http://NSA Whistleblower Indicted for Leaking Classified Information to Reporte

Thursday 15 April 2010

by: Jason Leopold, t r u t h o u t | Report

(Image: Lance Page / t r u t h o u t; Adapted: NSA, cleanzor)

A former senior National Security Agency (NSA) official was indicted Thursday on charges he leaked classified information to and served as a source for a reporter who wrote a series of critical articles about the agency's work.

The indictment "suggests the Obama administration may be no less aggressive than the Bush administration in pursuing whistleblowers and reporters’ sources who disclose government secrets," the New York Times noted.

According to the federal indictment, Thomas A. Drake, 52, allegedly corresponded and met in person with an unnamed newspaper reporter between February 2006 and November 2007 and exchanged hundreds of emails with the journalist about the inner workings of the super-secret spy agency.

The allegations agaisnt Drake are unrelated to the charges leveled against Thomas Tamm, the NSA whistleblower who revealed the Bush administration's domestic surveillance program to the New York Times. No charges have been filed in the Tamm case. Tamm has publicly admitted he was a source for the Times story. 

The Washington Post identified the reporter Drake allegedly leaked classified information to as Siobhan Gorman, who worked for the Baltimore Sun and published a series of reports in that newspaper which focused on poor management at the NSA and the agency’s failure to set priorities.

"Gorman wrote a number of articles about the NSA during the time period cited in the indictment, including stories about problems with classified information collection and analysis programs known as ‘Turbulence’ and ‘Trailblazer,’” Agence France-Presse reported.

Gorman's reports also "disclosed a crisis in meeting NSA's demands for electrical power and described how the agency had rejected a program that had the promise of collecting communications while protecting Americans’ privacy," according to the Times.

"The articles, though, did not focus on the most highly protected NSA secrets — whose communications it collects, exactly how it collects them and what countries’ codes it has broken," the Times report added. "That may make a prosecution more feasible, from the point of view of protecting secrets during a trial. But because the articles in question documented government failures and weaknesses, the decision to prosecute could raise questions about whether the government is merely moving to protect itself from legitimate public scrutiny."

Ironically, Gorman, who now works for the Wall Street Journal, was covering the Senate confirmation hearing of NSA Director Lt. Gen. Keith B. Alexander when the Justice Department announced that a federal grand jury in the District of Maryland returned an indictment against Drake. Gorman, the Post reported, did not comment about the case as she left the hearing.

“Gorman's coverage of NSA often placed an unflattering focus on NSA administrators,” the Post reported. “An August 2006 story quoted intelligence officials as showing that the NSA eavesdropping facilities in Fort Meade were at risk of paralysis because of electrical overload and potential failure of the power supply.”

A call to the Baltimore Sun was not returned Thursday. The Justice Department would not confirm whether Gorman is the reporter identified in the indictment.

Drake was charged with 10 felonies, including obstruction of justice, making false statements to the FBI, and the willful retention of classified information related to four classified emails and one classified document. He is alleged to have obstructed justice by shredding classified and unclassified documents, including his handwritten notes that he had removed from the NSA and deleted classified and unclassified information on his home computer

The indictment further alleges that in November 2005, Drake, who was the head of an office within the NSA that dealt with signals intelligence (SIGNIT), was asked by a former congressional staffer to speak with a reporter. Between November 2005 and February 2006, Drake set up a free email account and then paid for a premium Hushmail account that allowed users to exchange secure emails without disclosing the sender or recipient’s identity.

The Justice Department claims Drake used an alias when he contacted the reporter, had her set up her own private, secure email account and then “volunteered” to disclose classified information about the NSA. The indictment alleges Drake had the reporter agree to a set of ground rules, such as never disclosing his identity, attributing information he provided to a "senior intelligence official,” never relying on Drake’s information alone to report a story, never telling Drake who the reporter’s other sources were; and not commenting on what people, to whom Drake recommended the reporter speak, said to the reporter.

