Freedom... We're Talking About Your Freedom

This is a tough post for me to write and I've been avoiding it. I encouraged Noah and Ken to work on Wikileaks instead and I referred to it a few times in Streams of Consciousness, our nightly wrap-ups. And I just hoped people would get their fill reading smart commentators like Digby on the subject. That's because I lived through it, or something just like it, before-- from afar. In 1971 I was spending a few months in Kabul when Daniel Ellsberg slipped the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times... and all hell broke lose. People were even talking about it there. This week there were two last straws that made me go for it-- the tweet from Ron Paul (below) and this open letter to Amazon, urging a boycott on the super-website from Daniel Ellsberg himself.

December 2, 2010

I’m disgusted by Amazon’s cowardice and servility in abruptly terminating today its hosting of the Wikileaks website, in the face of threats from Senator Joe Lieberman and other Congressional right-wingers. I want no further association with any company that encourages legislative and executive officials to aspire to China’s control of information and deterrence of whistle-blowing.

For the last several years, I’ve been spending over $100 a month on new and used books from Amazon. That’s over. I ask Amazon to terminate immediately my membership in Amazon Prime and my Amazon credit card and account, to delete my contact and credit information from their files and to send me no more notices.

I understand that many other regular customers feel as I do and are responding the same way. Good: the broader and more immediate the boycott, the better. I hope that these others encourage their contact lists to do likewise and to let Amazon know exactly why they’re shifting their business. I’ve asked friends today to suggest alternatives, and I’ll be exploring service from Powell’s Books, Half-Price Books, Biblio and others.

So far Amazon has spared itself the further embarrassment of trying to explain its action openly. This would be a good time for Amazon insiders who know and perhaps can document the political pressures that were brought to bear-- and the details of the hasty kowtowing by their bosses-- to leak that information. They can send it to Wikileaks (now on servers outside the US), to mainstream journalists or bloggers, or perhaps to sites like antiwar.com that have now appropriately ended their book-purchasing association with Amazon.

Yours (no longer),

Daniel Ellsberg

When Ellsberg finally leaked the Pentagon Papers he had already spent over a year trying to persuade anti-War senators, like William Fulbright (Arkansas wasn't a fiefdom of the Walton Family back then and there were actual independent-minded politicians), Charles Goodell (a Republican who Nixon and Agnew were able to destroy politically) and George McGovern, who told him the First Amendment was all the protection he needed to make it public, but that it wasn't the place of an elected official to do it. In those days, it took forever to do 7,000 pages of photocopying on a xerox machine. There was no wikileaks.com and not even an internet. Imagine.

Rick Perlstein reports extensively on this sad chapter of American history in his brilliant book Nixonland and that's where all the blockquotes below are coming from. The NYTimes began publishing excerpts from the 43 volumes Ellsberg gave them on June 13, 1971-- Vietnam Archive: Pentagon Study Traces Three Decades of Growing US Involvement. The papers showed without doubt that Vietnam was a wrongful war and, in Ellsberg's own words, "demonstrated unconstitutional behavior by a succession of presidents, the violation of their oath and the violation of the oath of every one of their subordinates."

Kissinger found it easy to manipulate the drug-addicted, alcoholic Nixon and he stoked a rage in the always paranoid president to go on a jihad against everyone and everything involved with the leak, even though Nixon's first assessment was that it had nothing to do with him-- it didn't-- and why should he even care. It went from that to injunctions and accusations of treason. Nixon's attempts to force the Times and over a dozen other papers to stop publishing went to the Supreme Court, which ruled 6-3 that the papers could be published freely.

Justice Brennan's decision argued that press reports that embarrass the government were precisely the reason the First Amendment was invented. Just Black concurred. "Every moment's continuance of the injunctions against these newspapers amounts to a flagrant, indefensible, and continuing violation of the First Amendment... [F]or the first time in the 182 years since the founding of the Republic, the federal courts are asked to hold that the First Amendment does not mean what it says." Just in case the court ruled the other way, the previous evening Mike Gravel, the forty-one-year-old senator from Alaska, had called an extraordinary two-man night "hearing" of his Subcommittee on Buildings and Grounds. He began reading aloud from a four-thousand-page typescript-- the historical narrative portion of the Pentagon Papers, provided to him by an anonymous source.

He started at 9:45 p.m. "The story is a terrible one," Gravel warned. "It is replete with duplicity, connivance against the public. People, human beings, are being killed as I speak to you. Arms are being severed; metal is crashing through human bodies." Then he began to weep.

He read for three hours and word spread throughout Capitol Hill and the hearing room was soon packed. He was able to introduce the entire document into the Congressional Record, thwarting Nixon and Kissinger. But they were on the warpath and Nixon seems to have snapped completely and never recovered. Kissinger had figured out that Ellsberg was the leaker within a couple of days and destroying him became a White House crusade. Remind anyone of Peter King, the demented Republican congressloon from Long Island? He wants Julian Assange prosecuted as a terrorist and he seems to be cracking up the same way Nixon did.

The he cacophony of outrage and hysteria engendered by the Wikileaks disclosures has ranged from the embarrassing (the NYT’s Bill Keller admission that he allowed the US government vet his reports) through to the downright bloodthirsty (see calls for Julian Assange’s assassination from the likes of John Hawkins, Marc Thiessen et al).

But the prize for breathtaking hypocrisy must surely go to Long Island GOP Congressman Peter King who has been all over the airwaves since the leaks began, demanding that Wikileaks be treated like Al Qaeda and placed on the list of foreign terrorist organizations. “Their activity is enabling terrorists to kill Americans,” he told MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Monday. “Wikileaks is an accessory to this, they are taking information which they know is classified, which they know can cost life. They are as guilty as (Pfc Bradley Manning) is.”

