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^{Truth, holding a mirror and a serpent

(1896). Olin Levi Warner, Library of Congress

Thomas Jefferson Building, Washington, D.C.}

You know something is very wrong with the world which is what led you to this site. The following people and concepts will give you essential knowledge to understand the perspectives of reformist posters who comment on alternate internet sites. In the never-ending battle for common citizen rights, the following actors have risked it all for your freedom:

Social Prophets Hall of Fame:

Plato: An Ancient Greek Philosopher who maintained that free democracies always descend into much worse tyranny than other forms of government. Considering how free the US used to be, and how much of a totalitarian police state it is now, his disdain for the spoiled offspring of free generations seems to ring true.

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Aldous Huxley: Famous British Author of the surreal corp/gov distopia: "Brave New World", Huxley was a teacher of George Orwell and maintained that governments would try to drug and seduce their populations into slavery rather than physically beating them into submission. In his book, the government supplied Helicopters, "Feelies", Orgies and Drugs kept citizens from realising what their leaders were up to.

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George Orwell: Pen name for Eric Blair of the British Empire, who's dystopian nightmare: "1984", "Animal Farm", and other writings like "Shooting an Elephant", dealt with totalitarian ordeals where common citizens were brutally tortured, spied upon, harassed and lied to by merciless despotic governments headed by bloodthirsty dictators. Orwell lived it in Burma first hand as a military cop tasked with beating the devil out of colonial citizens.

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Government Whistleblowers Hall of Fame:

Private Bradley Manning: Army Intelligence Analyst who witnessed war crimes against innocent civilians depicted in the military video called Collateral Murder and countless secret cables of wrongdoing and government skullduggery. The video shows Rumsfield's "double tap" policy of firing on reporters with cameras, rescuers and children. The helicopter aircrew keeps claiming verbally that everybody is armed, but in this original version, people only appear to have knapsacks and Cameras. Manning leaked these troves of illegal and disgraceful government behaviour to Julian Asange's website called: Wikileaks. He was kept in jail without charge for years and tortured, and was tried in a secretive military court with secret evidence and secret proceedings the public was not allowed to see. Obama declared this soldier guilty before this "show trial" even began.

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Julian Assange: Creater of Wikileaks Website which published leaks of government and globalization wrongdoing all over the world. Since wikileaks was a legal component of the Free Press, US prosecutors could find nothing to charge this Australian citizen with, so he was reportedly set up by a CIA woman in Sweden and now is trapped inside a South American embassy in London.

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Russell Tice: NSA Whistleblower who, in 2006, claimed the NSA was wasting millions of taxpayer dollars and that the Bush Administration was engaging in illegal Warrantless Wiretaps on innocent Americans. His house was raided by the FBI. In 2013 he revealed more details after Snowdens leaks: Tice claimed the NSA was "going after" judges, senators and generals, and had blackmail material on the president as well. http://boilingfrogspost.com/wp-content/uploads/BF.0112.Tice_20130617.mp3

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Thomas Drake: High-level ranking NSA official who reported government waste and illegal data collection by the "Trailblazer" program. FBI raided his home and retroactively classifed documents in his home that were not classified. http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WsrEqC2ABlg

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John Kiriakou: CIA whistleblower: revealed that torture was government policy. Is now in prison for revealing crimes being committed by the government.

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William Binney: NSA whistleblower raided by FBI. During interviews on Democracy Now! in April and May 2012 with elaboration in July 2012 at 2600's hacker conference HOPE and at DEF CON a couple weeks later, Binney repeated estimates that the NSA (particularly its Stellar Wind project) had intercepted 20 trillion communications "transactions" of Americans such as phone calls, emails, and other forms of data (but not including financial data). This includes most of the emails of US citizens. Binney disclosed in a sworn affidavit for Jewel v. NSA that the agency was "purposefully violating the Constitution".

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Edward Snowden: An Ex-CIA and NSA analyst working subcontract for Booz Allen Hamilton, Snowden blew the lid off the NSA's illegal spying on innocent citizens. 2013: Awarded the Corner-Brightener Candlestick Award by the Sam A. Adams Association for Integrity in Intelligence. Nominated also for the Nobel Peace Prize. He has been the victim of a secret sealed indictment against him by the government, being charged with an obsolete war law from 1917: The Espionage Act. Snowden revealed the existence of the NSA computer system called: PRISM which illegally sweeps social networking information from Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft etc and phone calls and emails of US citizens. A flagrant violation of the Fourth Amendment and a complete contradiction of the sworn congressional testimony of the National Security Director James Clapper, who later apologised for lying to Congress.

