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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings & Torture |
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August 4th,
2009 - CIA Whistleblower Complaint Declassified |
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CIA
Whistleblower Complaint Declassified By Steven Aftergood Secrecy News August 4, 2009 In May 2001, CIA officer
Franz Boening submitted a memorandum to the Agency Inspector General alleging
that the CIA’s relationship with disgraced Peruvian intelligence official Vladimiro
Lenin Montesinos may have involved violations of U.S. law. There is no evidence that
the CIA Inspector General ever took any action in response to Mr. Boening’s
memorandum, which was presented as a whistleblower complaint. CIA
classification officials, however, responded quickly and energetically - to
silence him. Information contained in
the Boening whistleblower complaint is classified, declared CIA information
review officer Ralph S. DiMaio, and its disclosure “reasonably could be expected
to cause damage to national security.” Pursuant to the
non-disclosure agreement that Mr. Boening had signed upon employment at CIA,
Agency officials forbade him from publicly revealing his allegations, though
he said they were based on published news reports and other open
sources. And CIA classified most of
the substance of his 2001 complaint, including even (or especially) the name
of Montesinos. With the assistance of
attorney Mark S. Zaid, Mr. Boening went to court to challenge the Agency’s
censorship of his allegations as an unlawful act of prior restraint. Eight years after submitting the document,
he emerged more or less victorious, as the CIA withdrew most of its
objections, and permitted publication of the 2001 whistleblower complaint
regarding Montesinos with only a few remaining redactions. Mr. Boening is still obliged
to comply with his Agency nondisclosure obligations, advised R. Puhl, the
chairman of the CIA Publications Review Board, and he must seek a new Agency
review if he wishes to make any changes at all to the newly authorized text,
including any deletions of material. “If you add or delete
material to or otherwise change the text the Board has approved for
publication, you must submit these additions, deletions, or changes to us
before giving them to your publisher or anyone else,” Mr. Puhl wrote in a
February 13, 2009 letter. External link: http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/2009/08/boening_memo.html |