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OpEdNews Op Eds    H2'ed 6/19/10

Truth through a soda straw

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Defense Secretary Robert Gates was quick to condemn the video leak. He said it was like looking at war "through a soda straw."

It's hard to disagree with Gates' soda straw metaphor. (I'll leave for another day the question why the Bush appointee Gates is still running the Defense Department.)

Gene Roberts, the famous editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer during the 1980s when the paper was a crusading magnet for Pulitzer Prizes, liked to describe his business this way: A city newspaper was a lighthouse in the center of a darkened city, sending out a pencil-thin line of light to illuminate tiny pockets in the life of the city.

Soda straw. Searchlight. It's all the same. The only way to bring the light of truth to a vast area of darkness is to illuminate small pieces of that darkness. This is exactly what WikiLeaks is attempting to do using the internet -- and it seems to scare the Hell out of the US military and the Obama administration.

They are so scared, the man who campaigned for transparent government is more dogged than George Bush in stanching journalistic leaks and shutting down court hearings that might tap into the military's reservoir of secrecy.

Currently, the Obama administration is seeking to send whistleblower Thomas Drake to jail under The Espionage Act for leaking material on a National Security Agency program to a Baltimore Sun reporter. His purpose was efficiency and the discouragement of waste. The intention is clearly to make an example and intimidate future leakers.

Then, there's the courts. All now agree Canadian Maher Arar was 100% innocent when the US rendered him to Syria for a full year of detention and torture. Still, the Obama administration argued the Supreme Court should not hear his case.

Why? According to Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal, it might raise questions about "the motives and sincerity of the United States officials who concluded that petitioner could be removed to Syria."

Leaking is an honorable enterprise

In order to prevent the release of material damning or embarrassing to them, the Pentagon and the Obama administration are criminalizing good, honorable people whose instincts are to be open and fair.

There is no reason why Americans should not see what US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are doing in their name and with their tax resources. In a free society, the fact something may discredit the military is the military's problem. Using the power of courts, prisons or worse to quash the truth is, as a Times editorial put it, disgraceful.

In a Department of Defense Anti-Terrorism Awareness Training course, the following question is asked:

Which of the following is an example of low-level terrorism activity?

A. Attacking the Pentagon.
B. IEDs.
C. Hate crimes against racial groups.
D. Protests.

The correct answer is D. Protests.

If at the center of your government you have a huge, closed, untouchable military institution that trains its personnel to see legitimate civilian opposition as the enemy, you are in trouble. The arbitrary rule of secret government becomes inevitable.

Decent, red-blooded Americans need to support courageous entities like WikiLeaks and prevent the US government from making truth-seeking a criminal act.

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I'm a 72-year-old American who served in Vietnam as a naive 19-year-old. From that moment on, I've been studying and re-thinking what US counter-insurgency war means. I live outside of Philadelphia, where I'm a writer, photographer and political (more...)
 

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