I Was a Whistleblower. The Trump Whistleblower Is About to Go Through Hell.

Retribution, soul-searching, and years of inquiry followed me after I exposed wrongdoing in the intelligence community. Imagine what the person who exposed the president faces.

Dan Meyer

Published 10.01.19 4:43AM ET

After 17 years of aiding federal whistleblowers, I became one myself.

I made three national security disclosures regarding wrongdoing within the intelligence community program used recently by a whistleblower filing a complaint about President Donald Trump and Ukraine. I was in charge of the IC whistleblowing program now overseen by Inspector General Michael Atkinson and acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire. The program is supposed to forward the complaint to Congress and then protect the source. Instead, in 2017, I was sidelined and eventually fired.

I had revealed the suppression of the disclosure to Congress that July. The matter is still classified. My disclosures were about matters important, but still garden-variety Beltway corruption allegations—nothing like the Trump-Ukraine matter. So I was a whistleblower while serving as the DNI’s advocate for whistleblowing. Existential. The whistleblowing was about whistleblowing. What follows happened to me and there are lessons for the Ukraine whistleblower and the wider country.

American whistleblowing at its best is cold and transactional: you think the violation through, you record it without emotion, you convey it lawfully, and you run for cover. When you can’t get cover or your cover is blown, the lessons are hard. The first reality the Ukraine whistleblower needs to internalize is that the arc of events may go on for years now that the disclosure is on Capitol Hill. There is a danger that the event will distract him from his long-term personal and private plans. There will be pain in the indifference or perceived betrayal of peers. He will be confused as to why the law is so clear on paper, and so obscure in practice.

“My husband, family, friends and associates are now familiar with my whistleblowing; they don’t always, however, understand why whistleblowers cannot ignore the law and remain silent as others do.”

My first whistleblowing—regarding investigative misconduct relating to the explosion on board battleship Iowa in 1989—showed me the cycle every whistleblower goes through: endless second-guessing as to future of a career; staring at the ceiling all night wondering whether family, friends and future (and current) employers would understand why I followed the rules and disclosed; and brutal self-questioning as to why I knew I had to disclose wrongdoing as others felt they could go along with the wrongdoing and not disclose.

Whether you are religious or not, you should pray for this poor soul.

That same cycle reoccurred again with respect to my later disclosures regarding the Afghan National Hospital, the movie Zero Dark Thirty, and the three matters disclosed as an intelligence officer in 2017. Over time, I have developed practices to cope with the inevitable stressors. My husband, family, friends, and associates are now familiar with my whistleblowing; they don’t always, however, understand why whistleblowers cannot ignore the law and remain silent as others do.

Whistleblowing is not optional; it is required by all executive branch employees under Executive Order 12674, signed by President George Bush in 1989, and not revoked by Trump. That whistleblowing obligation is also imposed on those having suppressed the Ukraine disclosure, as well. They are now in violation of an executive order (and a law) and are obligated to report themselves to their security officers, just as if they had taken a puff on their old roommate’s doobie at a college reunion.

Shortly after I made the 2017 disclosures to the House and Senate intelligence committees, as well as other committees of jurisdiction, I was placed under security investigation. A month later I testified to Homeland Security IG investigators on behalf of a now-vindicated CIA whistleblower. Shortly after that testimony, I was referred for removal. In between, Senators Feinstein and Harris lit up the confirmation hearing of a CIA IG nominee with two CIA reprisal cases. Five months and four hearings later, I was terminated.

Once the balloon goes up, the whistleblower is uncomfortably reliant on others to “do the right thing.”

When I blew the whistle as a naval officer in 1990, I was pretty much on my own in trying to regain my direction. On the Afghan National Hospital, Zero Dark Thirty, and the most recent intelligence community disclosures, I had a network to support me. But each time you witness wrongdoing and decide to report it, the gnawing returns: Did I do this correctly? Will my circle of trust step in to help? Will others not in my circle now, see the merits of supporting me, and step forward? Will I just be a pawn in some federal or congressional game?

