This piece was reprinted by OpEd News with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.
Seal of the Central Intelligence Agency.svg.
(Image by Wikipedia (commons.wikimedia.org), Author: Author Not Given) Details Source DMCA
Reprinted from caitlinjohnstone.com
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
-
The consistently insightful Branko Marcetic has a new article out with Jacobin titled "After the Ukraine Documents Leak, Mainstream Media Is Missing the Story" about the way imperial narrative managers have been manipulating the discourse about the information released in the Pentagon leaks by Jack Teixeira.
Marcetic criticizes the way mass media outlets like The Washington Post and The New York Times (who actually hunted down and outed Teixeira before the FBI even brought him in) have been dragging the conversation kicking and screaming away from the contents of the leaks into discussions about how bad leaks are and what a bad, bad man Teixeira is.
"What's more corrosive to US democracy?" asks Marcetic. "That the president secretly put US boots on the ground in an incredibly dangerous, constantly escalating war zone, explicitly breaking a promise in the process and acting against the wishes of the majority of the voting public? Or that the public was finally told about it? If we truly believe that 'Democracy Dies in Darkness,' then it makes little sense to vehemently oppose turning on a light."
"It also means less time and energy spent on thinking about the years-long, bipartisan war on leaks that this young airman is the latest to be ensnared in," Marcetic adds. "It means no one discusses the government's now-routine practice of ruining people's lives over even admittedly inconsequential leaks, and how the point of it is to intimidate future leakers and ensure the political and economic elite can continue to operate in secrecy."
Rather than the jaw-dropping disclosures of the Ukraine war documents leak, the political establishment and mainstream media are instead fixating on the leaker and what the government is doing to make sure a leak like this doesn't happen again. https://t.co/swsLgf0XUi
-- Jacobin (@jacobin) April 17, 2023
I've seen a lot of discussion about the possibility that Teixeira is an unwitting patsy and that these leaks were planted by the US intelligence cartel to help facilitate various foreign policy agendas and/or manufacture consent for the odious RESTRICT Act, and that's possible -- by far the most prolific leaker of documents from the US government is the US government itself. But whether that's what happened or not, it seems a safe bet that this young man is going to be spending many years behind bars in one of the most draconian prison systems on this planet.
Teixeira's life is being ruined, perhaps permanently, under the justification that he revealed true things about his government. That is the one and only crime he stands accused of.
And I don't think people pay enough attention to how insane and outrageous it is that this happens. It's one of those things that gets more infuriating the more deeply you contemplate it. The government has no business keeping secrets from the public about important matters that are relevant to their interests, much less about matters relating to their government's own lies and misdeeds, and it has still less business punishing people for trying to bring that information under public scrutiny where it belongs.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
