Former whistleblowers: open letter to intelligence employees after Snowden

[unhappycamper]

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/11/whistleblowers-open-letter-after-snowden-revelations



Blowing the whistle on powerful factions is not a fun thing to do, but it is the last avenue for truth, balanced debate and democracy

Former whistleblowers: open letter to intelligence employees after Snowden
theguardian.com, Wednesday 11 December 2013 09.45 EST

At least since the aftermath of September 2001, western governments and intelligence agencies have been hard at work expanding the scope of their own power, while eroding privacy, civil liberties and public control of policy. What used to be viewed as paranoid, Orwellian, tin-foil hat fantasies turned out post-Snowden, to be not even the whole story.

What's really remarkable is that we've been warned for years that these things were going on: wholesale surveillance of entire populations, militarization of the internet, the end of privacy. All is done in the name of "national security", which has more or less become a chant to fence off debate and make sure governments aren't held to account – that they can't be held to account – because everything is being done in the dark. Secret laws, secret interpretations of secret laws by secret courts and no effective parliamentary oversight whatsoever.

By and large the media have paid scant attention to this, even as more and more courageous, principled whistleblowers stepped forward. The unprecedented persecution of truth-tellers, initiated by the Bush administration and severely accelerated by the Obama administration, has been mostly ignored, while record numbers of well-meaning people are charged with serious felonies simply for letting their fellow citizens know what's going on.

It's one of the bitter ironies of our time that while John Kiriakou (ex-CIA) is in prison for blowing the whistle on US torture, the torturers and their enablers walk free.

[MannyGoldstein]

1. "Make no mistake... Only by protecting torture can we end torture..."

Regards,

The Transparency President

[unhappycamper]

2. And my personal favorite: "We had to destroy the village to save it." n/t

[MannyGoldstein]

4. Seems as if the Transparency President was a close student of the Viet Nam War

We are blessed.

[idwiyo]

3. k&r