Atkinson could not investigate reprisal against me because he was inspector general at the time of my removal. He had a conflict of interest. But the Council of Inspectors General for Integrity and Efficiency could have organized an investigation. They still can. The DHS IG’s findings in the case of the CIA whistleblower now provide facts essential to my case, but several other associated investigations are still pending. My 2017 complaint remains uninvestigated.

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For me, this is not new: I have seen this in other whistleblowers’ experience because this is what I do professionally. For the average employee simply complying with the executive order to blow the whistle, the inability of the system to answer the question as to whether someone was hammered for blowing the whistle can be paralyzing.

I had—and still have—dedicated congressional and non-government organizations in my corner helping to find an investigating authority to review the alleged reprisal against me by former DNI Dan Coats and his senior leadership. But many of the civil servants, activists and congressional staff predicted to be at the forefront of that fight shrank from protecting whistleblowers when they considered the mortgages to be paid, the orthodontist and day school fees to be paid, and the general cost of doing business inside the Beltway.

“This is what executive branch officials fear, the law working as designed.”

After blowing the whistle in 1990 on the Iowa investigation, a fellow naval officer told me in a Newport, Rhode Island parking lot: “I was so proud of how you stood up for the sailors during the investigation; many of us wanted to, but we couldn’t, with kids and wives and all.” When supervisors and managers go after a whistleblower, they can hurt the family too—it is a powerful means of controlling the federal workforce.  

As events tumble forward, there will also be anonymized leaks from unnamed “intelligence community officials.” Some of these leaks will be unauthorized disclosures; some will be authorized comments to the press; some will be unacknowledged-but-expected comments to the press to ensure “plausible deniability” for the senior-most officials, to use a Watergate-era term. 

The biggest burden in the whistleblower protection arena right now lies on Atkinson and Chairman Adam Schiff of the House Intelligence Committee. When the reprising comes against the current whistleblower—and it will—will those oath-takers stand by that person? I did for the three whistleblowers in 2017 by informing the Senate and House intelligence committees, and other committees of jurisdiction, of the wrongdoing.

These moments in American public life gnaw on everyone; our reaction to the present crises tell us more about ourselves than they do about Trump. As I taught our intelligence officers and their enabling staff when I was charged with outreach to potential whistleblowers, are we true to the American values of transparency and candor? Indeed, are transparency and candor really American values?

For those now playing out their assigned roles, the task is enormous. Nothing begets more whistleblowing like, well, successful whistleblowing. This is what executive branch officials fear, the law working as designed. That is why so much effort goes into containing, rather than fostering, whistleblowing.

In my two decades of helping federal whistleblowers, I have never seen a professional and constitutional crisis of this magnitude. But now a whistleblower has effectively completed the task Special Counsel Robert Mueller failed to do: focus the public debate on the president. The American people now understand the question before the Republic, even if they have not provided the answer, yet.

Dan Meyer is managing partner of the Washington, D.C., office of Tully Rinckey PLLC. The views expressed are the author’s own and do not represent those of the U.S. Government or the firm.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/i-was-a-whistleblower-the-trump-whistleblower-is-about-to-go-through-hell

The Guardian - Back to home  

How vested interests tried to turn the world against climate science

For decades fossil fuel majors tried to fight the consensus – just as big tobacco once disputed that smoking kills

Environmental activists gather outside the American Petroleum Institute headquarters in Washington during global climate action week last month. Photograph: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images


Felicity Lawrence, David Pegg and Rob Evans


Thu 10 Oct 2019 11.00 EDT

After the memo was leaked to the New York Times, the industry said the plan was only a proposal and was never put into effect.

Climate campaigners such as Greenpeace say they believe a highly organised effort by the fossil fuel industry to question climate science, involving scientists and some thinktanks in receipt of fossil fuel industry funding, nevertheless succeeded in the following years in shifting public opinion away from urgent action.

