A Rare Bit of Good News for Whistleblowers

The shameful DOJ case against Thomas Drake may have turned to dust.

The government’s espionage case against Thomas Drake, a former National Security Agency employee, appears to be crumbling, with prosecutors offering Drake a plea bargain involving vastly reduced charges.

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Sources close to the case, which I wrote about for The New Yorker, say that the government has been scrambling to find a way to avoid the trial now scheduled for next Monday in the federal court in Baltimore. [...] Drake is refusing, so far, to plead guilty to any wrongdoing, arguing that it is a lie, and he won’t compromise the truth.

  New Yorker

I hope he holds out.

The government’s willingness to bargain down the charges from ten felony counts to a single misdemeanor suggests that the case is teetering. The bargaining follows a series of setbacks for the government. The government had wanted to substitute summaries for some of its evidence, which it argued was too sensitive, from a national-security standpoint, to show. The judge, however, ruled that Drake had to be able to refer the jury to the specific details in order to fully defend himself. As Politico’s Josh Gerstein wrote on Monday, the lead federal prosecutor in the case, William Welch, then decided to withdraw all references to that classified material, undercutting his own case.

Easy for me to say, but I’d like to see Drake force this trial to continue.

And speaking of whistleblowers….here’s a leak that provides the crux of the reason the government needs to shut down Wikileaks:

Contractors for Fruit of the Loom, Hanes and Levi’s worked in close concert with the US Embassy when they aggressively moved to block a minimum wage increase for Haitian assembly zone workers, the lowest-paid in the hemisphere, according to secret State Department cables.

The factory owners told the Haitian Parliament that they were willing to give workers a 9-cents-per-hour pay increase to 31 cents per hour to make T-shirts, bras and underwear for US clothing giants like Dockers and Nautica.

But the factory owners refused to pay 62 cents per hour, or $5 per day, as a measure unanimously passed by the Haitian Parliament in June 2009 would have mandated. And they had the vigorous backing of the US Agency for International Development and the US Embassy when they took that stand.

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Haiti is the poorest country in the hemisphere and the World Food Program estimates that as many as 3.3 million people in Haiti, a third of the population, are food insecure. In April 2008 Haiti was rocked by the so-called Clorox food riots, named after hunger so painful that it felt like bleach in your stomach.

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According to a 2008 Worker Rights Consortium study, a family of one working member and two dependents needed at least 550 Haitian gourdes, or $12.50, per day to meet normal living expenses.

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[Haitian President René] Préval negotiated a deal with Parliament to create a two-tiered minimum wage increase—one for the textile industry at about $3 per day and one for all other industrial and commercial sectors at about $5 per day.

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A deputy chief of mission [from the US embassy], David E. Lindwall, said the $5 per day minimum “did not take economic reality into account” but was a populist measure aimed at appealing to “the unemployed and underpaid masses.”

  The Nation

Gasp!

“ADIH and USAID funded studies on the impact of near tripling of the minimum wage on the textile sector found that an HTG 200 Haitian gourde minimum wage would make the sector economically unviable and consequently force factories to shut down.”

That same old song heard everywhere: if we raise minimum wage, businesses will shut down because they can’t afford to pay. I would truly like to see a list of businesses that shut their doors after an imposition of a raise in minimum wage. But (corporate owned) politicians and government spokespersons never fail to plead the case.

The revelation of US support for low wages in Haiti’s assembly zones was in a trove of 1,918 cables made available to the Haitian weekly newspaper Haïti Liberté by the transparency group WikiLeaks.