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Glenn Greenwald: Civil Rights Attorney and Reporter for the UK mainstay Paper: The Guardian, who published the Snowden NSA leaks. Arguably, the greatest Mainstream reporter of our time.

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Ladar Levinson: Secure email provider who refused to be bullied by the Obama Administration's NSA Witch-Hunt On Edward Snowden. Rather than hand over everyone's private emails, on August 8, 2013, Lavabit suspended its operations, and the email service log-in page was replaced by a message from the owner and operator Ladar Levison.[1] The New Yorker suggested that the suspension might be related to the National Security Agency’s "domestic-surveillance practices".[13] Wired speculated that Levison was fighting a warrant or national security letter seeking customer information under extraordinary circumstances, as Lavabit had complied with at least one routine search warrant in the past.[10][14] Levison stated in an interview that he has responded to "at least two dozen subpoenas" over the lifetime of the service.[15] He hinted that the objectionable request was for "information about all the users" of Lavabit.[16]

Levison explained he was under gag order and that he was legally unable to explain to the public why he ended the service.[15] Instead, he asked for donations to "fight for the Constitution" in the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. Levison also stated he has even been banned from sharing some information with his lawyer.[15] Meanwhile, the Electronic Frontier Foundation called on the FBI to provide greater transparency to the public, in part to help observers "understand what led to a ten-year-old business closing its doors and a new start-up abandoning a business opportunity".[17]
Levison said that he could be arrested for closing the site instead of releasing the information, and it was reported that the federal prosecutor's office had sent Levison's lawyer an e-mail to that effect.[16] [18]

Lavabit is believed to be the first technology firm that has chosen to suspend/shut down its operation rather than comply with an order from the United States government to reveal information or grant access to information.[3] Silent Circle, an encrypted email, mobile video and voice service provider, followed the example of Lavabit by discontinuing its encrypted email services.[19] Citing the impossibility of being able to maintain the confidentiality of its customers' emails should it be served with government orders, Silent Circle permanently erased the encryption keys that allowed access to emails stored or transmitted by its service.[20]
In September 2013 Levison appealed the order that resulted in the closing of his website.[21]

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Wayne Madsen: Ex-NSA analyst who turned whistleblower and became an investigative reporter. Broke major stories the MSM wouldn't cover like Obama's CIA family and employment. Also Dick Cheney's suspected involvement in missing nukes mounted and armed on B-52's and flown over the United States before the Iran invasion was called off. Ruined the careers of many USAF officers when the coverup was exposed by him. He has had to leave the US due to harassment by Federal Agencies.
Copies of Madsen pay site story

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Scott Ritter United Nations Weapons Inspector (former USMC ballistic missile expert) who blew the whistle on fake WMD intel claims leading the US into war on false pretence. Decried Bush Administration dishonesty in pretending that his investigations were proof of WMDs, when in fact he found none in Iraq. His disclosures to the press about the Administration cooking the intelligence to steal oil in Iraq and Haliburton extracting Natural Gas in Iran (in violation of Sanctions), caused repeated police sex stings against him, where he was repeatedly the target of undercover on-line sex solicitors who later revealed they were underage, according to wiki.

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Daniel Ellsberg: A former United States military analyst who, while employed by the RAND Corporation, precipitated a national political controversy in 1971 when he released the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret Pentagon study of U.S. government decision-making in relation to the Vietnam War, to The New York Times and other newspapers. He was awarded the Right Livelihood Award in 2006. He is also known for a fundamental contribution to decision theory, the Ellsberg paradox. His actions led to the end of the war, but not before the government broke into his psychiatrists office to steal his patient files to discredit him. He was prosecuted for many alleged crimes, but when the government was caught wire-tapping him without a court order, and then claimed to have lost those recordings, the judge threw the case against him out.

From a recent talk by Daniel Ellsberg:

"There's the infrastructure for a police state here that has never existed in the history of the world… You may think you have nothing to hide, but how sure are you that your congressman has nothing to hide?" This level of surveillance gives the executive branch blackmail leverage over the legislature, the judiciary, and the media, completely subverting the structure envisioned by the framers of the US constitution. And it gives the Carlyle Group (parent of Booz Allen) blackmail leverage over the executive branch. The Death Bell is Tolling for your so-called Democracy.

