Whistle blown on whistleblowers

The Judiciary Committee of the US House of Representatives has begun, in the aftermath of the scandal surrounding the dismissal of US attorneys, to collect tips from whistleblowers inside the Justice Dept. Tipsters were promised that the Committee would deal with their information in "strictest confidence", though it would not take into account information submitted anonymously.

Unfortunately, as TPM Muckraker reported last weekend, that anonymity has been blown for many informers. The Judiciary Committee sent an e-mail to all contributers with their e-mail addresses revealed in the "to:" field, instead of using the "bcc:" function.

As if that wasn't bad enough, TPM reports,

[c]ompounding the mistake, the committee later sent out a second email attempting to recall the original email; it, too, included all recipients in the "to:" field, according to a recipient of the emails.

The only thing that could have been worse would have been to send this correpondence, with the full e-mail addresses of all internal critics of the Justice Dept, directly to Dick Cheney himself. Well, not even such spineless and brain-dead idiots as the Judiciary Committee members would have made such a terrible... oh oh:

Some of the email addresses appear to be transparently fake, but there's also, much more troubling, a vice_president@whitehouse.gov carbon copied on the email, which is the public email address for Vice President Dick Cheney. In other words, an email containing the email addresses of all the whistleblowers who had written in to the committee tipline was sent to public email address of Vice President Cheney.

N.b., these are the representatives of the people, whom we rely on to function as a corrective to the abuses of executive power by the Bush administration. Unfortunately, the American people seems to be represented by the bastard offspring of the Keystone Kops and the Three Stooges:

The purpose of today's mis-sent email was, ironically enough, to announce careful new procedures about to be put in place by the committee for reviewing the tips received through the committee's website.

The headline for the above article by Paul Kiel says it all: D'Oh. The entire e-mail from the Judiciary Committee can be read on the Talking Points Memo (TPM) website, though minus the incriminating e-mail addresses (not that that makes any difference, as Evil Dick has been cc'd).