The United States of America was founded by people seeking religious and economic freedom. The vagrants, rejects and hopefuls of European society got on boats to start a New World, to wipe the slate clean and begin on a level playing field. The hereditary lines, the aristocracies and the monarchies of their past would not hinder them here.
In many ways, they succeeded at establishing a new order focused on the rule of law and merit. Despite this, the Declaration of Independence, the First Amendment and the Second Amendment are still our boldest documents. We still fight to create a society that succeeds in seeing self-evident that all men are created equal, endowed by our creator with self-evident rights, among these being the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. At our founding, these rights were legally protected only for white men who owned property. It took another half-century to extend these rights to white men who did not own property by President Andrew Jackson, a populist and something of the Donald Trump of his day. It took another half century to fight the Civil War, dividing the North and South into the Union and the Confederacy, the bloodiest war of our nation with an American body count exceeding 1,000,000, greater than the combined American death tolls of the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Spanish War, the Philippines War, World War I, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, the Iraq War and the Afghanistan War. In postbellum United States of America, black men got the right to vote and legal protections. Men of other nationalities were protected too, though these legal promises failed to obtain until greater federal intervention in the 20th century. Speed to after World War I, and women are afforded voting rights under President Woodrow Wilson.
The right to participate in one’s government is the foundation of the claim of its representation. For a government to represent its people, we the people must assert ourselves and have our interests respected. If a government claims that it represents us, but then does not give the ability to air our grievances and appoint representatives, then its claim is null and void. The century and a half that it took to ensure that the federal government of our United States legally represents most of its adults demonstrates the suspended fulfillment of ethical norms in practice. Frequently, ethics are realized and declared, then reality stumbles to keep up: a Hegelian dialectic of Geist.
Legal representation in the United States of America, our united states, is fundamentally related to our freedom of speech. A similarly conflicted thesis in our history, this right is hard-won and hard-kept. Freedom of speech enables the contribution of citizens in manners relevant to every section of government, society and personality. From infrastructure to economy, military to municipal policy, diet and entertainment choices, the freedom of speech enables the public airing of concerns, grievances and recommendations between citizens, corporations and government. Our country, America, has been special in this respect. Even in pre-Revolutionary America, we struck a new chord against the ways of the traditional societies of our past. In 1735 AD, an important court case in New York between the newspaperman John Peter Zenger and the English monarchically instituted governor named William Cosby centered on the issue of free speech. The question was whether a subject or citizen can truthfully communicate about and criticize a person in power without being punished for libel. Under English common law, truthfulness was not a defense. Throughout the hearing, the judge had Governor Cosby’s back. But Zenger had the support of the American people. Andrew Hamilton, his defense attorney, was persistent, addressing the jury directly. The jury acquitted Zenger after ten minutes of deliberation, accepting the defense that truthfulness protects the speaker from libel.
Before our Revolution, America was changing history by protecting truth over power. The right to free speech, may then, be considered inalienable, one of those that the Signers of the Declaration stated are among those of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. By recognizing this, we take our stand in an ethical order, much like the original Revolutionaries, abolitionists and suffragettes. Philosophically or spiritually, the Geist realizes ethics, Lockean natural law is enforced. Many of the liberationists of our past simply relied on Jesus.
It is disappointing, tragic and performatively contradictory to treasure our history and attack Julian Assange. In the beginning of the third millennium AD (2006 AD), Assange began a journalism outlet named WikiLeaks to publish classified documents from organizations, corporations and governments for the benefit of the public. Time and again, his organization hit the mark on the head, for example, exposing extrajudicial killings in Kenya in 2007 (The Cry of Blood), tax evasion by the Swiss bank Julius Baer & Co., and treatment of prisoners in our military base in Cuba that violated Geneva Conventions. He quickly made enemies, but also many friends in landmark newspapers such as the Guardian, Der Spiegel and the New York Times.
To understand WikiLeaks and our reaction to it, it is important to contextualize its beginning. WikiLeaks began during our United States’ War on Terror and the dusk our country entered into in order to fight it. WikiLeaks sought to penetrate the darkness and gray areas of governmental and military secrecy that led to such human rights atrocities as the prison at Abu Ghraib, revealed in 2004 AD in the New Yorker. The work and persecution of Julian Assange is illuminated by their the military and legal night that the War on Terror plunged us into, internationally and domestically.
Our contemporary incursion into the Middle East began with unanimous international support. Following the end of the Iraq-Iran War in the late 1980s AD, Iraq found itself in a difficult position. Kuwait, one of its major financiers, was not budging in their loan terms and was being accused of economic warfare, even being called a tool of the Western nations. So, President Hussein invaded, intending to gain territory, safeguard his state economically and gain oceanic access. Our United States and the United Kingdom decided to defend Kuwait, beginning the Gulf War in 1991 AD. A fifth of states worldwide supported us, even Syria, and we dealt a bloody defeat to Iraq with 50,000 soldiers killed and a decade of turmoil following.
