CRIMINALIZING THE TRUTH TELLERS – AN ANALYSIS BY DR. LAWRENCE DAVIDSON
05. Mar, 2011
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Dr. Lawrence Davidson
Part I
There is no doubt that Julian Assange, the head of the Wikileaks organization, and Bradley Manning, the soldier who allegedly leaked U.S. classified documents, are being singled out and made examples of by the Obama administration. Their suffering constitutes a message which goes like this: if you inform the public of what the United States government is doing, no matter how illegal and disgusting it might be, our police and intelligence agencies will track you down and turn your life into hell. We will do that to you whether we can prove you committed a crime or not (as in the case of Assange) and we will do it to you even if it runs counter to our own legal codes (as in the case of Manning).
That is why Julian Assange is hold up in a British home under virtual house arrest devoting most of his energy to avoiding extradition to Sweden on what is almost certainly an exaggerated charge of sexual misconduct. The Swedes are cooperating with Washington and if Assange is extradited there he may well end up in the U.S. where, despite having not been charged with a crime, various politicians and talking heads have called for “punishment” of the most draconian sort. And it is not just Assange. Most of those involved with Wikileaks have been reduced to fear and trembling. As Glenn Greenwald puts it, “all of them, to a person, no matter what their nationality is, the thing they fear most is ending up in the hands of American authorities and in the American…justice system.” Greenwald notes the irony of it all. For the truth tellers, the land of the free has become a land of justice denied.
And, speaking of draconian punishment and justice denied, Bradley Manning who, for the past nine months, has been in incarcerated in the brig at Marine base in Quantico Virginia, is subject to treatment that is certainly cruel and unusual and thus illegal. He is in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day. In the 24th hour he is taken into another room where he can walk about shackled. This is for exercise. If he stops walking at any time during this hour he is immediately returned to his cell. Periodically he is put under constant surveillance because the military says he is potentially suicidal. How did he get that way? He was not suicidal upon his arrest. If in fact he is suicidal now it probably because the U.S. military has subjected him to conditions that drove him in that direction. The Commandant at Quantico has apparently seen fit to turn his brig into a stateside version of one of those infamous black hole detention facilities used by the CIA. The ones in which the Bush gang conducted “torture by proxy.” At Quantico we have decided to torture Bradley Manning ourselves.
Sadly, all of this is being done on Barack Obama’s watch. Yes, the President has defended Gay rights both in military and civilian society, and he has pushed for the employment of people with disabilities. However, when it comes to the federal government’s actions in violation of its own laws, he has refused to interfere or punish. This has produced the most startling juxtapositions. The U.S. government can lie to its people and start a war on that basis that kills millions of people (the ultimate crime according to the Nuremberg trials) and Obama will not investigate and will not prosecute. He will in fact do worse than nothing, as when he put pressure on Spain to cancel its own investigation of crimes against international law under the Bush administration. But, if someone like Bradley Manning defies the American code of secrecy and reveals the truth, President Obama will allow him to be driven half mad and charged with “aiding the enemy” which carries the death penalty. But wait a minute. If your war is based on lies and manipulation and a good deal of official stupidity, it logically follows that the “enemy” is a contrived one. Under those circumstances does the charge of aiding such an enemy make any sense? Well, it makes sense if government secrecy has kept everyone mostly ignorant of the lies and other machinations. All of this makes you wonder how the man in the Oval Office sleeps at night.
Part II
And what about the rest of us? President Obama is not doing these things alone. What is happening to Julian Assange and Bradley Manning requires the cooperation or acquiescence of at least two additional groups.
1) The first group is made up of those employed to carry out the draconian measures now being practiced. You do not have to be familiar with the sociologist Max Weber to figure out how such people can do what they do, largely with impunity. They are mostly bureaucrats and bureaucracies have evolved so as to hide responsibility. President Harry Truman once reacted to this fact by putting a sign in his office that said “the buck stops here.” In other words, buried in organizations with layers of authority, are anonymous millions who can always claim that they are “just following orders.” And, as a number of psychological studies have shown, most of us do in fact “just follow orders” especially if we are enmeshed in a peer group which is doing likewise. To this might be added the fact that there is always a sub-group of order takers who get their adrenalin highs from hurting others (every combat platoon has one or more of these). They are the ubiquitous torturers, abusive prison guards, and lower echelon thugs that find employment with all governments, including Washington. They were particularly active under the Bush regime. To be sure there are laws against acting in a criminal fashion, even as a member of a government department. However, if your illegal actions are officially sanctioned, you are almost certain to get away with it. One will recall that the Bush gang, from top to bottom, is protected from prosecution by President Obama. Problems only develop when someone “blows the whistle” in a very public way. It is interesting that in such cases, more often than not, it is the “whistle blower who gets punished, and not the criminals. Assange and Manning are good examples of this.
