By Judith Gayle | Political Waves
As usual, I’m conflicted about what I’d like to spotlight this week, but I’ll start here and finish elsewhere: the Department of Justice is continuing to behave badly on all fronts, zealous in its prosecutions (as in the case of Aaron Swartz) and heavy-handed (as regards, for instance, Julian Assange.) Some of you may be familiar with the case of John Kiriakou, a former CIA agent who has been convicted of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act by outing an informant to a journalist. Kiriakou, an early critic of waterboarding, has just been sentenced to 30 months in prison (while Dick Cheney, who did similar, retired with a nice pension and someone else’s heart). Kiriakou plead that he was a whistleblower, but that defense was not accepted by the court, which will basically imprison this mild-mannered father of two young kids for treason.
The time-honored tactic of whistleblowing itself is under attack by a secret and often silent bureaucracy that ballooned after 9/11 into a shadow-government dedicated to keeping us “safe” even if that means tapping our phones and/or putting us all in jail. Growing like mushrooms under the Homeland Security umbrella, the number of institutions responsible for American ‘safety’ has burgeoned into a security-industrial complex too huge to wrap our imagination around. According to Rachel Maddow, it includes, but is not limited to, the National Counterterrorism Center, which oversees intelligence collected by 1,271 government agencies and 1,931 private companies under government contract, and growing daily.
If you watch and listen closely, you can connect public dots back to these shadows, but you must develop an ‘ear’ to hear about them, an ‘eye’ to see them. For instance, in his opening remarks after nomination for Secretary of State, John Kerry indicated that cyber-attack and security were the nation’s top priority. Obviously, a near-paperless society is vulnerable to the kind of hacking Iran is training itself to do (in its own defense). You might not be surprised to learn that the Department of Defense and DHS merged their interests over cyber-security way back when, and include a dizzying amount of federal and private sector players. Part of the problem with discovering all this information is how incestuous it has become.