In 2010 the American sociologists Riley Dunlap and Aaron McCright identified conservative thinktanks, along with US conservative politicians, media and fossil fuel corporations, as crucial components in a “denial machine” that emerged in the 1990s.

The activity of this machine would peak when the industry’s financial interests came under threat, most notably in the years after 2007 and the election of Barack Obama, who had pledged to regulate and cap emissions.

Half a century of dither and denial – a climate crisis timeline

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Robert Brulle, a professor of sociology and environmental science at Drexel University in Pennsylvania, published the first peer-reviewed study in 2013 of who was funding what he called the climate change counter-movement that delayed action on the crisis. He found that between 2003 and 2010 more than $500m had been donated by private conservative philanthropic foundations to organisations whose output included material disputing the consensus.

Thinktanks, trade associations and front groups were a key part of the effort, he concluded, with their major funders including foundations affiliated to the fossil fuel magnates the Koch brothers, ExxonMobil, and the ultra-conservative Scaife and Bradley foundations.

Brulle also found evidence of a trend to conceal the sources of funding once campaign groups such as the Union of Concerned Scientists, Greenpeace and the Climate Disinformation Database started tracking what they called dark money to climate denial from the mid-2000s.

In the second half of that decade, Koch, Scaife, Bradley and ExxonMobil foundation funding to organisations involved in propagating doubt declined while donations to the same organisations via two anonymised vehicles, the Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund, increased rapidly.

Among the thinktanks most identified with spreading doubt are the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Marshall Institute (which folded in 2015), the Cato Institute, the Heartland Institute, the Heritage Foundation and the campaign group Americans for Prosperity.

Elsewhere the Institute of Economic Affairs and the Global Warming Policy Foundation have been prominent publishers of material questioning the consensus on climate science in the UK. These organisations fiercely dispute that any of their work constitutes organised climate change denial.

Richmond v Chevron: the California city taking on its most powerful polluter

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Americans for Prosperity, which has received a very substantial part of its funding from the Kochs, helped make resistance to action on climate a feature of Tea Party rallies in the US.

The counter-movement against action wound up to fever pitch in 2009 when it looked as though Obama and the US would sign up to UN climate protocols after the Copenhagen summit due at the end of that year.

Before the summit, individual independent climate experts found themselves subject to devastating attacks. Scientists at the University of East Anglia’s prestigious Climate Research Unit had their emails hacked. The contents of the emails were circulated, with the information they contained having been extracted in a way that suggested the scientists had manipulated their data. A police investigation failed to establish who the hackers were.

The rightwing media labelled it “climategate” and several thinktanks promoted the story enthusiastically. Multiple inquiries would later exonerate the scientists but by then the damage was done; the public’s faith in climate science had been measurably dented.

Half a decade later some fossil fuel industry funding of climate contrarian science was exposed, when Greenpeace found out via freedom of information requests that a prominent academic at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Willie Soon, had attracted more than $1.2m in payments over 14 years from ExxonMobil, Southern Company, the API and a Koch foundation, to the centre for his work. Soon doubted the scientific consensus that emissions were the principal cause of global heating.

He is now an affiliate of the Heartland Institute. Soon strenuously denied that his industry funders had any influence over his conclusions and the Heartland Institute said he was not even aware of who some of the donors to the centre were, making a conflict of interest impossible.

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 US college students protest against the Kyoto treaty in support of George W Bush at a climate summit in Bonn in 2001. Photograph: Frank Augstein/AP

There has been a noticeable moderation of views from those previously involved in questioning the science of climate change. Several now acknowledge global heating is caused by human activity but have shifted focus to arguing that the market and technological innovation rather than government action or international treaties curbing emissions are the best ways to tackle it.