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Ray McGovern: Critic of Fake War. McGovern was an Officer for the CIA, responsible for the analysis of Soviet policy in Vietnam.
From 1981 to 1985 was one of the intelligence officers in charge for the daily briefing of Reagan and Bush I. Overall he advised six different presidents. McGovern has been an outspoken commentator on intelligence-related issues since the late 1990s. He was heavily critical of the government's handling of the Wen Ho Lee case in 2000. In 2002 he was publicly critical of President George W. Bush's use of government intelligence in the lead-up to the war in Iraq.
In 2003, together with other former CIA employees, McGovern founded the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity or VIPS. The organization is dedicated to analyzing and criticizing the use of intelligence, specifically relating to the War in Iraq. In January 2006, McGovern began speaking out on behalf of the anti-war group "Not in Our Name". According to the group's press release, McGovern served symbolic "war crimes indictments" on the Bush White House from a "people's tribunal."

McGovern highlighted the significance of the leaked 2007 Intelligence Estimate showing Iran had no nuclear weapons. This leak by Military Brass, was essentially an "In-your-face" Air Force Insurrection refusing to cooperate with a Bush/Cheney planned attack on Iran. It led to missing nukes, finally found unguarded at Barksdale AFB and possibly the mysterious fatal auto accidents and suicides of many airman with possible knowledge of the events according to the Wayne Madsen Report (ex-NSA analyst). Declared a mistake by Defense Secretary Gates at the time, the missing nukes spelled the end of the careers of a number of USAF officers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_United_States_Air_Force_nuclear_weapons_incident
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Citizen Alert!

Disturbing Russel Tice Report:
NSA Whistleblower: NSA Spying On – and Blackmailing – Top Government Officials and Military Officers
Posted on June 20, 2013 by WashingtonsBlog
Whistleblower Says Spy Agency Targeting Top American Leaders

NSA whistleblower Russel Tice – a key source in the 2005 New York Times report that blew the lid off the Bush administration’s use of warrantless wiretapping – told Peter B. Collins on Boiling Frogs Post (the website of FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds):

Tice: Okay. They went after–and I know this because I had my hands literally on the paperwork for these sort of things–they went after high-ranking military officers; they went after members of Congress, both Senate and the House, especially on the intelligence committees and on the armed services committees and some of the–and judicial. But they went after other ones, too. They went after lawyers and law firms. All kinds of–heaps of lawyers and law firms. They went after judges. One of the judges is now sitting on the Supreme Court that I had his wiretap information in my hand. Two are former FISA court judges. They went after State Department officials. They went after people in the executive service that were part of the White House–their own people. They went after antiwar groups. They went after U.S. international–U.S. companies that that do international business, you know, business around the world. They went after U.S. banking firms and financial firms that do international business. They went after NGOs that–like the Red Cross, people like that that go overseas and do humanitarian work. They went after a few antiwar civil rights groups. So, you know, don’t tell me that there’s no abuse, because I’ve had this stuff in my hand and looked at it. And in some cases, I literally was involved in the technology that was going after this stuff. And you know, when I said to [former MSNBC show host Keith] Olbermann, I said, my particular thing is high tech and you know, what’s going on is the other thing, which is the dragnet. The dragnet is what Mark Klein is talking about, the terrestrial dragnet. Well my specialty is outer space. I deal with satellites, and everything that goes in and out of space. I did my spying via space. So that’s how I found out about this.

Collins: Now Russ, the targeting of the people that you just mentioned, top military leaders, members of Congress, intelligence community leaders and the–oh, I’m sorry, it was intelligence committees, let me correct that–not intelligence community, and then executive branch appointees. This creates the basis, and the potential for massive blackmail.

Tice: Absolutely! And remember we talked about that before, that I was worried that the intelligence community now has sway over what is going on. Now here’s the big one. I haven’t given you any names. This was is summer of 2004. One of the papers that I held in my hand was to wiretap a bunch of numbers associated with, with a 40-something-year-old wannabe senator from Illinois. You wouldn’t happen to know where that guy lives right now, would you? It’s a big white house in Washington, DC. That’s who they went after. And that’s the president of the United States now.

http://boilingfrogspost.com/wp-content/uploads/BF.0112.Tice_20130617.mp3

Other whistleblowers say the same thing. When the former head of the NSA’s digital spying program – William Binney – disclosed the fact that the U.S. was spying on everyone in the U.S. and storing the data forever, and that the U.S. was quickly becoming a totalitarian state, the Feds tried to scare him into shutting up:

[Numerous] FBI officers held a gun to Binney’s head as he stepped naked from the shower. He watched with his wife and youngest son as the FBI ransacked their home. Later Binney was separated from the rest of his family, and FBI officials pressured him to implicate one of the other complainants in criminal activity. During the raid, Binney attempted to report to FBI officials the crimes he had witnessed at NSA, in particular the NSA’s violation of the constitutional rights of all Americans. However, the FBI wasn’t interested in these disclosures. Instead, FBI officials seized Binney’s private computer, which to this day has not been returned despite the fact that he has not been charged with a crime.

