Tag Archives: Whistleblowers

Killing the First Amendment, by Philip Giraldi

Posted on January 4, 2022 | Leave a comment

Governments hate free expression, especially when the expression consists of exposing governments’ depredations. From Philip Giraldi at unz.com:

When one travels nearly anywhere in Europe where Medieval government centers, including courts, remain, one will frequently see the personification of a sometimes blindfolded woman representing Justice holding a sword in one hand and a scale or a scroll in the other. As soon as human beings came together to form governments, one of the first demands has always for justice that is accessible to all and that is readily understood. That is not to say that governments have not corrupted the mechanisms that were set up to deliver justice to serve their own parochial ends, but it does demonstrate that the human desire for fair treatment under law has been strong for thousands of years.

Now, it seems, those who seek justice often find that justice is denied through various artifices that have been contrived to give the government greater control over what constitutes criminal behavior. It is an emphasis on punishment of those the government has decided to make an example of. One only has to look at the treatment of whistleblowers by the US government, most notably the cases of CIA veterans Jeffrey Sterling and John Kiriakou, where punishment was the objective to discourage anyone from exposing criminal behavior by those in charge.

Even though in theory whistleblowers are protected because they have come forward to reveal illegal activity by the government, in practice that protection is often notional. And then there are those instances where justice is deliberately perverted, as in the current case of Julian Assange, whom the United States government would like to extradite so he can be tried under the Espionage Act of 1917. But the actual charges against Assange are where things get murky. Assange is accused of having collaborated with Chelsea Manning to steal and publish classified material relating to clear evidence that atrocities were carried out by the US military in Iraq and then covered up. And perhaps more to the point in political terms, Assange is also being accused of having participated in the theft of the Hillary Clinton emails in 2016. It should be pointed out that the Federal government has not provided any actual evidence of either alleged crime.

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Pfizer Whistleblower Sinks Vaccine Trial Integrity, by Joseph Mercola

Posted on November 16, 2021 | Leave a comment

What’s especially galling is that Pfizer is legally immune from lawsuits over its vaccines, and of course, so too are the regulatory agencies. From Joseph Mercola at lewrockwell.com:

Yet again, mainstream media have completely ignored what should have been front-page news. According to a whistleblower who worked on Pfizer’s Phase 3 COVID jab trial in the fall of 2020, data were falsified, patients were unblinded, the company hired poorly trained people to administer the injections, and follow-up on reported side effects lagged way behind.

What makes the media’s silence all the more remarkable is that this revelation was published in The British Medical Journal. Paul Thacker, investigative journalist for The BMJ, writes in his November 2, 2021, report:1

“Revelations of poor practices at a contract research company helping to carry out Pfizer’s pivotal covid-19 vaccine trial raise questions about data integrity and regulatory oversight …

[F]or researchers who were testing Pfizer’s vaccine at several sites in Texas during that autumn, speed may have come at the cost of data integrity and patient safety … Staff who conducted quality control checks were overwhelmed by the volume of problems they were finding.”

As noted by Bill Bruckner for transparimed.org:2

“Editors’ widespread failure to pick up on the story is deeply problematic. First and foremost, it lets the U.S. Food and Drug Administration off the hook for what appear to be severe lapses in regulatory oversight over this trial … Where are the media outlets questioning the FDA about its oversight processes? Where are the politicians calling for an enquiry? …

Second, it lets Pfizer off the hook for apparently failing to adequately oversee the operations of its subcontractor … Where are the media outlets questioning Pfizer about its oversight and quality assurance processes? …

Third, it undermines confidence in democratic institutions and public health bodies because it gives citizens … the impression that mainstream media are deliberately ignoring a big story in order to avoid fueling vaccine hesitancy.”

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Assange: A Threat to War Itself, by Robert C. Koehler

Posted on October 25, 2021 | Leave a comment

It makes it a lot easier to wage war if only a small segment of the population knows what you’re doing. That was the lesson the US military and intelligence learned from Vietnam. WikiLeaks’ exposures undermined the secrecy. From Robert C. Koehler at consortiumnews.com:

By pulling the realities of war out of its carefully crafted public context, the WikiLeaks founder became a danger to the country’s political status quo, writes Robert Koehler.

The Pentagon’s offer of “condolence money” to the relatives of the 10 people (seven of them children) who were killed in the final U.S. drone strike in Afghanistan— originally declared righteous and necessary — bears a troubling connection to the government’s ongoing efforts to get its hands on WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and punish him for exposing the inconvenient truth of war.

You know, the “classified” stuff — like Apache helicopter crewmen laughing after they killed a bunch of men on a street in Baghdad in 2007 (“Oh yeah, look at those dead bastards”) and then smirked some more after killing the ones who started picking up the bodies, in the process also injuring several children who were in the van they just blasted. This is not stuff the American public needs to know about!

