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Whistleblowers

Daniel Ellsberg Is Calling On All Of Us To Work To Avert Nuclear War

March 16, 2023 Marjorie Cohn, Truthout. , , , ,
The legendary Daniel Ellsberg has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. In a March 1 email to friends, Dan wrote, “I’m sorry to report to you that my doctors have given me three to six months to live … it might be more, or less.” He will turn 92 on April 7. Dan displayed uncommon courage in 1971 when he publicized the 7,000-page top-secret Pentagon Papers while working at the Rand Corporation. As a consultant to the Department of Defense, Dan drafted Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s plans for nuclear war. In his book, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, Dan wrote that the Pentagon Papers exposed the “secrets five presidents had withheld and the lies they told” about U.S. decision-making in Vietnam.

How Comrades Revealed The Existence Of Cointelpro

March 12, 2023 Margaret Kimberley, Black Agenda Report. , , ,
On March 8, 1971 a group of 8 activists broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania and removed every document they could find. Calling themselves the Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI, they knew there was FBI infiltration and disruption of the antiwar movement and they were looking for proof to present to the public. They discovered far more than they anticipated. The burglars had all been politically active and some participated in the theft of records from draft board offices. After planning for months they successfully removed documents, copied them and began sending them to newspapers and to politicians who had liberal reputations.

What Dan Ellsberg Means

March 7, 2023 Patrick Lawrence, Consortium News. , , ,
I have never met Daniel Ellsberg. A mutual friend, Rob Johnson, the executive director of the Institute of New Economic Thinking, in New York, proposed to introduce us several times but the occasion never presented itself. It does not matter. I know Dan Ellsberg as one knows someone by way of the work he or she has done, and what that work has meant in one’s life. Another friend, a dear one, wrote a note from Gadsden, Alabama, last Thursday with the subject line, “Ellsberg dying.” This was thoughtful, as this friend unfailingly is, because Twitter has censored my account and I cannot read anything on it unless someone sends an item I am able to open.

Silencing Another Jailed Whistleblower

February 2, 2023 John Kiriakou, Consortium News. , , ,
I’ve written extensively about whistleblower and “hacktivist” Marty Gottesfeld, who was given a draconian 10-year sentence for initiating a directed denial-of-service attack on the fundraising website of Boston Children’s Hospital to protest its treatment of a young girl who’d been forcibly taken from her parents at the insistence of doctors at the hospital. The doctors maintained that the girl, Justina Pelletier, was a victim of parental abuse.  It turned out they were wrong. Instead, she suffered from a rare genetic disorder, which Children’s Hospital had misdiagnosed. But it was Gottesfeld who became the bad guy and the government’s target.  The doctors who had snatched a little girl from her parents and then accused her parents of unspeakable crimes against their own child, remain free and working at the hospital.

Washington DC: Belmarsh Tribunal Calls For Assange’s Release

January 21, 2023 People's Dispatch. , , ,
On Friday, January 20, progressive groups in the United States will be hosting the third Belmarsh Tribunal in the capital, Washington DC. The 17-member Belmarsh Tribunal is hosted by Progressive International along with the Wau Holland Foundation. The DC Tribunal will be held at the National Press Club, close to the US Capitol building, which houses the US Congress. The Club was where Assange first screened Collateral Murder over a decade ago. Collateral Murder is 39 minutes of unedited, leaked footage from a gun cam that showed a US military drone attacking Al-Amin al-Thaniyah, a suburb of Baghdad, and killing 12 civilians. The Tribunal was formed in October 2021 and named after the high-security prison near London where Assange has been held since 2019. He has spent most of this time there under judicial remand, awaiting the conclusion of his extradition trial.

Ellsberg, Donziger Among Those Demanding Freedom For Daniel Hale

December 17, 2022 Julia Conley, Common Dreams. , , ,
Anti-war and First Amendment advocates are among those ramping up pressure on President Joe Biden to commute the 45-month prison sentence of Daniel Hale, a former Air Force intelligence analyst and Pentagon employee who disclosed documents regarding the U.S. drone assassination program and was convicted last year of violating the Espionage Act. Human rights attorney Steven Donziger and political activist Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked classified information about the U.S. war in Vietnam to the New York Times five decades ago in what became known as the Pentagon Papers, are scheduled to join Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) at a press conference Thursday morning where they plan to appeal to the president and highlight what the congresswoman called Hale's "courageous" and "patriotic" actions.

Worldwide Human Rights Day Rallies For Assange

December 11, 2022 Consortium News. , , ,
Supporters of imprisoned WikiLeaks  publisher Julian Assange are using the occasion of Human Rights Day this Saturday to demand that the British government refuse to extradite him to the United States. Assange is waiting on his application for appeal before the High Court of England and Wales against the home secretary’s decision to send him to the U.S. where he faces 175 years in prison for publishing truthful information about U.S. crimes and corruption. Supporters gathered in London on Saturday for a vigil at 2 pm GMT  in front of high-security Belmarsh Prison, where Assange has been languishing for nearly four years on remand. A rally took place in Washington in front of the British Embassy from 1 to 3 pm EST at 3100 Massachusetts Ave. NW.

Daniel Ellsberg: Indict Me Too

December 8, 2022 Joe Lauria, Consortium News. , , ,
Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg has told the U.S. Justice Department and President Joe Biden that he is as indictable as WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange for having unauthorized possession of classified materials before they were published by WikiLeaks and that he would plead “not guilty” because the Espionage Act is unconstitutional. Ellsberg revealed this week to the BBC interview program Hard Talk that Assange had given him the files leaked by U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to keep as a backup before they were published by WikiLeaks in 2010. Assange has been charged with violating the Espionage Act for possession and dissemination of classified information and faces 175 years in a U.S. prison if he is extradited from Belmarsh Prison in London.