During this time, both the United Nations, which did the will of our United States and the United Kingdom (we were the new victors of the Cold War), and Iraq were accused of wrongdoing. Under orders of former President Hussein, Iraq was fighting and committing ethnic cleansing against Kurds and Shiite Muslims in the North and South who rose up following his defeat in the Gulf War. Meanwhile, the United Nations, following our lead, were criticized for economic sanctions that led to extreme suffering regular people. Three professionals appointed to lead the United Nations’ Oil-For-Food program stepped down in protest of its effects on the Iraqi people. Dennis Halliday, the first to do so, said, “I don’t want to administer a program that satisfies the definition of genocide.” A United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) study in 1999 AD concluded that over 500,000 children, not including adults, had been killed by the effects of the sanctions. It is a radical finding. A year before this study, in 1998 AD, while most of the world was moving on from the defeat of Saddam Hussein, our Congress in the United States passed the Iraq Liberation Act, committing to regime change for the state. From that until the Iraq War in 2003, the public goal of our nation in Iraqi relations was to weaken the control of former President Hussein’s Ba’athist Party and depose him.
Two years later, in 2001 AD, our United States were shaken by the greatest attack on our national soil we have ever suffered. In September 11, 2001, people associated with the al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden hijacked and flew passenger airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. In total, about 3,000 people died, but more would have had there not been a courageous uprising by civilians in United Airlines Flight 93, preventing the hijackers from reaching their targets.
As a nation, we were angry and ready for war. As a people, we were terrorized. We declared the Afghanistan War. We received a lot of support and the United Nations even invoked Article 5 of its charter, declaring that an attack on one of us, on one state, is an attack on each of us, on each state. Right after our first big victory in the region in 2002 AD, capturing Kabul, we pushed for another war in Iraq, following through on our plans for regime change. The justification given by our Bush Administration was that Iraq harbored terrorists and held weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). There has not been evidence for this since. In the lead up to this war, there was so much international controversy that there were the most and largest anti-war demonstrations ever held, in cities from Rome to Washington, D.C. The Iraq War, a decade after the Gulf War proposed against the same combatant found uncontested unanimity, found unanimous disapproval, with the United Nations not approving invasion. Instead of complying with the international body, of whom we are only one member on its most authoritative body, the Security Council (U.S., U.K., China, France, & Russia, permanently) we invaded. This was declared illegal by international law and the U.N. Secretary-General, the leader of the United Nations, Kofi Annan.
We decided we were above international law. Before our invasion of Iraq, our United States Congress passed the American Service-Member’s Protection Act in 2002 AD, declaring ourselves and our activity exempt from the International Criminal Court (ICC). Operating above international law is not unique in our history, especially given our activities during the Cold War, for example, multiple illegal state coups: Iran, 1953 AD; Nicaragua, 1954 AD; Brazil, 1964 AD; and Chile, 1973 AD. These are illegal according to Article 2 of the United Nations Charter which protects state sovereignty and non-interference in the domestic affairs of other states. But, it was the Cold War. We justified this behavior on the basis of security, and to this day, as is seen by the recent case brought by journalists against the C.I.A., the violation of the most basic constitutional rights of our own citizens is not protected in the courts against those who plea “in defense of national security.” The national security defense has been the M.O. (modus operandi; mode of operation) of our security services since World War I, imprisoning even the socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs in 1918 AD when he spoke against participating in the War to End All Wars.
The leaks of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 AD provide more recent exculpatory, important American legal precedent for the activity of WikiLeaks. In these papers, the Pentagon analyzed our United States’ governments control and presentation to the public of Vietnam from 1945 to 1967 AD. They were leaked by an economist and military analyst of the RAND Corporation, Daniel Ellsberg. They demonstrated that our government systematically lied to us, the public, about the scope of the problem in Vietnam, the likelihood of victory and denied peace negotiations with the North Vietnamese. This report was labeled Top Secret. Ellsberg, who had worked on the report, was shocked, so he photocopied it and leaked it to the press at the New York Times. The Department of Justice, claiming “irreparable harm to national security,” sought a temporary restraining order against the NYT. It did not work. The Supreme Court, in New York Times Co. v. United States, 1971 AD, ruled, “Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively disclose deception in government.” In Senate hearings about the leak during 1971 and 1972 AD, security officials admitted that no operational military plans were compromised and that the leak was more embarrassing than dangerous. This is a safe assumption: security officials protect the security of their operations. In contrast to this, our responsibility as citizens is to know what is happening, support good government, and make the activity of our government, our community and ourselves accountable.
