MoveOn's Phony New Campaign for 'Protecting Whistleblowers'
By Norman Solomon, Reader Supported News
30 September 19
All of a sudden, MoveOn wants to help "national security" whistleblowers.
Well, some of them, anyway.
After many years of carefully refusing to launch a single campaign in
support of brave whistleblowers who faced vicious prosecution during the
Obama administration - including Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning, NSA
whistleblowers Thomas Drake and Edward Snowden, and CIA whistleblowers John
Kiriakou and Jeffrey Sterling - MoveOn.org has just cherrypicked a
whistleblowing hero it can support.
"The stakes could not be higher for the whistleblower, who took a great
personal risk to defend our democracy," MoveOn declared in a mass email
Sunday afternoon, referring to the intelligence official who went through
channels to blow the whistle on Donald Trump's phone call with Ukraine's
president. "We need to have the whistleblower's back."
I agree wholeheartedly.
But what about Manning, Drake, Snowden, Kiriakou and Sterling, who also took
great personal risks on behalf of democracy? With its digital finger to the
wind, MoveOn refused to engage in a campaign to help any of them. Manning,
Kiriakou and Sterling were railroaded into prison and remained there for
years; Snowden has been forced to stay in exile; and Drake endured years of
persecution under threat of decades behind bars.
I experienced MoveOn's refusal firsthand when, in December 2015, I wrote to
the group's campaign director with a request. After a sham trial, Sterling
had gone to prison six months earlier for allegedly providing information to
New York Times reporter James Risen that he included in a book. "Is there a
way that MoveOn could use a bit of its list to promote this petition in
support of Jeffrey Sterling?" I asked.
The answer that I received was disappointing - merely a suggestion that the
petition be put on MoveOn's do-it-yourself platform, where it would not be
supported with distribution to any of MoveOn's email list. After pressing
further, I got an explanation from MoveOn that had a marketing sound: "It
looks like we have definitely done a lot of testing on Snowden and Manning
in the past, but unfortunately nothing quite reached the level of member
support where we were able to send it out."
That approach has endured. In the last decade, MoveOn - which says it has an
email list of 8 million "members" - has refused to do any campaigns to help
Manning, Drake, Snowden, Kiriakou or Sterling.
(Full disclosure: The organization where I'm national coordinator,
RootsAction.org, has campaigned in support of all five of the above-named
whistleblowers, with petitions, news conferences, protests and fundraising.)
Now, the whistleblower initiative that MoveOn has started might seem like a
welcome change of direction. But it's actually worse than problematic.
The organization that MoveOn just teamed up with - Whistleblower Aid -
explicitly does not support people like Snowden, Drake, Kiriakou, Sterling
and Manning, or the more recent whistleblower Reality Winner. The founding
legal partner at Whistleblower Aid, Mark Zaid, has maintained a vehement
position against unauthorized release of classified information for many
years.
"As a matter of law, no one who leaks classified information to the media
(instead of to an appropriate governmental authority) is a whistleblower
entitled to legal protection," Zaid wrote in a Washington Post op-ed piece
in 2017. "That applies to Winner, Snowden and Chelsea Manning, no matter
what one thinks of their actions. The law appropriately protects only those
who follow it. Anyone who acts contrary does so at their own peril."
According to Zaid and his organization - which MoveOn is now avidly
promoting and helping to subsidize - if the White House whistleblower's memo
had been bottled up via official channels and then had been leaked to a news
organization, the whistleblower leaking the memo would not be, and should
not be, "entitled to legal protection."
But, as Snowden has often emphasized, the official scenario of going through
channels is a dangerous myth for "national security" whistleblowers. The
reason Snowden didn't go through channels is that he saw what happened to
whistleblowers who did - like Drake, who was targeted, harassed and then
prosecuted on numerous felony counts. Snowden clearly understood that going
through channels would achieve nothing except punishment, which is why he
wisely decided to go directly to journalists.
MoveOn has not only refused to support courageous whistleblowers like
Snowden, Drake, Manning, Kiriakou and Sterling - who've informed the world
about systematic war crimes, wholesale shredding of the Fourth Amendment
with mass surveillance, officially sanctioned torture, and dangerously
flawed intelligence operations.
Now, MoveOn is partnering with a legal outfit that actually contends such
brave souls don't deserve any protections as whistleblowers. Despite its
assertion that "protecting whistleblowers is critical for a healthy
democracy," MoveOn is now splitting donations with an organization that
supports the absence of legal protections for many of them.
Norman Solomon is co-founder and national coordinator of RootsAction.org. He
is the executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy and the
author of a dozen books including War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits
Keep Spinning Us to Death.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission
to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader
Supported News.
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