Congressional Committee Hears from Whistle-blowers
By Adam Kredo
WASHINGTON, Feb. 14 – How would your boss react if you blew the whistle on fraud, abuse or waste within the workplace? Instead of celebration, what if your company retaliated with harassment and intimidation, forcing you to either step down from your position or retire?
For government employees working in national security agencies, this type of retaliation could be restricted under legislation Congress is considering.
“Whistle-blowers in critical national security positions are vulnerable to unique forms of retaliation,” Rep. Christopher Shays, R-4, said at a hearing Tuesday. “Those with whom we trust the nation’s secrets should not be second-class citizens when it comes to answering their rights to speak truth to power.”
Shays, vice chairman of the Government Reform Committee, chairs its National Security, Emerging Threats and International Relations Subcommittee, which heard from a number of witnesses Tuesday.
Army Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer said he was harassed and intimidated by his superiors for disclosures he made to the 9/11 Commission. Shaffer, who said he was deployed twice to Afghanistan to collect sensitive intelligence information about terrorists, said he revealed that more could have been done by the government “to maximize the intelligence and promise” of certain security programs. As a result, he said, he was threatened with rank demotion.
“I became a whistle-blower not out of choice, but out of necessity – necessity to tell the truth,” Shaffer said at the hearing.
The other witnesses on the panel recounted similar stories.
Russell Tice, a former intelligence officer for the National Security Agency, said he was subjected to an “emergency psychological evaluation” and was covertly followed by FBI agents after revealing to a Defense Intelligence Agency’s officer that he thought a co-worker was engaged in espionage.
“My Kafkaesque journey from that time on involved surveillance by the FBI,” Tice said. He said a National Security Agency security officer was sent to his home “to threaten me in person with dire consequences if I talked to the press.”
“I was not given substantive options for reporting the injustices that were inflicted upon me as a whistle-blower,” Tice said.
Each witness agreed that the current legislation protecting whistle-blowers – The Whistleblower Act of 1998 – is not sufficient.
The proposed House bill would clarify the scope of protected disclosures by a federal employee to include “any lawful disclosure an employee or applicant reasonably believes is credible evidence of waste, abuse or gross mismanagement,” according to the bill titled The Federal Employee Protection Disclosures Act.
Government employees “go to the media as a last resort,” Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said in a telephone interview Tuesday.
“There are not enough protections in place right now for whistleblowers to be protected going through the normal channels,” she said. The committee is a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing free legal assistance to journalists.
