Blow the Whistle *to* Shift Alliances (WikiLeaks' Manning -- Colleen Rowley, Robert Parry)
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Subject: Blow the Whistle *to* Shift Alliances (WikiLeaks' Manning --
Colleen Rowley, Robert Parry)
Date: Jun 17, 2010 5:24 AM
ARTICLE BELOW
==============================================
As it is more the WOTUS (World Outside
The United States) who is informed, leary
and weary of AmerIsraeli war crimes and
general incompetence, it - the torture of
whistleblowers - in the end doesn't matter
(for us).
The best way to be certain the WOTUS is
watching is to have your own whistleblower's
website. This gives one confidence that this
AmerIsraeli BS will not go on much further.
And there are, repeatedly, some events -
like Katrina and the Oil Leak, like LYMErix
and the failed HIV vaccines; like Abu Ghraib
and Guantanamo; like 911 and Niger Uranium
Letters; like threatening Congress with Civil
Chaos and Marshal Law and the Great Bankster
rip-off (the Global Financial Crisis caused by
*losing-Iraq-as-a-source-of-petrodollars*) -
which prove to the world that AmerIsrael has
nothing to offer.
Emergency Dys-Management, Health Un-Science, War
Crimes, Financial and *ALL* Regulatory Incompetence
(Anthony Fauci and the FDA, I mean in particular),
the inability to plan successfully for the puppet
government of Iraq (Chalabi), the shifting goals
of the Afghanistan war,...
The point, now, of whistleblowing is *to* *effect*
the shifting alliances of our former allies.
You blow the whistle for the specific purpose
of isolating AmerIsrael and hastening her demise.
KMDickson
http://www.actionlyme.org
http://www.relapsingfever.org
==================================================
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2010/061510.html
Almost four decades after Defense Department insider Daniel Ellsberg
leaked the Pentagon Papers – thus exposing the lies that led the
United States into the Vietnam War – another courageous “national
security leaker” has stepped forward and now is facing retaliation
similar to what the U.S. government tried to inflict on Ellsberg.
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Army Intelligence Specialist Bradley Manning is alleged to have turned
over a large volume of classified material about the Iraq and
Afghanistan wars to Wikileaks.org, including the recently posted U.S.
military video showing American helicopters gunning down two Reuters
journalists and about 10 other Iraqi men in 2007. Two children were
also injured.
The 22-year-old Manning was turned in by a convicted computer hacker
named Adrian Lamo, who befriended Manning over the Internet and then
betrayed him, supposedly out of concern that disclosure of the
classified material might put U.S. military personnel in danger.
Manning is now in U.S. military custody in Kuwait awaiting charges.
Though there are historic parallels between the actions of Manning
today and those of Ellsberg in 1971, a major difference is the
attitude of the mainstream U.S. news media, which then fought to
publish Ellsberg’s secret history but now is behaving more like what
former CIA analyst Ray McGovern calls the “fawning corporate media” or
FCM.
In the Ellsberg case, the first Pentagon Papers article was published
by the New York Times – and when President Richard Nixon blocked the
Times from printing other stories – the Washington Post and 17 other
newspapers picked up the torch and kept publishing articles based on
Ellsberg’s material until Nixon’s obstruction was made meaningless,
and ultimately was repudiated by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Today, the major response of the Times, Post and other tribunes of the
FCM has been to write articles disparaging Manning, while treating
Lamo as something of a patriotic hero.
The Washington Post depicted Manning as a troubled soldier, “slight”
of build, a loser who “had just gone through a breakup,” who had been
“demoted a rank in the Army after striking a fellow soldier,” and who
“felt he had no future.”
The Post even trivialized Manning’s motive for leaking the material,
suggesting that he was driven by his despair, thinking “that by
sharing classified information about his government’s foreign policy,
he might ‘actually change something.’”
Lamo also was quoted, speculating on what prompted Manning’s actions.
"I think it was a confluence of things -- being a thin, nerdy, geeky
type in an Army culture of machismo, of seeing injustice," Lamo told
the Post.
Saving Lives?
Meanwhile, the New York Times put Lamo’s motives in the most favorable
light.
“Mr. Lamo said he had contacted the Army about Specialist Manning’s
instant messages because he was worried that disclosure of the
information would put people’s lives in danger,” the Times reported.
“He said that Army investigators were particularly concerned about one
sensitive piece of information that Specialist Manning possessed that
Mr. Lamo would not discuss in more detail.”
The Times quoted Lamo as saying: “I thought to myself, ‘What if
somebody dies because this information is leaked?’ ”
According to the Times, Lamo elaborated on his moral dilemma in a
Twitter message. “I outed Brad Manning as an alleged leaker out of
duty,” Lamo said. “I would never (and have never) outed an Ordinary
Decent Criminal. There’s a difference.”
