one thing that you do, it's that you have to cooperate.
And he said, you seem like a nice man, but you're the enemy, and I'll never cooperate.
Well, finally, the CIA jet flew in.
We carried him out to the jet.
He asked me to hold his hand.
He was crying.
We tied him to the luggage rack, and the plane took off, and I never saw him again.
When I got back to CIA headquarters a couple of weeks later, I was in the cafeteria, and a senior counterterrorism center officer approached me in the cafeteria very nonchalantly and said, Oh, I'm so glad I ran into you.
I wanted to ask you, do you want to be certified in the use of enhanced interrogation techniques?
I said, What's that mean?
I had never heard the term before.
This was May of 2002.
And very excitedly, he said, We're going to start getting rough with these guys.
And I said, Well, what's that mean?
And he delineated these 10 techniques.
And I said, I don't know, man, that sounds like a torture program to me.
Right?
Waterboarding, sleep deprivation, killing people.
We're not really supposed to kill people.
But I thought about it, and the more I thought about it, the more I thought, this is wrong, wrong, wrong.
And so I went back up to him and I said, this is a torture program, and I don't want any part of it.
As it turned out, they had approached 14 people.
Two of us said no, and one of the two changed his mind and said yes later.
So because I had said no, I was cut off.
I was actually passed over for promotion.
Here, I just caught the number three in Al-Qaeda.
I was passed over for promotion.
And in my promotion panel, they said that because I didn't want to be trained in torture, that I, and these were the exact words in my panel notes, I had displayed a shocking lack of commitment to counterterrorism.
And I said, do I need to catch bin Laden?
Is that how you get a promotion around here?
Anyway, I kept my mouth shut for years.
I left the CIA two years later, went into the private sector, and still kept my mouth shut.
Finally, I got a call from Brian Ross at ABC News, and he said he had a source who said that I had tortured Abu Zubaydah.
I said that was absolutely untrue.
I had never tortured Abu Zubaydah.
I never laid a hand on Abu Zubaydah or on any other prisoner.
I said, your source is either misinformed or he's a liar.
Well, Brian says, you're welcome to come on the show and defend yourself.
I had no idea that that was a reporter's trick because I had never dealt with reporters before.
Well, I'm thinking about this.
And coincidentally, that same week, President George W. Bush hosts a news conference.
And during the conference, he looked directly into the camera and he said, we do not torture.
And I said to my wife, who was also a senior CIA officer, he is a bald-faced liar.
He is looking the American people in the eye and he's lying to us.
And then a couple of days later, in response to a reporter's question, he said, well, if there is torture, it's the result of a rogue CIA officer.
And I said to my wife, Brian Ross's source is at the White House and they're going to pin this on me.
So I called Brian Ross and I said, I'll give you your interview.
And I decided in the days leading up to that interview that no matter what he asked me, I was going to tell the truth because the American people had the right to know the truth.
We have the right to know what our government is doing in our name.
So I wish I could tilt this.
There it is.
So I said three things in that interview that have utterly changed the course of the rest of my life.
I said that the CIA was torturing its prisoners.
I said that torture was official U.S. government policy.
It was not the result of a rogue.
And I said that the policy had been personally approved by the president himself.
Within 24 hours, the FBI began investigating me.
And they investigated me for a full year from December of 2007 to December of 2008.
Finally, in December 2008, they decided that I had not committed a crime and they closed the case.
Right?
My attorney got a letter, all done.
I remember him shaking my hand and congratulating me.
It's all over.
This nightmare is all over.
Well, what I didn't know was four weeks later, the most transparent president in history was inaugurated.
And the CIA asked him to secretly reopen the case against me.
I had no idea that the FBI was intercepting my emails, that they were surveilling me, that they were intercepting my telephone calls.
I had no idea.
In the meantime, I went to work for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, thinking I was a big shot again, working for John Kerry.
Yeah, John Kerry, when I finally got arrested, I emailed him and I said, Senator Kerry, can you help me out here?
Can you weigh in with the president and ask him to, you know, lighten up?
And three days later, I got an email back, and all it said was, please do not ever attempt to contact me again.
Big war hero, John Kerry, big liberal.
So anyway, I had no idea that this investigation was going on.
The investigation lasted for another three years.
And then finally, in January of 2012, I was charged with five felonies, including three counts of espionage.
Espionage is the gravest crime with which an American can be charged.
And in many cases, it carries with it the death penalty.
Well, I'm a patriot, just like everybody else at this table is a patriot.