2) The second group is the citizenry at large. Particularly in a democracy like the United States, these grossly inhumane acts by government officials are harder to carry on if the public knows about them and strongly objects. So there are two qualifiers here: a) if the public knows and b) if the public objects.
a) Secrecy, along with a less than aggressive media, is the way the American government attempts to assure that its own citizens do not know of its illegal doings. Until the age of the Internet this was relatively easy to do. Most of the privately owned media outlets are either whole heartedly conservative in outlook, and thus share the government’s attitude toward secrecy, or they are scared of the legal complications and bad publicity the government can cause them. There have been times in recent history when some news companies have acted in aggressive ways to assert the public’s right to know (one thinks of the Washington Post at the time of the Watergate scandal) but the present day is not one of them. This is demonstrated by the fact that there has been no concerted effort on the part of the American media to defend Julian Assange, much less Bradley Manning. The combination of a government addicted to secrecy and news businesses that are essentially castrated means that what the public knows is what the government and its media allies tell it. So, unless someone breaches the walls of this system, either by doing something incredibly stupid, such as torturing prisoners at Abu Gharib while being photographed, or something incredibly brave, such as making public thousands of incriminating government documents, the citizenry will know little.
b) However, there is the second factor and that is objecting if you do happen to learn that something is amiss. One cannot assume that such objection comes automatically. Most people are so engrossed in their private lives that they do not pay attention to what the government is doing, particularly what it is doing abroad. They are more than willing to give Washington the benefit of the doubt unless the media aggressively asserts otherwise. So, when Obama says he will not allow for an official investigation of the Bush gang is there a public outcry? No. For that matter, if Washington quietly dropped all the charges against Bradford Manning and Fox News failed to go ballistic over the issue, would their be a public outcry? No. In the absence of an aggressive media to stir the pot and keep the citizenry focused, the default position of the majority is always a local one. In other words, if it does not impact my life, I am not going to pay attention unless you make me do so.
Part III
It may well be that the U.S. government has already achieved its goal when it comes to Julian Assange and Bradley Manning. It has created an atmosphere of fear and trembling so as to reduce the probability that anyone else will soon come along and replicate their behavior. In this effort law and due process mean nothing to either the President, the men and women who carry out his orders, or the citizens who go about their daily affairs with only minimal awareness that these two individuals are being harassed and tortured in their country’s name. It is a sad, but hardly unique, situation. It makes one nostalgic for those days in the 1960s when there was a another war based on lies, but also an aggressively skeptical media and a military draft that impacted lots of citizens’ lives. It is no mistake that this combination, one that indeed got the American masses into the streets, is missing today.
ldavidson@wcupa.edu
www.tothepointanalysis.com
Lawrence Davidson
Department of History
West Chester University
West Chester, Pa 19383
USA
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DR. LAWRENCE DAVIDSON is professor of Middle East history at West Chester University in West Chester, PA, and the author of America’s Palestine: Popular and Official Perceptions from Balfour to Israeli Statehood (University of Florida Press, 2001), Islamic Fundamentalism (Greenwood Press, 2003), and Foreign Policy, Inc.: Privatizing American National Interest (University of Kentuck Press, 2009).
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Same fate for Aafia Siddiqui also. She was very well educated & from a very good family background.
US punished her for 86 years imprisonment. If you want to know more about and what is going on around her
you can read the below links…
http://www.bostonmagazine.com/articles/whos_afraid_of_aafia_siddiqui/page1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aafia_Siddiqui
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Oh, but the American public is well aware. They just don’t give a shit or they agree with the treatment of Assange/Manning. Proof of the latter is widely spread on the internet.
There are good people in the US, but not nearly enough and they don’t scream enough to be heard.
This whole nasty affair has left the US with very few friends abroad.
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Assange seems to have one trump card. Seems the former Chief Executive Officer for Bear Bank gave him two CD’s containing evidence of slush funds at the Vatican Bank. Seems almost every member of Congress has an account funded by Timmy Geitner’s U.S. Treasury there. Supreme Court Judge Roberts was mentioned having a billion dollars in his account. Please, dear God and the free press for a free world, make sure these CD’s see the light of day. I want to watch the Americans lynch these war criminal, torturing, baby killing, Congress critter thieves to light poles when they find out. Murder a couple of million Iraqi’s no problem. But when the dollar is no longer the reserve currency and they can’t afford to put gas into their car… and then inflation steals all of their life savings, then it will be a different ball game played with pitch forks, gas bombs, and rope.
