Redacted Dept. of Defense document. Image: Wikimedia
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Image: Screenshot/Russia Today
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Unlike Snowden, each of the these whistleblowers did not set out with a clear premeditated plan to expose wrongdoing. Drake repeatedly attempted to appeal to legal channels and to Congress before internal pressures led him to the press. Radack's misfortune was following the law too closely, and threatening to derail a high profile investigation with her knowledge of illegal conduct. And judging the way the event is depicted in the film, Kiriakou never intended to blow the lid off any secret torture program—he simply described what was happening the best he could, because it had become so normalized within the CIA.Each can be said, in a way, to have stumbled into whistleblowing (with caveats in Drake's case), and that makes the situation all the more harrowing. What begins with honest, even routine complaints of government misconduct, ends up tearing their lives asunder. Kirakou did confirm the identity of a CIA operative to a member of the press, which he regrets doing now, and which is patently illegal. But it again raises the point that the way the government chooses to prosecute leaks is often arbitrary—those who leak classified information that embarrasses the government become targets, while those who utilize secrets to lionize it are patted on the back.There was plenty of classified information relayed to the makers of Zero Dark Thirty, Radack points out, but no one's in jail. Bob Woodward's books are full of classified sources, and Kiriakou points out that General David Petraeus gave classified information to his civilian mistress—but, seeing as how their leaks are harmonious with the power structure, there's no whisper of espionage there. Meanwhile, those who tell more humiliating truths are often dogged even when the charges are dropped. "I know we're being surveilled, so we use 'drug dealer' tactics," like using burner phones and encryption, Radack said in a Q+A following a screening of Silenced."You're not loyal. You're not a good American. You're a terrorist sympathizer."
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