And I knew in my heart that I hadn't done anything wrong.
Those three espionage counts were the result of two interviews I had given.
The original one for ABC News and another one for the New York Times, in which I repeated what I said on ABC News.
I felt very strongly about torture.
Torture is unconstitutional.
And as Peter Van Buren said, you know, when you raise your hand on your first day of work in any federal agency, you swear to protect and uphold the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
How could it be that I was the only person in the auditorium that day who took that seriously?
So I decided to fight with the help of Jessalyn Radak.
Because to tell you the truth, the day I met with Jessalyn, I was just as likely to decide to fight as I was to throw myself in front of the Metro.
And it was Jesslyn and a team of the best lawyers in Washington who told me, you've got to fight this thing.
You haven't done anything wrong.
And so I did.
Now, unfortunately, this becomes an economic decision.
The government does something, two things.
One is called charge stacking, where let's say maybe you have done something wrong.
They'll charge you with five, ten, twenty felonies.
And they'll wait until you're bankrupt.
And they'll wait until your wife leaves you.
And then they'll come back and say, okay, take a plea to one, and we'll drop all the other charges.
So you're facing, in my case, I was facing 45 years in prison, or they're offering me 30 months and I do 23.
Well, I already owe my attorneys over a million dollars.
The government has confiscated my pension.
Do I really roll the dice knowing that, according to ProPublica, the government wins 98.2% of its cases?
When I was at the CIA, I spent most of my career working on Iraq.
And, you know, Saddam Hussein would always have these elections, and he would win 98% of the votes.
And we would laugh and laugh.
And we would say the fix was in.
And then the government here wins 98.2% of its cases.
And we say, oh my God, they're geniuses.
It's incredible.
They never lose.
They get these criminals.
So I ended up taking a plea.
You know, one of the things that I learned, and I apologize if I'm going a little long, one of the things that I learned in this whole process was how you can't win.
You just can't win against the federal government.
It's impossible.
In the course of discovery, we received a tranche of about 10,000 documents from the Justice Department.
And I'm going to give you a little bit of background.
When I was with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, one of the wonderful things about that job was you got to have lunch with foreign diplomats all the time.
And you talk about the issues of the day, you know, what's going on in the papers, what's happening around the world.
I just loved it.
And so I got a call one day from the number three at the Japanese embassy, and he wanted to have lunch.
So I remember that lunch being delightful.
We talked about the Middle East peace process.
We talked about elections in Turkey.
And at the end of the lunch, he said to me, so what's next for you?
And I said, well, I think actually I'm going to resign soon.
I promised Senator Kerry I'd give him two years.
It's been two and a half.
I think I'd like to go into the private sector and make some money.
I have five children I needed to put through college.
And very excitedly, he said, No, don't do that.
If you give me information, I can give you money.
And I said, What's wrong with you?
You have any idea how many times I've made that pitch in my career?
Shame on you.
And I went, literally, I went directly to the office of the Senate Security Officer.
And I said, I was just pitched by a foreign intelligence officer.
He had me write it up.
He sent it to the FBI.
Two days later, two FBI agents came to interview me.
And they said, Here's what we want you to do: We want you to call him back, invite him to lunch, and try to get him to tell you exactly what information he wants and how much he's willing to pay for it.
I said, Okay, you want me to wear a wire or something?
They said, No, we're going to be at the next table.
We're going to listen to the whole conversation.
I said, Great, right?
USA, USA, right?
So that morning, they called and said, Something came up.
We can't be there.
You do the lunch and then write us another memo.
I said, Great.
I had lunch with a guy.
I wrote them a memo.
They asked me to do it a third time and a fourth time and a fifth time.
And finally, the guy said, Hey, I got my dream job.
I'm being transferred.
I'm going to be the number two in Cairo.
I said, Congratulations.
I shook his hand.
I never saw him again.
A year later, we get discovery from the Justice Department.
And as it turned out, there never was any Japanese diplomat.
He was an FBI agent undercover trying to get me to commit real espionage.
But I kept reporting the contact to the FBI.
And finally, after five attempts, they said, Look, the guy's not going to commit espionage.
We might as well just drop this case.
Just tell him you're transferred to Cairo or something.
I said to my lead attorney, Why would they do this?
And he says, Because they have a shit case and they know it's a shit case.
You haven't committed espionage.
You're a whistleblower.
That was a lesson that I learned: that we are on our own.
You know, in this country, we have something called the Whistleblower Protection Act.
But guess what?
