Predisposed to be Polarized: Whistleblowers' Role in National Security

Whistleblowers: Honesty in America from Washington to Trump. Allison Stanger. New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2019.

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Grappling with these questions, Allison Stanger’s book Whistleblowers interrogates the role whistleblowers play in democratic governance, with particular relevance to U.S. national security. As whistleblowers play a vital role in addressing corruption, the book offers a timely analysis. The coronavirus pandemic has opened the floodgates of U.S. government spending, offering ripe conditions for corruption, under the leadership of an executive that routinely seeks to reduce the authority of federal inspectors general tasked with oversight.

General studies, including Marcia P. Miceli and Janet P. Near’s seminal Blowing the Whistle, highlight how whistleblowing helps corporate and public organizations comply with the law. National security whistleblowing also appeals to the law for justice, but it is simultaneously illegal in nature. The Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning leaks sparked renewed attention to this paradox.

While much has been made in the media about Snowden’s motivations, scholars who have addressed the subject, including Stanger, take a more balanced approach centering on the outcomes of the leaks. What makes Stanger’s book unique is that it places a richly researched narrative of the contemporary debate in a historical context, demonstrating that whistleblowing has long played an important, yet understudied function in U.S. national security.

The term whistleblower is relatively new to the American lexicon, appearing first in the 1970s, but Stanger argues that the tradition dates back to the American Revolution. When the Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Navy during the Revolution, Esek Hopkins, filed libel charges against officers who reported his torture of prisoners, Congress paid the officers’ legal fees and proclaimed the importance of whistleblowing with the resolution that:

In a brief review of subsequent American history, Stanger argues whistleblowing continues to periodically serve national interests when the rapacity of self-interested elites erodes the function of public services. Stanger’s examples show that when government entities are corrupt, concerned public servants have little to no internal recourse to challenge waste, fraud and abuse. The processes that lead individuals to alert the public by blowing the whistle on corruption vary, but most whistleblowers do so because they believe there is no mechanism within government to address their concerns.

Often the primary motivator behind whistleblowing in any organization, corruption receives diligent attention in Whistleblowers. Stanger argues,“Self-interested behavior in contemporary America has assumed new forms, but public awareness of the importance of whistleblowing has lagged behind...corruption [today] is not of the quid pro quo variety. It has instead become institutionalized as part of the game itself.”[2]

Democratic governance relies heavily on transparency and oversight, but the defense of the polity from foreign assault and subversion requires the intelligence community to implement strict secrecy. In overly simplistic terms, this is why intelligence community officials are denied the whistleblower protection provided for individuals flagging abuse in other appendages of the U.S. government.

Stanger acknowledges the need for secrecy, but also addresses the inherent paradox that “Excessive secrecy can enable cynical elite manipulation of the American public square through the strategic deployment of information.”[3]

Foundational to the stability and prosperity of the United States, national security, on its face, is the supreme interest of all American entities, however Whistleblowers highlights the many times in American history when national security and corporate prosperity were not self-reinforcing.

Building off her earlier work, One Nation Under Contract, Stanger is concerned that the privatization of government functions presents serious challenges for principled self-government. With the now routine and accepted revolving door between government and lobbies and contractors, it is fair to ask who is overseeing and serving whom?

Whistleblowing can only contribute to the eradication of corruption in the national security community if there is effective oversight of the executive branch by Congress. Worryingly, Stanger writes that technological developments have increased the government’s surveillance and war-making capabilities during an era when the American executive has gained far greater freedom from the check of Congress to employ force than ever before.

In his masterful critique of the myths surrounding the American government, A Necessary Evil, Gary Wills reminds us that James Madison wrote in an explanation of the Constitution’s system of checks and balances that “In republican government, the legislative authority necessarily predominates.”[4] In A Necessary Evil, Wills writes:

“Congress always gets the last say (if it wants). It may not want to exercise that right, for any of a number of reasons – ignorance, indifference, division in its members, the unpopularity of the move. But that does not deprive it of the right, or deposit it elsewhere, in the order of law.”[5]

For all of the reasons Wills cites, Congress as a whole has indeed abdicated its responsibility to exercise that right in recent times.

Because opacity is an immutable feature of the intelligence community protecting national security, civil and military elites ask citizens to implicitly trust that they act in the public interest, but Stanger argues there are few mechanisms to ensure elites are worthy of that trust.

While the impeachment of President Donald J. Trump may seem to suggest that whistleblower complaints submitted through formal channels can reach the public, the case conversely demonstrates the fragility of existing mechanisms. The relevant whistleblower complaint only reached Congress after the intelligence community’s Inspector General Michael Atkinson informed the House Intelligence Committee that the Acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire was blocking the lawful delivery of the complaint to the Committee.

Michael Atkinson, former Inspector General of the U.S. Intelligence Community (Reuters)

In this case, Atkinson served as an effective watchdog, but Stanger notes that because “statutes explicitly exclude [national security] agencies from whistleblower protection, [national security inspectors general] cannot always function with the independence that a genuine watchdog organization requires.”[6] Indeed, most whistleblowers in American history have not enjoyed similar protection and mechanisms to handle explosive security-sensitive information with equal care.

The fact that Atkinson took considerable professional risk by carrying out his duty to notify Congress—he was later fired by the president—highlights the difficulty with which current mechanisms handle the paradoxes of national security whistleblowing. Stanger states, “Our current regime provides an illusion of oversight, but reality is another matter.”[7] Left with little institutional support as they decide how to handle information regarding government abuses, how then should whistleblowers’ actions be judged?

