Washington Post/SpyTalk, 19 Aug 2010: A decorated former Defense Intelligence Agency officer, who served at one time as an aide to Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Colin Powell, continued his court fight this week to demolish the government’s right to revoke security clearances and fire employees without explanation.
John C. Dullahan, an Irish immigrant who joined the U.S. Army in 1968, served in Vietnam, became an American citizen and attained the rank of lieutenant colonel before retiring from the military and joining the DIA. He lost his security clearance in 2009 after he ran afoul of polygraph examiners.
The examiners accused Dullahan, whose job as Powell’s political-military adviser for Eastern Europe required him to be in contact with counterparts from former communist countries, of having been under the control of Soviet intelligence. Dullahan denied the accusation and challenged the government to back up its claims with evidence, to no avail.
“The polygraph examiner accused Dullahan of meeting ‘Soviet handlers’ when he had visited – 20 years earlier – East Germany in the early 1980s, during his U.N. assignment in Syria, and on his numerous official trips to Europe while on the Joint Staff, including trips with General Powell,” said Dullahan’s complaint, first filed in January. . . . .
CNN, 1 Aug 2010: The Army private charged with leaking an airstrike video and downloading documents remained in solitary confinement Saturday. Military officials told CNN that Pfc. Bradley Manning is also the prime suspect in the latest leak of documents to the WikiLeaks website.
Manning was routinely processed Thursday at the Quantico detention facility, a military spokesman said Friday. Manning arrived at 9:30 p.m. Thursday and was given a physical exam and medical screenings, according to Lt. Col. Rob Manning (not related) of the Military District of Washington. The suspect is in solitary confinement and is being observed in accordance with normal operating procedures, the spokesman said.
Manning’s legal future is complex. He has already been charged with leaking a 2007 airstrike video and downloading documents from classified military systems. And he is suspected in the latest leak of thousands of Afghanistan field reports to the Wikileaks.org website. . . .
POGO, 30 July 2010: Is the state secrets privilege still being abused? POGO has witnessed government actions to thwart litigation, to seemingly conceal environmental crimes, or to cover up embarrassment (as in the Sibel Edmonds battle). But another case is raising similar red flags—a religious discrimination case. David Tenenbaum falls into this unfortunate group, but his case is not yet closed.
The government invokes the state secrets privilege in cases to prevent disclosure of alleged sensitive national security information relevant to the claims and defenses at issue. When invoked, the evidence is removed from the case, and in most cases, the privilege summarily prevents the case from moving forward. Simply stated, the case never reaches the merits—it is dismissed based on government claims that it cannot proceed without jeopardizing national security.
In 1995, David Tenenbaum started working on an unclassified program to upgrade vehicles’ armor at the Army’s Tank-Automotive and Armaments Command (TACOM) under the Department of Defense (DoD). In the fall of 1996, the DoD started investigating Tenenbaum for espionage, telling him that the intrigue was just a security clearance test.
The investigation included submitting him to an unrecorded polygraph test in which he was asked directly about his personal faith, and later accused of admitting to crimes he could not have possibly committed. On February 14, 1997, he was accused of spying for Israel, had his security clearance revoked and was placed on administrative leave. The next day the FBI raided his home. The raid came out empty-handed, and the following months of constant surveillance also failed to produce any evidence indicating Tenenbaum was a spy. His security clearance was restored and upgraded to “Top Secret” in 2003—proof that the government knew Tenenbaum didn’t disclose classified information. . . . .
Review of the Case of Mr. David Tenebaum, Department of Army Employee (DOD IG)
STRATFOR, 20 July 2010: . . . . The relation to the nation is personal. The relation to the state is legal. We can see this linguistically in the case of the United States. I can state my relation to my nation simply: I am an American. I cannot state my relationship to my state nearly as simply. Saying I am a “United Statian” makes no sense. I have to say that I am a citizen of the United States, to state my legal relationship, not personal affinity. The linguistic complexity of the United States doesn’t repeat itself everywhere, but a distinction does exist between nationality and citizenship. They may coincide easily, as when a person is born in a country and becomes a citizen simply through that, or they may develop, as when an individual is permitted to immigrate and become naturalized. Note the interesting formulation of that term, as it implies the creation of a natural relationship with the state.