The director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s (CEI) Center for Energy and Environment, Myron Ebell, for example, told the Guardian: “CEI believes strongly that the policies being proposed by climate alarmists to deal with global warming pose much greater threats to human flourishing than do the effects of global warming. Abundant, affordable energy is a necessary condition of human wellbeing but the global energy-rationing policies being pursued, like those in the Paris climate treaty, threaten to consign billions of people around the world to energy poverty and perpetual economic stagnation.”

ExxonMobil, Chevron, Southern Company and the API all said they recognised the seriousness of the climate crisis and the need for business, governments and consumers to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The API said the industry as a whole had invested billions of dollars in zero- and low-carbon technologies. Chevron and Southern Company said they had ambitious targets to reduce their carbon footprints. ExxonMobil said its position on climate science in the past had been misrepresented, and that claims regarding what it knew and when had been debunked. None of the companies responded to questions on the communications plan and funding of organisations whose output included doubting the science.

The Koch, Scaife and Bradley Foundations Donors Trust, Donors Capital Fund and Americans for Prosperity did not respond to requests for comment.

The thinktanks said the criticisms levelled at them by climate activists and critics seriously mischaracterised their positions. They said the views they published were those of individual affiliates rather than institutional ones. They added that they respected their donors’ privacy but the source of their money did not influence their research or output, which was completely independent. The Heritage Foundation said allegations it had denied climate science were “seriously inaccurate”. It accepted “the climate is changing, the planet is warming and that humans are playing a role”. Instead it described itself as “sceptics of climate catastrophism and costly policies that will drive energy prices higher”.

The Cato Institute said it had never been in the business of “promoting climate science denial”; it did not dispute human activity’s impact on the climate, but believed it was minimal.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/10/vested-interests-public-against-climate-science-fossil-fuel-lobby

The Guardian - Back to home  


Wed 9 Oct 2019

The big polluters’ masterstroke was to blame the climate crisis on you and me

George Monbiot


Fossil fuel giants have known the harm they do for decades. But they created a system that absolves them of responsibility

L

et’s stop calling this the Sixth Great Extinction. Let’s start calling it what it is: the “first great extermination”. A recent essay by the environmental historian Justin McBrien argues that describing the current eradication of living systems (including human societies) as an extinction event makes this catastrophe sound like a passive accident.

While we are all participants in the first great extermination, our responsibility is not evenly shared. The impacts of most of the world’s people are minimal. Even middle-class people in the rich world, whose effects are significant, are guided by a system of thought and action that is shaped in large part by corporations.

 

We are guided by an ideology so familiar and pervasive that we do not even recognise it as an ideology. It is called consumerism

The Guardian’s polluters series reports that just 20 fossil fuel companies, some owned by states, some by shareholders, have produced 35% of the carbon dioxide and methane released by human activities since 1965.

  This was the year in which the president of the American Petroleum Institute told his members that the carbon dioxide they produced could cause “marked changes in climate” by the year 2000. They knew what they were doing.

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Even as their own scientists warned that the continued extraction of fossil fuels could cause “catastrophic” consequences, the oil companies pumped billions of dollars into thwarting government action. They funded thinktanks and paid retired scientists and fake grassroots organisations to pour doubt and scorn on climate science. They sponsored politicians, particularly in the US Congress, to block international attempts to curtail greenhouse gas emissions. They invested heavily in greenwashing their public image.

These efforts continue today, with advertisements by Shell and Exxon that create the misleading impression that they’re switching from fossil fuels to renewable energy. In reality, Shell’s annual report reveals that it invested $25bn in oil and gas last year. But it provides no figure for its much-trumpeted investments in low-carbon technologies. Nor was the company able to do so when I challenged it.

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 BP’s oil refinery complex in Grangemouth, central Scotland. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

A paper published in Nature shows that we have little chance of preventing more than 1.5C of global heating unless existing fossil fuel infrastructure is retired. Instead the industry intends to accelerate production, spending nearly $5tn in the next 10 years on developing new reserves. It is committed to ecocide.

