Kaiser Permanente chose to fire Justin Deal, but a Mother Jones article discusses whistleblowers like Sibel Edwards who got much worse treatment.
Office of Special Counsel's War On Whistleblowers : Then again, given the current climate for whistleblowers, false hope might be all the hope there is. A series of court rulings, legal changes, and new security and secrecy policies have made it easier than at any time since the Nixon era to punish whistleblowers; the climate has deteriorated in recent years with the Bush administration's emphasis on plugging leaks and locking down government information. Bloch's tenure—he is the first director of the whistleblower office to face a whistleblower complaint of his own—has only added insult to injury.It's come to the point where some advocates now counsel federal employees against coming forward, period. “When people call me and ask about blowing the whistle, I always tell them, 'Don't do it, because your life will be destroyed,'” says William Weaver, a professor of political science at the University of Texas-El Paso and a senior adviser to the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition. “You'll lose your career; you're probably going to lose your family if you have one; you're probably going to lose all your friends because they're associated through work; you'll wind up squandering your life savings on attorneys; and you'll come out the other end of this process working at McDonald's.”
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Fluent in Turkish, Farsi, and Azeri, Sibel Edmonds was hired in the fbi's translation unit shortly after 9/11. Just six months later, after reporting her suspicions that her department had been infiltrated by a Turkish intelligence operation, she was abruptly fired. The department's inspector general later found many of her allegations to be well founded and concluded that the fbi displayed “an unwarranted reluctance to vigorously investigate these serious allegations.” The report offered eight recommendations for improving the fbi's translation service. None were implemented. Edmonds sued the Justice Department for unfair dismissal; former Attorney General John Ashcroft mounted an unprecedented defense, invoking the State Secrets Privilege to essentially classify any information regarding the case and even barring Edmonds and her lawyer from hearing the government's arguments to the judge. The suit was dismissed and Edmonds was left with a $285,000 legal bill. “Five years of fight, and it's like, 'Why do we even blow the whistle?'” she says. “It didn't fix the system.”
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