Though the Cold War brought our United States into dusk, it was the War on Terror that brought us into the night, giving us the everyday illegal character of our United States. Drone strikes in regions and states we have not declared war on, extrajudicial killings of American citizens (without court), extraordinary rendition (i.e., state-sponsored abduction and transport to a foreign jurisdiction for illegal treatment, like torture), and mass surveillance of citizens violating the Fourth Amendment are just a few activities that are daily occurrences that are not normal and not protective of a free society. The British Monarchy levied taxes without American colonist representation and housed its soldiers in their homes. Our American government suspends due process and international relations and threatens those who question them.
Our illegal invasion of Iraq, combined with the greatest, and most ineffectual, anti-war protests ever led to our rejection on the world stage, and a stiff coldness about the impact of the voice of the people on our government and on our people. Were it not for our financial, corporate and military power, we would have suffered the same fate as former President Hussein of Iraq during the Gulf War. The War on Terror has promoted terror from a few individuals in remote compounds of Afghanistan to our neighbors and our co-workers. Terror, like drugs (this war began in the 70s), or poverty (this war began in the 60s), is not a specific combatant, with geography or defined character. It is amorphous and ambiguous, crossing national lines and challenging a final victory. The War on Terror seems more like a public relations or advertising campaign than a military one, involving as it does the systematic manipulation of our American public. The history of our involvement in Afghanistan is a twenty year long defeat rivalling that of Vietnam, 3,000 American military deaths, the death of Osama bin Laden and a couple thousand al-Qaeda terrorists, the deaths of at least 50,000 Afghani civilians and the mass displacement of millions of people within and outside of the country. The second prong of our War on Terror, the Iraq War, while quickly deposing Saddam Hussein, found no evidence for the state support of terrorists (unlike Saudi Arabia [WikiLeaks cable 09STATE131801: Terrorist Finance: Action Request For Senior Level Engagement On Terrorism Finance], who are our allies) and no WMDs. We left the region destabilized, promoting extremism and providing the environment for the rise of the Islamic State, following our troop reductions in 2011 under our Obama Administration. The same Islamic State later came to fight in Afghanistan. Civilian body counts since our involvement in this region in 1991, including starvation and deprivation of medical resources exceeds the lives, hopes ands dreams of 2,000,000 people. This number does not include the consequences of our interventions in Libya or Syria.
Not all of this is the fault of the West or the United Nations. But it is blind, corrupt and shameful to pretend that we are not responsible in these deaths and that we would do better to bring life to our world.
In our concern for “terror,” we gaslit our neighbors, our selves and our representatives into thinking that anyone could be a terrorist. We were fearful enough that we created another department for these security concerns, the Department of Homeland Security, and passed a series of legislations and began processes in our intelligence apparatus that challenged legal precedent, circumvented constitutional rights and subverted the right to privacy. The surveillance state justified itself, all while basic constitutional rights and the basis of a free state, the clear communication and trust involved in representative government, was uprooted. This was unprecedented in our history. There was a fear of surveillance during the Cold War, but the extent and fear of Terror exceeded our fear of the Reds.
The night that our country entered into following the attack on September 11, 2001 AD created the environment for the attack that the intelligence apparatus, state departments and banking systems of multiple Western nations has carried out on Julian Assange.
Born down-under in Australia, a kid who had something of a nomadic life with his mom in Australia, he quickly took a liking to computers and developed skills in cryptography. By the time he had grown up, he had developed a strong suspicion of corporate and governmental secrecy. As a free citizen, he began a press outlet focused solely on publishing classified documents in the public interest.
According to the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR; 1948 AD) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR; 1966 AD), the latter of which is binding to all signatories of which the United States is one, freedom of expression, which includes the right to seek, receive and impart information of all kinds, is legally protected. The United States government must respect these declarations and covenants, if not our own legal precedents, if a rules-based order is the goal. Our United States must also recognize that we must enforce our norms, such as self-evident rights and First Amendment protection, in a pluralist, global society, so that we maintain our character.
WikiLeaks began releasing confidential documents in 2007 AD, declaring its actions and work to support the cause of freedom and transparency. This was what was done. The media was largely supportive, but they only had a peripheral placement on the news cycle despite their early releases being significant. It was their publishing of the Afghanistan and Iraq War Logs, the U.S. State Department Cables dating back to 1966 and the Guantánamo Files, detailing nearly every detainee held at Guantánamo from 2002 to 2009 AD, that WikiLeaks gained the attention of our American media companies and the intelligence apparatus of the Western world.
