LIST 75

11 Whistle-blowers

 

1

Major General Smedley D. Butler

Imagine one of the most highly-decorated military men in US history. Imagine a Marine who was awarded two Congressional Medals of Honor, the Army Distinguished Service Medal, the Navy Distinguished Service Medal, and the French Order of the Black Star. Imagine a Marine still spoken of with awe within the Corps, whose name is now the name of the base in Okinawa. Now imagine that, upon retiring, this “hero” and “legend” (two words the military uses to describe him) realized that America's foreign interventions are done “to protect some lousy investment of the bankers.” Then imagine that he spoke out about this.

You can stop imagining now, because this really happened. Major General Smedley D. Butler was a brilliant, brave military man who realized that he had been used as the enforcer in a global shakedown. In 1935 he published a long essay titled “War Is a Racket,” which has become an anti-war classic. Two years prior to that, he gave a speech along the same lines. The most widely quoted section contains the following confession:

I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.

I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service.

I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

2

Karen Silkwood

On November 13, 1974, Karen Silkwood was ready to blow the whistle on the unsafe conditions, faulty products, and missing radioactive material at a Kerr McGee plutonium plant, where she was a lab analyst and union organizer. She had already spilled the beans to union officials, and she was on her way to present a New York Times reporter with smuggled documents proving her claims when she died in that bane of troublemakers everywhere—the one-car accident on a lonely road. The documents were not found with her and have never been recovered. High amounts of plutonium in Silkwood's body and apartment indicated that she had been exposed to radiation within 30 days of her death.

3

Daniel Ellsberg

Ellsberg's name is now synonymous with leaking official secrets revealing government lies. But given his early life as a Marine, Harvard Ph.D. in economics, RAND consultant, and assistant in the Departments of Defense and State, he was an unlikely person to turn the establishment on its head. “From my first day in the Pentagon—August 4, 1964—I witnessed lies about US provocations and imaginary torpedos in the Tonkin Gulf,” he wrote in 2000. “I became a participant in secret plans to escalate the war as soon as President Johnson won in a landslide by promising voters just the opposite.” While working on a highly classified study of the Vietnam War, Ellsberg got to the point where he could no longer stomach the lies. He clandestinely, and illegally, photocopied the 7,000-page study and gave it to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. When it became apparent that they weren't doing anything meaningful with it, in 1971 he sent it to newspapers, including the New York Times, which published portions of it after winning an epochal Supreme Court ruling over prior restraint.

The government prosecuted Ellsberg on a dozen felony counts, but he beat the rap when it became known that the Nixon Administration had used dirty tricks against him. Since those heady days, he's been arrested around 60 times for civil disobedience against nuclear war and foreign interventionism. He now urges other government insiders to release bombshell documents about the 2003 Iraq invasion.

4

Mordechai Vanunu

Starting in 1976, Mordechai Vanunu worked as a technician in Israel's secret nuclear weapons program. Before leaving the country in 1985, he took photos of the inner workings of the Dimona installation. In October of the next year, the London Sunday Times ran an extensive interview with Vanunu—accompanied by his photos—in which he definitively revealed the existence of Israel's nukes. In September 1986, even before the Times had printed the story, Israeli agents kidnapped Vanunu, drugged him, and shipped him back to his home country, where he was found guilty of espionage and treason. Sentenced to eighteen years in prison, he spent the first eleven and a half in solitary. He's due to be released before the Disinformation Book of Lists hits the streets, but the Israeli government is planning ways to extend his sentence or at least gag him and prevent him from leaving the country.

Control room of plutonium separation plant at Israel's Dimona nuclear facility.
Photo by Mordechai Vanunu.

5

Martin Jay Levitt

Martin Jay Levitt went from busting unions to busting the union-busters. For almost 20 years, he was a consultant for corporations that wanted to prevent their workers from organizing, becoming known as a ruthless, dirty-playing enemy of labor. But in 1988, during an alcoholic midlife crisis, he realized that—like all others in the field—he was the scum of the earth. He immediately created the Justice for Labor Foundation, wrote a book exposing the underhanded tactics of union-busters, and is now heavily in demand as a pro-labor speaker, consultant, expert witness, etc. As someone who was once a master of this nasty game, he is in a prime position to reveal the way it's played.

He talks about the time he and his colleagues arranged for cocaine to be planted in the locker of a union organizer. “The employee went to open his locker,” Levitt told National Public Radio, “and, conveniently, not one, but two supervisors were standing within six feet of the locker, saw a bag of white substance fall to the floor, confronted the employee, took the employee to personnel.” The personnel director said that the cops should be called over this, but: “I'm gonna give you a break. You resign now and we'll forget the whole incident.”

