Russell Tice was a signals intelligence officer at the super-secret National Security Agency (NSA). In a letter to the Senate and House Intelligence Committee Chairmen, Trice sought protection under the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act (ICWPA) for leaking highly classified information to the New York Times. The missive was dated December 18th, 2005. Remember that date, it's important.President Bush's decision to order the National Security Agency to monitor international electronic communications into and out of the United States from suspected terrorists was first revealed by the New York Times on December 16th. The Times story, held for more than a year, was written by James Risen and timed to the release of his book, "State of War" and the congressional vote on the extension of the Patriot Act. Tice told ABC News that he was a source for the Times' report.
So, a year after the Times first received highly classified information from someone violating national security laws and two days after the Times story broke, Tice decides to apply for federal whistleblower protection and has since joined the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition.
However, during a friendly interview with Amy Goodman on the uber-left-wing Pacifica Radio, Tice himself said, "Well, like I said before, as a whistleblower, you're not protected by the whistleblower laws that are out there. The intelligence community is exempt from the whistleblower protection laws."
But the bigger question remains, is Tice a whistleblower or a traitor?
Careful reading of statements he has made in the last couple of weeks might explain what drove him to betray his oath as an intelligence officer and the confidences placed in him by the NSA during a time of war by revealing the super-secret program to the New York Times, an act equivalent to the disclosure of the Allied success in breaking the German and Japanese codes during World War II.
During the Goodman interview, Tice said, "The freedom of the American people cannot be protected when our constitutional liberties are ignored and our nation has decayed into a police state.”
Which prompted Goodman to ask, "What do you think of the term police state?"
Tice responded with what seems like Democratic talking points, saying, "Well, anytime where you have a situation where U.S. citizens are being arrested and thrown in jail with the key being thrown away, you know, potentially being sent overseas to be tortured, U.S. citizens being spied on, you know, and it doesn't even go to the court that deals with these secret things, you know, I mean, think about it, you could have potentially somebody getting the wrong phone call from a terrorist and having him spirited away to some back-alley country to get the rubber hose treatment and who knows what else. I think that would kind of qualify as a police state, in my judgment."
Tice continued, saying, "The freedom of the American people cannot be protected when our constitutional liberties are ignored and our nation has decayed into a police state. Lord help you if you’ve got a wrong phone call from one of these guys, a terrorist overseas or something, and you're American. You’re liable to have the FBI camping out your doorstep."
He argued that the president should receive FISA authority for the electronic surveillance but in the same breath says the court is useless.
"I kinda liken the FISA court to a monkey with a rubber stamp. The monkey sees a name, the monkey sees a word justification with a block of information. It can't read the block, but it just stamps “affirmed” on the block, and a banana chip rolls out, and then the next paper rolls in front of the monkey. When you have like 20,000 requests and only, I think, four were turned down, you can't look at the FISA court as anything different."
So, by his own words, Tice's actions weren't driven by the president's bypassing FISA Court but by something else. Could it be that he was a disgruntled employee whose lacked the necessary judgment to fill such a sensitive role?
Responding to a Goodman question about the Attorney General, Tice responded by saying, "Yeah, I think that for anyone to say that the Attorney General is going to be totally unbiased about something like this, I think that’s silly. Of course, the answer is no. He can't be unbiased in this. I think that a special prosecutor or something like that may have to be involved in something like this, otherwise we're just liable to have a whitewash."
He continued, "Boy, I think most folks at NSA right now are just running scared. They have the security office hanging over their head, which has always been a bunch of vicious folks, and now they've got, you know, this potential witch hunt going on with the Attorney General. People in the intelligence community are afraid. They know that you can't come forward. You have no protections as a whistleblower."
So, he repeats his understanding that he has no protection as a whistleblower. Then why is he claiming such protection? Could it be that Tice just might have an agenda?
It also seems that he was having psychological problems for some time.
Tice says he sent an e-mail to a Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) agent in April 2003. In this e-mail, he wrote that he suspected a co-worker being a Chinese spy and questioned the competence FBI counterintelligence. In the same e-mail, Tice wrote that he thought that he was the subject of electronic monitoring. Sounding just a tad paranoid, Tice believes the DIA agent called NSA to ask them "to go after him" on their behalf." Shortly after sending this e-mail, an NSA security officer ordered him to report for an emergency psychological evaluation, his second in nine months.
He was determined to be unsuitable to perform his duties and was put on administrative leave. He was later assigned to unload furniture from trucks at an NSA warehouse and also served an eight-month tour of duty in the NSA motor pool during an evaluation period.
Tice accused NSA leadership of breaking the law, saying, "... certainly General Alexander and General Hayden and Bill Black knew that this was illegal," although he provides no documentation or evidence to support this contention.
He told Goodman that, "imagine if something -- if we were like, I don't know, taking Americans and assassinating them for suspicions of suspicions of terrorism, and then we just put some classification on it and said, Well, this is super top secret, so no one can say anything about that. Well, at what point do you draw the line and say enough is enough. We have to say something here."
Tice claims that he was being followed by the FBI and began a letter writing campaign to Congress claiming he and others in the intelligence community were being punished by having their security clearances lifted.
These publicly aired statements certainly indicate that Tice was not fit to be entrusted with the security of the United States and that he did have some paranoia issues.
Tice gives some further insight into his judgment by saying, " I saw our last president (Clinton) get impeached for what personally I thought should have been something between his wife and his family, and the big guy upstairs. Of course his take on this is incorrect since Clinton was impeached for perjury not his adulterous behavior.