But the biggest and most successful lie it tells is this: that the first great extermination is a matter of consumer choice. In response to the Guardian’s questions, some of the oil companies argued that they are not responsible for our decisions to use their products. But we are embedded in a system of their creation – a political, economic and physical infrastructure that creates an illusion of choice while, in reality, closing it down.

We are guided by an ideology so familiar and pervasive that we do not even recognise it as an ideology. It is called consumerism. It has been crafted with the help of skilful advertisers and marketers, by corporate celebrity culture, and by a media that casts us as the recipients of goods and services rather than the creators of political reality. It is locked in by transport, town planning and energy systems that make good choices all but impossible. It spreads like a stain through political systems, which have been systematically captured by lobbying and campaign finance, until political leaders cease to represent us, and work instead for the pollutocrats who fund them.

In such a system, individual choices are lost in the noise. Attempts to organise boycotts are notoriously difficult, and tend to work only when there is a narrow and immediate aim. The ideology of consumerism is highly effective at shifting blame: witness the current ranting in the billionaire press about the alleged hypocrisy of environmental activists. Everywhere I see rich westerners blaming planetary destruction on the birth rates of much poorer people, or on “the Chinese”. This individuation of responsibility, intrinsic to consumerism, blinds us to the real drivers of destruction.

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 A protester is detained during an Extinction Rebellion demonstration in Whitehall, London. Photograph: Henry Nicholls/Reuters

The power of consumerism is that it renders us powerless. It traps us within a narrow circle of decision-making, in which we mistake insignificant choices between different varieties of destruction for effective change. It is, we must admit, a brilliant con.

It’s the system we need to change, rather than the products of the system. It is as citizens that we must act, rather than as consumers. But how? Part of the answer is provided in a short book published by one of the founders of Extinction Rebellion, Roger Hallam, called Common Sense for the 21st Century. I don’t agree with everything it says, but the rigour and sweep of its analysis will, I think, ensure that it becomes a classic of political theory.

It begins with the premise that gradualist campaigns making small demands cannot prevent the gathering catastrophes of climate and ecological breakdown. Only mass political disruption, out of which can be built new and more responsive democratic structures, can deliver the necessary transformation.

Revealed: the 20 firms behind a third of all carbon emissions

 

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By studying successful mobilisations, such as the Children’s March in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963 (which played a critical role in ending racial segregation in the US), the Monday Demonstrations in Leipzig in 1989 (which snowballed until they helped bring down the East German regime), and the Jana Andolan movement in Nepal in 2006 (which brought down the absolute power of the monarchy and helped end the armed insurgency), Hallam has developed a formula for effective “dilemma actions”. A dilemma action is one that puts the authorities in an awkward position. Either the police allow civil disobedience to continue, thereby encouraging more people to join, or they attack the protesters, creating a powerful “symbolism of fearless sacrifice”, thereby encouraging more people to join. If you get it right, the authorities can’t win.

Among the crucial common elements, he found, are assembling thousands of people in the centre of the capital city, maintaining a strictly nonviolent discipline, focusing on the government and continuing for days or weeks at a time. Radical change, his research reveals, “is primarily a numbers game. Ten thousand people breaking the law has historically had more impact than small-scale, high-risk activism.” The key challenge is to organise actions that encourage as many people as possible to join. This means they should be openly planned, inclusive, entertaining, peaceful and actively respectful. You can join such an action today, convened by Extinction Rebellion in central London.

Hallam’s research suggests that this approach offers at least a possibility of breaking the infrastructure of lies the fossil fuel companies have created, and developing a politics matched to the scale of the challenges we face. It is difficult and uncertain of success. But, he points out, the chances that politics as usual will meet our massive predicament with effective action are zero. Mass dilemma actions could be our last, best chance of preventing the great extermination.

• George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/oct/09/polluters-climate-crisis-fossil-fuel