I was also honoured to be able to attend the Sam Adams Associates’ award ceremony in Oxford, United Kingdom last month, and Chelsea Manning is a truly worthy recipient of the Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence. Her leaking of the Collateral Murder video to WikiLeaks (a video showing how U.S. Air Force personnel shoots at several unarmed civilians, 2 Reuters journalists and a father with 2 small children) proved that the U.S. was committing war crimes in Iraq. It was incredibly brave of her to leak the footage to WikiLeaks. For obvious reasons, Manning sadly could not make it to the ceremony herself, so her friend Aaron Kirkhouse received the award and delivered her acceptance speech.
It is absolutely horrific that whistle-blowers are being persecuted (Manning received 35 years in prison) while the real war criminals (the crew who fired from the Apache attack helicopter, killing dozens of unarmed civilians) gets to live in freedom.
And this isn’t happening solely to Manning either, it happened to other whistle-blowers and the people who are brave enough speak truth to power as well. And now we’ve come to the point where journalists are prevented from doing their jobs, and are increasingly approached with hostility by the state. Especially the ones who ask the critical questions that need asking.
Julian Assange is still under what basically amounts to house arrest in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, because the Swedish authorities want to prosecute him. Assange fears that the Swedes will hand him over to the U.S. authorities because of his work for WikiLeaks. I think this is a very real fear, and Assange has offered the Swedish authorities the opportunity to send investigators to the U.K. to question him in person inside the Embassy. They have refused.
Just last week I’ve read the news about how the Dutch authorities have made up lies about the Dutch investigative journalist Brenno de Winter, that he had hacked facilities/infrastructure or committed burglary, etcetera. They then shared his personal information, including his address to government departments and the police. When he was having a lunch meeting the receptionist was startled and said that they had a ‘protocol’ for Mr. De Winter. A security guard was then sent to accompany him and watch his every move as he ate his lunch.
These are all classic cases of the government shooting the messenger, instead of heeding to the message and making serious inroads in making sure that war crimes and crimes against humanity, corruption, and abuse of power are stopped.
Whistle-blowers are incredibly important for society to keep power in government and corporations accountable to the people, to let the people know about what is going on. Journalists, and a free press in general, are likewise very important as well, and the second we lose a free press, that’s the second we’ve lost our freedom. The media are being used by the powers that be to influence public opinion. After all, to quote Juice Rap News: “If it’s not on “the News”, it didn’t happen, right?”