Of Course this is a Part of Obama's War on Whistleblowers

The Pentagon is looking at stripping the security clearance for the lead whistle-blower advocate for spies in the US government:

The Pentagon’s inspector general is trying to suspend and possibly revoke the top secret access of the Defense Department’s former director of whistleblowing, triggering concerns in Congress that he’s being retaliated against for doing his job.

If the recommendation is acted on, Daniel Meyer would no longer be able to work in his current job as the executive director for intelligence community whistleblowing at a time when President Barack Obama’s reforms of the system are supposed to be underway .

The controversy over Meyer’s fate comes at an awkward moment for the Obama administration. Meyer, the Pentagon inspector general’s whistleblower advocate until last summer, was well-known for aggressively investigating whistleblower allegations. In his current job, he was supposed to have a key role in the president’s initiative to improve the intelligence whistleblowing system.

The administration pointed to those reforms after former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden leaked details on the agency’s then-classified mass collection of Americans’ email and phone records. Snowden has said he was prompted to disclose the details because he believed the whistleblowing system was broken.

“Dan Meyer has been a relentless advocate for whistleblowers in making sure they don’t fall through the cracks,” said one congressional staffer, who asked to remain anonymous because of the sensitivity of the matter. “If action is taken against him, it could have a chilling effect on whistleblowers coming forward."

This is, of course, a feature, not a bug.

While I do not think that the political appointees in the Obama administration directly authorized this, I think that it is clear that this is a part and parcel on President Obama's war on whistle-blowers. (He has criminally prosecuted more of them than all of his predecessors combined)

This is happening because this is a part of the culture within institutions like the DoD, the NSA, and the CIA, and because it is a part of the culture of the Obama White House.

Intimidating potential whistle blowers is an implicit goal of all of these policies.