If you work in national security, intelligence, or the military, you're exempt from its coverage.
And so if you decide to blow the whistle on waste, fraud, abuse, or illegality, you literally take your life into your hands.
You know, they will do anything they can to ruin you.
They will separate you from your normal friends and allies.
They will bankrupt you.
I still owe my lawyers $880,000, which they will never see.
Never.
I'll never work again.
I mean, not really.
I make a couple of bucks here and there, but I think everybody else at the table can attest to the fact that you're never going to have a real job or a real career ever again.
Surreal Oath, Shattered Loyalty00:05:09
But I can sleep at night.
I'll tell you, I was.
oh thank you about about three days before i went to prison uh the The former deputy director of the CIA, who was the godfather of the torture program, tweeted at me.
Do you remember this, Jess?
And he said, Don't drop the soap, asshole.
Now, my normal reaction would be something that I can't say with television cameras here.
But I gave myself an hour to cool down, and I responded, Jose, I am on the right side of history, and you are not.
And I left it at that.
So thanks for having me.
I'm excited about this entire event.
Hi, my name is Thomas Drake, and sitting in front of you, per the government, is an enemy of the state.
it's still surreal it's still surreal for me to say that because i took the oath four times in my government career to support and defend the constitution united states of america against all enemies
foreign and domestic, and I found myself defending that Constitution against my own government, at first in secret, and then exercising my First Amendment rights to inform the public.
And for that, it was defined as a crime of state, for having called out state crimes.
But it's important for me to share a little bit of history with you because how would I even find myself under incredibly egregious circumstances at one point looking at spending literally the rest of my life in prison?
How did I find myself in this situation simply for taking an oath to a piece of paper that I was told when I was blowing the many, many whistles for many, many years to many, many investigators and others in the government through all proper channels before I made that fateful decision to go to the press.
You don't understand, Mr. Drake, the Constitution is not a suicide pact.
Which brings up the rhetorical question, which side of history are they on?
But I grew up in two republics before they became states in the United States of America, namely Texas and Vermont.
They don't call it the lone star state for nothing.
And in Vermont, it was the original republic in terms of that part of our history.
And for 14 years between 1777 and 1791, it was independent before it joined as a 14th state.
And for me, growing up in Vermont, Town Meeting Day was an extraordinary demonstration of what it meant to live in a republic, that special form of democracy in which everybody got to say their peace.
We held ourselves accountable.
We congratulate ourselves on what we had done for the community.
We also chided ourselves, and there was a voice in our community, his name was Fred Cooper.
You could hardly understand him through his thick Vermont brogue, holding a mirror up to us.
And he reminded us of who we were and who we had not been for the previous year.
But I remember, I remember, is I was a very, very young teenager in the 1970s watching some extraordinary events unfold in terms of U.S. history.
Unless we forget history, these were seminal years for me.
Extraordinary seminal in terms of my civic awakening.
It wasn't just the fact that I was growing up in Vermont.
It wasn't just the fact that the Vietnam War was still raging.
It wasn't the fact that seniors are burning their draft cards in the back parking lot.
It wasn't the fact that Ellsberg actually went to trial, was declared the most dangerous man in America at that time, in spite of the big red scare and communism and all that.
Thrown Back Into History00:15:23
It wasn't just the fact that as certain things started to transpire with a certain president of the United States, Richard Milhouse Nixon, it's not just the fact that there was a thing called Watergate involving the CIA.
It wasn't just the fact that certain, I wish, and they just don't seem to have the cojones to do so anymore in our Congress, having formal investigations in which all kinds of revelations came out about assassinations and interfering in other people's elections and overthrowing duly elected governments across the world and surveillance by NSA,
spying on tens of thousands of Americans in total violation of the Fourth Amendment, in cooperation with certain types of telcos and other providers of information.
Then a president resigns.
And we have the Church Committee, Pike Committee, Abzug, Rockefeller Commission.
All of this is critical.
Because in 1978, because of severe abuses by NSA, a very secret agency actually literally created by Truman in 1952, literally by the stroke of his pen, not by legislation signed into law by the president, a military intelligence agency to constrain its powers, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
I want to just emphasize the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, not domestic intelligence surveillance act.
But I also recall, especially now with a little bit of distance in time, not just from that period, but what I faced here just a few short years ago, that I don't remember, and I'm going to look to my fellow panel members, I don't remember growing up in America and when I remember having these guidance counselor sessions about what do you want to do when you grow up,
I actually don't remember seeing whistleblower listed as one of those things you would aspire to as a career.