Levitt maintains that this is not an isolated incident. Every company that tries to prevent unions from forming “routinely” uses immoral and illegal methods, including lying, spying, threatening, harassing, and framing, as well as more subtle tactics like making superficial improvements for workers and turning organizers against each other.

6

Jeffrey Wigand

Disney made a movie about him; Russell Crowe portrayed him; and The Insider was nominated for seven Academy Awards, including best picture. But before this, Jeffrey Wigand had to endure hell when he became the highest level tobacco executive to expose the industry's dirt and ashes. In 1988, he had been made Vice President of Scientific Research at Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp., and his mission—or so he believed—was to develop a less addictive cigarette. What he found is that Big Tobacco wants their products to be as addictive as possible.

In 1993, he started quietly, then overtly, revealing inside secrets to the government and the press. He appeared in a legendary 60 Minutes interview that was temporarily spiked for fear that Brown & Williamson might sue. For his actions, Levitt was followed, physically threatened, and found a bullet in his mailbox. His former bosses launched a classic smear campaign against him, then sued him for violating trade secrets (they later dropped the suit).

Wigand's information sparked the successful multibillion-dollar lawsuits against Big Tobacco. He started the Smoke-Free Kids Foundation, and now he lectures, consults, and advocates against the nicotine pushers.

7

M. Wesley Swearingen

M. Wesley Swearingen was an FBI agent from 1955 to 1977. During those particularly volatile 22 years of American history, he was involved in the FBI's dirtiest deeds against US political dissidents, including burglaries, disinformation campaigns, and other unethical activities. On top of that, he has insider knowledge of even more extreme tactics, including assassination. After quitting the agency in disgust and spending a year in mental anguish, Swearingen became a whistle-blower.

When he arrived as a rookie agent in Chicago, he had visions of doing battle with mobsters. Instead, he was assigned to surveil the wives of two leaders of the Communist Party of the United States. Soon, he was participating in black bag jobs, in which he illegally and unconstitutionally broke into people's homes looking for incriminating documents. He estimates that the FBI performed 23,800 such break-ins over 35 years, and he personally participated in hundreds of them.

His accusations get even stronger: “…I learned how the FBI had arranged to assassinate members of the Black Panther Party by using hit men in the United Slaves organization, a black nationalist organization based in Southern California, who were FBI informers. I learned how the FBI had neutralized the charismatic leader of the Los Angeles Black Panther Party, Elmer ‘Geronimo’ Pratt, by framing him for murder.” A colleague of Swearingen's disclosed to him that the FBI had orchestrated the murders of Chicago Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark.

In his almost unprecedented exposé, he claims that the Bureau lied to the General Accounting Office during its audit of FBI files and that top FBI brass committed perjury before Congress. He also reveals internal problems within the FBI during his tenure—authorized cheating on training examinations, attitudes of extreme racism and sexism, anally retentive neatness rules, thievery and laziness, and the apparently random dismissals of agents.

8

Dr. Bernard Nathanson

Bernard Nathanson, M.D., was a founder of the National Abortion Rights Action League. “I worked hard to make abortion legal, affordable, and available on demand,” he wrote in his autobiography. After Roe v. Wade, he performed thousands of the procedures himself, and he headed the Center for Reproductive and Sexual Health, which performed more abortions than any other clinic in the world. Nathanson eventually renounced abortion, converted to Catholicism in 1996, and now spills the beans about the movement to legalize abortion. He claims that he and his colleagues made up polls out of thin air, telling the media that 60 percent of people wanted no restrictions on abortion. In his essay “Confessions of an Ex-Abortionist,” he writes:

We aroused enough sympathy to sell our program of permissive abortion by fabricating the number of illegal abortions done annually in the US. The actual figure was approaching 100,000 but the figure we gave to the media repeatedly was 1,000,000. Repeating the big lie often enough convinces the public. The number of women dying from illegal abortions was around 200-250 annually. The figure we constantly fed to the media was 10,000. These false figures took root in the consciousness of Americans convincing many that we needed to crack the abortion law. Another myth we fed to the public through the media was that legalizing abortion would only mean that the abortions taking place illegally would then be done legally. In fact, of course, abortion is now being used as a primary method of birth control in the US and the annual number of abortions has increased by 1500% since legalization.