Other NSA whistleblowers have also been subjected to armed raids and criminal prosecution.

After high-level CIA officer John Kiriakou blew the whistle on illegal CIA torture, the government prosecuted him for espionage.

Even the head of the CIA was targeted with extra-constitutional spying and driven out of office. Indeed, Binney makes it very clear that the government will use information gained from its all-pervasive spying program to frame anyone it doesn’t like.

Retired high-level CIA analyst Ray McGovern – the top CIA briefer to numerous presidents – said this a few weeks ago on a radio program:

Which leads to the question, why would [Obama] do all these things? Why would he be afraid for example, to take the drones away from the CIA? Well, I’ve come to the conclusion that he’s afraid. Number one, he’s afraid of what happened to Martin Luther King Jr. And I know from a good friend who was there when it happened, that at a small dinner with progressive supporters – after these progressive supporters were banging on Obama before the election, “Why don’t you do the things we thought you stood for?” Obama turned sharply and said, “Don’t you remember what happened to Martin Luther King Jr.?” That’s a quote, and that’s a very revealing quote.

McGovern also said:

In a speech on March 21, second-term Obama gave us a big clue regarding his concept of leadership – one that is marked primarily by political risk-avoidance and a penchant for “leading from behind”: “Speaking as a politician, I can promise you this: political leaders will not take risks if the people do not demand that they do. You must create the change that you want to see.”

John Kennedy was willing to take huge risks in reaching out to the USSR and ending the war in Vietnam. That willingness to take risks may have gotten him assassinated, as James Douglass argues in his masterful JFK and the Unspeakable.

Martin Luther King, Jr., also took great risks and met the same end. There is more than just surmise that this weighs heavily on Barack Obama’s mind. Last year, pressed by progressive donors at a dinner party to act more like the progressive they thought he was, Obama responded sharply, “Don’t you remember what happened to Dr. King?”

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Ralph Nader: A tireless Consumer Watchdog and Defender of Citizen's Rights, Ralph Nader is a political activist, as well as an author, lecturer, and attorney. Nader fought his entire life for consumer protection, humanitarianism, environmentalism, and democratic government.

He came to prominence in 1965 with the publication of his book "Unsafe at Any Speed", a critique of the safety record of American automobile manufacturers in general, and most famously the Chevrolet Corvair. In 1999, a New York University panel of journalists ranked Unsafe at Any Speed 38th among the top 100 pieces of journalism of the 20th century.
Nader is a five-time candidate for President of the United States, having run as a write-in candidate in the 1992 New Hampshire Democratic primary, as the Green Party nominee in 1996 and 2000, and as an independent candidate in 2004 and 2008.

Non-profit organizations
Throughout his career, Nader has started or inspired a variety of nonprofit organizations,with most of which he has maintained close associations :
Citizen Advocacy Center
Citizens Utility Boards
Congress Accountability Project
Consumer Task Force For Automotive Issues
Corporate Accountability Research Project
Disability Rights Center
Equal Justice Foundation
Foundation for Taxpayers and Consumer Rights
Georgia Legal Watch
National Citizens' Coalition for Nursing Home Reform
National Coalition for Universities in the Public Interest
Pension Rights Center
PROD (truck safety)
Retired Professionals Action Group
The Shafeek Nader Trust for the Community Interest
1969: Center for the Study of Responsive Law
1970s: Public Interest Research Groups
1970: Center for Auto Safety
1970: Connecticut Citizen Action Group
1971: Aviation Consumer Action Project
1972: Clean Water Action Project
1972: Center for Women's Policy Studies
1973: Capitol Hill News Service
1980: Multinational Monitor (magazine covering multinational corporations)
1982: Trial Lawyers for Public Justice
1982: Essential Information (encourage citizen activism and do investigative journalism)
1983: Telecommunications Research and Action Center
1983: National Coalition for Universities in the Public Interest
1988: Taxpayer Assets Project, WFHW-LP
1989: Princeton Project 55 (alumni public service)
1993: Appleseed Foundation (local change)
1994: Resource Consumption Alliance (conserve trees)
1995: Center for Insurance Research
1995: Consumer Project on Technology
1997: Government Purchasing Project (encourage purchase of safe products)
1998: Center for Justice & Democracy
1998: Organization for Competitive Markets
1998: American Antitrust Institute (ensure fair competition)
1998: Commercial Alert (protect family, community, and democracy from corporations)
1999: Arizona Center for Law in the Public Interest
2000: Congressional Accountability Project (fight corruption in Congress)
2001: Citizen Works (promote NGO cooperation, build grassroots support, and start new groups)
2001: Democracy Rising (hold rallies to educate and empower citizens)

