The Loneliness and Courage of Thomas Drake: A Whistleblower’s Journey June 6, 2011
Posted by rogerhollander in Civil Liberties, Criminal Justice, Democracy.Tags: constitution, democracy, dissent, espionage act, leaks, nsa, robert shetterly, roger hollander, secrecy, thomas drake, transparency, whistle blower, whistleblower
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“As a student of history and politics, I firmly believe that we have reached a breaking point in this country, when the government violates and erodes our very privacy and precious freedoms in the name of national security and then hides it behind the convenient label of secrecy.
This is not the America I took an oath to support and defend in my career. This is not the America I learned about while growing up in Texas and Vermont. This is not the America we are supposed to be.” – Thomas Drake, from his acceptance speech of the 2011 Ridenhour Prize for Truth–Telling
Thomas Drake tried to do everything right. He thought that the road he was on of government service was the same road that was consistent with his values.
(Portrait of Thomas Drake by Robert Shetterly. All rights reserved. Courtesy of the artist.)
Immediately after his first day on the job at the National Security Agency — September 11, 2001 — he began to see those roads diverge. For years he tried to straddle them — one foot on the road of loyalty to the NSA and procedural complaint, one foot on the road consistent with his oath to uphold the Constitution. Finally he had to choose or be ethically dismembered. He chose to blow the whistle on waste, fraud, and patent illegality at the NSA. He chose consistency with his ethical sense of Constitutional duty. He knew that illegal wiretaps and the obsessive secrecy to hide them was inconsistent with democracy and the rule of law.
Thomas Drake is being charged under the Espionage Act, section 793(e), only the fourth American ever. The first was Daniel Ellsberg. He’s been charged with mishandling classified information. Not with spying. His crime was to tell the truth about illegality and corruption. “This has become the specter of a truly Orwellian world,” Drake said in his Ridenhour speech, “where… whistleblowing is now equated with spying. Dissent has become the mark of a traitor. Truth is equivalent to treason and speaking truth to power makes one an enemy of the state. And yet who is really the enemy here?”
Jesselyn Radack, a former whistleblower while in the ethics division of the Department of Justice, who is now a lawyer for the Government Accountability Project defending whistleblowers, said this while introducing Tom at the Ridenhour ceremony:
“This Administration has brought more ‘leak’ prosecutions than all previous presidential administrations combined. When first elected, President Obama acknowledged that often the best source of information about government wrongdoing is an employee committed to public integrity and willing to speak out. He called such acts courageous and patriotic. So it is especially hypocritical to be prosecuting public servants under the Espionage Act.
Painting whistleblowers as spies serves another ugly purpose: alienating these brave employees from their natural allies in the legal, civil rights and civil liberties community. It is rank hypocrisy for our government—preaching openness and transparency—to criminalize whistleblowing that exposes embarrassing or illegal government conduct. This Administration—whose mantra is to ‘look forward, not backward’—gives war crimes, torture and warrantless wiretapping a pass . . . but is going after the whistleblowers who exposed that misconduct.
The prosecution of Tom Drake is the most severe form of whistleblower retaliation I have ever seen and it sends a chilling message. It is tragic when serving your country gets you prosecuted under the Espionage Act, and when telling the truth gets you charged with ‘making false statements.’ “
We have all cheered the mass demonstrations for justice, human rights and democracy whether in Tunisia, Yemen, Syria or Madison. But the ordeal of the whistleblower is not part of a collective movement. It’s the isolated courage of a gang of one. And the fate of democracy hangs on the success of that one person as much as it does on the success of a mass protest — except that the whistleblower’s conditon is a lot more lonely. When Tom Drake’s trial opens in Baltimore on June 13th, he faces 35 years in prison.
I have just finished painting Tom Drake’s portrait as part of my Americans Who Tell the Truth project. Being with him, being in the presence of his integrity and determination, being able to witness the suffering our government has put him through, was extraordinary. I tried to portray those qualities in the painting. I placed him in the corner of the composition to suggest his isolation and to convey a feeling of his looking back at America in disbelief — and defiance. His defiance is that he adhers to the truth of this country’s ideals even if the country has betrayed and abandoned them.
Thomas Drake needs our support as much as Bradley Manning needs it.