I just, did you remember, John, or Jess or?
The back of the page.
I just don't remember that.
I do remember intrepid reporters pursuing the truth.
I do remember hearing this extraordinary, you know, we found out who it was later, deep throat, and that the government, in fact, gee, guess what?
Does violate the law.
Wow, and can be held accountable.
I do remember that, right?
That even presidents, even if they say it's legal, right?
They're not above the law.
I said I took the oath four times in a government career, United States Air Force, crypto linguists.
I went through survival school.
I actually went through the SEER training in 1981, in which in a training environment, I went through everything that you heard about later in terms of torture, enhanced interrogation techniques.
I was actually waterboarded in a training environment twice.
It was a very intense experience.
And it was made crystal clear that we don't do this.
We actually court-martialed our own soldiers in World War II when they tortured Japanese prisoners.
Wow.
As an American.
I also remember in history classes during my military career learning about Nuremberg and simply saying as a defense that following orders was sufficient.
I didn't take an oath to just follow orders.
I didn't take an oath to president.
I didn't take an oath to lie.
I didn't take an oath to break the law.
I didn't take an oath to do things in secret that if made public, the American people would be asking all kinds of questions about.
And yet, I found myself at an agency that some back in its day called no such agency.
never say anything and now it's no secrets anymore.
Yes, it's true that I take not an oath to defend secrecy or protect secrecy.
I signed a number of non-disclosure agreements, but even the non-disclosure agreement says you can't use secrecy in the classification system to hide wrongdoing, violate the law, etc.
And there I was shortly after 9-11, an utter failure of the United States government to provide for the common defense.
Because I was there at the Pentagon.
This was the third time I had taken my oath.
I actually had a short stint at the CIA working on weapons of mass destruction, Science and Technology Directorate.
I'm sitting there at the Pentagon.
We're doing all the analysis.
This is when they tried to drop the World Trade Center towers the first time, as you heard earlier.
And we were sending out reports saying they're coming back.
And I remember the two-star general coming down the J-2 into the National Military Joint Intelligence Center, the Alert Center, saying, yeah, I'm reading all the reports.
Who cares?
Who cares?
And my apologies for the pejorative.
Who cares about some raghead spouting off in the desert underneath a fig tree?
Who cares?
That was 1993.
Even George Tennett said 1998 system was blinking red.
But even he was largely ignored.
Counterterrorism was not a priority, even when the Bush administration came into power.
You know, as a quick side note, I remember there was that weird period in U.S. history in the fall of 2000 where we didn't know who the President of the United States is going to be.
I was in Brussels, Belgium, at a conference when I used to be on the International Lecture Circuit, and I was actually doing a rather technical presentation on the Euro conversion problem.
It was sort of similar to Y2K, just dealing with other kinds of financial digits.
And during the QA, it was a keynote, during the QA, all they wanted to do was ask about the American election.
And can you tell us, Mr. Drake, what hanging Chad is?
We're seeing these pictures being held up.
Was that a dimple?
Was it pressed?
Was it popped?
It perforated what because there was this gigantic suspense as to who was going to become president.
We know what the outcome was.
And then my first day on the job at NSA was 9-11.
So imagine for the moment you're Indiana Jones and Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Remember that famous scene when the Ark is opened up?
Don't look, keep your eyes closed.
Pandora's box was opened up in front of me in the deepest of secret, secrecy.
But I'm also inside the box behind triple-level security and all kinds of guard dogs and having badges to go in and out of certain buildings.
And as those furies were escaping, I realized that I was thrown back to when I was growing up in Vermont.
And I was thrown back to those extraordinary Watergate hearings.
And I was thrown back to now for the fourth time having taken that oath.
And here was my government in secret committing a coup against the Constitution.
And no one knew.
No one knew what was unleashed as a result of 9-11.
A silent coup against our own Constitution.
And I found myself, this is not right.
The government can't use the failure to provide for the common dissent as an excuse to simply set the Constitution aside.
A decision was made verbally and then formally.
I did not know about the formal decision, but I knew about the verbal decisions that are already being made days after 9-11.
First week in October, I confront the lead attorney after blowing the whistle with the number three at NSA.
This is the lead attorney.
He said, you don't understand, Mr. Drake.
So it's important, given what I share with you about the 70s growing up, these words were incredibly chilling.
The hair is literally standing off in the back of my neck because I was thrown back.
I was like, wow, but the stakes were far greater.
