[Infowarrior] - Secrecy creep

[Richard Forno]

Tuesday, Aug 14, 2012 1:17 PM UTC
Secrecy creep

Executive branch agencies have learned well from the Obama administration's fixation on punishing whistleblowers

By Glenn Greenwald

That the Obama administration has waged an unprecedented war on whistleblowers is by now well-known and well-documented, as is its general fixation on not just maintaining but increasing even the most extreme and absurd levels of secrecy. Unsurprisingly, this ethos — that the real criminals are those who expose government wrongdoing, not those who engage in that wrongdoing — now pervades lower levels of the Executive Branch as  well.

Last night, McClatchy reported on a criminal investigation launched by the Inspector General (IG) of the National Reconnaissance Office, America’s secretive spy satellite agency, against the agency’s deputy director, Air Force Maj. Gen. Susan Mashiko. After Mashiko learned that four senior NRO officials whose identities she did not know reported to the IG “a series of allegations of malfeasant actions” by another NRO official relating to large contracts, Mashiko allegedly vowed: “I would like to find them and fire them.”

Moreover, after McClatchy published stories in June about the agency’s abusive and problematic use of polygraph tests to root out leakers, top agency officials made statements “taken as a threat that polygraphers who raise similar concerns about the agency’s practices — even to the inspector general — would be punished or criminally prosecuted as leakers.” As usual in today’s Washington, punishment is solely for those who expose high-level wrongdoing, and secrecy powers are primarily devoted to shielding the wrongdoers.

Today, Mother Jones‘ Kate Sheppard reports on a complaint alleging very similar behavior at the Department of Interior. In 2009, President Obama issued an executive order requiring the primacy of objective science over ideology in policy-making. It was not until 2011 that the Interior Department got around to complying by creating the position of Scientific Integrity Officer — “to ensure and maintain the integrity of scientific and scholarly activities used in Departmental decision making” — and it then hired for that position a hydrologist, Dr. Paul Houser, who was previously an associate professor in George Mason University’s Geography and Geoinformation Sciences Department.

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http://www.salon.com/2012/08/14/secrecy_creep/


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Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it.