All whistleblowers are leakers, Stanger explains, but not all leakers are whistleblowers. She argues that the personal motivations of a leaker do not determine whether an individual is a legitimate whistleblower or not. Rather the public value of the content they leak should. It does not matter, she says, that Mark Felt hoped to become FBI Director—hopes that went unfulfilled—when he leaked the details leading to the Watergate scandal; his actions as Deep Throat provided a service to the country by revealing abhorrent corruption in the executive, making him an indispensable whistleblower.

More recent, and infamous, whistleblowers Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden have drawn far greater government retribution and corresponding public condemnation. Their motivations set aside, it has been argued that despite exposing government impropriety, the information they leaked also damaged national security interests and put Americans in harm’s way in the process.

Stanger provides comprehensive, balanced case studies of both leaks, derived from rare interviews with the sources of the leaks and National Security Agency leadership itself. So unbiased are these chapters that it later comes as some surprise when Stanger definitively makes perhaps her most controversial argument in the book on the penultimate page:

Edward Snowden in a zcreenshot of the film Prism (Wikimedia)

“Trump’s successor should pardon Edward Snowden, who broke the law to force Americans to ask important questions. If President Ronald Regan could pardon Mark Felt for violating FBI procedures to bring down Richard Nixon, then a Republican or Democratic president can pardon Snowden. Nothing would more starkly highlight the differences between the defenders of democracy and those who worship at the altar of dictatorship.”[8]

Whistleblowers alone cannot resolve the Snowden debate, but its detailed recounting of his conduct is a resource for further discussion on the impact of his actions that goes beyond the public narrative focusing almost exclusively on reasonable but distracting questions surrounding Snowden’s allegiances.

Where other commentators tend to equivocate, Stanger helps move the debate on whistleblowing forward by taking firm positions on key points of contention like Snowden. Whistleblowers’ greatest strength is, however, that Stanger saves those positions for the conclusion. This leaves the reader relatively free to digest the book’s balanced case studies from their own perspective before being introduced to Stanger’s more contentious opinions.

In the present moment, Whistleblowers can help inform objective analysis of the Trump administration’s actions, including its retaliations against government officials that testified in the impeachment inquiry.

Faced with the extraordinary circumstances of an executive that systematically attacks the rule of law, high-ranking national security officials like retired Admiral William McCraven have argued President Trump poses a threat to the nation. This is not whistleblowing per se—McCraven has revealed no classified secrets—but it does arguably violate parallel norms prohibiting national security leaders from publicly weighing in on political matters.

The moment appears to simultaneously require individuals willing to radically depart from norms to counteract existential threats posed by corrupt authority, individuals to defend those departures as acceptable, and individuals to equally express deep anxiety about those very same well-intentioned norm violations.

Once President Trump leaves office, Stanger says, “both his trespasses and the unusual behavior of the [intelligence community] must be condemned to reaffirm those values that Trump sought to overthrow. In a state of emergency, a whistleblowing [intelligence community] is a necessary evil, but it is not one Americans would be wise to tolerate for any extended period of time.”[9]

During the Revolution, Thomas Jefferson rigidly adhered to the rule of law as governor of Virginia to the catastrophic detriment of effective governance in wartime. In A Necessary Evil, Gary Wills directs us to observe that after later serving two terms as president, Jefferson had reversed his uncompromising opinion of the law in practice, writing in 1810:

“A strict observance of the written laws is one of the high duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation. To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to written law, would be to lose the law itself, with life, liberty, property and all those who are enjoying them with us; thus absurdly sacrificing the end to the means.”[10]

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Embracing Jefferson’s sentiment, the United States should, as Stanger suggests, extend whistleblower protection “in a security-sensitive manner to cover the national security agencies.”[11] Not doing so reduces the likelihood that future principled officials will observe the laws of necessity when the United States’ interests are in peril by exposing intolerable corruption, enabling the possibility of institutional authoritarian drift.

Beyond the current moment, Stanger’s exposition in Whistleblowers will remain relevant as we continue to debate the perpetual incongruence between the competing requirements of secrecy and transparency ingrained in American national security since the founding of the Republic. The book’s accessible narrative makes it an excellent and informative read for any citizen. At the same time, the convincing argument Stanger makes for more protection of national security whistleblowing—based on her framework for objectively judging whistleblowers—will be of interest to the national security practitioners, policymakers, and scholars who must contend professionally with the high-stakes paradox at the heart of matter.

Ian J. Lynch holds a Masters in Middle East, Caucasus, and Central Asian Security Studies from the University of St Andrews in Scotland. He previously led the development of girls’ education programs in Afghanistan.

This article appeared originally at Strategy Bridge.

[1] Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774-1789, ed. Worthington C. Ford et al. (Washington, D.C. 1904-37), 11:732. (View page cited).

[2] Allison Stanger, Whistleblowers: Honesty in American from Washington to Trump (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2019), 190.

[3] Stanger, Whistleblowers, 204.

[4] James Madison, Federalist No. 51, in The Federalist Papers. (View article cited).

[5] Gary Wills, A Necessary Evil: A History of American Distrust of Government (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999), 86.

[6] Stanger, Whistleblowers, 196.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid, 208.

[9] Ibid, 207.

[10] Wills, A Necessary Evil, 53.

[11] Stanger, Whistleblowers, 208.