Of the estimated 1.4 million top security clearance U.S. personnel employed by one or another of the government’s 18 branches of its $81 billion annually budgeted “U.S. Intelligence Community,” perhaps one or two individuals each year are designated as “whistleblowers” and persecuted to the high heavens.
Today WikiLeaks founder and journalist/publisher Julian Assange stands at the top of the list, currently imprisoned in London’s Belmarsh Prison and fighting against the Biden administration’s – and Trump’s before him – heinous efforts to extradite him to the U.S. on spurious charges under the witchhunt era Espionage Act. Revealing the truth about U.S. war crimes around the world, not to mention exercising a journalist’s right to free speech and a free press, is unacceptable to the U.S. imperialist beast that daily wages wars against poor and oppressed nations around the world. That the single dissident voice of a far off non-U.S. citizen must be silenced forever, informs us of the disgusting arrogance of those who command the seats of U.S. power.
Similarly, heroes like Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning today, and Daniel Ellsberg, the renowned Vietnam-era Pentagon Papers defendant of yesteryear – whose revelations educated millions about the U.S. horrors committed against the Vietnamese people – are unacceptable to today’s modern day thought police.
Four million people, mostly civilians, were murdered in the U.S. ten-year Vietnam genocide, begun with the CIA’s lie that a...
Welcome to Reality Check, NewsGuard’s nonpartisan newsletter that tracks the false claims and conspiracy theories that shape our world — and who’s behind them. Please support us by becoming a premi...