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On the criminalization front, let us all marvel with dread at the anti-terrorism law in the USA. It allows (but does not require) the government to list terrorist organizations on a proscribed list.
HAMAS is listed, various SETTLER-MILITANT groups are not.
Anyone (certainly any American, but perhaps anyone at all) who gives “material support” to a listed group violates the law.
However, giving material support to a listed group even if widely known does not guarantee prosecution, as police (FBI, CIA, Police) and prosecutors are not required to prosecute all known crimes — the doctrine of “prosecutorial discretion” allows them to allow criminals to go free.
One is well advised to view the government of the USA with dread, quite as governments of kings and emperors were once, and perfectly correctly, viewed by those who lived within their reach.
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We have to remember that 95% of Federal prosecutions end in conviction or guilty pleas. Innocence is no defense nowadays. Federal jurors come mostly from the suburbs and just want to go home. Anyone who looks like a thinker gets excused.
To call President Obama an empty suit is an insult to empty suits.
We hoped he would end the wars and abuses of George Dubya. It turns out we might just as well have elected the old drooling McCain.
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DR Lawrence Davidson laments the furor surrounding US wikileaks truth tellers emanating from the bullies of empire.
Human compassion for those who risk their freedom and or their lives to tell the truth about war crimes or US state department spy operations in the UN targeting Palestinian diplomats is great among the free thinking liberals of alternet, ICH,the major papers who covered Assange’s material and leftists whose minds are centered on transparency in national affairs and jurisprudence concerning criminals and the repercussions upon civilized society.
Civil society in Palestine chose to rebuke zionist Israel for it’s intransigence in peace talks with a BDS and movement, non violent protests at the wall in Jenin and Nablus and raucous demonstration against war crimes in Gaza City by Hamas and Gazans en masses, and both societies have paid a price for their dissent similar to what Bradley Manning is undergoing now but for fifty years and counting and civilized society is starting to talk above it’s usual murmur in a rising crescendo of symphonic concerted shouting at the walls of injustice in many of the western worlds support bases of Israel and their press and diplomatic corps.
It would not surprise me in the least if these shouts at the unjust “walls of Jericho”now rising in many nation dont prevail soundly against injustice and topple more than a few more gutlessly selfish zionsit pricks from their ivory towers. People power is rising up as the phoenix of the ashes of Moses, Yashua, Mohammed, Jefferson,Herzle,Marx, King and even the spirit of Ghenghis Khan understand where we as human beings stand today, on the very precipice of ruin should we the people stand down to such as strip our heroes naked in their cold cells”for their own safety> For Manning’s own safety he should be tried in civil, civilian courts as the Quantico command seems unable to respect his condition as grave and onerous to the world of witness. Is it any wonder the moniker assigned to the US national edifice of power is the great satan?
Truth be told, when we mount our own Tahrir Squares across this nation their will be many added to Manning’s company and many others wont make that trip to jail but to the grave, as the US military injustices reaper counts only it’s own dead,let us pro- actively remember the martyrs great and small, the victims of unjust military actions who dont make the welcome home parades of conquering US armies.
May I add the voices of all of the victims of unjust US military actions to this lamentation, allow me to add the brothers and sisters fallen in Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan,Dafur,Rwanda, Chile, Venezuela, Colombia,Argentina,Serbia Pakistan Libya,Egypt,Tunis,Bahrain,Jordan Yemen,and Germany, France and Russia, let us remeber them all as the risen in Christ are remembered as Martyrs ought to be hinoroed and ask for the freedom of our heroes from graves, cells and harsh conditions and ask together that if our voices are not heard in lamenting, let us protest these heroes greateness together forever and never relent from remembering that they sacrificed for US,we the people are loved and ought to return this love from whence it comes, to the brave, perhaps braver than ourselves, the martyrs fallen in unjust military operations are workers worthy of their pay and if no greater remuneration comes for them, our lamentations and prayers exalt them forever,ameen. March 19 people, we demand the fair treatment of Bradley Manning in rising shouts of protest together as his brothers and sisters, which we are.
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I doubt if O’bamastein is doing anything, he is just a figurehead who takes his orders from Aipac & Israel. If anybody out there thinks it is going to change,well i think your smoking some mind bending shit. Hopefully I am wrong. If anybody thinks this can change please enlighten me. Hopefully it will happen before I take the dirt nap.Lets face it America your leaders have sold you out.I wonder what would happen if those scumbags from westbound baptist church were to protest a young Jewish veterans death. [Though any veteran who gives his life for his country should be honored]The stink from congress would be overwhelming as we know.
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