You can support his cause by signing the Change.org petiton here.
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Robert Shetterly [send him mail] is a writer and artist who lives in Brooksville, Maine. He is the author of Americans Who Tell the Truth. See his website.
Why I’m Posting Bail Money for Julian Assange December 14, 2010
Posted by rogerhollander in 9/11, Media.Tags: 9/11, espionage act, journalism, julian assange, leaks, Media, michael moore, roger hollander, terrorism, whistle blower, wikileaks
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Yesterday, in the Westminster Magistrates Court in London, the lawyers for WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange presented to the judge a document from me stating that I have put up $20,000 of my own money to help bail Mr. Assange out of jail.
Furthermore, I am publicly offering the assistance of my website, my servers, my domain names and anything else I can do to keep WikiLeaks alive and thriving as it continues its work to expose the crimes that were concocted in secret and carried out in our name and with our tax dollars.
We were taken to war in Iraq on a lie. Hundreds of thousands are now dead. Just imagine if the men who planned this war crime back in 2002 had had a WikiLeaks to deal with. They might not have been able to pull it off. The only reason they thought they could get away with it was because they had a guaranteed cloak of secrecy. That guarantee has now been ripped from them, and I hope they are never able to operate in secret again.
So why is WikiLeaks, after performing such an important public service, under such vicious attack? Because they have outed and embarrassed those who have covered up the truth. The assault on them has been over the top:
**Sen. Joe Lieberman says WikiLeaks “has violated the Espionage Act.”
**The New Yorker‘s George Packer calls Assange “super-secretive, thin-skinned, [and] megalomaniacal.”
**Sarah Palin claims he’s “an anti-American operative with blood on his hands” whom we should pursue “with the same urgency we pursue al Qaeda and Taliban leaders.”
**Democrat Bob Beckel (Walter Mondale’s 1984 campaign manager) said about Assange on Fox: “A dead man can’t leak stuff … there’s only one way to do it: illegally shoot the son of a bitch.”
**Republican Mary Matalin says “he’s a psychopath, a sociopath … He’s a terrorist.”
**Rep. Peter A. King calls WikiLeaks a “terrorist organization.”
And indeed they are! They exist to terrorize the liars and warmongers who have brought ruin to our nation and to others. Perhaps the next war won’t be so easy because the tables have been turned — and now it’s Big Brother who’s being watched … by us!
WikiLeaks deserves our thanks for shining a huge spotlight on all this. But some in the corporate-owned press have dismissed the importance of WikiLeaks (“they’ve released little that’s new!”) or have painted them as simple anarchists (“WikiLeaks just releases everything without any editorial control!”). WikiLeaks exists, in part, because the mainstream media has failed to live up to its responsibility. The corporate owners have decimated newsrooms, making it impossible for good journalists to do their job. There’s no time or money anymore for investigative journalism. Simply put, investors don’t want those stories exposed. They like their secrets kept … as secrets.
I ask you to imagine how much different our world would be if WikiLeaks had existed 10 years ago. Take a look at this photo. That’s Mr. Bush about to be handed a “secret” document on August 6th, 2001. Its heading read: “Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US.” And on those pages it said the FBI had discovered “patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings.” Mr. Bush decided to ignore it and went fishing for the next four weeks.
But if that document had been leaked, how would you or I have reacted? What would Congress or the FAA have done? Was there not a greater chance that someone, somewhere would have done something if all of us knew about bin Laden’s impending attack using hijacked planes?
But back then only a few people had access to that document. Because the secret was kept, a flight school instructor in San Diego who noticed that two Saudi students took no interest in takeoffs or landings, did nothing. Had he read about the bin Laden threat in the paper, might he have called the FBI? (Please read this essay by former FBI Agent Coleen Rowley, Time’s 2002 co-Person of the Year, about her belief that had WikiLeaks been around in 2001, 9/11 might have been prevented.)
Or what if the public in 2003 had been able to read “secret” memos from Dick Cheney as he pressured the CIA to give him the “facts” he wanted in order to build his false case for war? If a WikiLeaks had revealed at that time that there were, in fact, no weapons of mass destruction, do you think that the war would have been launched — or rather, wouldn’t there have been calls for Cheney’s arrest?
