Chickens Coming Home To Roost
By Charles P. Pierce at 10:15am
<http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/trans-pacific-partnership-documents-released-120913>
"The Guardian" Falls Under the Shadow of McCarthyism
The persecution of the UK newspaper over the NSA espionage case shows
how the Cameron administration has moved away from moderation
By Walter Oppenheimer
December 09, 2013
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article37054.htm
--0--
<http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/shooting_the_messenger_20131208>
Shooting the Messenger
Posted on Dec 8, 2013
By Chris Hedges
There is a deeply misguided attempt to sacrifice Julian Assange,
WikiLeaks, Chelsea Manning and Jeremy Hammond on the altar of the
security and surveillance state to justify the leaks made by Edward
Snowden. It is argued that Snowden, in exposing the National Security
Agency's global spying operation, judiciously and carefully leaked
his information through the media, whereas WikiLeaks, Assange,
Manning and Hammond provided troves of raw material to the public
with no editing and little redaction and assessment. Thus, Snowden is
somehow legitimate while WikiLeaks, Assange, Manning and Hammond are
not.
"I have never understood it," said Michael Ratner, who is the U.S.
lawyer for WikiLeaks and Assange and who I spoke with Saturday in New
York City. "Why is Snowden looked at by some as the white hat while
Manning, Hammond, WikiLeaks and Julian Assange as black hats? One
explanation is that much of the mainstream media has tried to pin a
dumping charge on the latter group, as if somehow giving the public
and journalists open access to the raw documents is irresponsible and
not journalism. It sounds to me like the so-called Fourth Estate
protecting its jobs and 'legitimacy.' There is a need for both. All
of us should see the raw documents. We also need journalists to write
about them. Raw documents open to the world give journalists in other
countries the chance to examine them in their own context and write
from their perspectives. We are still seeing many stories based on
the WikiLeaks documents. We should not have it any other way. Perhaps
another factor may be that Snowden's revelations concern the
surveillance of us. The WikiLeaks/Assange/Manning disclosures tell us
more about our war crimes against others. And many Americans do not
seem to care about that."
The charge that the WikiLeaks dump was somehow more damaging to the
security and surveillance state because it was unedited, however, is
false. Snowden's revelations to the journalist Glenn Greenwald, which
are ongoing, have been far more devastating to the security apparatus
than the material provided by Manning. Among the four larger data
sets released by Manning-collectively 735,614 documents-only 223
documents were charged against the Army private first class under
"reason to believe such information could be used to the injury of
the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation," as
stated in the Espionage Act. Specifically there were 116 diplomatic
cables, 102 Army field reports from Iraq and Afghanistan, and five
Guantanamo Bay detainee assessment briefs, as the journalist Alexa
O'Brien has reported.
As O'Brien points out, many of the individual documents that resulted
in charges have not been identified and those that have been are
turning out to be very, very benign. For example, the government
prosecuted the soldier, then known as Bradley Manning, for three
detainee assessment briefs from Guantanamo Bay that were nothing more
than profiles of the "Tipton 3," British citizens who were held for
years without trial or charges before finally being released. The
information Manning made public was not top secret. There was much in
the WikiLeaks release that was already public or unclassified. All
the leaked material had been widely circulated to at least half a
million military and government officials as well as private
contractors. It had no serious impact on U.S. operations at home or
abroad. Even then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, in a letter to
the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, admitted that a
Department of Defense review of the leaked Manning documents had "not
revealed any sensitive intelligence source and methods." But what the
leaks did do was expose the deep cynicism of U.S. policy, especially
in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the plethora of government lies about
what was happening under U.S. occupation. The WikiLeaks material
documented several important war crimes that the government had
covered up. Manning wrote, correctly, in a letter last October to The
Guardian newspaper: " ... [T]he public cannot decide what actions and
policies are or are not justified if they don't even know the most
rudimentary details about them and their effects."
Manning, whose material was published by WikiLeaks as the Iraq War
Logs and the Afghan War Diary, was sentenced to 35 years in prison in
his court-martial at Fort Meade, Md., on 22 charges, including
espionage, exceeding authorized access, stealing U.S. government
property and wanton publication.
The Snowden case differs substantially from Manning's. The Snowden
leaks are top secret. They expose the National Security Agency's
wholesale abuse of privacy across the world and repeated lies told by
senior officials, including President Barack Obama, to cover up the
massive capture, monitoring and storage of electronic communications
of Americans and others. Snowden's revelations, unlike most of the
revelations from Manning and WikiLeaks, detail current, ongoing
operations. And these violations are being committed not only against
foreigners but against us. Snowden is hated as much as any of the
other leakers by the security and surveillance apparatus. He has
done, arguably, far more damage than WikiLeaks by exposing the
illegality of our surveillance state. It will not assist him if he or
his supporters try to parse his way out of his legal problem-some of
the charges against him are under the Espionage Act, which was used
to charge Manning-by attempting to differentiate himself from other
courageous whistle-blowers. The government propaganda machine,
working feverishly to discredit Snowden, as well as Greenwald, the
reporter who made public the Snowden documents, considers all leakers
and their allies to be traitors. It doesn't make distinctions among
them. And we shouldn't either.
The attempt to paint Snowden as prudent in his disclosures and
Manning, Assange, WikiLeaks and Hammond as reckless will not protect
Snowden. It myopically lends credibility to the relentless attacks by
the government against Manning, Assange, WikiLeaks and others, such
as Hammond, who has courageously and at great personal sacrifice
opened a window into the nefarious world of the power elite.
If the corporate state were legitimate it would be worthy of more
judicious and careful consideration. If the corporate state truly
cared about the common good it would have to be treated with more
deference. If the war on terror was, in actuality, a war to protect
us rather than an excuse to enslave us we could take as serious our
leaders' warnings about loss of secrecy. But our corporate overlords
are gangsters in pinstriped suits. They care nothing for the rule of
law. They have put into place the most sophisticated system of
internal security in human history. They have shredded our most basic
constitutional rights and civil liberties. They have turned the three
branches of government into wholly owned subsidiaries of the
corporate state. They have seized control of the systems of
information to saturate the airwaves with lies. They distort the law
and government regulations to advance their own pillage and
exploitation of us, as well as the ecosystem, which now totters
toward global collapse. They have arrogated the right to assassinate
U.S. citizens and to rain terror and death from the skies across the
planet even though we have not declared war on any state that is
being attacked by drone aircraft. There is no internal mechanism
left, whether the courts, electoral politics, the executive branch of
government or the traditional press, by which these corporate elites
can be reigned in or held accountable. The corporate state, in
theological terms, is about unchecked exploitation and death. And if
the corporate state is not vanquished, and vanquished soon, the human
species will not survive.
The most crucial point about the leaks from Assange, Manning, Hammond
and Snowden is that they expose egregious crimes by the state and a
concerted attempt by the government to mask and lie about its
criminal activity. We have a legitimate right to be informed about
these crimes. And those who live in foreign countries have a
legitimate right to know about the crimes we have carried out and are
carrying out against them. But we live in a state where the rule of
law no longer functions. We live in a state where those who commit
crimes are the persecutors and those who expose them are the
persecuted. This is the nature of all totalitarian states. Manning,
Assange, Snowden and Hammond, whatever their differences, function as
our prophets. They are the voices crying out in the wilderness. And
they are the ones the state intends to martyr. Just as the
differences between Jeremiah and Amos in the Hebrew Bible did not
diminish their courage and their voices, the differences among
Snowden, Manning, Assange and Hammond should not be permitted to
diminish the vital importance of all their acts.
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