Tuesday, July 04, 2006

Orrin Hatch. Dirty Dozen

The following is the Orrin Hatch excerpt from my interview with Sibel Edmonds on whistleblowers and the Dirty Dozen. This is Sibel speaking:

Senator Orrin Hatch
Senate Judiciary Committee
Select Committee on Intelligence

Ok - now over to Orrin Hatch - he was the Chair of the Judiciary Committee. As a whistleblower I have dealt with Orrin Hatch's office as the leadership for the Judiciary Committee for the Senate, and I know how he was for my case - but besides that, just look at his record. Since 1986, Orrin Hatch has always sided with secrecy - especially when it comes to do with anything related to law enforcement - FBI, CIA, NSA - and he has always voted against whistleblowers and that has been consistent throughout his career - since 1984.

With first hand experience, I dealt with his office and the Senate Judiciary Committee for 2.5 years - but also as NSWBC, we have been trying to deal with Senate Judiciary Committee, they don’t want to even read or listen - they are not even open to look into any of these issues or give briefings. Just the way that we finally succeeded with Congressman Shays we have been begging the Senate Judiciary Committee to hold hearings - both on whistleblowers in general like the ones we had with Shay's committee - but also on some high profile cases.

You know about my petition, right - that is for the Senate Judiciary Committee. That was the first committee I went to as a whistleblower - it's been 4.5 years, and they promised that they were going to investigate and have public hearings - 4.5 years later I’m sitting here - they are not even willing to look at the case - even to have a meeting, or a briefing on it! For 2 years they said that they had to wait for the IG report, then when the IG report came out - and it basically backed up everything that I said - and now they say 'No - this is prevented by Senator Hatch' - as I mentioned earlier - but also on whistleblower legislation they are completely irresponsive. They don’t even respond to any request for legislation or amendments for whistleblowers protection. The Senate Judiciary Committee has not held a single hearing on whistleblowers issues since 2001 - they have not had a single investigation on shistleblowers cases from the FBI, and we have had so many whistleblower cases. There have been some with Sen. Grassley - but it's not going to mean anything unless it is followed by action and hearings - so even though in some cases, like mine and Mike German's case, Sen. Grassley and Sen. Leahy have done some preliminary investigations, and based on their findings they come to senior people like Hastert and Specter and say 'let's have hearings - this is disastrous!' but they get blocked. Who are the people who are doing the blocking? Specter, but he's not up for election, and before that it was Sen. Hatch.

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