A couple of plugs here for bloggers and newspapers. I just found the ADN story on the web that Chad Joy has been identified as the FBI agent who wrote the so-called whistleblower document. I know that the ADN was 95% sure as was I, that the author was Chad Joy, but we both withheld naming him in the articles/posts we did on the topic. Not everyone posts things they know, let alone wild rumors.
I don't blow my own horn here too often. It isn't seemly. But when I wrote the article on the FBI Complainant Document, I realized that few readers if any would read the whole thing. It was way too long. But I think it is one of the better posts I've written. People who did read it carefully would have known the author of that document was probably Chad Joy. I didn't make that claim. The information was buried deep in the post. But I followed the line of reasoning of the author of the document. He wrote that he'd been mentioned frequently in an FBI source's book about the Alaska political corruption investigation. I pointed out there was only one book published so far, and in that book, Chad Joy and Mary Beth Kepner were the two FBI agents mentioned in the list of characters.
But I also argued that I thought the term whistleblower didn't fit. Whistleblowers are people who warn the public about some impending danger, and in this document, nothing like that was ever mentioned, the complaints were basically about rules being broken and the author also complained that he was made uncomfortable and no one was listening to him. If there was a complaint at all, it should have been a grievance.
In the ADN post today, it turns out that Chad Joy was NOT granted whistleblower protection. I want to thank my UCLA 17th Century English Literature Prof, Dr. Clayton, for teaching me how to read between the lines, basically how to think. I did a post on how that happened a while ago, reading between the lines.
Posted 8:49am, Jan. 15 Thailand Time
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
2 comments:
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You don't think it is a public danger to have the FBI engaging in the same type of corrupt activities that they are accusing their targets of? I find it downright chilling! I agree that public officials should be held to a higher standard than us "regular folks" but I think that those who enforce that should be held to an even higher standard yet. Also, if the agent in charge of this whole investigation has been lying and breaking rules and/or laws, how do we know that the guys wasting time in prison are not actually innocent of her accusations?
ReplyDeleteTuesday, Jan 20 10:21am Thai time
ReplyDeleteSorry this took so long, I'm just back from five days in an internet free zone.
I think there are serious ethical issues about how the FBI do undercover work, how they deal with confidential sources, the slippery slope into entrapment, and the enormous power that the FBI have compared to regular folk, including the Alaska state politicians whose legal power was overwhelmed by the Prosecution's. Law enforcement has to be held to a higher standard because the law itself is at stake if they do not follow it. And I've done at least one if not more posts on these problems.
But, if you read the complaint carefully and my analysis of it, you'll see that in the complaint itself, Chad Joy never identifies any danger to anyone, except some minor inconvenience/discomfort to himself. Most of the stuff he objects to are rule violations, with no mention of harmful consequences. For the most part, the rules he says were violated were rules that, at best, are unclear (discretionary issues like "more than necessary") and don't threaten people. Basically, his concerns are that the FBI needs weren't protected enough, they weren't concerns that the FBI was abusing people. The exceptions are the issues he raises about the Stevens trial, but those are all issues that were already public.
And these are his allegations of how things went with no proof other than his say-so. Having done grievance work in the past, I know that people often present stuff out of context, and leave out significant details, because that is their view of how things happened.