"As alleged, this defendant used a secret, non-government e-mail account to transmit classified and unclassified information that he was not authorized to possess or disclose,” said Assistant Attorney General Lanny A. Breuer. “As if those allegations are not serious enough, he also allegedly later shredded documents and lied about his conduct to federal agents in order to obstruct their investigation. Our national security demands that the sort of conduct alleged here – violating the government’s trust by illegally retaining and disclosing classified information – be prosecuted and prosecuted vigorously."

In addition to the email exchanges, the Justice Department claims Drake:

• Research[ed] stories for the reporter to write in the future by e-mailing unwitting NSA employees and accessing classified and unclassified documents on classified NSA networks.
• Cop[ied] and past[ed] classified and unclassified information from NSA documents into untitled word processing documents which, when printed, had the classification markings removed.
• Print[ed] both classified and unclassified documents, bringing them to his home, and retaining them there without authority.
• Scann[ed] and email[ed] electronic copies of classified and unclassified documents to the reporter from his home computer and reviewing, commenting on, and editing drafts of the reporter’s articles.

The Obama administration’s decision to prosecute Drake will have a chilling impact on whistleblowers, said Lucy Danglish, executive director of The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

"It's not a shock,” Danglish said. "They've always had the ability to charge people with violating national security laws when they leak to a reporter. They just don't typically do it very often."

Danglish said Gorman's reports exposed "a multibillion-dollar boondoggle that was of great interest to Congress."

Still, Danglish said the indictment is "unfortunate" and is "designed to have an impact on leakers."

"It's going to impact people sharing information with reporters," she said.

 
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Let The Sun Shine In......

The Bomb-Bomb-Iran 'Parlor Game'

By Robert Parry
April 2, 2010

Normally, if two countries with powerful nuclear arsenals were openly musing about attacking a third country over mere suspicions that it might want to join the nuclear club, we’d tend to sympathize with the non-nuclear underdog as the victim of bullying and possible aggression.

You might think that – unless you were told that the two nuclear-armed countries are Israel and the United States and the non-nuclear country is Iran. Then, different rules apply, especially it seems in leading American news outlets like the New York Times.

In what reads like a replay of the run-up to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, the Times and other major U.S. news media appear onboard for war, again happy to make the likely aggressors the “victims,” and to turn the prospect of a bloody conflict in a Muslim country into a parlor game.

Indeed, the New York Times on March 28 presented the idea of “imagining a strike on Iran” as “Washington’s grimmest but most urgent parlor game,” assessing how a military strike by Israel, “acting on its fears that Iran threatens its existence,” would play out.

That same day, the Times also led its front page with an alarmist story about Iranian atomic energy official Ali Akbar Salehi saying Iran might soon begin work on two new nuclear enrichment sites built into mountains to protect against bombings.

The article by reporters David E. Sanger and William J. Broad repeated a recurring falsehood in the Times, that it was President Barack Obama who “publicly revealed the evidence of a [previous] hidden site,” a hardened facility near Qum.

The actual chronology was that Iran informed the International Atomic Energy Agency about the non-operational Qum site on Sept. 21, four days before Obama joined with French President Nicolas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown in highlighting its existence.

At the time, the Obama administration spun Iran’s earlier disclosure of the Qum facility as having been prompted by Tehran’s awareness that the United States was onto the plant’s existence, but there was no independent evidence of that and the undisputed fact is that Iran disclosed the facility’s existence before Obama’s revelation.

Yet, the Times has now altered the chronology to put Obama’s announcement first, and thus cast Iran into a more sinister light.

Who’s the Victim?

The Times’ biased approach toward the Iranian nuclear issue is underscored further by the Times’ refusal to mention that the presumed “victim” in this story, Israel, possesses one of the world’s most sophisticated nuclear arsenals yet has neither publicly admitted that it has nukes nor signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Indeed, it is the fact that Iran is a treaty signatory -- and renounces any interest in building a nuclear bomb -- that is the basis for IAEA inspections of its facilities and for the legal requirement that it disclose new facilities, such as the one at Qum.

But the through-the-looking-glass quality of the Times coverage is that it portrays Israel as the “victim,” although it is a rogue nuclear-weapons state and refuses to abide by international inspections or other safeguards, restrictions that Iran accepts.