9

Anthony V. Bouza

After a 36-year career in law enforcement—including stints as police chief of Minneapolis and commander of the Bronx police—Anthony V. Bouza wrote a book, Police Unbound, that both honored cops for their good points and excoriated them for the rotten things they do. He confirms the existence of the “blue wall of silence,” which most cops will swear is mythical, and he relays the term “testilying,” police slang for giving false testimony under oath in order to convict someone. He tells of instances of police brutality, and admits: “Unquestionably, racism is endemic in the ranks.” He also dishes up anger at the system that uses cops as a means of social control, deliberately underreports crime so the mayor looks good, and continues the mindless the war on drugs.

10

Joseph E. Stiglitz

At one time, Joseph Stiglitz was a leading force in economic globalization. As a senior vice president and the chief economist of the World Bank, this Nobel laureate thought he was helping undeveloped and underdeveloped countries to grow and prosper. Then he realized he wasn't. “And you know what the problem with globalization and the program of privatizations, deregulation, liberalization of capital markets is?” he asked in an interview. “They don't work”

The World Bank and International Monetary Fund loan scads of money to Second and Third World nations with an average of 111 conditions—often suicidal conditions—attached. The countries are forced to change their political and economic systems in ways that allow First World “vulture capitalists” to massively profit from the situation while the masses get screwed. Stiglitz calls it “briberization,” not privatization.

Beyond that, he admits that every single nation that has gotten onboard the World Bank/IMF's globalization scheme has gotten trashed. China and Botswana have achieved growth, he says, because they told the globalizers to shove their money and conditions.

In his call to arms, Globalization and Its Discontents, Stiglitz confesses that “the policies of the international economic institutions are all too often closely aligned with the commercial and financial interests of those in the advanced industrial countries.” He writes:

Modern high-tech warfare is designed to remove physical contact; dropping bombs from 50,000 feet ensures that one does not “feel” what one does. Modern economic management is similar: from one's luxury hotel, one can callously impose policies about which one would think twice if one knew the people whose lives one was destroying.

11

Katharine Gun

In spring 2002, the US and UK were trying to convince the United Nations Security Council of the need to invade Iraq over weapons of mass destruction that no longer existed. Six countries were seen as sitting on the fence, so, in order to figure out how to manipulate them, the National Security Agency was told to spy on their delegates. Phone calls and email of the representatives from Mexico, Chile, Angola, Cameroon, Guinea, and Pakistan were intercepted.

We know about this shameful episode because Katharine Gun—who worked as a translator in Britain's eavesdropping facility, GCHQ—bravely leaked a classified NSA memo to the London Observer. Right-wingers insinuated that the document was fake, but when the British government arrested and prosecuted Gun for leaking state secrets, it became obvious that this was for real and that America was spying on UN delegates. She says that she leaked the memos “because they exposed serious illegality and wrongdoing on the part of the US Government who attempted to subvert our own security services,” as well as “to prevent wide-scale death and casualties among ordinary Iraqi people and UK forces in the course of an illegal war.” In late Februrary 2004, Gun's trial for violations of the noxious Official Secrets Act was abruptly called off, the British government saying that it would have to reveal sensitive information in order to prosecute her.

The NSA Memo Leaked by Katherine Gun

To: [Recipients withheld]
From: FRANK KOZA, Def Chief of Staff (Regional Targets)
CIV/NSA
Sent on Jan 31 2003 0:16
Subject: Reflections of Iraq Debate/Votes at UN-RT Actions + Potential for Related Contributions
Importance: HIGH
Top Secret//COMINT//X1

 

All,
As you've likely heard by now, the Agency is mounting a surge particularly directed at the UN Security Council (UNSC) members (minus US and GBR of course) for insights as to how to membership is reacting to the on-going debate RE: Iraq, plans to vote on any related resolutions, what related policies/negotiating positions they may be considering, alliances/ dependencies, etc - the whole gamut of information that could give US policymakers an edge in obtaining results favorable to US goals or to head off surprises. In RT, that means a QRC surge effort to revive/ create efforts against UNSC members Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Bulgaria and Guinea, as well as extra focus on Pakistan UN matters.

 

We've also asked ALL RT topi's to emphasize and make sure they pay attention to existing non-UNSC member UN-related and domestic comms for anything useful related to the UNSC deliberations/ debates/ votes. We have a lot of special UN-related diplomatic coverage (various UN delegations) from countries not sitting on the UNSC right now that could contribute related perspectives/ insights/ whatever. We recognize that we can't afford to ignore this possible source.

 

We'd appreciate your support in getting the word to your analysts who might have similar, more in-direct access to valuable information from accesses in your product lines. I suspect that you'll be hearing more along these lines in formal channels - especially as this effort will probably peak (at least for this specific focus) in the middle of next week, following the SecState's presentation to the UNSC.

 

Thanks for your help