Sen. Benjamin Cardin's "impressive" feat [View All]

BY GLENN GREENWALD
Sen. Benjamin Cardin of Maryland genuinely deserves an award . . . for reaching all new heights of projection, nationalistic self-regard, and hypocrisy. Even for D.C.'s lowly standards, what he's doing is really quite a feat.

Cardin has been on a crusade to punish Russian officials because of their intolerance for whistleblowers. In conjunction with Sen. John McCain, he has been pushing bipartisan legislation to impose sanctions on Russians who were involved in the mistreatment and death of Sergei Magnitsky, the whistleblowing lawyer who died in the custody of Russian police after being denied medical care, as well as lambasting Russians generally for their attacks on whistleblowers. Yesterday, Cardin went to the Senate floor (beginning at 3:06) to denounce Russia and other tyrannical nations who pay lip service to the virtues of whistleblowing while hypocritically taking actions against them

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This is the very same Sen. Benjamin Cardin who has also introduced legislation that, if enacted, would be the most severe legislative attack on whistleblowers in the United States in the last several decades at least. In particular, his bill, as Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists explained, "would broadly criminalize leaks of classified information" and would, in effect, turn all disclosures of classified information into a felony, regardless of how corrupt or even illegal the exposed conduct was

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http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/05/27/cardin/index.html