Danny Schechter - DEFAMATORY POLITICS IN AMERICA; Not Letting The Facts Get In The Way of A Vicious Attack Against Candidates and Whistle Blowers

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Increasingly, politics is a game driven by often-invented beliefs and myths that are firmly detached from facts and their interpretation.

The parties and their factions live not only in parallel universes but worlds of information that are driven mostly but what they think will work in pandering to their bases and the public.

Even as progressives complain that Barack Obama has moved right even if he occasionally talks left, the hard-core right-wing see him a black revolutionary shaped by Reverend Wright’s black liberation theology with allusions to Malcolm X and Kenyan communists thrown into the mix to “prove” their case.

Never mind that Obama threw his one time mentor Wright under the bus in 2008, or that his policies rarely speak of the needs of a black community suffering under the burden of high joblessness, foreclosures and growing poverty.

In fact, real black revolutionaries like Cornell West and so many others find the President a sell-out and embarrassment even if their community embraces him more as an identity issue.

The recent plan by Wall Street trader Ed Ricketts to recycle the alleged Obama-Wright conspiracy into an defamatory political ad campaign spoke more to his ignorance and fears than any truth-based assessment. Had the New York Times not exposed it, this $10 million dollar race-based smear would have moved forward.

Read More:

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=30997

NSA Domestic Spying Continues Under Obama

WASHINGTON - April 25 - On Monday, National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower and Government Accountability Project (GAP) client William Binney continued publicly revealing massive domestic surveillance beginning under President George W. Bush in the aftermath of 9/11, and continuing rampantly under President Obama.

A senior crypto-mathematician, Binney served at NSA for over forty years, lastly as the Technical Director of the NSA World Geopolitical and Military Analysis Reporting group, made up of thousands of NSA employees charged with analyzing massive volumes of electronic data gathered worldwide. Today, on the day of the annual Ridenhour Prizes that celebrate whistleblowers and truth-telling in the public interest, GAP is lauding Binney for courageously taking a stand and continuing to blow the whistle on NSA’s unconstitutional domestic surveillance.

Binney’s explosive disclosures over the past few weeks include:

Read More:

http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2012/04/25-3?print

James Ball - WikiLeaks supporters plan US foundation to restore funding

High-profile US supporters of WikiLeaks are planning to establish a foundation to break the 500-day "banking blockade" that has disrupted donations to the whistleblowing website.

WikiLeaks was forced to suspend many of its publishing operations in October last year after Visa, MasterCard and PayPal refused to process supporters' donations to the website, reducing its donation income by about 95%.

The move, which came after the US senator Joe Lieberman called on US companies to cut off services to WikiLeaks, was called a blockade by the organisation's editor-in-chief, Julian Assange, and came without any legal orders or actions against the site.

Supporters based in the US are now in talks with Assange to establish a US-based foundation aimed at funding organisations cut off by private companies in situations with first amendment implications.

At the forefront of the efforts are Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers to the US media, and John Perry Barlow, the former lyricist for the Grateful Dead and co-founder of the US online rights organisation Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

Read More:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/apr/20/wikileaks-500-day-banking-blockade

Whistleblower: BP Oil Platform Faces 'Present and Imminent Danger'

A whistleblower who has a standing lawsuit against BP has argued this week that the company's Atlantis Project, located 150 miles south of New Orleans in the Gulf of Mexico, faces "present and imminent danger."

The whistleblower, Kenneth Abbott, is a former BP contractor on the Atlantis. His lawsuit says that BP failed to keep required records of the safety systems for the Atlantis.

Back in 2010, Food & Water Watch, which joined Abbott's lawsuit, warned that the massive Deepwater Horizon oil disaster foreshadowed another Gulf of Mexico disaster caused by BP's Atlantis platform. At that time, Wenonah Hauter, Executive Director of Food & Water Watch, said, “We have evidence that Atlantis is unsafe and is in danger of creating an even worse spill than the one caused by the Deepwater Horizon explosion.”

Read More:

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/03/17-1

Karen J. Greenberg - The Unstoppable Legacy of the War on Terror

By now, you’d think we’d be entering the end of the 9/11 era.  One war over in the Greater Middle East, another hurtling disastrously to its end, and the threat of al-Qaeda so diminished that it should hardly move the needle on the national worry meter.  You might think, in fact, that the moment had arrived to turn the American gaze back to first principles: the Constitution and its protections of rights and liberties. 

