“Torture is wrong.”
The Washington Post reported Friday that Christine Axsmith, a CIA contractor, was fired for posting in her blog, on a top secret clearance government intranet, that “torture is wrong.”
The day of the last post, Axsmith said, after reading a newspaper report that the CIA would join the rest of the U.S. government in according Geneva Conventions rights to prisoners, she posted her views on the subject.
It started, she said, something like this: “Waterboarding is Torture and Torture is Wrong.”
And it continued, she added, with something like this: “CC had the sad occasion to read interrogation transcripts in an assignment that should not be made public. And, let’s just say, European lives were not saved.” (That was a jab at Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s trip to Europe late last year when she defended U.S. policy on secret detentions and interrogations.)
One wonders when the government is going to fire half the authors at the War College, where opinions like this (some based on the authors’ experience with classified information) are far more outspoken.
Mind you, Axsmith posted to peers only, on a top-secret access intranet.
As ZDnet said,
Fired - and threatened with criminal prosecution - for opining that torture is wrong, at a time when that sentiment is official policy.
How’s that for a chilling effect?
When such speech in such a context draws such consequences, what hope is there for real whistleblowers, or people working on true governmental transparency?