Nader was instrumental in passing at least 8 Consumer Protection Acts, including the Safe Drinking Water Act, The Environmental Protection Act (EPA) The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), and The Consumer Product Safety Administration.

In 1980, Nader resigned as director of Public Citizen to work on other projects, lecturing on the growing "imperialism" of multinational corporations and of a dangerous convergence of corporate and government power.

Hundreds of young activists, inspired by Nader's work, came to DC to help him with other projects. They came to be known as "Nader's Raiders" and, under Nader, investigated government corruption, publishing dozens of books with their results:

Nader's Raiders (Federal Trade Commission)
Vanishing Air (National Air Pollution Control Administration)
The Chemical Feast (Food and Drug Administration)
The Interstate Commerce Omission (Interstate Commerce Commission)
Old Age (nursing homes)
The Water Lords (water pollution)
Who Runs Congress? (Congress)
Whistle Blowing (punishment of whistle blowers)
The Big Boys (corporate executives)
Collision Course (Federal Aviation Administration)
No Contest (corporate lawyers)
Destroy the Forest (Destruction of ecosystems worldwide)

In 1971, Nader co-founded the nongovernmental organization (NGO) Public Citizen with fellow public interest lawyer Alan Morrison as an umbrella organization for these projects. Today, Public Citizen has over 225,000 members and investigates congressional, health, environmental, economic and other issues. Nader wrote, "The consumer must be protected at times from his own indiscretion and vanity."

During the Watergate affair Nader challenged the dismissal by Robert Bork of Nixon's special prosecutor Cox in the aftermath of the Saturday Night Massacre.
In the 1970s and 1980s Nader was a key leader in the antinuclear power movement. "By 1976, consumer advocate Ralph Nader, who later became allied with the environmental movement, 'stood as the titular head of opposition to nuclear energy'." The Critical Mass Energy Project was formed by Nader in 1974 as a national anti-nuclear umbrella group. It was probably the largest national anti-nuclear group in the United States, with several hundred local affiliates and an estimated 200,000 supporters. The organization's main efforts were directed at lobbying activities and providing local groups with scientific and other resources to campaign against nuclear power. Nader advocates the complete elimination of nuclear energy in favor of solar, tidal, wind and geothermal, citing environmental, worker safety, migrant labor, national security, disaster preparedness, foreign policy, government accountability and democratic governance issues to bolster his position.

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Dr Helen Caldicott: Defender of Children against radioactive exposure from leaking nuclear power plants. Austrailian Doctor and graduate of the University of Adelaide Medical School, In 1977 she joined the staff of the Children's Hospital Medical Center in Boston, and taught pediatrics at the Harvard Medical School from 1977 to 1978.Citing confidential memos, Caldicott says that the Hershey Foods Corporation was concerned about radiation levels in milk used in their products because of the proximity of the Three Mile Island accident to Hershey's Pennsylvania factory. According to Caldicott, citing a 30 March 1979 study by the Pennsylvania State University, College of Engineering, radiation contaminants that fell on the Pennsylvania grass found their way into the milk of the local dairy cows.[3] Caldicott noted this was contrary to the findings in the government official report[4] released shortly after the Three Mile Island disaster. Caldicott disputes the governments false claims in her book, Nuclear Power is Not the Answer.
Also in 1980, she founded the Women's Action for Nuclear Disarmament (WAND) in the United States, which was later renamed Women's Action for New Directions. It is a group dedicated to reducing or redirecting government spending away from nuclear energy use towards what the group perceives as unmet social issues.

