Preview of Chapter 1

Chapter 1:  Shoot The Messenger

I am the Justice Department attorney who blew the whistle on government misconduct in the case of John Walker Lindh, the “American Taliban.”

You remember the famous December 2001 trophy photo of John Walker Lindh – one of the most prominent prisoners of the Afghan war – naked, blindfolded, tied up and bound to a board. That was our first glimpse of American-led torture and we didn’t even flinch. Lindh was found barely alive, shot in the leg, and suffering from dehydration, hypothermia and frostbite. Although Lindh was seriously wounded, starving, freezing, and exhausted, U.S. soldiers blindfolded and handcuffed him naked, scrawled “shithead” across the blindfold, duct-taped him to a stretcher for days in an unheated and unlit shipping container, threatened him with death, and posed with him for pictures. Parts of his ordeal were captured on videotape. Sound familiar?

The Lindh case foreshadowed what would occur on a much larger scale at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. Like an aggressive, contagious and deadly virus, this first outbreak of lawless behavior was spread by the CIA and Army intelligence teams to the entire archipelago of American-controlled detention centers throughout the world. The scandal is not, in President George W. Bush’s words, the "disgraceful conduct by a few American troops” at Abu Ghraib, or in Rumsfeld’s words, “grievous and brutal abuse and cruelty.” It’s that the

Bush Administration thought it could torture people and get away with it.

When I, a 30-year-old Justice Department lawyer and legal ethics advisor, recommended against interrogating “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh without his lawyer, and later blew the whistle when evidence of my advice was destroyed and withheld from the court, the Justice Department forced me out of my job, put me under criminal investigation, got me fired from my next job, reported me to the state bars in which I am licensed, and put me on the “no-fly” list.

I don’t wear the label “whistleblower” comfortably. Why should I get some special moniker for doing what I would have done anyway? The vast majority of civil servants labeled as “whistleblowers” never thought of themselves in that role. In their minds, they were simply doing their jobs. Increasingly, the line between simply doing what is right and being a whistleblower has become blurred, particularly as society changes its expectations about how government employees should serve the public.

Our nation’s top leaders pay lip service to the importance of whistleblowers, but the conscientious employee is not welcome in the Bush Administration. Few paths are more treacherous than the one that challenges abuse of power and tries to make a meaningful difference. The conscientious employees who take career risks to address problems are precisely the kind of people who best serve the public, but they are invariably the first casualties.

Our country has a love-hate relationship with whistleblowers. When one thinks of a “whistleblower,” images from movies like “The Insider” or “Erin Brockavich” spring to mind. Or more recently, Colleen Rowley of the FBI, Sherron Watkins of Enron, and Cynthia Cooper of Worldcom, TIME Magazine’s “Persons of the Year” in 2002. One has visions of determined individuals risking it all to make explosive disclosures before Congress or on “60 Minutes.” The media glorifies those who risk everything to expose corruption and illegal activity. And these lionized individuals deserve every ounce of praise they get. But their happy outcomes are not typical. For every success story, there are a hundred stories of professional martyrdom. Mine is one of them.

Whistleblowers often find that they have become the subject of the story. Any personal vulnerability or peccadillo they possess can, and will, be used against them. Through this contortion, the whistleblower’s charges become a subsidiary issue. The Bush Administration is expert at this subterfuge.

The conscientious employee is often portrayed as vengeful, unstable, or out for attention. I have not been completely immune from these accusations, but the terms that have been used by what the press cites as “anonymous Justice Department officials” to describe me are far more incendiary: “traitor,” “terrorist sympathizer,” “turncoat,” and “unpatriotic.” Never mind that in debate circles, the lowest form of argumentation is name-calling. For an Administration attempting to quell opposition through a campaign of secrecy and silence, neither the Bush White House nor the Ashcroft Justice Department were short of words.

One of this Administration’s favorite tactics is to paint any sort of dissent or criticism – whether it comes from whistleblowers, anti-war protesters, or advocates of the politically unpopular – as disloyal at best and unpatriotic at worst. With a Crusader’s fervor, Ashcroft warned in stark terms that critics who “scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve.” In a ham-handed way, he tried to portray the expression of civil liberties concerns as treasonous. Such ill-considered exhortations have a very real chilling effect on the exercise of basic freedom of speech.

Although my story is different in its details, it shares many of the same elements with the experiences of other whistleblowers: abuse of government power, lack of due process (or any process at all), secrecy and silence, political overkill, and base vengefulness. The Administration’s vindictive response to its critics goes beyond questioning their truthfulness, competence and motives: it seeks to destroy them.

In most cases of whistleblowing, the Executive Branch attacks the person rather than the substance of his or her complaint. It shoots the messenger rather than addressing the message. It silences the critic rather than answering the criticism. It engages in intimidation, character assassination and professional destruction of those who break the code of silence. And it will not let go. As Jerome Doolittle, novelist and former White House speechwriter, characterized the Justice Department’s venomous attacks on me: “There is something primordial about Team Bush’s reaction to dissent, something reptilian. They’re like the gila monster, its jaws holding their poisonous grip even after its head is severed.”

