TRAITOR: The Whistleblower and the "American Taliban" (Foreword by Glenn Greenwald) [Paperback]

Jesselyn A. Radack (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 30, 2012

This is the the memoir of the Justice Department legal ethics advisor, Jesselyn Radack, who blew the whistle on government misconduct in the case of the so-called "American Taliban," John Walker Lindh--America's first terrorism prosecution after 9/11.

Editorial Reviews

Review

There's simply no better first-person book about whistleblowing.  It illustrates dramatically both the risks of conscientious truth-telling--fully experienced by Jesselyn, a horror story greatly to the discredit of the government--and the compelling need for indomitable whistleblowers like her.

DANIEL ELLSBERG
Pentagon Papers Whistleblower

This is a riveting--and chilling--account of how far the Bush Administration's Justice Department went to destroy a critic.

ANTHONY LEWIS
New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist (retired)

This book offers a poignant illustration of the erosion of civil rights and liberties in the "war on terrorism. It questions whether we can respond effectively to the threat of terrorism without jeopardizing the very freedoms that characterize a democratic society.

NADINE STROSSEN
Former President, American Civil Liberties Union

From the Back Cover

I will mention one truth teller and not many people know about her . . . Jesselyn Radack.  Jesselyn was the person on duty when John Walker Lindh was taken in.  With all this talk about torture you should know that the first person tortured was an American citizen and he was tortured mercilessly for the first few days of his internment and denied medical care.  She raised holy Hell.  She was tossed out of the justice Department and blacklisted.  That's the kind of guts Jesselyn had.  Jesselyn had tremendous guts and now she's written a really terrific book.

RAY McGOVERN
CIA Analyst (retired)

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 180 pages
• Publisher: Whistleblower Press (January 30, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0983992800
• ISBN-13: 978-0983992806
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #110,035 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #6 in Books > Law > Constitutional Law > Human Rights

More About the Author

Jesselyn Radack is currently the director of National Security & Human Rights at the Government Accountability Project, the nation's leading whistleblower organization. Her writing has appeared in the L.A. Times, Washington Post, Salon, Legal Times, National Law Journal, and The Nation. A graduate of Brown University and Yale Law School, she lives in Washington, D.C. with her husband and three children.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 22 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Glenn Greenwald: this book "should be required reading for all first-year law students . . ." February 7, 2012

By mwcjim

Format:Paperback

Glenn Greenwald: this book "should be required reading for all first-year law students . . ."

Jesselyn Radack's exceptionally well-written memoir about her ordeal as a Justice Department whistleblower details attacks from the George W. Bush administration on both her professional and personal life, from forcing her out of her career at the Justice Department to anonymous administration officials calling her a "traitor," "turncoat," and "terrorist sympathizer."

Glenn Greenwald says it best in his forward to Radack's first-hand account of whistleblowing: "In June 2002, Jesselyn Radack exposed one of the first cases of torture post-9/11 - being used on an American - in the case of John Walker Lindh. Her sobering book should be required reading for all first-year law students because it shows poignantly how 'national security' is being used to fundamentally bastardize constitutional law, criminal procedure, human rights, civil liberties and legal ethics."

Greenwald is right, the intersection in Radack's book of torture, national security, freedom of speech and legal ethics makes the book a unique - and invaluable - contribution to any curriculum. The book is packed full of weedy legal issues fit for wanna-be lawyers, but anyone will be mesmerized by her harrowing tale about the lengths to which our government will go to silence critics.

Radack's story is a stark example of how necessary whistleblowers are in order to ensure transparency in government and of how necessary whistleblower rights are in order to ensure that patriots like Radack are protected and not excoriated.

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Extremely Important February 8, 2012

By David C N Swanson

Format:Paperback

It began with that monstrous young man so evil we needed to blindfold him and strap him to a board, that confusing young man who looked like Christ but cast us in the role of crucifiers, that treasonous young man who brought dark and heathen evils across linguistic and cultural borders and brought torture onto the list of accepted government actions.

When you hear the phrase "American Taliban" you probably think of a young American who betrayed his country, aided its enemies, and - like Saddam Hussein - was behind the attacks of 9-11. John Walker Lindh was an American. That part is accurate. He converted to Islam at age 16 and traveled to Yemen to study classical Arabic and Islamic theology. In 2001 he went to Afghanistan to join an ongoing battle between a political group funded by Russia and another group funded by the United States. Lindh joined the group that was backed and funded by the Bush Administration. It was called the Taliban. Lindh trained to fight the Northern Alliance, not civilians, and not the United States. But, after 9-11, the United States attacked the Taliban, and Lindh attempted to escape and return to America.