Openness, transparency — these are among the few weapons the citizenry has to protect itself from the powerful and the corrupt. What if within days of August 4th, 1964 — after the Pentagon had made up the lie that our ship was attacked by the North Vietnamese in the Gulf of Tonkin — there had been a WikiLeaks to tell the American people that the whole thing was made up? I guess 58,000 of our soldiers (and 2 million Vietnamese) might be alive today.
Instead, secrets killed them.
For those of you who think it’s wrong to support Julian Assange because of the sexual assault allegations he’s being held for, all I ask is that you not be naive about how the government works when it decides to go after its prey. Please — never, ever believe the “official story.” And regardless of Assange’s guilt or innocence (see the strange nature of the allegations here), this man has the right to have bail posted and to defend himself. I have joined with filmmakers Ken Loach and John Pilger and writer Jemima Khan in putting up the bail money — and we hope the judge will accept this and grant his release today.
Might WikiLeaks cause some unintended harm to diplomatic negotiations and U.S. interests around the world? Perhaps. But that’s the price you pay when you and your government take us into a war based on a lie. Your punishment for misbehaving is that someone has to turn on all the lights in the room so that we can see what you’re up to. You simply can’t be trusted. So every cable, every email you write is now fair game. Sorry, but you brought this upon yourself. No one can hide from the truth now. No one can plot the next Big Lie if they know that they might be exposed.
And that is the best thing that WikiLeaks has done. WikiLeaks, God bless them, will save lives as a result of their actions. And any of you who join me in supporting them are committing a true act of patriotism. Period.
I stand today in absentia with Julian Assange in London and I ask the judge to grant him his release. I am willing to guarantee his return to court with the bail money I have wired to said court. I will not allow this injustice to continue unchallenged.
P.S. You can read the statement I filed today in the London court here.
P.P.S. If you’re reading this in London, please go support Julian Assange and WikiLeaks at a demonstration at 1 PM today, Tuesday the 14th, in front of the Westminster court.
Moore, Glover, Stone, Greenwald, Wolf, Ellsberg Urge Correa to Grant Asylum to Assange June 24, 2012
Posted by rogerhollander in Civil Liberties, Criminal Justice.Tags: assange asylum, bradley manning, civil liberties, Criminal Justice, daniel ellsberg, death penalty, ecuador asylum, eric holder, espionage act, julian assange, justice department, michael moore, naomi wolf, oliver stone, press freedom, Rafael Correa, roger hollander, torture, whistle blower, wikileaks
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Roger’s note: It is hard to believe that Correa will not come under tremendous pressure from the US government not to grant asylum to Assange. As far as I can see the most leverage the US will have has to do with trade. At present the US grants Ecuador privileged status with regards to export tariffs. Should the US withdraw this privilege, it will have an impact of Ecuadorian exporters, how much I am not sure. On other hand, accepting Assange is likely to be popular in Ecuador and internationally and would enhance Correa’s international profile. And Correa can not be ignorant of the fact that Ecuador may very well be Assange’s last chance to avoid US “justice.” Even if Assange somehow makes it to Ecuador, given the obsession of Obama, Holder, Congressional leaders, and — last but not least — the CIA, I doubt if the hunt will be over. All Obama has to do is brand him as terrorist, and the US — which respects no national boundary or sovereignty — will have the “legal” pretext to nab or murder him.
opednews.com, June 24, 2012
By Michael Moore, Glenn Greenwald, Chris Hedges, Naomi Wolf, et al, Just Foreign Policy
The following letter has been circulated mostly in the United States by Just Foreign Policy. It will be hand-delivered to the Embassy of Ecuador in London by Just Foreign Policy Policy Director Robert Naiman on Monday, June 25.
We will also hand-deliver the online petition circulated by Just Foreign Policy, which has now been signed by more than 4,000 people. That petition — which you can still sign — is here:
June 25, 2012
Dear President Correa,
We are writing to urge you to grant political asylum to Julian Assange.
As you know, British courts recently struck down Mr. Assange’s appeal against extradition to Sweden, where he is not wanted on criminal charges, but merely for questioning. Mr. Assange has repeatedly made clear he is willing to answer questions relating to accusations against him, but in the United Kingdom. But the Swedish government insists that he be brought to Sweden for questioning. This by itself, as Swedish legal expert and former Chief District Prosecutor for Stockholm Sven-Erik Alhem testified, is “unreasonable and unprofessional, as well as unfair and disproportionate.”