‘Free Julian Assange!’ Say Latin America’s Leftist Leaders

December 8, 2022 Ben Norton, Multipolarista. , , ,
Latin America’s leftist presidents are leading the campaign to free Julian Assange. The WikiLeaks journalist has the support of Brazil’s Lula da Silva, Mexico’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Argentina’s Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, Colombia’s Gustavo Petro, Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, Bolivia’s Evo Morales, and Honduras’ Manuel Zelaya. A movement is growing in Latin America to demand the freedom of political prisoner Julian Assange, the Australian journalist persecuted by the United States for his work exposing its war crimes. Most of the major leftist leaders in Latin America have called for Assange to be released from the maximum-security British prison where he has been held since 2019 and subjected to torture.

Chelsea Manning On Her New Memoir

October 25, 2022 The Real News Network. , , ,
Chelsea Manning was imprisoned in 2010 after leaking 750,000 military documents to the website WikiLeaks. Chelsea’s revelations exposed heinous war crimes by the US military. While the perpetrators of the atrocities she exposed have never faced justice, Chelsea herself spent seven years behind bars, including several months in solitary confinement before her trial. README.txt is Chelsea’s first full-length memoir detailing what led her to speak out, and her experiences in prison. In an event organized by Baltimore worker cooperative bookstore Red Emma’s, Chelsea Manning joins Baltimore-based activist and independent journalist Ryan Harvey for a special discussion on her memoir.

Doctors Renew Call For Assange’s Release After COVID Infection

October 19, 2022 Kevin Gosztola, The Dissenter. , , , ,
Doctors For Assange sent a letter to United States Attorney General Merrick Garland and the United Kingdom Home Secretary Suella Braverman yet again expressing their concern about the deteriorating health of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. The coalition of over 300 doctors, psychiatrists, psychologists, and other medical professionals have repeatedly called for Assange’s release from Her Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh in London and protested “health injustices” that have occurred as a result of the extradition case against him. Worsening matters, as Doctors for Assange notes, is the fact that Assange tested positive for COVID-19 on October 8. “Given his chronic lung ailment, Mr. Assange may be at increased risk of serious illness resulting from COVID infection,” the doctors write.

Assange Supporters Call For ‘Truth Not War’ On UN Peace Day

September 19, 2022 Globetrotter,  Pressenza. , , ,
Calls of ‘Truth not War’ can be heard around the globe this week as supporters of the world’s most famous political prisoner, Australian journalist Julian Assange, rally for his immediate release by the 21st anniversary of the United Nations International Day of Peace (21 Sept 2022). Julian’s growing army of millions of supporters – from ordinary people to governments, politicians, professional and non-government organisations, charities, activists, lawyers, journalists, authors, academics, doctors, artists, unions and grass-roots community groups – are all calling on the USA and UK Governments to stop the US extradition and drop the charges against the award-winning Australian journalist and WikiLeaks founder. On 5 April 2010, WikiLeaks published ‘Collateral Murder’, a classified US military video depicting the indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen civilians in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad, including two Reuters news staff.

Julian Assange Files His Perfected Grounds Of Appeal

August 27, 2022 Assange Defense. , , ,
Today, 26 August 2022, Julian Assange is filing his Perfected Grounds of Appeal before the High Court of Justice Administrative Court. The Respondents are the Government of the United States and the Secretary of State for the Home Department, Priti Patel. The Perfected Grounds of Appeal contain the arguments on which Julian Assange intends to challenge District Judge Vanessa Baraitser’s decision of 4 January 2021, and introduces significant new evidence that has developed since that ruling. The Perfected Grounds of Appeal concerning the Secretary of State for the Home Department (SSHD) include arguments that Home Secretary Priti Patel erred in her decision to approve the extradition order on grounds of specialty and because the request itself violates Article 4 of the US-UK Extradition Treaty.

The Biden-Trump Persecution Of Julian Assange

August 21, 2022 Eve Ottenberg, Counter Punch. , , , ,
For a good while one could blame Trump for the prosecutorial monstrosity perpetrated on journalist Julian Assange. But now it’s time for Trump to move over. The single worst assault on the first amendment and a free press in recent centuries is no longer solely his. Biden owns it. Biden could end this state persecution of a journalist today, if he felt like it. A persecution that a U.N. expert has called torture. A persecution that could easily lead to Assange’s death. But maybe that’s the point. Indeed, if killing Assange isn’t the point, Biden should prove it, by pardoning him now. Biden doesn’t feel like it. Unlike Jamal Khashoggi, whose murder he deplored before he didn’t, Biden never censured the years of abuse heaped on Assange by the U.S. government. He enabled it.

Pompeo Sued Over Surveillance Of Assange Visitors

August 16, 2022 Joe Lauria, Consortium News. , , ,
Four U.S. citizens who were surveilled by the C.I.A. during visits to WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange in the Ecuador embassy in London have sued the C.I.A, former C.I.A. Director Mike Pompeo, the Spanish security firm UC Global and its director David Morales Guillen for allegedly violating their constitutional rights protecting them from illegal searches and seizure. The lawsuit was filed at 8 a.m. Monday in the Southern District of New York federal court. Assange spent seven years in the embassy as a political asylee. He is being held on remand in London’s Belmarsh prison after the U.S. indicted him in 2019 under the Espionage Act for alleged possession and dissemination of defense information. Assange is awaiting a decision by the High Court of England and Wales on whether it will hear his appeal of the ruling by the High Court, signed by the home secretary in June, to extradite him to the United States.
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