What Peter King neglected to tell Morning Joe, or NBC’s Matt Lauer and Fox News for that matter, is that when it comes to supporting foreign terrorist organizations, the L.I. politician is not only in a league of his own in Washington but is the only living Congressman who can say that he owes his political career almost entirely to the ties he forged with one group of foreign terrorist bombers and gunmen.

In the wake of November’s mid-term gains for the GOP, Peter King is poised to take over the chairmanship of the Homeland Security Committee in the new session. That is an extraordinary turnabout for a politician who spent most of the previous thirty years as the most prominent American supporter of the Irish Republican Army, earning in the process the hostility of his own GOP colleagues, the US, British and Irish governments and the attention of the FBI, the Secret Service and Britain’s intelligence agencies, MI5 and MI6.

Americans should be grateful to Julian Assange but many seem to be hysterically and irrationally aroused by criminals like King and the guilty parties brought to light by the leaks. John Grooms, taking a more balanced perspective at Creative Loafing, thinks Rep. King ought to switch to decaf:

WikiLeaks’ release of a quarter-million State Dept. cables is a welcome, up-close look inside the foreign policy bubble. You want “transparency in government”? You got it. The leaks will probably be the center of media reporting for the rest of the week — accompanied by the usual Chicken Little-style panic and anger from the right wing. Rep. Peter King (R-NY), the chair (come January) of the House Homeland Security Committee, is especially freaked out. King says WikiLeaks “presents a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States,” and wants the group to be classified, and prosecuted, as terrorists and spies. Never mind that re-classifying whoever you don’t like as a “terrorist” has been the standard method of despots for over 100  years. And never mind that the cables were “released” after the involved newspapers let the White House know about the various topics of interest in the cables, and even made some changes and deletions requested by the government. Hopefully, Rep. King will soon switch to decaf.

...At the Fox Nation site, nearly every comment on the story by their readers was “This guy (Wikileaks honcho Julian Assange) needs to be eliminated, he’s a traitor, Pres. Palin will put an end to these leaks [this is not a joke], blah blah blah.” Then I noticed the Fox Nation “mission statement,” sitting right there on the site’s front page, which says it is “for those opposed to excessive government control of our lives, and attempts to monopolize opinion or suppress freedom of thought.” Hmm, I guess their idea of freedom of thought only applies to those with whom they agree. Reminds me of late-’70s gay Brit singer Tom Robinson, who sang that the right’s version of “freedom” actually means “freedom from the likes of you.”

Fair enough. It also reminds me of former FBI agent/whistle-blower/congressional candidate Coleen Rowley, long a Blue America favorite. Coleen has an informed perspective on wikileaks and she wrote about it Saturday at OpEdNews.

Unfortunately, the US corporate PR machine is again triumphing. The naked emperor has shot the little boy trying to yell the truth. About 70% of Americans, misled by the likes of Amy Klobuchar, now declare that ignorance is bliss and they want to see Assange assassinated and WikiLeaks taken out. Only a tiny fraction of critical thinker Americans recognize that what they don't know CAN hurt them.

The last time an Administration got 70% of the country to believe a false proposition (that Iraq was behind 9-11), we launched an unending war that has already killed over a million and, in so doing, we shot ourselves in the foot. So unless Americans are willing to take their heads out of the sand, that's about to happen again. We find ourselves in such an Orwellian tragedy, that if we don't laugh, we'll cry.

Note: I agree with the realists that neither those in the White House nor in the Congress are listening. The elected in Washington DC operate in a kind of lead SKIF that encloses those inside the DC Beltway like Maxwell Smart's old "cone of silence". (So the politicians are truly unable to hear anyone outside that bubble and they are deaf to all except the ir own corporate and special interest funders, which include the powerful Military Industrial Complex war profiteers and also includes the neo-con aligned Likud branch of Israeli warhawks.)

...For the most part, the media seems to view a WikiLeaks truth-telling mechanism and government whistleblowers as trying to upset their easy job of transcribing leaders' press releases. Not surprisingly, much of the press says, "quick shoot the little boy calling the emperor naked." The corporate media is funded by the corporations and wealthy Americans who don't want to pay higher taxes or even pay any taxes and who are largely profiting off the continuing wars.

No one remembers that in the summer of 2001, Richard Clarke was unable to get anyone to pay attention to his plan to stem Al Qaeda terrorism. It seems incomprehensible as we bankrupt ourselves (which, by the way, is and always was Osama Bin Laden's stated goal, to bankrupt the U.S.) that Richard Clarke and others were repeatedly put off during that summer of 2001 when "all their hair was on fire", being told that there was "not one dollar available" for anti-terrorism efforts.

So that's the current horrible situation we find ourselves in at the present moment. The current quagmire devoid of truth on every level is a vortex sucking us all down. A truly independent media mechanism like WikiLeaks and more government whistleblowers would be a huge part of a root solution and that is why those in power are in the process of somehow (whether thru assassination or prosecution), taking them out. WikiLeaks had given me a flicker of hope of perhaps getting a sufficient number of Americans to take their heads out of the sand at least long enough to see the danger all around them, their children and grand children but sadly the Propaganda Machine already has 70% of Americans in agreement that they would prefer not to know the Sorrows of Empire that will befall them (as Chalmers Johnson termed it).

America is very lucky that Bill Keller wasn't the editor of the NY Times when Daniel Ellsberg sent over the Pentagon Papers. People in our generation, on the other hand, are poorer for the quality of editors the Times employs these days: