From James Sandler at Salon:

After 9/11, the administration feared terrorist attacks on high-profile U.S. landmarks, and ordered Chambers to double the number of officers standing guard at icons like the Statue of Liberty and those on the National Mall in Washington. But the Park Police force already faced staffing shortages, and Chambers was forced to pull officers who were patrolling other national parks, leaving those areas vulnerable. Drug dealers soon moved in, and rapes more than tripled. In August 2002, when one of Chambers' patrolmen was handling a traffic accident with insufficient backup, he was run over and killed.

In the fall of 2003, when a Washington Post reporter contacted Chambers for a story about the growing peril in the parks, she responded candidly. The Park Police, she told the Post, needed twice as many officers and millions of dollars to cover overtime expenses. She said officers had been working grueling 12-hour shifts, and department morale was plummeting. "My greatest fear is that harm or death will come to a visitor or employee at one of our parks," she said.

Retaliation against her began almost immediately. Chambers' supervisor, Donald W. Murphy, then the deputy director of the National Park Service, ordered her in an e-mail to never again "reference the President's '05 budget under any circumstances" and summoned her to his office. In court documents later filed by Chambers she described how armed federal agents suddenly appeared and surrounded her in Murphy's reception area, and took away her gun and badge. She was then paraded in front of media when escorted to another building to collect her belongings.

During the course of her case, Bush officials and attorneys attacked Chambers from multiple angles, documents show. One high-ranking official at the Interior Department, which oversees the Park Police, said Chambers was no longer "trustworthy" and that she "potentially endangered large numbers of citizens" by speaking to the media. Murphy, her former boss, said Chambers had been "communicating to the criminal elements," signaling to them that national parks had become their "free territory to exploit." A lawyer for the Bush administration asserted that Chambers had made reconnaissance operations easier for "America's enemies in the world."...in the wake of Watergate, Congress passed the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978. It established the Office of Special Counsel, with a staff of investigators to look into complaints of retaliation against employees who spoke out. The new law also created the Merit Systems Protection Board, the administrative court with a bipartisan panel of three judges, and it assigned a special federal appeals court to interpret the law in the most complex cases.

But year after year, whistle-blowers complaining of retaliation lost their cases. Some faced insidious tactics by their co-workers and superiors.

Joseph D. Whitson Jr. was a civilian chemist in the Air Force who spoke out about superiors falsifying drug test results. His desk was moved to a room in the basement and his job duties stripped.

Vernie Gee Sr. was an agricultural inspector who sounded the alarm about tainted meat in the U.S. food supply and inspectors taking bribes from slaughterhouses. Gee was beaten up by a plant worker during an inspection -- and then reprimanded by superiors for fighting.

George Randall Taylor, a chief of police at a Navy base in Bermuda, exposed coverups of rapes on the base. He was then forced into a psychiatric hospital.

Before Teresa Chambers was fired from the Park Police, she found used condoms on her car, and someone pepper-sprayed her office door.

"One of the great tricks in whistle-blowing is to get rid of someone for a reason that doesn't seem like it was for whistle-blowing," said Fred Alford, a professor of government at the University of Maryland. "You do all the things you can to get someone to quit, to get them enraged, to get them to act out. Then you can fire them."

Government managers and attorneys almost always argue that measures taken against whistle-blowers were justified because of bad behavior or poor performance by the employee.

"It is usually not that hard for [agencies] to build up a case against somebody if they want to," said Elaine Kaplan, who headed the Office of Special Counsel under President Clinton. "They start looking at your e-mails, they start nitpicking you … It is difficult to prove whistle-blower retaliation."

Details of Chambers' case reflect that struggle.

Prior to becoming chief of the Park Police, Chambers had a distinguished 28-year career in law enforcement. She was a Republican, was eager to serve the nation in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and would be the first woman to lead the force. But her pedigree apparently would no longer matter once her public comments created political embarrassment for the Bush administration.

After 9/11, the administration feared terrorist attacks on high-profile U.S. landmarks, and ordered Chambers to double the number of officers standing guard at icons like the Statue of Liberty and those on the National Mall in Washington. But the Park Police force already faced staffing shortages, and Chambers was forced to pull officers who were patrolling other national parks, leaving those areas vulnerable. Drug dealers soon moved in, and rapes more than tripled. In August 2002, when one of Chambers' patrolmen was handling a traffic accident with insufficient backup, he was run over and killed.

In the fall of 2003, when a Washington Post reporter contacted Chambers for a story about the growing peril in the parks, she responded candidly. The Park Police, she told the Post, needed twice as many officers and millions of dollars to cover overtime expenses. She said officers had been working grueling 12-hour shifts, and department morale was plummeting. "My greatest fear is that harm or death will come to a visitor or employee at one of our parks," she said.

Retaliation against her began almost immediately. Chambers' supervisor, Donald W. Murphy, then the deputy director of the National Park Service, ordered her in an e-mail to never again "reference the President's '05 budget under any circumstances" and summoned her to his office. In court documents later filed by Chambers she described how armed federal agents suddenly appeared and surrounded her in Murphy's reception area, and took away her gun and badge. She was then paraded in front of media when escorted to another building to collect her belongings.

