Nuclear Weapons

“Traitor,” A Whistleblower’s Tale

04.16.12 | 3 min read | Text by Steven Aftergood

Jesselyn Radack’s memoir “Traitor: The Whistleblower and the American Taliban” presents the moving story of a young attorney’s unexpected encounter with official misconduct, and the excruciating ordeal that ensued when she decided to challenge it.

In 2001, Ms. Radack was a Justice Department attorney and specialist in legal ethics.  In response to an official inquiry, she advised that the newly captured John Walker Lindh, the so-called “American Taliban,” should not be interrogated without an attorney present — which he then was anyway.  When Department officials publicly denied having received any such legal advice, and even destroyed evidence to the contrary, she exposed the deception.

Ms. Radack was not looking for a fight, but only to do the right thing. For her trouble, she was forced out of her Justice Department position, put under criminal investigation, fired from her subsequent job, reported to the state bar, and put on the “no fly” list.

“Traitor” is the story of a young professional whose career is derailed because her ethical compass will not let her be silent in the face of offical dishonesty.  It is also the story of a political system that is seemingly incapable of tolerating honorable dissenting views within the government workforce.

While a handful of “whistleblowers” become figures of popular acclaim, or heroes of movies such as The Insider or Erin Brockovich, they are the exception rather the rule, Ms. Radack writes.

“The media glorifies those who risk everything to expose corruption and illegal activity and rightly so; these lionized individuals deserve every ounce of praise they receive.  But their happy outcomes are not typical– for every success story, there are a hundred stories of professional martyrdom.  Mine is one of them.”

Ms. Radack eventually found a measure of redemption as an attorney with the Government Accountability Project where she has turned her own experience to advantage in promoting whistleblower rights.  She was among the most stalwart and effective defenders of Thomas Drake, the former NSA official and whistleblower whose dubious prosecution under the Espionage Act ended with the dismissal of all felony charges against him.

The Bush administration (in which she worked) was hostile to whistleblowers, according to Ms. Radack, but the Obama administration is even worse.

“The Bush administration harassed whistleblowers unmercifully,” she writes.  “But it took the Obama administration to actually prosecute them.”

I don’t think it is true, however, that the prosecution of Thomas Drake “was a test case for the Justice Department to try a novel legal theory… that the Espionage Act could be used to prosecute leakers” (p. 159).

Far from being novel, the use of Espionage Act to prosecute unauthorized disclosures of classified information predates the Drake case by decades.  At least since the conviction of Samuel L. Morison in the 1980s for providing classified intelligence imagery to Jane’s Defence Weekly — and the Supreme Court’s refusal to review the case — this application of the Espionage Act has been seemingly well established.

And there is some ambiguity about who qualifies for the appellation “whistleblower.”  It is a loaded term both because it presumes the pure intention of the individual challenger, and because it takes for granted the corruption of his target.  These need to be demonstrated, not simply asserted.  It cannot be the case that a strong sense of personal conviction, untethered from legal or ethical constraints, is enough to entitle anyone to be called a whistleblower.  If that were so, then Jonathan Pollard and other disreputable figures could claim the title.

Ms. Radack states twice that the Obama Administration has prosecuted leakers “who more often than not were whistleblowers” (p. 69, 92).  This suggests that she thinks at least some of the six leak defendants to have been prosecuted by the Administration may not have been whistleblowers.  But if so, she does not specify which ones they were, or why she came to that conclusion.

I would say that “whistleblowers” are not a separate category of people in any essential sense.  Anyone can act with integrity under some circumstances.  The whistleblowers that we honor are people who act with integrity under extreme duress and sometimes at great cost.  Jesselyn Radack’s memoir is an eloquent account of one such case.

publications
See all publications
Nuclear Weapons
Report
Nuclear Notebook: Russian Nuclear Weapons, 2023

The FAS Nuclear Notebook is one of the most widely sourced reference materials worldwide for reliable information about the status of nuclear weapons, and has been published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists since 1987.. The Nuclear Notebook is researched and written by the staff of the Federation of American Scientists’ Nuclear Information Project: Director Hans […]

05.08.23 | 1 min read
read more
Nuclear Weapons
Blog
Video Indicates that Lida Air Base Might Get Russian “Nuclear Sharing” Mission in Belarus

On 14 April 2023, the Belarusian Ministry of Defence released a short video of a Su-25 pilot explaining his new role in delivering “special [nuclear] munitions” following his training in Russia. The features seen in the video, as well as several other open-source clues, suggest that Lida Air Base––located only 40 kilometers from the Lithuanian border and the […]

04.19.23 | 7 min read
read more
Nuclear Weapons
Blog
Was There a U.S. Nuclear Weapons Accident At a Dutch Air Base? [no, it was training, see update below]

A photo in a Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) student briefing from 2022 shows four people inspecting what appears to be a damaged B61 nuclear bomb.

04.03.23 | 7 min read
read more
Nuclear Weapons
Blog
STRATCOM Says China Has More ICBM Launchers Than The United States – We Have Questions

In early-February 2023, the Wall Street Journal reported that U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM) had informed Congress that China now has more launchers for Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) than the United States. The report is the latest in a serious of revelations over the past four years about China’s growing nuclear weapons arsenal and the deepening […]

02.10.23 | 6 min read
read more