Religion helped workers speak up

Recent news accounts on the ethics of whistleblowing have left out one major reason some government employees tell all — religion.

Call it faith-based whistleblowing.

Joe Carson, a nuclear safety engineer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, said it was his Christian worldview that impelled him to blow the whistle 19 times since 1990 on workplace and public-safety hazards at the Department of Energy, guardian of the nation’s nuclear stockpile.

“Whistleblowers are thinking of what’s good for others, not just looking out for number one,” said Mr. Carson, 51.

“If society wants to constrain evil, they license certain professionals to do so,” he said, “and I have a legal duty as a licensed professional engineer to blow whistles. Either you look the other way or confront what you believe is wrong.”

Jesselyn Radack, a former ethics attorney for the Department of Justice and a member of Temple Sinai, a Reform synagogue in Northwest, said Exodus 23:2 persuaded her to blow the whistle in the case of “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh.

The verse, “Do not follow a multitude to do wrong. You shall not give perverse testimony in a dispute so as to pervert it in favor of the mighty,” was the central theme in her 1984 bat mitzvah, a coming-of-age ceremony for Jewish girls.

It came to mind on Dec. 7, 2001, when she advised Justice’s criminal division not to interrogate Lindh without an attorney present. Lindh’s father had already retained counsel for his son.

When the FBI did so anyway, while claiming Lindh’s rights had been respected, a federal judge began looking into the matter. When Mrs. Radack learned that e-mails concerning the case were missing from her files, she retrieved them from her computer hard drive and gave copies to Newsweek magazine.

“I’m not a Bible thumper that goes around quoting Scripture,” she said. “But after September 11, there was such an outcry to get the terrorists dead or alive. What bothered me was the cutting of corners and the taking of shortcuts. In the DOJ’s ethics division, it was important to cut straight corners.”

Calls for comment to the Department of Justice and its Office of Special Counsel, created to protect federal whistleblowers, were not returned.

Mrs. Radack, who will be the keynote speaker Sept. 23 at a Whistleblowers for an Honest, Efficient and Accountable Government convention at the Watergate Hotel, said she’s spent $50,000 in attorney’s fees defending herself.

“It unleashed the full force of the executive branch against me for four years,” she said, adding she ended up on a “no-fly list” and was put under criminal investigation, although no charges were brought.

Rosemary Dew, a Lutheran who now works with the Department of Defense, said her decision to blow the whistle on sexual harassment in the FBI from 1978 to 1990 was based on Matthew 25:40, “Whatever you do unto the least of these, you do unto me.”

She applied that thought to the treatment that she said many women and minorities received at the FBI, which she described as “a very creepy, aggressive, predatory kind of harassment I had never seen anywhere else.”

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