Daniel Ellsberg speaks. . . .

June 8, 2013

I am linking to RSN’s interview with Mr. Ellsberg, whom I had the honor to meet in June 2011 at the Progressive Democrats of America convention in Cleveland, Ohio.
I am tempted to cut and paste the entire article here, as it is so filled with wisdom.  Instead, here is the link (http://bit.ly/ZZa8My), and I will select the following paragraph:
“There’s a very general impression that Bradley Manning simply dumped out everything that he had access to without any discrimination, and that’s very misleading or mistaken on several counts. He was in a facility that dealt mainly in information higher than top secret in classification. He put out nothing that was higher than secret. [Information he published] was available to hundreds of thousands of people. He had access to material that was much higher than top secret, much more sensitive. He chose not to put any of that out.”
And this exchange:
“TL: If you were in Bradley Manning’s situation, would you have released as much information as he did?”
“DE: I probably would not put out materials that I hadn’t read. But now we have three years of experience with essentially no harm, and a great deal of good. [Former Tunisian president] Ben Ali, I think, would still be in Tunisia. I don’t think you could have counted on the New York Times having put out the Tunisian material that Le Monde chose to put out. That was critical in bringing down Ben Ali. That led to bringing down [former Egyptian president Hosni] Mubarak. Looking at that altogether, with that experience, I think his decision to put out a great raft of secret material was justified and I would probably do it myself now if I had the chance.”
O.K., one more:
“I believe there’s strong reason to believe that without Bradley Manning’s revelations, some 20,000 to 30,000 troops would be in Iraq right now. That had been Obama’s plan. He was negotiating to that end. But the disclosure by Bradley Manning of a cable that disclosed that the State Department was aware of an atrocity that we had officially denied, and was neither investigating it further nor prosecuting it, made it politically impossible for the prime minister in Iraq to allow Americans to stay in Iraq with immunity from Iraqi courts.”


Well, it has been a long time. . .

June 6, 2013

. . . but today’s news brings me back here to process the insanity. It has been revealed that Verizon has been sending records on all telephone traffic to the NSA. The entire Twitter community, it seems, is sharing a joke—800,000 Tweeting, “Can you hear me now?” And, courtesy of the Washington Post, we have details about just how much our government is spying on us: http://wapo.st/1ba8gQL shows that they are mining data from nine Internet service providers.
Did the 23,000 of us who originally formed the group that ultimately set up this blog make the wrong call back in July 2008 and after, when we told our candidate, “You made the wrong choice on the FISA warrantless wiretapping act, but we will support you anyway”? Would we have been better to walk away and support a third-party candidate? There is no way to know, of course; the much-desired glimpse into an alternative universe for comparison is not possible except in science fiction. The clear truth is that we are at least disappointed, at most frightened for our democracy.
While we can still post here, spied upon or otherwise, welcome back to the conversation!


FISA Amendments Act Redux

May 27, 2012

The FISA Amendments Act is back, and our candidate from 2008 is sadly acting true to the form he established, which caused so many of us such distress back then. As he voted in July 2008, so now he is asking for full reauthorization of warrantless wiretapping. See the following article for details:

http://www.salon.com/2012/05/24/warrantless_spying_fight/singleton/

Here is a petition to sign and forward (Thanks, ACLU!)

https://www.aclu.org/secure/sem-tell-congress-fix-fisa-and-stop-warrantless-wiretapping?ms=gad_SEM_Google_Search-FISA_FISA-Name_fisa_p_14325892582

Time to get active again!