Instead he and other soldiers were captured by the Northern Alliance and beaten senseless in the presence of two CIA officers, Johnny "Mike" Spann and Dave Tyson, who interrogated Lindh and threatened him with death on the spot. When some of the other prisoners rebelled (Lindh was not involved), Northern Alliance troops shot and killed scores of prisoners, many with their arms tied behind their backs. Lindh was shot in the leg. Spann was killed. (Though he was not involved, Lindh was later charged with conspiracy to murder Spann.)

When Lindh was finally in U.S.... custody, Secretary of "Defense" Donald Rumsfeld's office told an Army intelligence officer to "take the gloves off" and ask Lindh whatever he wanted, only reading him his rights after he said something incriminating. The officer asked for a copy of the Miranda warnings and never received it and never read Lindh his rights. Instead, U.S. Special Forces tied his hands, put a hood over his head, drove him for hours, placed him in a dark room, and taunted him, denying his many requests for counsel.

The same day that Newsweek broke the story of the "American Taliban," Lindh's mother called the State Department, the ACLU, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch, all of which refused to help her. Lindh's father persuaded James Brosnahan to take the case the next day, by which point, in the words of Jesselyn Radack, Lindh

"was being discussed on every radio show, and images of him were constantly shown on TV. President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, Ashcroft, and Senators Hillary Clinton and John McCain made inflammatory comments and prejudicial statements, none of them true, that Lindh was an al Qaeda fighter, terrorist, and traitor; fired his weapon; attended a terrorist training camp; supported bin Laden; and had foreknowledge of September 11th - even though the government from the first day of Lindh's capture was in possession of facts to the contrary."

Jesselyn Radack should know. Radack was a top graduate from Yale Law School in 1995 who went straight to work in the U.S. Justice Department. By the time our nation was adopting torture as an open and respectable practice, Radack worked in the Justice Department's Professional Responsibility Advisory Office. There she received a call from counter-terrorism prosecutor John De Pue who wanted her advice on the FBI's proposal to interrogate Lindh without allowing him access to counsel, even though his father had retained a lawyer who was demanding to meet with Lindh and demanding that interrogations cease. Lindh, meanwhile, had been blindfolded, stripped naked, bound to a stretcher with duct tape, taunted, threatened, and locked in an unheated metal shipping container in the bitter cold at a Marine base in Afghanistan.

Radack made a fateful decision. She took an action that was drastically out of place in the Ashcroft Justice Department, although she herself did not then realize how out of place it was. She told De Pue the truth. She told him that the FBI could not legally interrogate Lindh, knowing that his father had retained counsel on his behalf.

Radack recounts what happened next in her book "The Canary in the Coalmine: Blowing the Whistle in the Case of 'American Taliban'." The book interweaves an account of the Justice Department's retaliation against Radack for doing her job and making public what she had done, with an account of the Bush Administration's development of greater and greater use of torture, violation of rights, secrecy, and lies.

The Justice Department lied about how Lindh was treated. Michael Chertoff even perjured himself in the U.S. Senate. Senator Kennedy and others knew the truth and still voted to confirm Chertoff to head up efforts to keep our "homeland" secure. Lindh is serving a 20-year sentence and is under a gag order not to talk about it. Our government is torturing the innocent and guilty alike around the globe. And many secrets are being kept secret by those who know better, because they've seen what has been done to Radack and others like Bunnatine Greenhouse, James Yee, Sibel Edmonds.

The Justice Department aggressively attacked Radack, costing her a job there and a later job with a private law firm, threatening her license to practice law, damaging her reputation, denying her income, placing her on the "no-fly" list, and endlessly harassing her. Her book recounts the hell she went through. Read more ›

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Integrity Prevails February 12, 2012

By Oneclassylady

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

This book is so real, so personal, and yet a message that every American who cares about the future of our Constitutional Republic and the fate of democracy must read. It is a tribute to Radack and her unyielding adherence to the deepest and most enduring values of duty, honor, and standing up for others -- unjustly tried and treated -- as an exemplar of defending liberty and justice when it is most under assault and peril.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars whistleblowereview September 5, 2012

By sharon

Format:Paperback

Ms. Radack should not have been subjected to such abuses as an attorney. It takes a courageous
person with a strong moral compass to buck the system and do the right thing when the easy thing is to do
the incorrect thing. Great story, but a ghost writer should have been employed.... the story and timeline
was a little hard to follow at times, and I was very interested.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Courageous Brown U. Graduate March 4, 2012

