The motive behind whistle-blower prosecutions

Glenn Greenwald
Jul. 16, 2010

One of the more flamboyant aspects of the Bradley Manning arrest was the claim that he had leaked to WikiLeaks 250,000 pages of "diplomatic cables." Those were the documents which anonymous government officials pointed to when telling The Daily Beast's Philip Shenon that the leaks "could do serious damage to national security." Most commentary on the Manning case has tacitly assumed that the leaking of "diplomatic cables" would jeopardize national security secrets. But a new BBC article today contains this quote from former UK intelligence analyst Crispin Black:

Diplomatic cables don't usually contain huge secrets but they do contain the unvarnished truth so in a sense they can be even more embarrassing than secrets.

As usual, government concern over leaks is about avoiding embarrassment and other accountability; national security harm is but the fear-mongering excuse. Similarly, a new Washington Post article today details the Obama DOJ's prosecution of NSA whistle blower Thomas Drake, whose disclosures resulted in no claimed national security harm, but rather, was evidence of "waste, mismanagement and a willingness to compromise Americans' privacy without enhancing security" (leaked only after his use of the official channels resulted in nothing, as usual). As is true for virtually every whistle blower prosecution or threatened prosecution, there is no actual national security harm identified from that leak. Other than when a covert agent's identity is blown (as happened to Valerie Plame), has anyone ever heard of any actual, concrete national security harm from any of the high-profile leak cases, whether it be the illegal NSA eavesdropping program, the network of CIA black sites, the release of the Apache helicopter attack video, or the corruption and privacy infringements revealed by Drake?

Continued