And this already, the decisions that are being made at the highest levels of government, up to and including the White House, far exceeded anything Nixon ever did.
I found out later about the state-sponsored torture program.
I found out later about the cooked intelligence on Iraq.
I confront the lead attorney.
He says, you don't understand.
I said, why are we violating the Constitution?
We have a 23-year regime that was put in place in 1978.
It was modified five times to keep up with the times.
Why are we setting it aside?
Why are we now literally turning the United States of America in the equivalent of foreign nation for the purposes of dragnet electronic surveillance?
You don't understand, Mr. Drake.
The White House has approved the program.
It's all legal.
All legal.
It's an abject violation of the Constitution.
I said, you know, there is a constitutional means in this country by which you change law.
You go to Congress.
In fact, the executive branch can introduce the basis for the legislation.
He said, with what we want to do, they will say no.
This was just after 9-11.
I mean, they did sign off.
One person, basically, a couple people objected to the Patriot Act late October.
This has been even before the Patriot Act.
And even when the Patriot Act passed, NSA was already in violation of the Patriot Act, as well as were other government agencies.
I realized in that moment, he said, and then he said, don't ask any more questions.
I was a marked person.
I realized in that moment that I was faced with not just looking into Pandora's box, but the abyss was staring back at me.
And at that moment, there was no question that I was going to have to defend that extraordinary piece of paper with all of its faults and foibles.
I was going to have to defend it against my own government at extraordinary risk.
And so for the next several years, multiple investigations, depositions, thousands of pages of documentation, massive billions of dollars in fraud, waste, and abuse, 9-11 intelligence failures, and this is critical, the original foundational program called Stellar Wind, which was the mass domestic electronic surveillance program unleashed on the United States as a Petri dish,
later exported overseas to engulf entire nations.
I always knew, given my civic awakening in the 70s, that there was always another option.
Because if none of the avenues for whistleblowing would realize or see the light of day, and in fact, the channels were exposure channels, and I went through all kinds of retaliation, there was one channel left, the Fourth Estate.
I could go to the press with what I knew.
But this was one of the most, it turned out, is even more secret than the state-sponsored torture program.
I knew that if I went to the press, that given the mass surveillance regime in place, given the fact that so few people knew about it, that we're only talking a few dozen people initially, and then others that weren't really read into it per se or knew about it, it was only whispers about it.
But it was all legal, just following orders.
I knew that if I went to the press, that I would at a minimum lose my job eventually, and I knew that a lot worse could happen to me.
So this was eyes wide open.
I was intimately familiar with what happened to Ellsberg.
Ellsberg wrote part of that history of Vietnam.
It was top secret, but the information that I knew about and had in fact disclosed through proper channels was actually not only above top secret, it was more sensitive than SCI.
For some of you in this room, you will know as soon as I say these three letters, you will realize how extraordinarily sensitive this was because it was approved by the President of the United States himself.
That's ECI level, highly super compartmented.
I made a fateful decision to go to the press in early 2006 anonymously because I realized that any attempt to go to the press will be picked up by the mass surveillance regime.
And so I exercised my First Amendment rights to bring to the public through the press what I knew that was unclassified.
Full-Time Prosecutors Investigation00:02:38
Except what happened just shortly before I had gone to the press myself, there was this article that came out in the New York Times revealing for the first time the existence of just the tip of the iceberg of this mass surveillance regime.
Government launched a criminal investigation, multi-millions of dollars, many, many, many prosecutors.
At one point, there were five full-time prosecutors and 25 full-time FBI agents, including their elite molehunter unit.
Some, and I wouldn't presume any knowledge that they may or may not, you can issue your Glomar responses accordingly to my two former fellow CIA colleagues with regards to what that actually means.
But there I was, okay?
So I went, I went to the press in the deepest of secrecy anonymously, but they launched this criminal investigation.
And this criminal investigation was extraordinarily wide-ranging.
The molehunter unit is the unit that goes after real spies.
We're talking about real espionage.
They're specially trained, and yet they were using that unit on me.
And it turns out I was the last person that was raided that we're aware of.
About a dozen people literally had their homes raided.
Some you haven't even heard about.
Others you have.
And I ended up facing a dozen FBI agents in November of 2007.
The irony, of course, is that the day before, I was teaching at the National Defense University as a visiting professor of behavioral science, leadership ethics, leadership strategy, and national security policy.
And we had gone to where?
The International Spy Museum.
What was the elective class?
The secret side of U.S. history.
And they had a little placard because it was the fall, and they had mistaken the creation of NSA.
