Traitors or patriots?

Allison Stanger begins “Whistleblowers: Honesty in America from Washington to Trump” with a quotation from James Baldwin. “Not everything that is faced can be changed,” Baldwin wrote, “but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

In her informative, insightful and timely book, Ms. Stanger, a professor of international politics and economics at Middlebury College, omits accounts of corporate malfeasance to concentrate on attempts by whistleblowers throughout American history to inform the public about harmful, illegal, and unconstitutional behavior by government officials and agencies. The Cold War and 9/11, she points out, have exposed the underlying tensions between secrecy in the name of national security and the informed citizenry on which democracies depend. A thorn in the side of those in power, “legitimate” whistleblowers, Ms. Stanger maintains, “are the bellows that keep the fires of justice burning brightly.”

The federal government, Ms. Stanger reveals, presents daunting challenges to whistleblowers. Only a tiny fraction of their claims are deemed meritorious, and more than two-thirds experience negative consequences for speaking out, with as many as one in four losing their jobs. Although whistleblower protection statutes have been on the books since the American Revolution, enforcement has been lax.

The 1989 Whistleblower Protection Act, moreover, explicitly exempted national security

personnel. Despite Barack Obama’s promise of transparency and a presidential directive that provided limited protection for individuals releasing classified information and reporting waste, fraud and abuse, his administration pursued leakers relentlessly, , Ms. Stanger indicates. Edward Snowden was the seventh person charged by Mr. Obama’s Justice Department with violating the Espionage Act of 1917 (in contrast to a total nine people previously prosecuted under the act). John Kiriakou, the sixth, received a 30-month sentence for telling reporters about the CIA’s secret “enhanced interrogation” (waterboarding) program and revealing the name of an intelligence agent. As president, Ms. Stanger writes, Mr. Obama no doubt learned things about the dangerous world he had to navigate; “yet it is also true that the powerful will always err on the side of secrecy.”

Ms. Stanger also documents the challenges for would-be whistleblowers posed by the massive increase in services delegated by the federal government after 9/11 to private contractors. In 2000, for example, the Department of Defense outsourced $133.2 billion; in 2008, the number was $391.9 billion. NSA contracts to wage the war on terror tripled.

Twenty-seven of the 37 interrogators at Abu Ghraib were contract employees. While soldiers could be prosecuted for violating the Geneva Convention, Ms. Stanger notes that the conduct of non-government staff (and whistleblowers) is governed by company policy.

“Whistleblowers” also contains fascinating assessments of the actions of Chelsea (née Bradley) Manning and Edward Snowden. Ms. Manning, Ms. Stanger suggests, seemed to view any confidential communication as proof of wrongdoing. Despite Ms. Manning’s claims, Ms. Stanger opines that “when the damage is easy to identify but the crimes are not,” leaking does not constitute whistleblowing.

Ms. Stanger is far more sympathetic to Mr. Snowden. The decision of a federal judge, upheld by the Second Circuit of the Court of Appeals in 2015, that the NSA’s collection of millions of Americans’ phone records was an illegal misapplication of the U.S. Patriot Act, she argues, meant the government could no longer legitimately contest Mr. Snowden’s status as a whistleblower. It’s difficult to deny, Mr. Stanger adds, that Mr. Snowden’s release of classified information to journalists alerted Americans to sweeping changes in NSA practices (including gathering and retaining communications from Internet users, 90% of whom were not targeted foreigners), “a debate the country desperately needed to have.” Despite the breach of confidentiality and “the great damage his revelations may have caused,” she concludes, provocatively, that one day he “may be seen as America’s first traitor-patriot.”

Often but not always judicious, Ms. Stanger ends her book by blowing the whistle on the president. Writing before the release of the Mueller Report, which probably did not affect her assessment, she declares, “When Donald Trump celebrates his deep connection with a sworn enemy of the United States, he is involved in an unjust war otherwise known as treasonous activity.” When Trump is no longer president, she hopes Congress will end warrantless surveillance of U.S. citizens; Mr. Snowden will be pardoned; and whistleblower protection extended to national security agencies.

The risks, she insists, must be weighed “against the enormous damage to American democracy.” It’s a debate worth having.