At the time of the release of that particular video, in 2010, then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates decried the fact that the public was seeing a fragment of the war on terror “out of context.”And, indeed, he was right. As I later wrote:

“The Department of Defense is supposed to have total control over context; on the home front, war is 100 percent public relations. The public’s role is to be spectators, consumers of orchestrated news; they can watch smart bombs dropped from on high and be told that this is protecting them from terrorism and spreading democracy. That’s context.”

Assange’s crime was collaborating with whistleblowers to expose hidden data and disrupt that context. Over the course of a decade, WikiLeaks published some 10 million secret documents, more than the rest of the world’s media combined, according to a Progressive International video.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Crime, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, History, Media, Morality, Politics, Propaganda, War

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For Every Whistleblower They Make An Example Of, They Prevent A Thousand More, by Caitlin Johnstone

Posted on July 28, 2021 | Leave a comment

The way those who tell the truth about the government are treated by the government, you’re not going to have a long line of people signing up for whistleblower positions. From Caitlin Johnstone at caitlinjohnstone.com:

Whistleblower Daniel Hale has been sentenced to nearly four years in prison after pleading guilty to leaking secret government information about America’s psychopathic civilian-slaughtering drone assassination program.

The sentence was much harsher than Hale’s defense requested but not nearly as harsh as US prosecutors pushed for, arguing that longer prison sentences are necessary for deterring whistleblowing in the US intelligence cartel.

The Dissenter’s Kevin Gosztola reports:

Despite the fact that Hale pled guilty on March 31 to one of the five Espionage Act offenses he faced, prosecutors remained spiteful and unwilling to support anything less than a “significant sentence” to “deter” government employees or contractors from “using positions in the intelligence community for self-aggrandizement.”

In other words, if you tell the public the truth about your government’s crimes, you will be made an example of so nobody else tries to do that. And then for that brave and selfless act, you’ll be smeared as doing it for “self-aggrandizement”.

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As Drone Whistleblower Daniel Hale Pleads Guilty, Advocates Warn of ‘Profound Threat’ to Free Press, by Brett Wilkins

Posted on April 5, 2021 | Leave a comment

Biden discontinues Trump’s good policies, like on immigration and taxation, and continues his terrible policies, like on Espionage Act prosecutions of whistleblowers who disclose government misdeeds. From Brett Wilkins at commondreams.org:

“Using the Espionage Act in this way to prosecute journalists’ sources as spies chills newsgathering and discourages sources from coming forward with information in the public interest.”

Drone whistleblower Daniel Hale (R) stands next to CodePink co-founder Medea Benjamin in this undated photo. (Photo:Democracy Now!)

Drone whistleblower Daniel Hale (R) stands next to CodePink co-founder Medea Benjamin outside the White House in Washintgon, D.C. in this undated photo. (Photo:Democracy Now!) 

Press freedom, peace, and human rights advocates are rallying behind Daniel Hale, the former intelligence analyst who blew the whistle on the U.S. government’s drone assassination program, and who pleaded guilty Wednesday in federal court to violating the Espionage Act.

The Washington Post reports Hale, who was set to go on trial next week, pleaded guilty to a single count of violating the 1917 law that has been used to target whistleblowers including Julian Assange, John Kiriakou, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, Jeffrey Sterling, Reality Winner, and others. 

Hale was charged in 2019 during the Trump administration after he leaked classified information on the U.S. government’s targeted assassination program to a reporter, who according to court documents, matches the description of The Intercept founding editor Jeremy Scahill. He is the first person to face sentencing for an Espionage Act offense during the admnistration of President Joe Biden. 

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Proposed Reform to US Espionage Act Would Create Public Interest Defense, by Kevin Gosztola

Posted on October 13, 2020 | Leave a comment

If this legislation was passed (it won’t be), it would be the highlight of Tulsi Gabbard’s career. From Kevin Gosztola at consoriumnews.com:

Defendants would be able to testify about their reason for engaging in the prohibited conduct, Kevin Gosztola reports. 

U.S. Representative Tulsi Gabbard in 2019. (Gage Skidmore, Flickr)

Legislation proposed in Congress would amend the United States Espionage Act and create a public interest defense for those prosecuted under the law.

“A defendant charged with an offense under section 793 or 798 [in the U.S. legal code] shall be permitted to testify about their purpose for engaging in the prohibited conduct,” according to a draft of the bill Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard introduced.

Such a reform would make it possible for whistleblowers like Edward Snowden, Reality Winner, Terry Albury and Daniel Hale to inform the public why they disclosed information without authorization to the press.

The legislation called the Protect Brave Whistleblowers Act is supported by Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg.

“If this long-overdue revision of the 1917 Espionage Act had been law half a century ago, I myself could have had a fair trial for releasing the Pentagon Papers in 1971: justice under law unavailable to me and to every other national security whistleblower indicted and prosecuted since then,” Ellsberg declared.