Yet warning signs abound that 2012 will be another year in which, in the name of national security, those rights and liberties are only further Guantanamo-ized and abridged.  Most notably, for example, despite the fact that genuinely dangerous enemies continue to exist abroad, there is now a new enemy in our sights: namely, American oppositional types and whistleblowers who are charged as little short of traitors for revealing the workings of our government to journalists and others.

Read More:

http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175517/

Thomas Drake - I was First Whistleblower Prosecuted Under the Espionage Act in Recent Government Rampage

On Saturday the 10th of March 2012, Matthew Miller, the ex-Director of the Office of Public Affairs for the Justice Department and Attorney General Holder's former spokesperson, posted an article on the Daily Beast asserting that the Obama Administration is right to go after 'leakers' who are not whistleblowers.

The difference between a leaker and a whistle-blower is important. Leaks of classified information can endanger American soldiers and intelligence officers and expose sensitive national-security programs to our enemies. Whistle-blowers expose violations of law, abuse of authority, or a substantial and specific threat to public health or safety.

Read More:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/03/12/1073513/-Government-s-War-Against-Whistleblowers-While-Leaking-Lies

John Pilger - The dirty war on WikiLeaks

War by media, says current military doctrine, is as important as the battlefield. This is because the real enemy is the public at home, whose manipulation and deception is essential for starting an unpopular colonial war. Like the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, attacks on Iran and Syria require a steady drip-effect on readers' and viewers' consciousness. This is the essence of a propaganda that rarely speaks its name.

To the chagrin of many in authority and the media, WikiLeaks has torn down the facade behind which rapacious western power and journalism collude. This was an enduring taboo; the BBC could claim impartiality and expect people to believe it. Today, war by media is increasingly understood by the public, as is the trial by media of WikiLeaks' founder and editor Julian Assange.

Read More:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/mar/09/julian-assange-wikileaks/print

Chris Hedges - Supreme Court Likely to Endorse Obama’s War on Whistle-Blowers

Totalitarian systems disempower an unsuspecting population by gradually making legal what was once illegal. They incrementally corrupt and distort law to exclusively serve the goals of the inner sanctums of power and strip protection from the citizen. Law soon becomes the primary tool to advance the crimes of the elite and punish those who tell the truth. The state saturates the airwaves with official propaganda to replace news. Fear, and finally terror, creates an intellectual and moral void.

We have very little space left to maneuver. The iron doors of the corporate state are slamming shut. And a conviction of Bradley Manning, or any of the five others charged by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act of 1917 with passing on government secrets to the press, would effectively terminate public knowledge of the internal workings of the corporate state. What we live under cannot be called democracy. What we will live under if the Supreme Court upholds the use of the Espionage Act to punish those who expose war crimes and state lies will be a species of corporate fascism. And this closed society is, perhaps, only a few weeks or months away.

Read More:

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/supreme_court_set_to_endorse_obamas_war_on_whistleblowers_20120312/

Peter Van Buren - Silent State – Washington’s Campaign Against Whistleblowers

On January 23rd, the Obama administration charged former CIA officer John Kiriakou under the Espionage Act for disclosing classified information to journalists about the waterboarding of al-Qaeda suspects. His is just the latest prosecution in an unprecedented assault on government whistleblowers and leakers of every sort.

Kiriakou’s plight will clearly be but one more battle in a broader war to ensure that government actions and sunshine policies don’t go together. By now, there can be little doubt that government retaliation against whistleblowers is not an isolated event, nor even an agency-by-agency practice. The number of cases in play suggests an organized strategy to deprive Americans of knowledge of the more disreputable things that their government does. How it plays out in court and elsewhere will significantly affect our democracy.

Read More:

http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175500/

Ed Silverman - Grassley Probes FDA Over Employee Whistleblowers

How does the FDA treat employees who blow the whistle? US Senator Chuck Grassley, a long-standing agency nemesis, wants to know. And so he has written FDA commish Margaret Hamburg to explain the circumstances surrounding a controversial episode in which several current and former agency employees say they were harassed and dismissed after complaining about device reviews to Congress. 

Their charges were contained in a sensational lawsuit filed last month, in which they accused the agency of secretly reading their personal email accounts, while the agency maintained they illegally disclosed confidential business information after writing to Congress to complain they were being coerced to approve devices that posed unacceptable risks (back story).

For instance, the employees, who are all scientists and doctors and worked in the Center for Devices and Radiological Health, charged three devices could have missed signs of detecting breast cancer; one device risked falsely diagnosing osteoporosis, and an ultrasound device could malfunction while monitoring pregnant women in labor.

Read More:

http://www.pharmalot.com/2012/02/grassley-probes-fda-over-employee-whistleblowers/