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.