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Exclusive: New leaks shatter OPCW’s attacks on Douma whistleblowers, by Aaron Maté

Posted on February 13, 2020 | Leave a comment

This may stand as the definitive article on the OPCW-Douma scandal. From Aaron Maté at thegrayzone.com:

Facing accusations that it issued a doctored report alleging a chemical attack in Syria, the OPCW has released an inquiry attacking two whistleblowers as rogue actors. Leaked documents obtained by The Grayzone reveal serious distortions in the OPCW inquiry as well as a campaign of intimidation against internal dissenters.

For the past year, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) has been roiled by allegations that it manipulated an investigation to falsely accuse the Syrian government of a chemical weapons attack. An OPCW report released in March 2019 lent credence to claims by Islamist militants and Western governments that the Syrian military killed around 40 civilians with toxic gas in the city of Douma in April 2018. The accusation against Damascus led to US-led military strikes on Syrian government sites that same month.

But leaked internal documents published by Wikileaks show that OPCW inspectors who deployed to Douma rejected the official story, and complained that higher-level officials excluded them from the post-mission process, distorted key evidence, and ignored their findings.

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The American Love Affair With War, by Donald Jeffries

Posted on January 9, 2020 | Leave a comment

Aside from the Vietnam War, since WWII Americans have for the most part embraced US wars and the military-industrial-intelligence complex. From Donald Jeffries at lewrockwell.com:

Donald Trump’s recent assassination of Iranian Maj. General Qassem Soleimani was not an exceptional act of madness by a deranged president. It was instead the continuation of a long, unfortunate American tradition. Military aggressiveness has been a feature of U.S. foreign policy for a very long time.

As I detail in my book Crimes and Cover-Ups in American Politics: 1776-1963, Americans love to portray themselves as the “greatest,” the “good guys” in each of their nearly continuous foreign skirmishes. While it certainly appears to any disinterested observer that we are the initiator in most, if not all, of these conflicts, the official mantra is that we are never at fault. We are only defending ourselves, even if the opponent is smaller and weaker to a laughable degree, as it usually is.

Abraham Lincoln set so many horrific precedents, and his manipulation of events that resulted in the South technically firing the first shot at Fort Sumter, paved the way for false flags like “Remember the Maine” in 1898, the sinking of the Lusitania  which “forced” us to enter World War I, the “sneak” attack on Pearl Harbor, the Gulf of Tonkin incident which is now universally acknowledged to have never happened, the “weapons of mass destruction” lie under Dubya Bush, and many other less obvious ones.

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Why Western Media Ignore OPCW Scandal, by the Strategic Culture Editorial Board

Posted on December 21, 2019 | Leave a comment

Western mainstream media ignore the OPCW scandal because it is controlled by the military-industrial-intelligence complex and its puppet government. From the Strategic Culture Editorial Board at strategic-culture.org:

The credibility of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons is on the line after a series of devastating leaks from whistleblowers has shown that the UN body distorted an alleged CW incident in Syria in 2018. The distortion by the OPCW of the incident suggests that senior directors at the organization were pressured into doing so by Western governments.

This has grave implications because the United States, Britain and France launched over 100 air strikes against Syria following the CW incident near Damascus in April 2018. The Western powers rushed to blame the Syrian government forces, alleging the use of banned weapons against civilians. This was in spite of objections by Russia at the time and in spite of evidence from independent investigators that the CW incident was a provocation staged by anti-government militants.

Subsequent reports by the OPCW later in 2018 and 2019 distort the incident in such a way as to indict the Syrian government and retrospectively exculpate the Western powers over their “retaliatory” strikes.

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Tucker Carlson is the Only Mainstream Pundit Properly Covering OPCW Bombshell, by Alan Macleod

Posted on December 1, 2019 | Leave a comment

From the get-go Tucker Carlson was suspicious of the official Douma story. It turns out he was right to be so. From Alan Macleod at mintpressnews.com:

That Tucker Carlson is one of the few pundits willing to report on a bombshell revelation about a chemical attack in Syria, may say more about the state of the corporate press than it does about Carlson’s character.

Dozens of people were found dead in the Syrian city of Douma in April 2018 in what appeared to be a chemical weapons attack. The United States and its NATO allies immediately pointed the finger at Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, accusing him of crimes against humanity. Almost immediately, NATO forces began a retaliatory bombing campaign, with many others calling for an invasion to protect civilians from a massacre.

Mainstream media, often presenting themselves as the home of the resistance to the dangerous madman Donald Trump, were fully behind the bombings. A survey by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting found that not one of the top 100 U.S. newspapers by circulation opposed the airstrikes.

A report from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) gave some credence to Washington’s assertions. While far from conclusive, OPCW’s report on the incidentdid suggest that it was “likely” that there was indeed some form of chemical weapons used, possibly an air attack that involved dropping chlorine canisters on the city. Although the OPCW refused to speculate on who was responsible, the suggestion of an aerial strike indicated Syrian government forces, the most equipped for such an attack, were to blame.

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