Tag: whistleblowers

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.

Keep reading

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. 

Keep reading

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”

Keep reading

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.

Keep reading

“Free Assange” Demands Grow as Biden DOJ Says It Will Continue to Seek Extradition

Just a day after a coalition of press freedom groups urged President Joe Biden to drop his predecessor’s effort to prosecute Julian Assange, a spokesperson for the Department of Justice said Tuesday that the new administration intends to challenge a British judge’s rejection last month of the U.S. attempt to extradite the WikiLeaks publisher.

“We continue to seek his extradition,” Marc Raimondi, a spokesperson for the DOJ’s National Security Division, told Reuters just days before the Friday deadline to appeal Judge Vanessa Baraitser’s ruling, which denied the U.S. extradition request on the grounds that America’s brutal prison system would pose a threat to Assange’s life.

Charged by the Trump Justice Department in 2019 with 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act for publishing classified documents that exposed U.S. war crimes overseas, Assange would likely face up to 175 years in a maximum-security prison if the extradition effort is successful.

Keep reading

Debunking All The Assange Smears

Have you ever noticed how whenever someone inconveniences the dominant western power structure, the entire political/media class rapidly becomes very, very interested in letting us know how evil and disgusting that person is? It’s true of the leader of every nation which refuses to allow itself to be absorbed into the blob of the US-centralized power alliance, it’s true of anti-establishment political candidates, and it’s true of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

Corrupt and unaccountable power uses its political and media influence to smear Assange because, as far as the interests of corrupt and unaccountable power are concerned, killing his reputation is as good as killing him. If everyone can be paced into viewing him with hatred and revulsion, they’ll be far less likely to take WikiLeaks publications seriously, and they’ll be far more likely to consent to Assange’s imprisonment, thereby establishing a precedent for the future prosecution of leak-publishing journalists around the world. Someone can be speaking 100 percent truth to you, but if you’re suspicious of him you won’t believe anything he’s saying. If they can manufacture that suspicion with total or near-total credence, then as far as our rulers are concerned it’s as good as putting a bullet in his head.

Those of us who value truth and light need to fight this smear campaign in order to keep our fellow man from signing off on a major leap in the direction of Orwellian dystopia, and a big part of that means being able to argue against those smears and disinformation wherever they appear. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to find any kind of centralized source of information which comprehensively debunks all the smears in a thorough and engaging way, so with the help of hundreds of tips from my readers and social media followers I’m going to attempt to make one here. What follows is my attempt at creating a tool kit people can use to fight against Assange smears wherever they encounter them, by refuting the disinformation with truth and solid argumentation.

Keep reading