We believe Mr. Assange has good reason to fear extradition to Sweden, as there is a strong likelihood that once in Sweden, he would be imprisoned, and then likely extradited to the United States.
As U.S. legal expert and commentator Glenn Greenwald recently noted, were Assange to be charged in Sweden, he would be imprisoned under “very oppressive conditions, where he could be held incommunicado,” rather than released on bail. Pre-trial hearings for such a case in Sweden are held in secret, and so the media and wider public, Greenwald notes, would not know how the judicial decisions against Mr. Assange would be made and what information would be considered.
The Washington Post has reported that the U.S. Justice Department and Pentagon conducted a criminal investigation into “whether WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange violated criminal laws in the group’s release of government documents, including possible charges under the Espionage Act.” Many fear, based on documents released by Wikileaks, that the U.S. government has already prepared an indictment and is waiting for the opportunity t o extradite Assange from Sweden.
The U.S. Justice Department has compelled other members of Wikileaks to testify before a grand jury in order to determine what charges might be brought against Mr. Assange. The U.S. government has made clear its open hostility to Wikileaks, with high-level officials even referring to Mr. Assange as a “high-tech terrorist,” and seeking access to the Twitter account of Icelandic legislator Birgitta Jónsdóttir due to her past ties to Wikileaks.
Were he charged, and found guilty under the Espionage Act, Assange could face the death penalty.
Prior to that, the case of Pfc. Bradley Manning, the U.S. soldier accused of providing U.S. government documents to Wikileaks, provides an illustration of the treatment that Assange might expect while in custody. Manning has been subjected to repeated and prolonged solitary confinement, harassment by guards, and humiliating treatment such as being forced to strip naked and stand at attention outside his cell. These are additional reasons that your government should grant Mr. Assange political asylum.
We also call on you to grant Mr. Assange political asylum because the “crime” that he has committed is that of practicing journalism. He has revealed important crimes against humanity committed by the U.S. government, most notably in releasing video footage from an Apache helicopter of a 2007 incident in which the U.S. military appears to have deliberately killed civilians, including two Reuters employees. Wikileaks’ release of thousands of U.S. State Department cables revealed important cases of U.S. officials acting to undermine democracy and human rights around the world.
Because this is a clear case of an attack on press freedom and on the public’s right to know important truths about U.S. foreign policy, and because the threat to his health and well-being is serious, we urge you to grant Mr. Assange political asylum.
Thank you for your consideration of our request.
The world’s number one fear regarding Sweden’s attempt to extradite Julian Assange is that Sweden is simply acting as an agent of the United States. In fact the paranoia regarding our government’s desire to silence Assange is so strong that one Australian journalist suggested that Assange might be assassinated by a high power rifle as he leaves the Ecuadoran embassy or die in a Swedish jail incident reminiscent of how Stephen Biko was killed in South Africa. The Administration better pray that Assange is alive in November as voters would likely hold any death of Assange against Barack Obama when the polls open.
The ludicrous extradition and Obama’s obsession with WikiLeaks and Assange play well into these fears. What country (other than Sweden in the Assange case) extradites someone over a broken condom? England, instead of exercising common sense, is willing to allow extradition, but England has a history of going to war and committing crimes against humanity on behalf of the United States. Neither England nor Sweden has a death penalty, but acting as agents of the United States, they could put an honest, innocent man to death simply by extraditing him to the United States.
As Assange is not an American and not physically in the United States, a round-about method is needed for the U.S. Government to apprehend him for extinction. Hence the entrance of Sweden and a claim by a female CIA agent that a condom broke while Assange was having sex with her. This little rouse is enough to launch a hero of the people into a nightmare that could lead to the American death chambers.
Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder can play all the games they want, but they’ve already gone public with enough information to verify all of Julian Assange’s claims that the Sweden nonsense is nothing more than a rouse for the real criminal prosecution awaiting Assange in the United States for going public with evidence of U.S. Government corruption in its prosecution of the war in Afghanistan and elsewhere. The FBI’s WikiLeaks probe commenced with the arrest of Private Manning in May 2010 after he had allegedly confessed to former computer hacker turned FBI informant Adrian Lamo that he had leaked classified documents.