By Geoffrey J. Waldau

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

A courageous book by a fellow Brown University graduate is a case study in how fundamental due process in America can be improved. A good read for anyone interested in law and public policy, especially free speech and whistleblower law.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Justice Advocate Radack Authors Courageous, Powerful Memoir August 29, 2012

By Andrew Kreig

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

In 1995, a brilliant, newly minted Yale Law School graduate named Jesselyn Radack began work at the U.S. Justice Department to fulfill her dream of public service. Six years after becoming an ethics adviser in the headquarters of the 100,000-employee department, she found herself a pariah after suggesting that government attorneys should not provide false information to the courts in a federal terrorism prosecution.

"The Justice Department forced me out of my job" she writes, "placed me under criminal investigation, got me fired from my next job in the private sector, reported me to the state bars in which I'm licensed as an attorney, and put me on the 'no fly list.'"

Her offense? She believed, erroneously as it turned out, that the Department would not want to use illegally obtained evidence in its prosecution of John Walker Lindh, an American convert to Islam. He had been imprisoned by Afghan warlords in November 2001 soon after the U.S.-led NATO invasion of the country after 9/11.

Lindh, then 20, was a California-born convert to Islam. He had travelled to Yemen on a spiritual quest in 2000, and went to Afghanistan in June 2001 to join the Taliban army at a time when the Taliban government, a United States ally in the 1980s, was still receiving United States aid. Lindh survived a harsh POW camp in which more than three quarters of his 400 fellow Taliban POWs died in chaotic conditions along with an American interrogator.

Radack advised against further federal interrogation of Lindh without a lawyer present because his parents had retained counsel.... Later, she blew the whistle when she learned that the department destroyed evidence of her advice, and then withheld the evidence from a Virginia federal court, where Lindh faced charges of murder and treason in a high-profile prosecution helping inflame the public in the earliest stages of the war.

Radack's gripping tale describes a culture clash at the Justice Department between due process advocates and conviction-hungry zealots. The story has implications far beyond the Lindh case or indeed any of the terror cases. Readers of the Justice Integrity Project's site (which I edit at [...]) know of documented prosecution misconduct in criminal and civil cases in other cases, including mind-boggling evidence of a federal frame-up of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, the state's most prominent Democrat for many years.

I saw Radack lecture at the National Press Club with her client Thomas Drake in early 2012, and invited her to appear Aug. 30 on the "Washington Update" public affairs radio show I co-host on the MTL network, which maintains an archive of past shows.

She is an expert on a fascinating topic: What a law enforcement employee, or indeed what any employee should do, when supervisors pressure for participation in a legal fraud? Naturally it would be for goals -- in this case claims of national security -- ostensibly far more important than truth in court.

Radack's situation was especially dramatic because she needed medical insurance as both a victim of multiple sclerosis and as a young mother. Nonetheless, she resigned from the Justice Department in 2002, only to find the department relentlessly followed her to try to thwart her employment (and health care) elsewhere, thereby making her an example of what happens to employees who do not toe the line on sensitive matters.

Civil liberties advocates have showered her and her book with praise, as indicated elsewhere in these reader reviews. She is currently the director of National Security and Human Rights at the Government Accountability Project.

After Radack's disclosures to a Newsweek reporter in 2002 Lindh pled guilty in 2002 to two relatively minor charges in a plea deal that avoided a potentially embarrassing pre-trial hearing for the government on its conduct. Lindh received a long prison sentence. He is back in the news this week with a lawsuit against prison officials in Indiana protesting restrictions on his ability to participate in group prayers.

The major officials who are exposed as leading a department-wide effort to suppress traditional due process safeguards in the case include Attorney General John Ashcroft and White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales. Another was Assistant Attorney Gen. Michael Chertoff, co-author of the Patriot Act and later secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.

Radack's slim (164-page) book is packed with insider information about the administration's first major terrorism case after 9/11, and how the White House made crucial decisions on legal strategies.

"The poetic justice of Radack's appalling experience," writes columnist Glenn Greenwald in an apt book foreword, "is that she is using her hard-learned lessons to advocate and represent some of the nation's today's biggest whistleblowers: Thomas Drake, Bradley Manning, Peter Van Buren, and John Doe in Doe v. Rumsfeld. As Drake put it: 'Jesselyn truly became my public voice and conscience -- speaking out and writing fearless and courageously -- bringing truth to power with all her simply superb outreach and advocacy.'" Read more ›