And I filled out one of those suggestion cards that you got the date wrong.
That was my last official act as a senior executive in the government.
So accelerate forward, because we definitely want to open this up for conversation and debate between us and you.
I said I was an enemy of the state.
Plea Deal Freedom00:05:37
John Kiriaku and myself are the only two people to date in relationship to the torture or mass surveillance regime, state-sponsored each, were the only two people to date that were criminally investigated, prosecuted, indicted under the Espionage Act, subsequently convicted and sentenced.
John served two years in a plea deal.
I also had a plea deal, but went free.
None of the people that authorized the program, approved the program, implemented the programs in terms of torture, mass surveillance have ever been held to account.
None.
I guess they're above the law.
But what law are we talking about?
It's definitely not national security law, but that's effectively what has replaced constitutional law.
So just imagine for the moment and why it's so precious for me, and you'll hear the emotion in my voice, especially speaking to this audience.
I can't even begin to tell you what it means to be free.
I cannot begin to tell you what it means to have liberty.
It's extraordinarily precious.
They are inanimate rights.
All I did, all we've done, those of us who've served on this panel and the government, is we took an oath to support and defend that Constitution.
The good, the bad, and everything else between took an oath to defend it.
No one is above it.
So imagine for the moment I'm facing the chief prosecutor of this multi-year, multi-million dollar investigation in a dark room at an FBI facility in the greater D.C. area, where I have to walk past the molehunter unit at the FBI.
He comes in after the FBI agent said there's someone here to see you and proceeds to tell me, how would you like to spend the rest of your life in prison, Mr. Drake, unless you cooperate in an investigation.
And if you cooperate, although there are no guarantees, maybe you'll only have to serve 25 or 30 years in prison.
But that's a lot better than the rest of your life, isn't it?
We have more than enough information to put you away for a long, long time.
You better start talking.
I simply looked at him in that moment.
I realized I've been cooperating with FBI across five months reporting state crimes that they didn't want to hear about.
I gave them names, places, and all the in-between information.
They didn't want to hear about it.
I said, I will not plea bargain with the truth.
If you have what you say you have, then I have rights under the Constitution, the Bill of Rights.
I'll see you in court.
I'll leave you with this.
Last year, CPAC conference, some of you may remember Lou Dobbs is moderating.
There was a debate, and I put debate in quotes, between Judge Napolitano and Michael V. Hayden, who's central to understanding my case.
Asked, what was the legal basis?
This is before all the legislation kicked in to make legal what was patently unlawful and unconstitutional.
Ex post facto laws are a violation of the Constitution for those lawyers in the audience and the one sitting next to me.
Well aware, because I'm in large part, I can actually sit in front of you and say all this because of her.
She was my voice when I had none.
Someone had to defend me in the court of public opinion.
It was the kangaroo court in the courtroom.
It's all under secrecy rules and all kinds of other restrictions.
But let me leave you with this, because at this conference, Michael V. Hayden was asked, what was the legal basis for all that surveillance before the legislation kicked in starting in 2007 with the Protect America Act, which got rolled in to the FISA Amendments Act, which was got renewed without any changes, despite many attempts to amend it five years later, and there's sunset portions of it coming up soon.
Three words.
And when I issue these three words, it's really important in terms of our Constitutional Republic to remind yourself what form of governments I took an oath to defend against three-word response, raw executive authority.
Raw Executive Authority00:06:45
Right there in the clear.
Raw executive authority.
Wow.
And that's why I do fear for the Republic.
But I wouldn't be on this stage with my fellow panelists if I didn't believe that there's still hope.
Because at the bottom of Pandora's box, after all the Furies escape, there lies hope.
And it's why I've dedicated the rest of my life to defending life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
There is nothing more important.
So thank you.
Okay, we've got about 20 minutes, so we can have a little back and forth.
Jesslyn, do you want to kick it off, or should I throw out a question or a topic for conversation?
You can throw out a question, but I just wanted to make a quick remark that a lot of the people at the top of these scandals that people were blowing the whistle on, people like Michael Hayden, people like David Petraeus, these folks occupy some of the highest positions in U.S. government.
So there's kind of, we joked about this sort of mantra of screw up, cover up, get promoted.
But again, a lot of the bad actors in these scenarios have come out unscathed.
May I mention that several of these bad actors have been sort of rehabilitated in the bizarro world of the last eight or nine months, where now people like Clapper and Hayden are being presented to us by a sympathetic media as patriots, as defenders of our freedoms.