In other words, the Times and the Post – two heroes of the Ellsberg
case – seemed more interested in making the case against Manning (and
sticking up for his betrayer) than in taking the side of a
whistleblower who had put his future and his freedom on the line to
inform the American people how the Iraq (and Afghan) wars are being
fought.
There has been little suggestion by either the Post or the Times that
Manning had done a patriotic service by helping to expose wartime
wrongdoing.
The FCM also has shown little interest in the U.S. government’s
apparent attempts to hunt down Julian Assange, the Australian-born
founder of Wikileaks.org which decrypted the video of the Iraq
helicopter attack and posted it on the Internet under the title,
“Collateral Murder.”
The Pentagon (undoubtedly with the help of the CIA and the National
Security Agency) is reportedly conducting a manhunt for Assange, who
is known to travel around the globe staying at the homes of friends
and doing what he can to evade government notice.
The U.S. military has argued that videos like the Baghdad helicopter
attack and photographs of American troops mistreating Iraqi and Afghan
detainees must be kept secret to avoid enflaming local populations and
putting U.S. soldiers in greater danger. President Barack Obama
adopted that argument last year in overturning a court-ordered release
of a new batch of photos showing U.S. soldiers committing abuses.
However, there is nothing classically classifiable about the
helicopter videos or the other photographic evidence that has leaked
out, such as the sordid pictures of naked Iraqi men being humiliated
at Abu Ghraib prison. Under U.S. law, the government’s classification
powers are not to be used to conceal evidence of crimes.
‘Most Dangerous Man’
Yet, except for the changed role of the big newspapers, history does
appear to be repeating itself, with the emergence of another “Most
Dangerous Man,” the appellation that Nixon’s aide Henry Kissinger gave
to Ellsberg during the Pentagon Papers case.
If you haven’t, you need to quickly watch the Academy Award-nominated
documentary, The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and
the Pentagon Papers, to brush up on your history. You’ll quickly
understand how Manning’s recent arrest and the Pentagon’s hunt to
neutralize Assange jibe with the story of the copying and publishing
of the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War.
It should also be kept in mind that Ellsberg wasn’t the only
“dangerous man” who helped undo the culture of secrecy surrounding the
Nixon presidency. When Nixon responded to the Ellsberg case by
organizing a special “plumbers” unit, which then spied on the
Democrats at their Watergate headquarters, other whistleblowers, like
“Deep Throat” (FBI official Mark Felt), helped journalists expose the
wrongdoing.
Poor Nixon, in his vain attempt to keep control and power, he just had
to keep expanding his “enemy list.”
A very similar crisis of conscience exists now. Power politics, and
especially the politics of war, corrupt policymakers who deal with
intelligence and security issues – and that leads to secrecy expanding
exponentially to cover up bloody mistakes and shocking crimes.
For eight years, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney ran a highly
politicized administration that took these inherent problems to new
heights. And Obama, for many reasons, has thus far chosen to “look
forward, not backward,” and has thus fallen way short of his singular
campaign promise of CHANGE.
Despite his assurances of greater government openness, Obama has
surely not given support to government whistleblowers. Quite the
opposite, Obama has expanded on Bush’s methods, such as claims of the
“state secrets” defense to block court challenges to government
actions.
The Obama Administration has even instituted criminal prosecution of
government employees who blew the whistle on prior unlawful actions of
the Bush regime by daring to reveal, for instance, that Bush’s NSA was
warrantlessly monitoring American citizens.
The final step in the U.S. government's continuing foray to the “dark
side” has been Obama’s signing off on the proposed targeted
assassination of an American citizen – who had been linked to support
for Islamic terrorism – without any judicial due process.
Imperial President
Another major similarity between the Ellsberg era and today is that
the United States is again witnessing the accrual of excessive “War
Presidency” powers by the Executive Branch to the detriment and
weakening of the legislative and judicial branches, not to mention
significant damage to the legitimate function of the Fourth Estate,
the press.
Crude attempts to avoid accountability (as well as the constitutional
checks and balances) by shredding documents and other evidence to
prevent judicial accountability even seem to have succeeded. For
instance, CIA officials learned the lessons of the Abu Ghraib
photographic evidence by brazenly destroying 92 videotapes of
terrorism suspects being interrogated with waterboarding and other
brutal methods.
