Sibel Edmonds: Calling all whistleblowers

sibel asked if i could post and circulate this press release from her group - the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition. I imagine they'll put it up on their site - but its not there yet.

The NSWBC is calling on potential whistleblowers at the NSA and elsewhere to step forward and tell what they know about snoopgate. Kudos to Sibel for establishing this group, and for their current campaign - a nation of whistleblowers would be kinda dandy right now.

NSWBC Call to Patriotic Duty
By Sibel Edmonds & William Weaver

Without whistleblowers the public would never know of the many abuses of constitutional rights by the government. Whistleblowers, Truth Tellers, are responsible for the disclosure that President George W. Bush ordered unconstitutional surveillance of American citizens. These constitutional lifeguards take their patriotic oaths to heart and soul: Rather than complying with classification and secrecy orders designed to protect officials engaging in criminal conduct, whistleblowers chose to risk their livelihoods and the wrath of their agencies to get the truth out. But will they be listened to by those who are charged with accountability?

The Whistleblowers Law of Congressional Hearings holds that the higher ranking the official who testifies the less the likelihood that the truth will be revealed. With this in mind, it is impossible to proceed to the viscera of what happened to whom and when without asking those who are charged with putting policy decisions into the actual stream of practice. High officials have perverse incentives to hide what is done in their orders by the employees below them. It is indispensable that Congress reach deep inside the National Security Agency and other agencies, seeking out employees at the operational level to determine how the President’s illegal order was carried into action. To assure that this occurs, we need for people with information from the agencies involved to come forward and ask to be interviewed by Congress. The National Security Whistleblowers Coalition calls on people with knowledge of unconstitutional surveillance of American citizens to contact NSWBC and let us know that they are willing to provide congress with information and testimony. Anonymity, if desired, will be scrupulously honored. NSWBC will provide contact information to Congress and investigative authorities, and will follow up to ensure that these witnesses were in fact interviewed in good faith by congressional staff and committees and allowed to participate in the hearing process. NSWBC will be the conduit between agents and Congress for those like Russ Tice, a former intelligence agent at the National Security Agency, who announced his willingness to disclose to Congress illegal acts by officials at his former employer. At NSWBC we know what we are asking people to do: Our organization is made up exclusively of veteran intelligence and law enforcement officers, agents and analysts.

Now is the time to come forward, not to reveal legitimately classified information, but to make yourselves available as witnesses and to serve the true supervisor of us all: the Constitution. Ordinarily one would expect the congress to be the guardian of our freedom by living up to its storied role as a check and balance to the President and the Executive Branch. But for four years, members of our Congress in supposed oversight committees were aware of illegal spying on American citizens. Co-opted by an unscrupulous commitment to secrecy and the state, intelligence oversight committees in Congress must step out of the way for a People’s hearing on the matter of presidentially ordered illegal surveillance. Congress must engage in a broad, public hearing of these matters.

Accountability, in the end, always comes down to the public’s right to know, the right to have the most basic knowledge about what its servants are doing with its money and its authority. Ambassador Maxwell Taylor, when asked what he thought about the public’s right to know of what the government is doing on its behalf, infamously responded the he did not “believe in that as a general rule.” Fortunately, that is not a general rule that comports with our system of government. Citizens cannot make informed choices if they do not have the facts. Public servants should not be forced to choose between career and conscience, between commitment to oath and commitment to colleagues, and if we live by our words, laws, and principles they will not have to. Protecting all employees of the People are that:

• Their higher loyalty is to the Constitution and the rule of law;
• Information may never be classified as secret merely because it is embarrassing or incriminating, or to cover up criminal and unlawful conduct;
  
• There is no agreement that public servants may sign that will require them lie to the Congress or courts;
  
• The United States’ Code of Ethics for Government Service explains carefully and clearly in an assured voice that "Any person in government service should put loyalty to the highest moral principles and to the Country above loyalty to persons, party, or Government department."

Contact: Sibel Edmonds-Director, National Security Whistleblowers Coalition, sedmonds@nswbc.org

(bradblog has also posted it here)

apologies for not yet posting the details of my conversation with her yet - i have some family visitors. I'll try to post that in the next 48 hours, but the headline is that she stumbled across my posts about her story and she thinks that my version of the story is pretty close to her version of events. more soon.

update: sibel asked for my opinion of her op-ed - here's my response:

"the only thing that i would add to your op-ed (and your campaign more generally) is that there are also potential whistleblowers within the media. we've got a horrible situation now where even though the nyt had a dozen whistleblowers about the spying scandal, they refused to publish the story for a year. this situation creates some interesting dynamics that the NSWBC needs to consider. as we have seen with snoopgate, there are some whistleblowers who risk everything by telling their story, only to learn that their story doesnt get published. we need to have a mechanism whereby potential whistleblowers dont get discouraged from blowing, even though their first attempt might fail (one of the most amazing elements of the NSA story is that a dozen people tried to blow the whistle to the nyt 15 months ago, only to get shut down. did they try other avenues after they were rebuffed or did they just shut up?). the flipside of this problem is that there are a bunch of journos who know way more than they say - and are therefore another potential source of whistleblowers. in snoopgate, we know that more than 5 media folk knew of the story more than a year ago - and in plamegate we know that many journos knew what was happening two years ago - not only those who had first-hand knowledge of the leaks (miller/woodward/cooper etc), but also those who knew what was going on (eg larry odonnell, viveca novak etc) - this is possibly a very valuable stream of 'whistleblowers'."