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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