[THS] McGovern, Ellsberg, Rowley: Americans Have a Right to Know

[The Harder Stuff in news and commentary]

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25758.htm

"Americans Have a Right to Know"

By Ray McGovern, Daniel Ellsberg and Coleen Rowley

June 18, 2010 "Institute for Public Accuracy" Today, Washington is trying to shut
down what it clearly regards as the most effective and dangerous purveyor of
embarrassing information -- Wikileaks, a self-styled global resource for
whistleblowers. It is a safe bet that NSA, CIA, FBI and other agencies have been
instructed to do all possible to make an example of Wikileaks leader, Australian-born
Julian Assange, and his colleagues. Much is at stake -- for both Pentagon and
freedom of the press.

"Those who own and operate the corporate media face a distasteful dilemma, both in
terms of business decision and of conscience. They must choose between the easier
but soulless task of transcribing government press releases, on the one hand; or, on
the other, following Wikileaks into the 21st century by adapting high-tech methods to
protect sources while acquiring authentic stories unadulterated by government
pressure, real or perceived.

"Deference to the government seems largely responsible for the failure to explore the
implications of particularly riveting reportage that gets millions of hits on the Web but
has been, up to now, largely ignored by mainstream media. The best recent example
of this is the gun-barrel video showing a merciless turkey-shoot of Baghdad civilians
by helicopter gunship-borne U.S. soldiers on July 12, 2007. Like the humiliating and
graphic but actual photos of Abu Ghraib, the publication of which Pullitzer-prize
winning Seymour Hersh repeatedly defended as necessary to the story of Iraqi
prisoner abuse, such raw footage is essential to people’s understanding of what is
happening. Like Daniel Ellsberg's copying of 7,000 pages of the 'Pentagon Papers,'
such whistleblowers are a great means of exposing the lies upon which the current
wars are based.

"Assange went public this week with an email announcement that Wikileaks is
preparing to release a classified Pentagon video of a U.S. airstrike in Afghanistan in
May 2009, which left as many as 140 civilians dead -- most of them children and
teenagers. He added that Wikileaks has 'a lot of other material that exposes human
rights abuses by the United States government.'

"Wikileaks has also published a secret U.S. Army report of March 2008 evaluating the
threat from Wikileaks itself and possible U.S. countermeasures against it. This will
undoubtedly prompt American officials to redouble efforts to find Assange and to
prevent Wikileaks from posting additional information they have classified to avoid
embarrassment.

"Americans have a right to know what is being done in our name, and how important
it is to protect members of the now-fledgling Fifth Estate so that it can continue to
provide information shunned or distorted.

"Assange ended his email with an unabashed appeal for donations for his website.
'Please donate ... and encourage all your friends to follow the example you set; after
all, courage is contagious.' His words sounded a bit like those of Edmund Burke:
'When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an
unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.'

"For the good to associate effectively, they need to know what is going on. It’s our
hope the old Fourth Estate press will recall the good and high-calling that Burke,
Jefferson and other leaders of democracy have extolled through the centuries and
catch some of that 'contagious courage'."

Coleen Rowley, an FBI whistleblower who was one of Time Magazine's people of the
year in 2002; Ray McGovern, CIA analyst for 27 years; and Daniel Ellsberg, who
leaked the Pentagon Papers (top-secret government documents that showed a
pattern of governmental deceit about the Vietnam War)