Even more remarkable, Israel is openly contemplating bombing Iran, an act that supposedly would be justified by Israel's assertion that a possible Iranian nuclear bomb would represent "an existential threat" to Israel.

It is true that some Iranian leaders favor a one-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian impasse, i.e. making the territory of Israel and the West Bank into a non-religious state where both Jews and Arabs would live as equals. Israel also has cited Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's wish that the “Jewish state” would disappear.

This claim of an “existential threat," in turn, has become the rationale for Israel openly plotting to bomb Iran and its nuclear facilities.

On March 28, David Sanger wrote a “Week in Review” story about the unabashed discussions underway in Tel Aviv and Washington about the geopolitical consequences of attacking Iran, doing what Sen. John McCain once playfully sang about as “bomb-bomb-bomb, bomb-bomb Iran.”

Sanger’s article noted that in 2008, “the Israelis secretly asked the Bush administration for the equipment and overflight rights they might need some day to strike Iran’s … nuclear sites. They were turned down, but the request added urgency to the question: Would Israel take the risk of a strike? And if so, what would follow?

“Now that parlor game question has turned into more formal war games simulations. The [U.S.] government’s own simulations are classified, but the Saban Center for Middle East Policy [a neoconservative adjunct] at the Brookings Institution created its own in December.”

The war game, directed by Kenneth M. Pollack, assumed that Israel would attack Iran without notifying the Obama administration, which would then demand that Israel halt the bombing even as Washington beefed up its own military forces in the Persian Gulf.

As the war game played out, Iran would retaliate against both Israeli targets and Saudi oil fields, spiking oil prices and pushing the United States toward the brink of its own attacks to destroy Iran’s military capability to disrupt oil supplies. At that point – a hypothetical eight days into the conflict – the war game ended.

Interestingly, the Times’ accompanying graphic included a rare – though indirect – acknowledgement of Israel’s undeclared nuclear-weapons capability. In a box entitled “Iran Strikes Back,” the war game anticipated that Iran would fire “missiles at Israel, including its nuclear weapons complex at Dimona.”

It would seem that if the Times truly wanted to provide an objective assessment of the Iranian nuclear issue – including Tehran’s possible motives for wanting a nuclear bomb – the Times would routinely make reference to the region's rogue nuclear states of Israel, India and Pakistan.

That the Times typically ignores that key fact suggests the Times sees its journalism on Iran as similar to its credulous reporting about Iraq’s non-existent WMD in 2002-03, more as propaganda than as a fair-minded presentation of the relevant facts.

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth' are also available there. Or go to Amazon.com.  

Let The Sun Shine In......

NYT report: National Security Agency tried to spy on a member of Congress.

Me thinks this is not even the tip of the iceberg

The New York Times’ Eric Lichtblau and James Risen report that the National Security Agency engaged in “overcollection” of e-mail messages and phone calls of Americans last year. The legal authority given to the NSA authorizes the surveillance of targets “reasonably believed” to be outside the United States. The Obama Justice Department said it “detected issues that raised concerns,” but claims that the problems have now been resolved. “[T]he issue appears focused in part on technical problems in the N.S.A.’s ability at times to distinguish between communications inside the United States and those overseas.” Lichtblau and Risen document one particular instance of misconduct involving the wiretapping of a member of Congress:

And in one previously undisclosed episode, the N.S.A. tried to wiretap a member of Congress without a warrant, an intelligence official with direct knowledge of the matter said.

The agency believed that the congressman, whose identity could not be determined, was in contact — as part of a Congressional delegation to the Middle East in 2005 or 2006 — with an extremist who had possible terrorist ties and was already under surveillance, the official said. The agency then sought to eavesdrop on the congressman’s conversations, the official said.

The official said the plan was ultimately blocked because of concerns from some intelligence officials about using the N.S.A., without court oversight, to spy on a member of Congress.

Congressional officials said they have “begun inquiries” into the matter.

 

Update: Kevin Drum writes, "Looking on the bright side, maybe this will finally motivate Congress to take NSA surveillance more seriously. Having one of their own members come within a hair's breadth of being an NSA target ought to concentrate their minds wonderfully, if anything will."

Let The Sun Shine In......