Is This TRUE? .........Whistleblowers Compare Reprisals from Bush, Obama
OR is Andre Kreig a RW NUT JOB?
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Whistleblowers Compare Reprisals from Bush, Obama
By Andrew Kreig
George W. BushWho has been worse for whistleblowers and the public, the Bush or Obama administration? I posed that question and received different answers Sept.18, the first of three days of meetings by watchdog groups in Washington, DC.
Obama hasBarack Obama been better than Bush "because of the quality of his appointments," responded Government Accountability Project (GAP) Legal Director Tom Devine, an eloquent advocate with three decades experience. Devine did not mention any names in his remarks to the International Whistleblowers Association. Mark Cohen, GAP's executive director until earlier this year, became deputy special counsel to Carolyn Lerner at the U.S. Office of Special Counsel. The agency's job is to protect federal whistleblowers and investigate disclosures.
However, OpEd News (OEN) Publisher Rob Kall, another speaker, has a different view. "Since Obama has taken office," Kall reported in RoughTime for Whistleblowers, "most whistleblowers say his administration and his DOJ treat whistleblowers worse than any previous president."
Kall quoted GAP Homeland Security and Human Rights Director Jesselyn Radack. a well-credential ethics advisor in 2001 at the Bush Department of Justice. It promptly ousted her from her job and tried to inflict harsh reprisals in her later career after she provided to superiors her opinion that FBI personnel committed an ethics violation in questioning American John Walker Lindh after he was caught with the Taliban in Afghanistan. "Obama," she told Kall, "has brought more prosecutions against whistleblowers under the Espionage Act than any previous president and all presidents combined."
Whatever the resolution of the "who's worse" debate, we in the public need to rally behind these courageous protesters against fraud, waste and civil rights violations. As part of that, we all need to demand from both Democrats and Republicans much more effective protections to replace the lip service they now provide. Kall, left,Rob Kall has many more insights from his coverage of the conference. It includes the dramatic story of James Murtaugh, MD, founder of the International Whistleblower Association. Murtaugh is a Georgia physician who believes he was poisoned with arsenic for reporting mammoth fraud at a Georgia hospital. Read more of Kall's column below, as well as excerpts from other recent news clips about injustices and misconduct by authorities in the United States and around the world.
OpEd NewsKall wrote:
I'm attending three days of whistleblower conferences and activities... I learned what it takes to become a whistleblower. You see something wrong, dishonest, corrupt, criminal, unjust. You go to your supervisor. He or she ignores you. Maybe one out of two or four would do that. After you are ignored you go back a second time. Maybe one out of five would do that. You're still ignored, or worse, are told to mind your own business, that you could lose your job.
Maybe one out of a hundred, by then, will go to a higher-level supervisor. The same process happens again -- ignored, rebuffed, threatened. Maybe one in a thousand, maybe 10,000, finally go all the way down the road of the whistleblower to blow the whistle to a level where waves are really made.
Becoming a whistleblower is often, perhaps usually, a life-devastating decision and experience. Once you take the big step, the powers that be align their forces against you. They try to ruin your life, threaten you and your family, do all they can to destroy you, your future ability to work, to hold a job, to have credit. I have heard accounts of this experience again and again from the whistleblowers I've met.
More at.....
http://www.google.com/search?q=Obama+has+highest+prosecutions+against+Whistleblowers+of+any+US+President&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US
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