Banned in Minnesota: Op-ed, " Send Ms. Smith to Washington"

In the classic movie, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, mainstream newspapers refuse to publish reports of idealistic Senator Jefferson Smith’s battle against Congressional corruption. Thus, it falls to an informal network of concerned citizens and newspaper boys to get out the truth.  Today, fiction became reality as word came that a Minnesota newspaper, the Pioneer Press, has refused to publish an op-ed supportive of Coleen Rowley, Democratic candidate for the 2nd District.

Clearly, the Press, which announced support for incumbent John Kline, fears that the gap between idealist Rowley and Stepford Republican Kline has narrowed to the extent that any favorable publicity for Rowley could result in a upset.

Let’s send the message to the Pioneer Press and likeminded papers that their strategy of suppressing differing opinions is a loser. With permission from the authors, please distribute this article and the banned op-ed, below, as widely as possible via blogs, email and commentary, and help the integrity candidate win on November 7!

SEND MS. SMITH TO WASHINGTON

by Tom Devine

Too rarely, elections happen at the same time the public is mad as heck and not going to take it anymore. That creates an opportunity for real change. Whistleblowers are the pioneers of change, because they keep society from becoming stagnant by challenging conventional wisdom.

Former FBI agent Coleen Rowley is one of the most effective whistleblowers in history. Despite battling the nation’s most Machiavellian bureaucracies, she somehow has retained the vision of a Mr. Smith Goes to Washington — idealism combined with steely determination. Now she wants to channel that energy toward community service in Congress. How much could taxpayers’ lives be bettered, if their congressperson were the gold standard on public service scales?

Those are strong superlatives, and high hopes. Who are whistleblowers, anyway? Aren’t they nutty, disloyal troublemakers who are never satisfied? Well, it takes all kinds .... But legally, whistleblowers are employees who exercise free speech rights to challenge abuses of power that betray the public trust. In other words, they exercise freedom of speech when it counts. They help prevent avoidable disasters by the freedom to warn. They impose accountability through the freedom to protest. They help us to learn our lessons and avoid repeating mistakes through the freedom to educate.

I’ve drawn those conclusions as legal director since 1979 for the Government Accountability Project, a national whistleblower support organization. GAP is non-partisan. I’m speaking publicly as an individual about a political candidate, not an organizational leader. It is something I never have done before.

But Coleen Rowley is special. She remained an idealistic public servant in one of government’s murkiest, most power-abusing bureaucracies - the FBI. She witnessed investigative agents in the Minneapolis Division pull their hair out as they attempted to investigate a terrorist suspect who was later found to have ties to the mastermind of the 9-11 terrorist conspiracy. But after 9-11, many officials were loath to air the dirty laundry, to engage in the painful process of admitting and unraveling the mistakes.

Ms. Rowley "committed the truth" and got away with it, almost a miracle in Washington, D.C. Her success sparked a stampede of disclosures by national security whistleblowers whose analogous warnings had been ignored by a bureaucracy in denial. Hers and their testimony became the foundation for the 9/11 Commission Report and nearly all meaningful congressional oversight of the last five years.

She wasn’t only a pioneer introducing the truth to the history of 9/11. In January 2003 Time Magazine named her one of three Persons of the Year, along with two whistleblowers from Enron and MCI. There recognition was a milestone for whistleblowers generally. Until that point, conventional wisdom was that whistleblowers are nuts and/or traitors who never are satisfied. Increasingly now their messages are heard rather than covered up. Managers are beginning to realize that whistleblowers may well be prophets whose warnings are ignored at the bureaucrat’s peril.

The Republicans should have drafted Ms. Rowley to run for Congress. She would be ideal for the party’s advertising campaign. The number one issue is national security. And restoring our country’s moral leadership and national security is going to have to start with the truth. Republicans desperately need to prove they are not the party of corruption, especially involving government contractors. Whistleblowers are the human factor that is the Achilles’ heel of government corruption. The Department of Justice reports their lawsuits against fraud in government contracts have saved the taxpayers $15 billion since 1986, and $1.4 billion last year alone. Most basicly, Republicans portray themselves as the party of freedom. Whistleblowers like Coleen Rowley exercise freedom of speech when it means risking their professional lives.

Ms. Rowley already has changed the face and course of history by challenging the paradigm that our country is safer by enforcing secrecy at all costs, forcing blind trust that the government will take care of us. After she exposed what happened behind closed doors, national security secrecy will never be the same. She didn’t blink pursuing those values in the world’s most intimidating, secretive bureaucracy. If she pursues those same values in Congress, an American revolutionary idea might return: government for the people, instead of for itself.