We all, I think, can see through that, but it fears me greatly that many of our fellow citizens don't see through that and have entered into this mirrored world where the same people that we're describing here are being presented to us as heroes and patriots.
And I raise that flag of caution.
More comments?
Yeah, I would add to that.
They not only have been rehabilitated, they've been, in a sense, promoted and rewarded.
If you look at all of these senior CIA NSA clowns that we've been subjected to, they all occupy now very senior positions in think tanks, in investment firms.
There's the Washington-New York nexus, which feeds all this stuff, basically rewards its loyal friends.
And all these people have been, as I say, not only rehabilitated, they've been rewarded beyond the imagination of any of us.
It's a horrific situation.
It's as corrupt as anything that if you wrote it in a novel, nobody would believe it.
One of the things that I had thought about, and we all remember, you know, the Snowden revelations sort of codified sort of our collective outrage.
And there were certainly predecessors, Thomas Drake and everyone here.
But that seemed to really get people to focus their attention on the surveillance program.
And of course, the government immediately stepped into action.
We will take care of it.
We now know we need to have reform.
And as we all know, the illegalities of the Patriot Act were codified, expanded, and called reform in the Freedom Act, written by the same guy, Sensenbrenner, who wrote the patriotic, oh, it's okay, guys.
I'll fix it.
I'll write another one.
Made it much worse.
But there was outrage, and that outrage caused government action.
It caused and forced the media to cover some of this.
However, I think that collective outrage has died down a little.
And I was just wondering if the panelists might comment on that process of dying down and what we might do to ramp up that sense of outrage because the surveillance hasn't stopped.
Just a brief comment.
It's really a catch-22.
Anybody who's read the Joseph Heller novel, I actually recently saw the movie and it just got flashbacks.
But what's interesting, even with all the revelations, and the Snowden revelations are extraordinary in terms of how far this surveillance regime went and how far it went overseas.
And it's still in place.
In the Catch-22, what I call the Colonel Cathcart defense, we have the power now.
Who's going to stop us?
So even with the revelations, that's why I mentioned the raw executive authority.
It's not hidden anymore.
We have the power, and you don't have the power to take it away from us.
And we'll do everything we can to defend it.
This is not their power, though.
But given history, remember, history is not kind.
So I just want to make reference.
This is critical to understanding it because there is probably, if some have said there's a flaw in the Constitution, our special form of democracy, it's we the people.
But as I recall, that very first extraordinary sentence in the preamble is we the people doing what?
We the people in order to form a more perfect union.
Those of us who spoke truth to power are about forming a more perfect union.
We're not about disunion.
We're not about conflict.
We're not about dividing.
We're actually bringing people together for a common purpose.
That's who we are as we the people.
I just want to make sure make the point because all this legislation has largely done is legalize or put into place a framework that's become normalized, an activity that was blatantly unconstitutional, violated all kinds of statutes, international norms, and who we are as Americans.
We the People00:02:08
Never mind who we are as human beings.
I mean, these are extraordinary violations of human rights.
These are many cases literally war crimes.
These are crimes against the integrity and the essence of who we are as human beings.
It cannot stand.
I have people right now who say, Tom, why do you even bother?
Why would you take a day off from work and actually come all the way out to Dulles?
Dulles.
To a Ron Paul Institute.
And why bother?
You already paid a high enough price.
You have no pension.
You have huge debts.
You've lost all kinds, lost a lot.
Family, friends, social networks.
Why bother?
I say, well, what kind of price are you going to put on freedom and liberty?
That's what's at stake.
How many people in this room use encryption?
Show of hands.
Not enough.
Not enough at all.
Look, if my high schoolers and my middle schooler can use Snapchat and InstaMessage and all these things.
I mean, my kids are more sophisticated.
I mean, they know how to use some level of encryption, but it's really a small step that you can take to try to evade government surveillance.
I mean, it's one of those things you can do on a daily basis.
When you do a transaction with Amazon, they'll let you sign in anonymously.
I mean, so there are small steps we can take in our daily lives to try to fight against how much surveillance has been normalized.
When I get those little snaps, you know, the little pictures that the traffic light took, your car, this is your car speeding.
Small Steps Against Surveillance00:07:39
Like, I've challenged it.
It's a pain to go down to the DMV and say, actually, no, I wasn't driving that day.
In fact, I don't drive that particular car at all.
I mean, you challenge this stuff.
It's a pain, but it's worth it.
And some of these measures you can take, like basic encryption, can go a long way in thwarting government surveillance.
