ALSO SEE: YouTube, Apple, Facebook and Spotify Escalate
Enforcement Against Alex Jones
When Twitter Decides Who Speaks
By John Kiriakou, Reader Supported News
08 August 18
Censorship has become such a normal part of daily American life that most
people either don't pay attention to it or don't care. But it's taken on a
life of its own, and it's beginning to spin out of control. We must take
back our constitutional right to freedom of speech and our civil liberties.
Many Americans laughed this week when Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube
suspended the accounts of Alex Jones and InfoWars. Jones is well-known for
his bombastic, conspiracy-laden, often offensive views on just about
everything from the Sandy Hook massacre (no children were killed; they were
all "crisis actors") to the United Nations (it's a hostile foreign power
that maintains a secret army and will launch a war to install a one-world
government) to so-called "chemtrails" and space aliens. (In the interest of
transparency, I have appeared three times on InfoWars' The Real News with
David Knight. David is a mainstream Libertarian and a great supporter of
whistleblowers.)
But the decision to ban Jones was not funny at all. You don't have to agree
with a single thing the man says to believe that he has the same fundamental
right to freedom of speech that you and I have. When news of the ban broke
on August 6, I was surprised at how few of my friends objected to it.
Indeed, many gloated over it. I felt exactly the opposite. I was infuriated.
And the next day, on August 7, Twitter permanently banned my friend Peter
Van Buren from the site.
Van Buren is a renowned State Department whistleblower and 24-year Foreign
Service veteran who also led a Provincial Reconstruction Team in Iraq. He
has written extensively about waste, fraud, and abuse at the State
Department, and he published a well-received memoir in 2012 entitled, "We
Meant Well: How I Helped to Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the
Iraqi People." As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton tried mightily to fire
Van Buren for that memoir, even though the State Department's publications
review staff approved its release. She tried to confiscate his pension. Only
after a lawsuit on his behalf by the American Civil Liberties Union and the
Government Accountability Project was he allowed to retire and to keep his
pension.
Twitter, however, doesn't have to answer to anybody. It's a private company
and it can do what it wants. Last week, Van Buren got involved in an
acrimonious exchange about government lying with mainstream journalist
Jonathan Katz, a freelancer who writes primarily for The New York Times,
Politico, and Slate. Katz apparently reported Van Buren to Twitter, which
quickly banned him for life, saying he had "harassed, intimidated, or used
fear to silence" Katz. No such thing ever took place. Because of the
permanent nature of the ban, every one of Van Buren's tweets from the past
seven years has been deleted.
Twitter's action turns out to not have been limited to Alex Jones and a
buddy of mine. The company went on yesterday to suspend the accounts of
Scott Horton, a prominent radio host, director of Antiwar.com, and great
friend of whistleblowers; and Dan McAdams, a highly-respected former
congressional staff member and executive director of the Ron Paul Institute
for Peace and Prosperity. I know both of these men well and I would stake my
reputation on their decency, honesty, and integrity. Twitter suspended them
because they came to Van Buren's aid.
There's an even worse result from Twitter's actions. InfoWars this week had
promoted a petition asking President Trump to pardon Julian Assange. In just
48 hours, the petition was signed by nearly 40,000 people. It was all but
killed when removed from Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.
There's a very serious issue at play here. Put aside your feelings about
Alex Jones, about crisis actors, and about chemtrails. This is an issue of
free speech. It's an issue of corporate censorship. Twitter, Facebook,
YouTube, and other tech mega-companies are telling us that they get to
decide what we see and don't see. They get to decide what we say and don't
say.
I won't live like that. Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
(VIPS), a group of retired intelligence officers, diplomats, military
officers, and FBI agents, is writing a letter to Twitter's leadership to
protest these heavy-handed, anti-democratic actions. I'm proud to be a
member of VIPS and I think that our collective voice will be heard. But VIPS
can't do it alone. Twitter and the others must be called to account. I, for
one, don't want to live like a North Korean, an Iranian, or even an Israeli
or a Brit, where my government or a company tells me what to think or to
say. I will boycott Twitter and speak out against it everywhere until it
remedies these egregious attacks on civil liberties.
John Kiriakou is a former CIA counterterrorism officer and a former senior
investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John became the
sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage
Act - a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a
result of his attempts to oppose the Bush administration's torture program.
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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