On November 29, 2010, US Attorney-General Eric Holder told a Washington press conference that the Justice Department was pursuing “an active, ongoing criminal investigation” into WikiLeaks. This was the day after WikiLeaks and its media partners began releasing more than 250,000 State Department cables, showing wrongdoing by the U.S. Government.
Holder was urged to prosecute Assange under the Espionage Act of 1917 in a December 2, 2010, letter from PATRIOT Act and Iraq War proponent Dianne Feinstein (Chairwoman, U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee) and Christopher Bond (Deputy Chairman of said committee). The Espionage Act of 1917 was used to round up thousands of American patriots for their opposition to World War I in a witch hunt that was worse than the one engaged in by Joe McCarthy. Now they expected Holder to use his authority as Attorney General to create a new witch hunt aimed at suppressing international opposition to the current undeclared wars in the Middle East.
It is known that a grand jury was convened in Alexandra Virginia on or before December 22, 2010 and continuing thereafter for the purpose of prosecuting Julian Assange. Therefore, any pretense that the United States is not targeting Assange for a possible life or death sentence is a flat out lie that is disrespectful to the citizens of the United States.
Guilt or innocence has little to do with whether a person is executed in the United States. It was universally known that Troy Davis was innocent when he was executed with the acquiescence of President Barack Obama. Across America and around the world, people offered up their own lives in exchange for saving an innocent Troy Davis. Following the example of Spartacus, people everywhere took up the slogan, “I am Troy Davis.” Showing that economics matters more than innocence, Obama intervened for economic reasons on behalf of a likely-guilty death row convict the day after Davis was killed.
Executing likely innocents has had a long tradition in the United States. Nomination for a Nobel Peace Prize and saving potentially thousands of lives in Los Angeles was not enough to prevent the execution of Stan “Tookie” Williams. Condemnation from the Queen of England and even Nikita Khrushchev was not enough to save Caryl Chessman. Millions of German death camp victims might have been saved if the United States Government had not stopped Chessman from succeeding in his attempt to assassinate Adolph Hitler prior to Chessman’s own execution by the State of California for an act Chessman probably did not commit and that was no longer even chargeable as a crime, not long after the erroneous conviction.
From using its Wall Street connections in preventing donations to WikiLeaks to arresting and torturing American military hero Bradley Manning on suspicion Manning leaked photos Americans NEEDED TO SEE, Eric Holder and the U.S. Government have made it clear they have ZERO TOLERANCE FOR TRUTH.
So with truth and justice still hanging in the balance, Ecuador may be the last hope of those who do not want truth to die. People around the world are praying that President Correa will do the right thing and take a stand for truth and freedom. Interestingly, it has been pointed out that the CIA has operatives in Ecuador and it may not be the perfect place for a CIA target to hang out. Yet, it is the only country offering to stand up for freedom of the press in this instance.
Ecuador has long opposed the death penalty and could really show its opposition to the death penalty through granting Assange asylum or going further and making him a diplomat and providing him with full immunity. Either would allow Assange to continue his work in ferreting out truths that the U.S. Government would rather keep hidden. If Obama ever decides to Hussein or Gadhafi Correa, Correa’s best hope for survival would be an informed public. Without safety for the Julian Assanges of the world, the U.S. is free to plunder Ecuador or other vulnerable countries at will.
The Wall Street executives, who think they own America, and the tyrants, who enforce the will of these spoiled rich elitists, should learn from history. They should read A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens and ponder whether three hundred million Americans are ready to listen to the words of Thomas Jefferson about patriots and tyrants. People and children are dying of starvation in the streets of America. Hard workers have lost their homes to Wall Street greed. The innocent are being maced and clubbed at their schools and arrested for standing on public property. Cities are enacting ordinances to prevent good Samaritans from feeding the homeless (like similar “Don’t feed the animals” ordinances). Revolution is in the air and it would not surprise me if any action taken against Assange were the catalyst. If Obama has any actual ability to govern and has not completely lost touch with reality, he should end all attempts to persecute Julian Assange and welcome any assistance from Ecuador in protecting this human symbol of everything for which America once stood.
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