In the United States, the following oath is administered when one is permitted to become a citizen, generally five years after being permitted to immigrate:
I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I will bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform noncombatant service in the Armed Forces of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform work of national importance under civilian direction when required by the law; and that I take this obligation freely without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; so help me God.
I should say I took this oath at the age of 17. Although I became a citizen of the United States when my father was naturalized years earlier, receiving my own citizenship papers involved going to a courthouse and taking this oath personally. Being confronted with the obligations of citizenship was a sobering experience.
The American oath is one of the most rigorous; other nations have much simpler and less demanding oaths. Intriguingly, many countries with less explicitly demanding oaths are also countries where becoming a naturalized citizen is more difficult and less common. For the United States, a nation and a state that were consciously invented, the idea of immigration was inherent in the very idea of the nation, as was this oath. Immigration and naturalization required an oath of this magnitude, as naturalization meant taking on not only a new state identity but also a new national identity.
The American nation was built on immigrants from other nations. Unless they were prepared to “absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen,” the American enterprise could fall into chaos as immigrants came to the United States to secure the benefits of full citizenship but refused to abandon prior obligations and refused to agree to the obligations and sacrifices the oath demanded. The United States therefore is in a position shared only with a few other immigration-based nations, and it has staked out the most demanding position on naturalization.
It is therefore odd that the United States — along with many other nations — permits nationals to be citizens of other countries. The U.S. Constitution doesn’t bar this, but the oath of citizenship would seem to do so. The oath demands that the immigrant abandon all obligations to foreign states. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Afroyim v. Rusk in 1967 that revoking citizenship on grounds of voting in foreign elections was unconstitutional. The ruling involved a naturalized American who presumably had taken the oath. The Supreme Court left the oath in place, but if we are to understand the court correctly, it ruled that the oath did not preclude multiple citizenship.
It is impossible to know how many people in the United States or other countries currently hold multiple citizenship, but anecdotally it would appear that the practice is not uncommon. Not being required to renounce one’s foreign citizenship verifiably obviously facilitates the practice.
And this raises a fundamental question. Is citizenship a license to live and earn a living in a country, or is it equally or more so a set of legal and moral obligations? There are many ways legally to reside in a country without becoming a citizen. But the American oath, for example, makes it appear that the naturalized citizen (as opposed to just the legal resident) has an overriding obligation to the United States that can require substantial and onerous responsibilities within military and civilian life. An individual might be able to juggle multiple obligations until they came into conflict. Does the citizen choose his prime obligation at that time or when he becomes a citizen?
The reality is that in many cases, citizenship is seen less as a system of mutual obligations and rights than as a convenience. This creates an obvious tension between the citizen and his obligations under his oath. But it also creates a deep ambiguity between his multiple nationalities. The concept of immigration involves the idea of movement to a new place. It involves the assumption of legal and moral obligations. But it also involves a commitment to the nation, at least as far as citizenship goes. This has nothing to do with retaining ethnicity. It has to do with a definition of what it means to love one’s own — if you are a citizen of multiple nations, which nation is yours? . . . .
Allegiance in a Time of Globalization (DOD PERSEREC)
Changes in Espionage by Americans: 1947-2007 (DOD PERSEREC)
Daily Telegraph, 15 July 2010: There was a time when a potential recruit to the Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6, would be invited for sherry in the room of his Oxbridge tutor and asked whether he had ever considered doing something for his country.
The flaw in the system, as the great spy scandals of the 1950s and 1960s testified, was that it was never entirely clear which country he had in mind. None the less, this form of vetting, if rudimentary, owed everything to personal contacts and an understanding of an individual’s strengths and beliefs that was gathered over time and at close quarters.
Nowadays, a would-be MI6 officer is self-selecting and will make a direct approach via the service’s website, itself a relatively recent innovation (2005). Matters are handled by a recruitment company before the applicant gets anywhere near the portals of SIS’s not-so-secret headquarters on the Thames, one of London’s most architecturally indiscreet buildings.
The main reason is to ensure that the intelligence services are fishing in a deeper reservoir, one that is more socially and ethnically diverse. But it is also because the sort of skills that modern spying agencies require, especially IT and computer encryption, cannot be found among Classics scholars at Cambridge. . . .
. . . . Unfortunately for MI6, Houghton turned out to be one of its bad picks. After the rigorous vetting process, which can take up to a year, he was offered a job as an SIS computer expert. . . .