While no legal action has as yet been taken against the CIA officials
involved, government whistleblowers and even journalists who helped
expose Bush-era wrongdoing may not be so lucky. The Obama
Administration is said to be threatening to not only prosecute
government whistleblowers but to jail a New York Times reporter for
not giving up his sources for stories that revealed Bush’s illegal
warrantless monitoring.
No wonder many news executives privately admit that in the current
environment, they would never have the guts to publish something like
the “Pentagon Papers” even though the Supreme Court upheld their prior
brave actions in a landmark decision bolstering freedom of the press.
The current crippling of the U.S. domestic press makes it impossible
for a singular Ellsberg-type insider to rely on the press as a last
resort to get important information to the public. (Ellsberg had first
taken his documents to members of Congress responsible for Executive
Branch oversight, but they didn’t act.)
Given the fracturing and weakening of the U.S. press – its
transformation into the FCM – a government “whistleblower” is more
often like a tree falling in the forest with no one to hear it.
(Witness the BP disaster in the Gulf and the prior unheeded warnings
of whistleblowers who warned of safety problems and potential
spills.)
No ‘Right Way’
Having been one of the very few government officials publicly
identified in a positive way for “whistleblowing,” Coleen Rowley has
often been asked if there’s a “right way” to do it and also “what
should and can a loyal and patriotic government employee who has sworn
to uphold the Constitution do after witnessing such fraud, waste,
abuse, illegality, or a serious public safety issue?”
The hard truth is that there are no good answers. There is no
effective whistleblower protection in attempting to disclose within
the chain of command and/or to warn one’s Inspector General. (Even
some of the IGs who stood up and tried to investigate have been
retaliated against or stifled.)
There is no protection for whistleblowers as well from the Office of
Special Counsel. (Indeed Bush’s former Director of the Office of
Special Counsel himself has faced accusations of ethical breaches.)
In 2006, the Supreme Court ruled that there is no protection under the
First Amendment for government employees making disclosures even if
they are privy to and blow the whistle on outright illegal activity.
[Garcetti v Ceballos—more here.]
The government insider who witnesses fraud, waste, abuse, illegality
or a risk of serious public safety faces certain retaliation or firing
if he attempts to disclose internally. Moreover, his/her warnings will
undoubtedly be swept under the rug.
It’s easy therefore to argue that less-compromised international press
outlets and Web sites, like Wikileaks.org, may offer a better hope for
getting out the truth. As Wikileaks.org’s founder Julian Assange has
said about the possibility of more news sites releasing sensitive
information: “Courage is contagious.”
If the story of the Pentagon Papers is again playing out, the attempt
to punish Manning and neutralize Wikileaks.org could be of similar
magnitude to the effort employed against Ellsberg and the newspapers
that received his photocopied documents. (The criminal case against
Ellsberg ultimately collapsed after the disclosure of Nixon's illegal
spying operations, including a break-in at the office of Ellsberg's
psychiatrist.)
There is one possible answer, however. Every decent reporter and
journalist as well as every honest government employee and citizen who
cares about democracy and freedom of the press could unite to do the
Paul Revere thing and sound the alarm.
The little bit of integrity and conscience left in the mainstream
media needs to be immediately reminded of the Nixon-Watergate-Pentagon
Papers history and awakened to the dangerous consequences that
otherwise flow from “war empowered” Presidents, from their well-oiled
military machine and covert intelligence apparatus.
The Fourth Estate needs to go back to work battling the undue secrecy
and covert perception management which will ultimately be used against
them all and the U.S. citizenry. (Those who would have you believe
that what you don’t know can’t hurt you must like the BP oil
executives downplaying their oil spill.)
It’s quite possible that the future of accountable government is
teetering on the brink with the arrest of the 22-year-old Army
intelligence specialist and the fugitive manhunt for the WikiLeaks
founder. History does repeat itself, but not necessarily with the same
positive ending. This time, it could go either way.
The choice now is whether to move toward more militarism (and the
secrecy that protects it) or toward more openness and honesty – and
possibly a more democratic future.
Coleen Rowley is a former FBI Agent. She holds a law degree, and
served in Minneapolis as "Chief Division Counsel," a position which
included oversight of Freedom of Information, as well as providing
regular legal and ethics training to FBI Agents. In 2002, Coleen
brought some of the pre 9/11 lapses to light and testified to the
Senate Judiciary Committee about some of the endemic problems facing
the FBI and the intelligence community. Rowley's memo to FBI Director
Robert Mueller in connection with the Joint Intelligence Committee's
Inquiry led to a two-year-long Department of Justice Inspector General
investigation. Today, as a private citizen, she is active in civil
liberties, and peace and justice issues.
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for
the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The
Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his
sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two
previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from
Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press &
'Project Truth' are also available there. Or go to Amazon.com.
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