“You are either with us or against us” – Bush’s Procrustean mantra during his inexorable march to war in Iraq – applies with equal or greater force to those who cross him, and more broadly, to anyone he perceives as an “enemy.” Ashcroft shares Bush’s us-or-them mentality, and their categorical thinking is reflected in the increasingly deep division between “Red America” and “Blue America,” a synecdoche that pollsters and political consultants use as shorthand for the U.S. population that is Republican and Democratic, respectively. Bush and Ashcroft also share a limitless capacity to nurse incandescent grudges. Ashcroft has made clear that forgiveness, while perfectly appropriate in religion, has no place at the Justice Department (except at his morning prayer meetings, of course). “The law is not about forgiveness,” he said. “It is oftentimes about vengeance, oftentimes about revenge.”

One of the most disturbing things about my story is that it’s not an isolated incident. As bizarre, unbelievable and outrageous as it sounds, it is not uncommon. These vicissitudes have happened to everyone from military officers to Muslim guys playing paintball. It has even happened to other Justice Department attorneys.

I’ve decided to tell my story because I vowed that if I could ever speak safely again, I would not remain silent out of some sort of misplaced gratitude that I was no longer being threatened with termination, criminal prosecution, disbarment or ostracization.

My ordeal should have ended at many points along the trajectory. I was muzzled for over a year, so I have a lot of pent up things to say. Also, I feel a moral imperative to say them because if a person like me who enjoys relative privilege – being white, a U.S. citizen, educated, and comfortably middle-class – can so easily lose her freedom, then maybe people in this country can more easily understand the plight of those in post-9/11 America who are Arab or Muslim, who are immigrants, who are poor, or who don’t speak English.

A lot of commentators saw the John Walker Lindh case as an example of the government going after a minnow with a sledgehammer. The same thing can be said of my case writ small. This modus operandi has been dubbed “Ashcroft justice.” Attorney General Ashcroft did not get the verdict he wanted against Lindh, in some measure, because of my actions. As CBS commentator Andrew Cohen noted in writing about my role, “It was clear, although the government never explicitly conceded so, that prosecutors were open to a [plea bargain] deal with Lindh because of the brutal way in which he was treated by his military captors in Afghanistan and the spurious way in which federal law enforcement officials had observed Lindh's constitutional rights. It is no coincidence that the Lindh deal came about on the eve of a scheduled week-long [suppression] hearing that was going to bring into the open the specifics of how Lindh was treated and by whom.” In a classic case of “the lady doth protest to much,” top officials at Justice took time out of their busy schedules to call Cohen after his article ran to try to convince him that he was wrong; specifically, that I had not caused the Lindh case to tank. They minimized me and downplayed my role in Lindh’s surprise plea bargain.

If I really had nothing to do with the unraveling of the Lindh case (in the words of The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, “the prosecution collapsed”), then query why Ashcroft and his functionaries are wasting so much time, energy and taxpayer money getting back at me. If I were a crank making wild allegations about the Lindh case, I would be ignored. But when the Assistant Attorney General starts throwing his weight around to keep me quiet, you have to wonder what I know.

Whether I played a large role or none at all, the government severely damaged my reputation and my psyche. It’s hard to un-ring the bell. One person against an entire agency or government is a David versus Goliath struggle. In terms of raw power, the government holds all the cards. To sic the infinite resources of the American government on someone is more than a mismatched contest – it is tyranny. It is also a waste of, what we are reminded time and again are, precious and limited government resources.

It has been hard for me to write this memoir because I suffer from the cult of objectivity – the mistaken belief that impartiality will lend legitimacy to my story. But how can I be neutral when what I have experienced has been so personal and so driven by emotion, surmise, and partisan politics? I therefore confess up front that I have an axe to grind, and nearly $100,000 in legal bills to show for it.

I’m here to tell you that the emperor has no clothes, and that those who expose the nakedness of this Administration’s policies and practices should be applauded, not annihilated. Public service does not mean blind obedience to one’s supervisor or subservience to an agency agenda that subverts the law and the public interest. Deciding to blow the whistle can be the single most important decision an individual ever makes. It should not be a question of whether to blow the whistle, but of how loudly to blow it. And in doing so, public servants should not be forced to choose between their conscience and their career.

The past three years have been the most difficult of my life, but they have also been a cataclysmic growth period that has cemented my commitment to civil rights and liberties. I realize that there are many stories like mine, and that I am just a footnote in a seismic shift that is occurring in our country. But I promised myself that if I could ever speak freely again, then I would use my voice to try to prevent this sort of political revenge from happening to anyone else.

My saga began on September 11, 2001, as did the life-altering journeys of so many others.