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 official dishonesty. It is also the story of a political system that is seemingly incapable of tolerating honorable dissenting views within the government workforce.
UPDATE 3: Brother Duff's provocative speculation aside, this looks more and more like a four-way goat-fest. 1) Idiot prostitute tried for $800 instead of the customary $60-80. 2) Secret Service cherub lost it. 3) Colombian police were not at all cool. 4) CIA fixer was asleep. Journalists are after the Secret Service “racist bitch” that may have made all of this much much worse, her identity should be public knowledge by the week-end.
UPDATE 2: Party line is that this was a wicked party that violated no local laws but was a breach of expected professional as well as personal ethics, with 20-21 women being involved (at the Colombian rate for gringos, $60 each). It defies belief that one of the US personnel would be dumb enough to stiff the Colombia prostitute (pun intended) and allow the situation to get to the point that the police were called. There is more to this story not yet in the public domain. Congress is raising legitimate questions about counter-intelligence vulnerabilities, but since Congressional delegations are notorious for precisely the same sort of behavior, one has to wonder where this will end up. We do have to wonder at just how stupid a Secret Service person has to be to register a hooker for the night and then not pay her. Had they been nurse-maided by CIA, there would have been no records, no price disagreements, and no blowback. Meanwhile, GSA is taking a hit for $830,000 in fiesta expenses. ” It's the culture, stupid.”
UPDATE 1: From inside the Secret Service, a lot of attention being cast on a female member of the presidential detail who is a “rascist bitch” and has been looking for a way to lash out at Obama…..along with serious concerns that there really is a plot that their and US counterintelligence missed. (US CI is practically non-existent–NSA does NOT “really” change its priorities for a Presidential visit prior to or during; nor are threats against the President a national intelligence collection priority). So this makes three scenarios: real plot missed by US CI and discovered by Colombian CI, not US CI; political theater with the detail being unwitting dupes; and internal break-down of both screening and discipline. We wait with bated breath–meanwhile, White House continues to cover up US unemployment and job losses; morally and intellectually challenged Secretary of the Treasury; the Japanese melt-down (pun intended); and other failures.
Was Presidential Detail Penetrated by an Assassin?
by Gordon Duff, Senior Editor
Cartagena, Colombia (VT) The story, one a child wouldn’t believe, is that our Secret Service and Army advance teams, those that arrange for presidential security, were arrested for failing to pay one or more whores for “services rendered.”
The real deal is very probably this:
At least one of the members of the presidential detail is suspected of working with foreign nationals to arrange the assassination of President Obama.
A certain nation comes to mind, one very close to former Governor Romney, the GOP candidate hopelessly behind in the polls, a candidate belonging to a religion seen as a dangerous sect, a candidate hated by most American women and women vote.
How much information will it take for someone to finally wake up? Or is it really being used to open another cash cow, to rob the public, or to exert additional control over the population??????
The vulnerability of the energy industry's new wireless smart grid will inevitably lead to lights out for everyone, according to leading cyber expert David Chalk. In an online interview for an upcoming documentary film entitled ‘Take Back Your Power', Chalk says the entire power grid will be at risk to being taken down by cyber attack, and if installations continue it's only a matter of time.
“We're in a state of crisis,” said Chalk. “The front door is open and there is no lock to be had. There is not a power meter or device on the grid that is protected from hacking – if not already infected – with some sort of trojan horse that can cause the grid to be shut down or completely annihilated.”
Phi Beta Iota: External attack is the least of our worries. The absence of intelligence with integrity at the top of all of the major institutions–academia, civil society, commerce, government, law enforcement, media, military, and non-governmental/non-profit–means that we continue to do things that are unaffordable, unsustainable, and very often total betrayals of the public trust.
I bought this back in December 2011 when I was scrounging around for books on panarchy (see for instance, Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems. It stayed in my pile as other books moved because my first impression was that it was more complicated than I cared to deal with and might – shudder — even include mathematical formulas. I was wrong.
This is a very straight forward book that I recommend as a read-ahead or work book for any group seeking to radically evolve their internal decision making processes away from the current standard of “I talk, you listen; I decide, you obey.” It has clear charts, the right amount of white space, and I put it down thinking very well of the book.
Panarchy is an evolution of the whole systems approach to anything, with the clarity and integrity of FEEDBACK LOOPS among the elements being the core of any successful system. If everyone does not talk; if everyone does not listen; if everyone does not decide; if everyone does not act in harmonization with all others, system failure is inevitable.
MDMA (known on the street as ecstasy) is showing promise as a psychotherapeutic tool for helping people with post traumatic stress disorder. Here's some info from Vanderbilt University:
Of course, conservatives tend to resist this kind of psychotherapy, even if it has shown promise, because they had a hard time getting beyond the fact that the drug produces euphoria. But one psychotherapist got special permission from the U.S. government to do a study using MDMA to treat PTSD. I think it's past time they expanded the program to try to start helping soldiers NOW. Before MDMA was made illegal, it was being commonly used as a tool of psychotherapy. So there's plenty of collected information on the subject, going all the way back to the eighties.
Phi Beta Iota: 18 US veterans a DAY succeed in killing themselves. A 1000 a month attempt to do so. This is a problem that in a properly managed government would lead to the firing of everyone from the Secretary of Defense down through the Army Chief of Staff to the head of Army personnel. Post-traumatic stress syndrome is a factor, but cognitive dissonance is a greater factor. We also need to remember depleted uranium and bio-chemical left-overs. These people cannot live with what they have done in our name and they live with the toxic environments we fund for them. Because military flag officers have lacked the integrity to dispute illegal unconstitutional orders to wage war on the world, they have put their troops into situations that did not warrant the insertion of our military, and that drawn out over time have destroyed our military and our veterans and therefore our society.
Sergey Brin says he and Google co-founder Larry Page would not have been able to create their search giant if the internet was dominated by Facebook. Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
The principles of openness and universal access that underpinned the creation of the internet three decades ago are under greater threat than ever, according to Google co-founder Sergey Brin.
In an interview with the Guardian, Brin warned there were “very powerful forces that have lined up against the open internet on all sides and around the world”. “I am more worried than I have been in the past,” he said. “It's scary.”
The threat to the freedom of the internet comes, he claims, from a combination of governments increasingly trying to control access and communication by their citizens, the entertainment industry's attempts to crack down on piracy, and the rise of “restrictive” walled gardens such as Facebook and Apple, which tightly control what software can be released on their platforms.
