what you get here

This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.
So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020
Showing posts with label whistle blowers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label whistle blowers. Show all posts

Wednesday, September 8, 2021

Holding Power to Account

I’ve posted before about how far the United States has become a rogue state. For the last half century at least, the principles of free speech and of democracy have been honoured there in the breach more often than in reality. I was, however, shocked this morning by a Scheerpost reporting two items which reveal just how far the power structure goes to muzzle those who challenge the military-industrial complex

First, human rights attorney Steven Donziger has now been under house arrest in his New York City apartment for two years. The reason for his detainment is that Donziger made it his business to hold Chevron accountable for how the Big Oil megacorp "harmed, sickened and killed tens of thousands in Ecuador" and tried to avoid paying "billions of dollars" in restitutions. 

Donziger's battle against American oil companies and on behalf of indigenous communities and farmers in Ecuador spans nearly three decades. He was part of an international legal team that represented indigenous groups in Northern Ecuador where, as he tells Camp, from the 1960s to the '90s Texaco (now Chevron) deliberately "dumped billions of gallons of cancer-causing toxic waste" into local waterways, costing thousands of people their health, livelihood—even their lives.

Though in 2011 the lawsuit culminated in a historic $9.5 billion pollution judgment, Chevron brass subsequently focused on going after Donziger rather than paying the fee. In late July, he was hit with a six counts of criminal contempt, a conviction stemming in part from his refusal to turn over his computer and other devices, which he fought last month with a request for a new trial. His ongoing pre-trial detainment for a misdemeanor offense is unprecedented for any person without a prior criminal record in federal court. (Click here to watch Chris Hedges' interview with Donziger, and listen to Robert Scheer's "Scheer Intelligence" podcast episode with Donziger here) 

The second example is of a former intelligence analyst in the drone program for the Air Force who as a private contractor leaked some 17 classified documents about drone strikes to the press, was sentenced today to 45 months in prison. 

The documents, published by The Intercept on October 15, 2015, exposed that between January 2012 and February 2013, US special operations airstrikes killed more than 200 people. Of those, only 35 were the intended targets. For one five-month period of the operation, according to the documents, nearly 90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets. The civilian dead, usually innocent bystanders, were routinely classified as “enemies killed in action.”

The Justice Department coerced Hale, who was deployed to Afghanistan in 2012, on March 31 to plead guilty to one count of violating the Espionage Act, a law passed in 1917 designed to prosecute those who passed on state secrets to a hostile power, not those who expose to the public government lies and crimes. Hale admitted as part of the plea deal to “retention and transmission of national security information” and leaking 11 classified documents to a journalist. If he had refused the plea deal, he could have spent 50 years in prison.  

But what’s really sinister about the case is, as Chris Hedges puts it, that 

Those charged under the act are treated as if they were spies.  They are barred from explaining motivations and intent to the court. They cannot provide evidence to the court of the government lawlessness and war crimes they exposed.  Prominent human rights organizations, such as the ACLU and PEN, along with mainstream publications, such as The New York Times and CNN, have largely remained silent about the prosecution of Hale. 

The sentencing of Hale is, of course, one more potentially mortal blow to the freedom of the press in the USA.  It follows in the wake of the prosecutions and imprisonment of other whistleblowers under the Espionage Act including Chelsea Manning, Jeffrey Sterling, Thomas Drake and John Kiriakou, who spent two-and-a-half years in prison for exposing the routine torture of suspects held in black sites.  Chris Hedges continues 

The group Stand with Daniel Hale has called on President Biden to pardon Hale and end the use of the Espionage Act to punish whistleblowers. It is also collecting donations for Hale’s legal fund. The bipartisan onslaught against the press — Barack Obama used the Espionage Act eight times against whistleblowers, more than all other previous administrations combined — by criminalizing those within the system who seek to inform the public is ominous for our democracy.  It is effectively extinguishing all investigations into the inner workings of power. 

Not that the Americans are the only ones up to dirty tricks of this sort. Just a few nights ago, I had watched the 2019 film Official Secrets which told the case of UK whistleblower Katharine Gun, who leaked a memo exposing an illegal spying operation by American and British intelligence services to gauge sentiment of and potentially blackmail United Nations diplomats tasked to vote on a resolution regarding the 2003 invasion of Iraq

Her defence team decided on the plea that Katharine was acting out of loyalty to her country by seeking to prevent the UK from being led into an unlawful war in Iraq. UK Foreign Office deputy legal adviser, Elizabeth Wilmshurst, had famously resigned when the UK Attorney General Peter Goldsmith changed his position on the legality of the Iraq War after meeting with several lawyers from the Bush administration. Despite the odds stacked against them, Katharine refused to plead guilty in exchange for a reduced charge.

On the day of the trial, the Crown prosecutor dropped all charges against Katharine on the grounds that prosecuting her would have shown that Bliar led the UK into war on false pretences. 

OK the goodies won on this occasion - but they all too rarely do!

Little wonder that one of the books on my recent reading list was Unaccountable – how the elite brokers corrupt; Janine Wedel (2014)

Update; Scheerpost has just put up a third striking post - this time a forensic dissection of the Afghan strategy.

And, on 13 September, this brilliant contextual analysis

Thursday, April 1, 2010

The world's first blogger


Montaigne is a name which evokes France in the troubled 16th Century; a lone writer in a castle tower putting his thoughts about everyday life on paper , a count who had taken early retiral from life in public service. I had bought an Everyman’s edition of The Complete Works a year or so ago but only dipped into its 1,340 pages. I am now more encouraged since starting to read Sarah Bakewell’s How to Live – a life of Montaigne in one question and 20 attempts at an answer. It’s a superb edition by Chatto and Windus – with superb black and white engravings, paper, layout and typeface (sadly it doesn’t say which). It’s a long time since I’ve seen such a beautifully produced book. It’s also beautifully written – and all for 10 euros from Amazon.
I knew that he had retired young from a political life in Bordeaux in troubled times in France to look after his estate and muse about life in what became an exemplar for the memoir – and that he was inventing the template which people like Proust (and Pamuk in modern times) have made their own. But I hadn’t realised that he retired at age 37! So I feel better at this first attempt at musing in retirement at 67!
Now The Guardian has its obvious April Fool story – although the picture and first para did fool me! You must have a look at it!

This spell in the mountains helped me rediscover my energy so quickly that I had an interesting marketing idea – a retreat for shell-shocked mercenaries of technical assistance – not so much to help send them back into battle as to help redefine the enemy and nature of battle needed!
The experience has helped me reconnect with the critique I wrote 3-4 years ago – which was a mite too ambitious. It’s the paper on my website’s “key papers” – entitled critique of development assistance.

And let me direct you to another excellent piece in Scottish Review – one on how those who blow whistles are treated