Jailing whistleblowers

Jury: 6 months in prison for Navy lawyer - Yahoo! News (AP):

NORFOLK, Va. - A military jury recommended Friday that a Navy lawyer be discharged and imprisoned for six months for sending a human rights attorney the names of 550 Guantanamo Bay detainees.

Lt. Cmdr. Matthew Diaz was convicted Thursday of communicating secret information about Guantanamo Bay detainees that could be used to injure the United States and three other charges of leaking information to an unauthorized person....

After the first day of his trial Monday, Diaz had told The Dallas Morning News he felt sending the list — which was inside an unmarked Valentine's Day card — was the right decision because of how the detainees were being treated.

"My oath as a commissioned officer is to the Constitution of the United States," Diaz said. "I'm not a criminal."

In early 2005, as he was concluding a six-month tour of duty as a legal adviser at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Diaz sent an anonymous note to a New York civil liberties group containing the detainees' names.

The Center for Constitutional Rights earlier had won a
U.S. Supreme Court ruling that terrorism suspects had the right to challenge their detention. But the
Pentagon was refusing to identify the men, hampering the group's effort to represent them.

"I had observed the stonewalling, the obstacles we continued to place in the way of the attorneys," Diaz told the newspaper. "I knew my time was limited. ... I had to do something."

Steamrolling whistleblowers

McClatchy Washington Bureau | 05/18/2007 | Ruling throws cold water on environmental whistleblowers: By David Goldstein
McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON - The sentence was buried deep within a recent Labor Department ruling, but the message was clear:

Whistleblowers, beware.

More specifically: Whistleblowers relying on the protections against official retaliation contained in several major environmental laws, proceed with caution.

The sentence was in a footnote at the end of a ruling against a federal whistleblower. It said the Labor Department recognized only the protections written into the clean air and solid waste-disposal acts, not laws governing clean water, drinking water, toxic substances and hazardous waste.

'This is the latest attack in a systematic war to gut the environmental whistleblowers' statutes,' charged Tom Devine, the legal director of the Government Accountability Project, a nonprofit watchdog group. 'They are a lifeline so government workers can challenge illegality without engaging in professional suicide.'