Particularly after 9/11, when government whistleblowers were lauded for having the courage to expose misjudgment and mismanagement in key federal agencies, the message went out to government employees: if you see a national security problem, don’t just keep it to yourself.
Unfortunately, the message failed to mention that whistleblowers wouldn’t get any protection at all.
In 2002, decorated FBI Special Agent Mike German was investigating meetings between terrorism suspects. When he discovered other officers had jeopardized the investigation by violating wiretapping regulations, he reported what he found to his supervisors, in accordance with FBI policy.
At the time, Coleen Rowley, the FBI agent who had raised concerns about how the pre-9/11 arrest of al-Qaeda conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui was handled, was being hailed as a national hero. German says he had also just received a mass e-mail from FBI Director Robert Mueller, urging other whistle-blowers to come forward.
“I was assuming he’d protect me,” German says.
Instead, German says his accusations were ignored, his reputation ruined and his career obliterated. Although the Justice Department’s inspector general confirmed German’s allegations that the FBI had “mishandled and mismanaged” the terrorism investigation, he says he was barred from further undercover work and eventually compelled to resign.
According to the Office of the Special Counsel, which handles whistleblower cases if employees prefer not to directly confront their bosses, the average number of whistleblower disclosures has risen 43% since 9/11.
But they’re not being rewarded for bravely coming forward; they’re being punished for exposing wrongdoing.
In the four years before the terrorist attacks, whistle-blowers filed an average of 690 reprisal complaints with the OSC annually. Since the attacks, an average of 835 complaints have been filed each year, a 21% increase.
The number of whistle-blower reprisal complaints is higher than the number of whistle-blower disclosure complaints because employees can file reprisal complaints with the OSC even if they had not previously filed their disclosure with the OSC.
“The sad reality is that rather than learning lessons from 9/11, the government appears to have become more thin-skinned and sensitive,” says Tom Devine, legal director of the Government Accountability Project, a non-profit group that offers legal aid to whistle-blowers.
Even advocates have begun to dissuade some government employees from coming forward.
“When I get calls from people thinking of blowing the whistle, I tell them ‘Don’t do it,’ ” says William Weaver, a professor at the University of Texas at El Paso and a senior adviser to the National Security whistle-blowers Coalition. “Most of the time they go ahead and do it anyway and end up with their lives destroyed.”
Those who come forward often face harassment, investigation, character assassination and firing — not to mention the toll their whistle-blowing takes on their families, Weaver and Devine say.
Intelligence-gathering agencies are exempted from the 1989 whistle-blower Protection Act; the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has ruled against whistle-blowers in 125 of 127 of the reprisal cases seen by the court since 1994, effectively helping gut the law; and congressional Republicans removed provisions from the 2007 Defense Authorization Bill that would have extended the whistleblower Protection Act to cover intelligence agency employees.
The result is an environment in which national security officials have to keep wrongdoing to themselves, or risk ruining their professional lives.
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