Whistleblowing Is Not Just Leaking — It’s an Act of Political Resistance
Inside the Assassination Complex
Whistleblowing Is Not Just Leaking — It’s an Act of Political Resistance
“I’ve been waiting 40 years for
someone like you.” Those were the first words Daniel Ellsberg spoke to
me when we met last year. Dan and I felt an immediate kinship; we both
knew what it meant to risk so much — and to be irrevocably changed — by
revealing secret truths.
One of the challenges of being a whistleblower is living with the
knowledge that people continue to sit, just as you did, at those desks,
in that unit, throughout the agency, who see what you saw and comply in
silence, without resistance or complaint. They learn to live not just
with untruths but with unnecessary untruths, dangerous untruths,
corrosive untruths. It is a double tragedy: What begins as a survival
strategy ends with the compromise of the human being it sought to
preserve and the diminishing of the democracy meant to justify the
sacrifice.
But unlike Dan Ellsberg, I didn’t have to wait 40 years to witness
other citizens breaking that silence with documents. Ellsberg gave the
Pentagon Papers to the New York Times and other newspapers in
1971; Chelsea Manning provided the Iraq and Afghan War logs and the
Cablegate materials to WikiLeaks in 2010. I came forward in 2013. Now
here we are in 2016, and another person of courage and conscience has
made available the set of extraordinary documents that are published in The Assassination Complex, the new book out today by Jeremy Scahill and the staff of The Intercept. (The documents were originally published last October 15 in The Drone Papers.)
We are witnessing a compression of the working period in which bad
policy shelters in the shadows, the time frame in which unconstitutional
activities can continue before they are exposed by acts of conscience.
And this temporal compression has a significance beyond the immediate
headlines; it permits the people of this country to learn about critical
government actions, not as part of the historical record but in a way
that allows direct action through voting — in other words, in a way that
empowers an informed citizenry to defend the democracy that “state
secrets” are nominally intended to support. When I see individuals who
are able to bring information forward, it gives me hope that we won’t
always be required to curtail the illegal activities of our government
as if it were a constant task, to uproot official lawbreaking as
routinely as we mow the grass. (Interestingly enough, that is how some
have begun to describe remote killing operations, as “cutting the
grass.”)
President Barack Obama talks with Vice President Joe Biden in the Oval Office, April 15, 2015.
Photo: The White House