I wanted to add something that's maybe a little farther down in the weeds, but I think part of our problem is that over the last 16 years, we've transitioned into a permanent wartime economy.
And so many people, especially in this area, have gotten rich and powerful that they're not going to let us go back without a fight.
You know, Jesslyn has been quoted, it's one of my favorite quotes, not just of Jessalyn's, but of anybody's, that we want our September 10th country back.
And not just because in maybe our memories, it's the good old days, but because there's been a real impact vis-a-vis the kind of country we are now.
Whether it's surveillance, whether it's these ridiculous and vast increases in the defense budget, whether it's an out-of-control CIA that answers to no one, whether it's oversight committees on Capitol Hill that oversee nothing, we've gone wrong, and we need to go right again.
And to that, I'll add a caution about not being distracted by which face is in which chair.
In other words, all of us here found ourselves under the various levels of prosecution under a Nobel Prize-winning president who promised the most transparent.
And these things continue.
And I say that not because I have any great love or dislike for one president versus the other, but to emphasize the point that people are being fooled into believing something's changed when in fact very, very little has changed.
Now, you're allowed in America today to claim that Russian bots change the course of an election because of Facebook gifs and cat pictures, but you're not allowed to use the term deep state.
At that point, you become a conspiracy theorist.
So I won't use that term.
I'll use the term permanent state.
And I'll encourage everyone to keep their eye on that focus, because there's a real danger that as we crawled out of the Bush years where these programs were put into place, torture and surveillance, that everything was okay because we had a new president.
And then there's a current now sense that everything's not okay again because we've got a different kind of bad president.
And at some point, there'll be another person and everything's going to be okay again.
And these attacks are very similar to basically saying, well, everything Julian Assange says is wrong because he's a terrible person or something.
These attacks add hominin.
And it's sort of the opposite of that what's happening now in terms of manipulating history to make us forget that the things we're talking about here are solid threads that run through, in our personal experiences, three different, very different presidents who at their cores are very much the same person when you get down to the roots, the things that matter the most, the First Amendment, the Fourth Amendment, Fifth Amendment.
And so keep your pressure on the media that you consume, that they keep their jobs in front of them and not fall prey to saying, well, the current guy in the White House is the reason for the surveillance state, or the previous guy did this or that.
It's only the free press is really one of the last tools that we're struggling to keep in our hands in this fight.
And we're the consumers.
At some point, they still need us.
and it gives us leverage that we should never, never give up.
Final thoughts from the panel.
We can close it out.
It's extraordinarily chilling, although I certainly experienced the fact that by going to the press, the government used that to charge me with espionage.
That's ultimately, and there's still a lot of misinformation even about my own case in that regard.
When you have a president of the United States, in this case, President Trump, saying that the press is the enemy of the people, just go back and read Henrik Ibsen's Enemy of the People play, that extraordinary Norwegian playwright.
It really is chilling, right?
Because in essence, he's now saying what has been the case, and as Justin Radak said, those of us, the few of us, although under Obama, more people were charged espionage and all other presidents, it's important to note combined.
We now have Reality Winner charged espionage.
I very much feel what she's going through because in fact, disclosing to the press information that actually would seem to point to some kind of interference or intrusion, and yet, guess what?
She's been indefinitely detained and is now awaiting trial, which got postponed another six months.
This idea that the press is the threat.
So it's one thing to go after the sources.
And that was clearly the chilling message with a number of us, including Justin Radock's own whistleblowing history, going, as I call it, the pioneering post-9-11 whistleblower, because the early, early stages of the state-sponsored torture regime involving John Walker-Lynn, making him the poster child, right?
So, and violating his rights as an American.
To go after the press is, we just, I have to say this before, it's really crucial because we forget our own history.
We forget, all those of us, it's a very small minority that rose up against King George.
We forget the egregious acts that are so elegantly articulated in the Declaration of Independence, that it was the basis for what became the First and Fourth Amendment.
This idea that you can just keep freeze people, put them in the stockade, show up with a piece of paper and take your effects away, your papers away, or even your person away.
And who, you know, you're just colonialists, you have no rights.
So we forget our own history, and it's just incredibly chilling for me seeing sort of the evolution of what has happened post-9-11, where now you have a president who makes no bones, political theater aside or not, to actually attack the press directly, separate from MSM, separate from Access Press, separate from much of the MSM press that tends to parrot, right?
They're stenographers, right, for power, because they don't want to lose that access or the access to that power.