The Ministry of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Truth
By Rita Cant, Attorney, ACLU at 11:16am
The frenzy over "Operation Fast and Furious" has been hard to avoid. It's been the subject of a massive DOJ report, Congressional hearings, contempt votes, subpoena fights in federal court, and relentless media scrutiny. But if there's one telling the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) would love to rectify, it's the "thoughtcrime" account of Agent John Dodson, one of the ATF insiders who helped bring the operation to public light.
The ACLU sent a letter today to the ATF, which has refused to allow Agent Dodson to publish a manuscript about Fast and Furious. Our letter explains why the denial violates his First Amendment rights, and undermines the importance that whistleblowers and public employee speech play in revealing wrongdoing and contributing to public debate.
Agent Dodson blew the whistle on the decision to "walk" the guns – alerting Congress after it appeared that two were used in a shootout that killed a U.S. border patrol agent. But when he recently asked to publish his own first-hand account of these events, ATF censorship was fast, and it was furious.
Foregoing redactions, they nixed his entire manuscript. Claiming a right to refuse publication requests "for any reason" (the ATF's emphasis), the ATF explained to Agent Dodson that his book would have "a negative impact on morale in the Phoenix [Field Division] and would have a detremental [sic] effect on our relationships with DEA and FBI." Agent Dodson doesn't deny that his book could add to the ATF scrutiny, or even its three-year streak of bad press as a result of the affair. But these reasons just don't cut it when it comes to a whistleblower's right to speak – and the public's right to hear what he has to say.
We decided to send the ATF a friendly reminder that we don't lose our rights to speak, write, and teach when we accept government employment. Forty-five years ago, the ACLU stood up for Marvin Pickering, a high school teacher whose name marks the first Supreme Court case recognizing public employees' speech rights. In 2009, we defended U.S. Air Force Col. Morris Davis, the former chief prosecutor for the Guantánamo military commissions, who was fired from his job at the Library of Congress's Congressional Research Service because of opinion pieces he wrote about the military commissions system. Just last year, we sent a letter to the State Department on behalf of Peter Van Buren, a State Department employee who is being punished for publicly criticizing the U.S. reconstruction effort in Iraq. And rest assured we will continue to remind government employers of those rights as the need arises.
https://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security-technology-and-liberty-free-speech/ministry-alcohol-tobacco-firearms-and
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