Bob Parks posted an update on a leak investigation -
a team of FBI agents, armed with a classified search warrant, raided the suburban Washington home of a former Justice Department lawyer. The lawyer, Thomas M. Tamm, previously worked in Justice’s Office of Intelligence Policy and Review (OIPR)—the supersecret unit that oversees surveillance of terrorist and espionage targets. The agents seized Tamm’s desktop computer, two of his children’s laptops and a cache of personal files. Tamm and his lawyer, Paul Kemp, declined any comment. So did the FBI. But two legal sources who asked not to be identified talking about an ongoing case told NEWSWEEK the raid was related to a Justice criminal probe into who leaked details of the warrantless eavesdropping program to the news media.
Matt Diaz, who leaked information about Gitmo, later regretted it in spite of the light penalty he received.
“I could have gone to the chief of staff, I could have gone to the IG (inspector general),” or to his commanding officers in Guantanamo, Diaz said. “There were a lot of better ways to do this, and I didn’t take those better ways.”
He also criticized his decision to send the information to Olshansky anonymously, saying he mailed the information off in a goofy-looking Valentine “for selfish reasons.”
“I wasn’t really willing to put my neck on the line, to jeopardize my career,” he said. ” So I did it anonymously. I’m disgraced, I’m ashamed. I was an inspiration to my family. I let them down. I let the JAG Corps down. I let the Navy down.”
Exactly. There are other options for people who believe that there is a wrong that they need to right by releasing classified information. Air Marshal P. Jeffrey Black is a great example.
In August of 2004, and just two months after the events of Northwest Flight 327, I reluctantly chose to become a whistleblower. The dangerous agency internal policies I wished to expose were so egregious, which seriously jeopardized the health and safety of every air marshal, flight crew member, and passenger, that I chose to take my disclosures straight to Congress. I gave testimony to the Chief Counsel of Oversight and Investigations, and went on the record with the House Judiciary Committee, that I had personally experienced what I believed to be numerous probing incidents aboard domestic flights, and that I believed the Federal Air Marshal Service was not only hiding the details to these incidents from other federal law enforcement agencies, but that they were also keeping this vital information from their own flying air marshals. I also had reason to believe, from speaking to other air marshals across the country, that I was not the only air marshal experiencing these probing incidents aboard domestic flights.
Sometimes doing what you believe is right comes with a price tag. There’s no way to know at this point if Thomas Tamm is guilty, and I won’t speculate on the motives of the leaker at this point. But whoever did leak the information had other options available to them.
Recent Comments