2016 Postmortem
Related: About this forumSupreme Court Likely to Endorse Obama’s War on Whistle-Blowers
Totalitarian systems disempower an unsuspecting population by gradually making legal what was once illegal. They incrementally corrupt and distort law to exclusively serve the goals of the inner sanctums of power and strip protection from the citizen. Law soon becomes the primary tool to advance the crimes of the elite and punish those who tell the truth. The state saturates the airwaves with official propaganda to replace news. Fear, and finally terror, creates an intellectual and moral void.
We have very little space left to maneuver. The iron doors of the corporate state are slamming shut. And a conviction of Bradley Manning, or any of the five others charged by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act of 1917 with passing government secrets to the press, would effectively terminate public knowledge of the internal workings of the corporate state. What we live under cannot be called democracy. What we will live under if the Supreme Court upholds the use of the Espionage Act to punish those who expose war crimes and state lies will be a species of corporate fascism. And this closed society is, perhaps, only a few weeks or months away.
Few other Americans are as acutely aware of our descent into corporate totalitarianism as Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971 to The New York Times and is one of Mannings most ardent and vocal defenders. Ellsberg, who was charged under the Espionage Act, faced 12 felony counts and a possible sentence of 115 years. He says that if he provided the Pentagon Papers today to news organizations, he would most likely never see his case dismissed on grounds of government misconduct against him as it was in 1973. The government tactics employed to discredit Ellsberg, which included burglarizing his psychoanalysts office and illegal wiretaps, were subjects of the impeachment hearings against President Richard Nixon. But that was then.
Everything that Richard Nixon did to me, for which he faced impeachment and prosecution, which led to his resignation, is now legal under the Patriot Act, the FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] amendment act, the National Defense Authorization Act, Ellsberg told me late Friday afternoon when we met in Princeton, N.J.http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/supreme_court_set_to_endorse_obamas_war_on_whistleblowers_20120312/
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(26,624 posts)Juan Mendez. He has been the official mouthpiece through which the Obama administration has repeatedly denied a private meeting between the U.N. torture investigator and PFC Manning.
Call Jeh Johnson's office: 703-695-3341
If the main line is busy: 703-697-7248
You can also fax his office: 703-693-7278
Tell him:
Let Juan Mendez meet with Bradley Manning in private, to conduct a proper fact-finding mission, according to the terms of his U.N. mandate.
Drop all charges against Bradley Manning. There is no excuse to imprison and subject anyone, let alone a soldier and a whistle-blower, to prolonged cruel and degrading treatment.
If he is unable to stand up for PFC Manning's rights under the Constitution and international humanitarian law, he should resign.
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