Tag: whistleblowers

Drone King Obama Enjoys $11 Million Mansion, While Drone Whistleblower Rots in Jail for Exposing War Crimes

In our upside-down world, good guys often go to jail, and bad guys get promoted and live luxuriously.

Ex-President Barack Obama, a key architect of modern drone warfare, today lives in an $11.75 million, 6,892 square-foot waterfront mansion on a 30-acre property on Martha’s Vineyard, and is regarded by many people as a great moral leader.

Donald Trump, who expanded the drone war even further than Obama, is also enjoying life these days at his $160 million Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida.

Daniel Hale, by contrast, a principled former Air Force officer and defense contractor who publicly exposed the drone program, will likely be spending at least the next two years in federal prison.

On March 31st, Hale pleaded guilty in the Eastern District of Virginia to one count of illegally retaining and transmitting classified national defense information in violation of the Espionage Act of 1917.

The documents pertaining to the U.S. drone war were transmitted to The Intercept reporter Jeremy Scahill in 2014/5 and published as part of a series called “The Drone Papers.”

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Everything The West Claims It Values Is Invalidated By Its Treatment Of Assange

The western world has a very high opinion of itself and its supposed values, and its treatment of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange makes a lie of it all.

Truth. Justice. Freedom. Democracy. We are taught from an early age that these are the sacred values our society upholds with the utmost reverence, and that we are very fortunate to have been born in a part of the world which holds such virtue.

You see this haughty self-righteousness pop up on a daily basis in the most influential circles on earth, from the way US presidents are still to this day referred to as the “leader of the free world”, to US Secretary of State Tony Blinken recently babbling about the “shared values” of the “free and open rules-based order”, to Magnitsky Act manipulator Bill Browder recently referring to the US-centralized power alliance as “the civilized world” in a bid to get Australia up to pace with the rest of the empire’s China hawkishness.

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As Drone Whistleblower Daniel Hale Pleads Guilty, Advocates Warn of “Profound Threat” to Free Press

Press freedom, peace, and human rights advocates are rallying behind Daniel Hale, the former intelligence analyst who blew the whistle on the U.S. government’s drone assassination program, and who pleaded guilty Wednesday in federal court to violating the Espionage Act.

The Washington Post reports Hale, who was set to go on trial next week, pleaded guilty to a single count of violating the 1917 law that has been used to target whistleblowers including Julian Assange, John Kiriakou, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, Jeffrey Sterling, Reality Winner, and others.

Hale was charged in 2019 during the Trump administration after he leaked classified information on the U.S. government’s targeted assassination program to a reporter, who according to court documents, matches the description of The Intercept founding editor Jeremy Scahill. He is the first person to face sentencing for an Espionage Act offense during the administration of President Joe Biden.

As vice president under President Barack Obama, Biden contributed to the creation of whistleblower protections in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, while simultaneously serving in an administration that, while promising “a new era of open government,” relentlessly targeted individuals who revealed U.S. war crimes and other classified information.

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DHS whistleblower who criticized the Obama administration’s handling of Islamic terrorism is found dead on a road side with a ‘self-inflicted gunshot wound’

Department of Homeland Security whistleblower Philip Haney, who spoke out against his own agency during the Obama administration, was found shot dead in California. 

The Amador County Sheriff’s Office said that authorities responded to reports of a man lying on the ground with an apparent gunshot injury near Highway 124 and Highway 16 in Plymouth. 

Red State and Heavy said Haney had been missing since Wednesday, and that the gunshot wound was found in his chest.   

‘Upon their arrival, they located and identified 66-year-old Philip Haney, who was deceased and appeared to have suffered a single, self-inflicted gunshot wound,’ said authorities, according to the Washington Examiner. 

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WHISTLEBLOWER: Coca-Cola Forces Employees to Complete Online Training Telling Them to “Try to be Less White”

A whistleblower leaked shocking images of Coca-Cola’s online training modules instructing employees to “try to be less white.”

Karlyn Borysenko, an anti-critical race theory activist, obtained the images from an internal whistleblower and posted them online:

“Confronting Racism: Understanding what it means to be white, challenging what it means to be racist”

“Try to be less white”

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Biden Continues Trump’s War On The Press

Biden’s divergence from the Obama administration’s less authoritarian position on the matter should not come as much of a surprise, since he took an absurdly hard line against WikiLeaks after the first publications of the earth-shattering Manning leaks in 2010.

“I would argue it is closer to being a hi-tech terrorist than the Pentagon papers,” Biden said of Assange at the time. “But, look, this guy has done things that have damaged and put in jeopardy the lives and occupations of people in other parts of the world.”

It should also come as no surprise because, all things considered, this administration has not been much different from the previous one in terms of actual policy. The policy of regime change interventionism in Venezuela is the same. The policy of hawkishness toward China is the same. The policy of starvation sanctions against Iran is effectively the same. In a recent CNN interview Secretary of State Tony Blinken could not speak highly enough of Trump’s more incendiary foreign policy decisions like moving the US embassy to Jerusalem and recognizing the illegally occupied Golan Heights as Israeli territory.

There are far, far more similarities between the Trump administration and the Biden administration than there are differences. As is consistently the case with US presidents, the narratives are different, the campaign platforms are different, the political parties are different, but the actual policies and behaviors remain more or less the same.

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