Posted on 09/16/2002 11:22:30 AM PDT by Stand Watch Listen
Celebrated FBI whistle-blower Coleen Rowley knows it was the fame which accompanied her national-security complaints about bureaucratic bumbling in the run-up to Sept. 11 — not the good will of FBI management — that kept her career alive. In the now-famous memo that blistered the FBI's hidebound senior management, Rowley took note of the "culture of fear" pervading the FBI, a climate that she said caused her many sleepless nights before she decided to act.
In an open letter to Congress she wrote earlier this month, Rowley admitted that prior to her own experience, "I did not fully appreciate the strong disincentives that sometimes keep government employees from exposing waste, fraud, abuse or other failures they witness on the job. Nor did I appreciate the strong incentives that do exist for agencies to avoid institutional embarrassment."
She continued: "Unfortunately, the cloak of secrecy, which is necessary for the effective operation of government agencies involved in national-security and criminal investigations, fosters an environment where the incentives to avoid embarrassment and the disincentives to step forward combine. When that happens, the public loses."
Rowley's earlier warnings helped lawmakers to take a more critical look at FBI practices and procedures. It only can be hoped that her letter to Congress sparks a similar review of the Bush administration's plans for the new Department of Homeland Security.
President George W. Bush personally has pledged that whistle-blower protections will be preserved for the new department's 170,000 employees, even as he insists that Congress give him the authority to waive the legal remedies available to whistle-blowers. Despite an overwhelming vote by the House Government Reform Committee in favor of adding whistle-blower protection, such protection effectively was stripped out of the final homeland-security bill approved last month by the full House on a partisan vote.
Despite the president's pledge, not one organization involved in the advocacy of whistle-blower protection has come forward to support the administration's position. Advocates point out that Bush's pledges come as bona fide national-security whistle-blowers — the type he pledges to protect in the new department — continue to face career-ending reprisals from senior federal management.
Take, for example, the case of Bogdan Dzakovic, a former CIA operative and, more recently, a member of the Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) elite antiterrorist "Red Team." When Dzakovic came forward last February to complain about massive security problems at the nation's airports, his disclosures made the nightly-news programs of all four TV networks as well as the front page of USA Today. Since then, however, all meaningful job duties have been taken from him. Dzakovic spends his days at the new Transportation Security Agency (TSA) "volunteering my time to assist other people with menial work, like punching holes in paper. I don't even know who my boss is — literally."
In Dzakovic's case, even celebrity status has not been sufficient to ward off on-the-job reprisal for whistle-blowing. Today there literally are dozens of national-security whistle-blowers — spanning the departments of Agriculture, Defense, Energy, State and Treasury — who find themselves in the same sinking boat despite the president's encouraging words.
If you have to choose between sinning against God and sinning against the bureaucracy, Adm. Hyman Rickover once famously noted, sin against God because at least He forgives.
Official security and law-enforcement breakdowns hidden under the mantle of excessive secrecy prevent oversight institutions such as Congress from doing its job effectively. When federal workers charged with protecting homeland security are muzzled to prevent them from bearing witness against wrongdoers, or from challenging supervisory incompetence or neglect, our security doubly is challenged from terrorists and from unbridled federal power.
Laws, not high-level good wishes, are the true protection of a democratic republic. As Rowley noted: "We need laws that strike a better balance, that are able to protect effective government operation without sacrificing accountability to the public. I was lucky enough to garner a good deal of support from my colleagues in the Minneapolis office [of the FBI] and members of Congress. But for every one like me, there are many more who do not benefit from the relative safety of public notoriety. They need credible, functioning rights and remedies to retain the freedom to warn."
Martin Edwin Andersen is a reporter for Insight and media director for the Government Accountability Project, a whistle-blower protection organization. In 2001 he won the U.S. Office of Special Counsel's prestigious "Public Servant Award" for disclosing massive security violations in Janet Reno's Justice Department.
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