Despite whatever any of our representatives or senators, or intelligence, military or government officials said in condemning Julian Assange, then-Bradley Manning and WikiLeaks after these reveals, it was the lead investigator for the Pentagon into assessing their impact, Brigadier General Robert Carr, who stated that he knew of no single example of a person who had been killed as a result of the leaks. There was no concrete harm as a result of the publishing of WikiLeaks. Perhaps, then, the testimony of those in front of the Senate in 1971 and 1972 AD still holds. Rather than concrete harm and danger to security, the more personal, and petty, emotion of embarrassment is involved. The ruling reached in New York Times Co. v. United States in 1971 AD, then, still holds: “”Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively disclose deception in government.”
For anyone interested in freedom, truthful government and promoting the integrity of our public servants, the WikiLeaks reveals are a crucial corrective to the paranoia of the War on Terror. These documents, harmful only to the unquestioned authority of military, intelligence and government officials, revealed the following:
- 15,000 unreported civilian deaths in Iraq
- A policy of non-investigation into reported human rights abuses, torture and killings of prisoners of war by the allied Iraqi military
- Hundreds of unreported civilian deaths in Afghanistan
- Collecting biometric and personal data on U.N. officials for surveillance (D.N.A., Frequent Flyer Numbers, etc.) including Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon
- Spying and eavesdropping on U.N. officials, including Secretary-General Kofi Annan before the invasion of Iraq
- Yemen’s cover-up of U.S. airstrikes in their state
- Weak evidence leading people to imprisonment in Guantánamo Bay
- Weak evidence not strong enough for conviction but deemed too dangerous for release requiring indefinite detention in Guantánamo Bay
- Intelligence about Guantánamo Bay prisoners and terrorist activity gained from repeat interrogation of specific prisoners, some of whom admitted to fabricating information under duress or torture
Given these revealing facts, perhaps WikiLeaks, in a world that values truth over power, ought to be awarded a Pulitzer. Since 1735 AD with the Zenger Trial, truth over power has been our American way. The fourth estate, journalism, is best when it checks the accuracy of the people who tell it stuff, whether they work for General Electric, the municipal government or the C.I.A. Issues of security, wars, intelligence and threats require this check more than other domains, as they are conducted with greater secrecy, power and control. The black box of our security state, rather than defend us against terror, terrorizes us, the very people we claim to defend. If my government, if our government refuses to be examined during this process, subject ourselves to international law and protect our constitutional rights, how can I not describe this as terrorism? How can I not describe this as becoming what we declared war against?
Friends, brothers and sisters: this cannot be. To become terrorists while fighting terrorists is to lose the spirit and way of life that what we are fighting for. It is precisely because we want to protect the rule of law that we fight a terrorist. It is precisely because we want to defend freedom that we fight for it. To violate law, and our freedoms, in our attack, even if were victorious, is a Pyrrhic victory. It is a defeat. Our way of life, our national character, our international credibility is under attack. Unfortunately, we are the ones who are attacking it by our lawlessness and disregard for the community.
For the Afghanistan and Iraq War Logs, the State Department Cables and the Guantanamo Files, Bradley, now Chelsea, Manning, the 2010s AD equivalent of Daniel Ellsberg, at 25 years old was sentenced to 35 years in prison. After being pardoned by our former President Obama in 2017 AD, Manning was reimprisoned in 2019 AD for refusing to testify against Julian Assange, the publisher of the files and released a year later. Julian Assange, following sexual assault allegations in Sweden under considerable haze, sought asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, U.K., fearing extradition to the U.S. if he left the embassy. He lived there for seven years while a contractor named UC Global set up cameras and mics that gave 24/7 video and audio surveillance who passed the information on to the C.I.A. Contractors for UC Global also retrieved the D.N.A. of his child from a thrown-away diaper. The C.I.A. drafted plans for extraordinary rendition or assassination. After a change of Presidents for Ecuador, the new Administration wanted to get close to Western governments and so gave up Julian Assange. Immediately, he was taken into custody by U.K. police, contested extradition to the U.S. on the Espionage Act of 1918 AD and threatened with up to 175 years in prison. After years in a U.K. prison, he got out following a plea deal with our United States prosecution. For pleading guilty, he can go home, prison time served. He now lives in Australia with his family.
In his first public statement following his release, he said that he was not free because the system worked, but because it did not work. He said that he “plead guilty to journalism.” In the 1971 AD ruling of New York Times Co. v. United States, Justice Potter Stewart wrote, “The only effective restraint upon executive policy in the areas of national defense and international affairs may lie in an enlightened citizenry.” Just half a century later, we have found ourselves stepping back from our commitment to truth, freedom and transparency. I pray the next fifty will be more open, that our shining light on a hill that cannot be hidden enlightens our neighbors and community. I have had enough of shadows.
Veracity as Virtue 