Revealing the wrongdoing of the powerful is a core task in
sustaining a functioning democracy.
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We need to know,
And soon it’s off
To jail you’ll go.
Don’t get fooled by terms like “classified secrets” or “aiding the enemy.” They just cover up the darker sides of our national security state.
Pointing out that the
emperor is naked isn’t dangerous. But it does leave governments (and
corporations) vulnerable to embarrassment.
Consider what happened to former CIA officer John Kiriakou after he revealed that the CIA was torturing people. None of those torturers have been prosecuted, let alone punished, but the U.S. government was sorely embarrassed. Now Kiriakou’s serving a 30-month prison term.
The whistleblower
formerly known as Pfc. Bradley Manning revealed, among other massive federal
wrongdoing, that U.S. troops had jovially gunned down a bunch of civilians from
their helicopter, videotape and all.
Manning, who recently expressed
a preference to be known as Chelsea and regarded as a woman, faces up to 35 years in prison
and no opportunity for parole for at least eight more years. Meanwhile, no move
has been made against those offending troops, let alone the diplomats whom she
disclosed had been engaged in so much international double-dealing.
And now Edward Snowden
also faces life in the clink for blurting out what our enemies already knew:
that our own government spies on everybody’s communications.
Snowden’s real sin
wasn’t what he told the enemy — it was what he told us.
We Americans didn’t
realize what our own government was doing to us, and citizens in allied nations
didn’t know what we were doing to them. These revelations are supremely
embarrassing to Washington. That’s perhaps the main reason why Uncle Sam is
intent on pursuing Snowden.
Washington has plenty
of other stuff to hide too. The effects of Agent Orange were suppressed for
decades, and we’re still not open about the devastation caused by one of our
current favorite weapons, depleted uranium. Without whistleblowers, we’d be
completely in the dark on both fronts.
The new secrecy front
is in farming. Former USDA microbiologist Gerald Zirnstein, the man who
inadvertently blew the whistle on “pink slime” in an internal memo that
surfaced years later, is
now being sued for coining the term. Once it became well-known to the public, his “pink slime” note
choked off demand for a product Big Ag prefers to call “lean finely textured
beef.”
USDA inspectors who
might want to raise a stink or write candid emails rightly worry about their
futures too.
Some states have even
made it illegal to video acts of animal cruelty and unsanitatary conditions on
farms or at processing plants.
Whistleblowing isn’t
just a U.S. phenomenon. The World Bank, the United Nations, and other powerful
financial countries are all having trouble keeping their dirty little secrets
under wraps. In Greece, one editor was briefly arrested last year for
publishing a list of his countrymen with secret
Swiss bank accounts.
It wouldn’t hurt if
someone did that here.
After all, it’s our
right to know what governments and corporate titans are doing behind our backs.
Revealing the wrongdoing of the powerful is a core task in sustaining a
functioning democracy.
Unfortunately, doing
the right thing can land you in jail.
OtherWords columnist
William A. Collins is a former state representative and former mayor of Norwalk,
Connecticut. otherwords.org