During the course of her case, Bush officials and attorneys attacked Chambers from multiple angles, documents show. One high-ranking official at the Interior Department, which oversees the Park Police, said Chambers was no longer "trustworthy" and that she "potentially endangered large numbers of citizens" by speaking to the media. Murphy, her former boss, said Chambers had been "communicating to the criminal elements," signaling to them that national parks had become their "free territory to exploit." A lawyer for the Bush administration asserted that Chambers had made reconnaissance operations easier for "America's enemies in the world."

In a recent interview, Chambers questioned whether raising concerns about an understaffed force angered Bush officials who were talking up policies for securing the U.S. homeland. "Was it just a bad day at the White House where I said we needed more officers, when somebody else was standing at a podium saying we've never been safer?" asked Chambers, who now teaches part-time at Johns Hopkins University and maintains a Web site documenting her case. "I don't know."

One advocacy group that assists whistle-blowers, the Government Accountability Project in Washington, has scrutinized past rulings to determine how whistle-blowers fare. GAP's pioneering work showed that whistle-blowers seldom win. But until now, no comprehensive study has been done on whistle-blower cases. The Merit Systems Protection Board does not specifically keep track of cases, but using records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, the CIR/Salon investigation reviewed 3,561 whistle-blower cases filed since 1994, when the Whistleblower Protection Act was last revised by Congress. The cases often traversed a costly and drawn-out series of legal steps prior to a decision. During the Clinton administration, in cases from 1994 to 2000, whistle-blowers won only 3.5 percent of the time. During President Bush's tenure, from 2001 through June 2007, 3.3 percent of whistle-blowers won. Most whistle-blowers spent several years fighting in court.

"Whistle-blowers are overly confident in the law, but in most cases there is no recourse," said University of Maryland's Alford, who has studied the issue. "We have this idea of whistle-blowers from television -- from '60 Minutes,' from Time magazine. But most whistle-blowers live and die in anonymity."

"If you are looking at that record and advising [a whistle-blower], I would suggest seeking out a different venue," said Robert G. Vaughn, a law professor at American University who has written extensively about the Merit Systems Protection Board...

Through a series of precedent-setting rulings -- which are binding for the entire whistle-blower legal system -- the judges on the Federal Circuit Court have interpreted the law in recent years to the point where, as one investigator from the Office of Special Counsel put it, whistle-blowers must "utter magic words" to get protection.

Whistle-blowers are often employees who, during the course of their jobs, notice violations of rules or laws; before going public, they may casually mention the wrongdoing to a boss, or write a memo expressing the need to address a danger to public safety. Teresa Chambers is one example of a person who first raised concerns within her department, to no avail. But legal precedents created by the Federal Circuit Court have rigged the odds heavily against such employees.

One ruling determined that employees will not be protected if the nature of what they disclose is "debatable" by others. Another precedent says whistle-blowers won't be protected if the coverup they disclose is common knowledge in the office. Another precedent strips protections for whistle-blowers who complain only to their direct boss but to no one higher up the chain. Perhaps the most notorious precedent, known as "Huffman," says whistle-blowers will not be protected if it is their job to scrutinize safety issues or mismanagement, and they speak out about a coverup -- like meat inspectors who discover a coverup of tainted beef in the food supply, or law enforcement officials who speak out about dangers to public safety.

In other words, these legal precedents have made the law more beholden to murky workplace protocols than to the substance of the allegations, even when those allegations concern serious public safety issues and are proven to be true...

The new whistle-blower law making its way through Congress, called the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act of 2007, is no panacea. But crucially, say its backers, it would allow whistle-blowers to appeal their cases in other U.S. circuit courts, whose judges may have a different interpretation of the law than those on the Federal Circuit Court. And prior to that stage, if the Merit Systems Protections Board didn't act on a case in a timely manner, whistle-blowers would be able to get a jury trial at a federal district court. Moreover, the legislation would seek to include whistle-blowers in the national security realm, instead of having to rely on more secretive internal procedures at the FBI or other law enforcement and intelligence agencies for recourse.

"These changes would help whistle-blowers appeal negative decisions and hopefully increase the likelihood their complaints of retaliation would be heard," said Sen. Grassley, who is co-sponsoring the legislation.

Briefed on the results of the CIR/Salon investigation, Democratic Sen. Daniel Akaka of Hawaii, who introduced the legislation, said: "What these statistics show is a real need to strengthen protections for federal whistle-blowers and close loopholes in the law created by judicial decisions that are inconsistent with congressional intent. It is important for our laws to protect the rights of these individuals who come forward with legitimate claims."

But the Bush administration has vigorously opposed stronger whistle-blower protections. In a confidential e-mail from 2006, obtained by CIR and Salon, the White House registered strong objections to a congressional committee that was reviewing a similar law to protect whistle-blowers drawn up last year, saying the "excessively overbroad definition of whistleblowing ... forbids using any common sense." And President Bush has said he will veto the new legislation moving through Congress, saying in a two-page Statement of Administration Policy that the new law would "increase the number of frivolous complaints and waste resources" and could "compromise national security." ...