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Arnold Gundersen: Nuclear Whistleblower, former Vice President of a company who made Nuclear Fuel Rod Racks, and also a liceneced nuclear reactor instructor. Gundersen blew the lid off the reckless for-profit Nuclear Power Plant industry. First reporting dangerous safety problems with dozens of plants endangering the public, both the NRC (gov regulator) and the nuclear industry came after him. He testified to Congress in the investigation of the Three Mile Island accident revealing later that the industrys claim that no one was hurt by the explosions at TMI-2 was completely untrue. Gundersen showed everyone that the governments own witness declared under oath that ten percent of ten million curries of radiation escaped and that transcripts of NRC phone calls refered to the situation as: NO CONTAINMENT. Arrnies due dilligence revealed that two million people downwind were nuked and the incidence of cancer near the accident reactor had soared. Gundersen then gave proffessional analysis of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, warning that the 23 Mark I plants in the US may also blow up as well as safety problems at dozens of running plants. He recently flagged the SONGS plant in Southern California as an accident waiting to happen and as a result of pointing the defective heat exchangers out to lawmakers got the plant shut down. [http://www.fairewinds.com]

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Bunnatine (Bunny) H. Greenhouse: Blew the whistle on Dick Cheney's looting of the US Treasury. A former chief contracting officer Senior Executive Service (Principal Assistant Responsible for Contracting (PARC)) of the United States Army Corps of Engineers. On June 27, 2005, she testified to a Congressional panel, alleging specific instances of waste, fraud, and other abuses and irregularities by Halliburton with regard to its operations in Iraq since the 2003 invasion. She described one of the Halliburton contracts (secret, no-bid contracts awarded to Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR)—a subsidiary of Halliburton) as "the most blatant and improper contract abuse I have witnessed during the course of my professional career".[1]
A long-time government employee, Greenhouse was hired by Lieutenant General Joe Ballard in 1997 to oversee contracts at the Army Corps of Engineers. After Ballard retired in 2000, Greenhouse's performance reviews, which had been exemplary throughout her public career, suddenly soured. Greenhouse filed an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) complaint alleging race and gender discrimination, which her attorney states has never been investigated. In August 2005, she was demoted in what her lawyer called an "obvious reprisal" for her revelations about the Halliburton contracts.[2][3]
On July 25, 2011, The U.S. District Court in Washington, DC approved awarding Greenhouse $970,000 in full restitution of lost wages, compensatory damages and attorney fees.[4]

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More…Truth-Tellers Hall of Fame:

Aaron Swartz: Fearless Crusader of a Free Internet. (November 8, 1986 – January 11, 2013) Swartz was an American computer programmer, writer, political organizer and Internet activist. Although just a young student, he was deeply involved in the development of the web feed format RSS, the organization Creative Commons, the website framework web.py and the social news site Reddit. In 2013, he was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame.
Swartz became an equal partner in Reddit after its merger with his company, Infogami. His later work focused on sociology, civic awareness and activism. In 2009, wanting to learn about effective activism, he helped launch the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. In 2010, he became a research fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Research Lab on Institutional Corruption, directed by Lawrence Lessig. He founded the online group Demand Progress, known for its campaign against the Stop Online Piracy Act.

On January 6, 2011, Swartz was arrested by MIT police on state breaking-and-entering charges, after systematically downloading academic journal articles from JSTOR. Draconian Federal prosecutors later charged him with two counts of wire fraud and 11 exaggerated violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, carrying a cumulative maximum penalty of $1 million in fines, 35 years in prison, asset forfeiture, restitution and supervised release, all for documents that were in most cases already in the Public Domain.
On January 11, 2013, two years after his initial arrest, Swartz was found dead in his Crown Heights, Brooklyn apartment, where he had apparently hanged himself. Driven to suicide by a vindictive government that has no shame and will trump-up charges on anyone who dares to expose it's chronic Fortune 500 corruption.

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Mordechai Vanunu: also known as John Crossman, is a former Israeli nuclear technician who, citing his opposition to weapons of mass destruction, revealed details and 57 photographs of Israel's often denied nuclear weapons program to the British press in 1986. He was subsequently lured to Italy by a Mossad agent, where he was drugged and abducted by Israeli intelligence agents. He was transported to Israel and ultimately convicted in a trial that was held behind closed doors.
Vanunu spent 18 years in prison, including more than 11 in solitary confinement. Released from prison in 2004, he became subject to a broad array of restrictions on his speech and movement. Since then he has been arrested several times for violations of those restrictions, including giving various interviews to foreign journalists and attempting to leave Israel.

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Dr. Vandana Shiva, PhD: is an expert in Quantum Physics, an Indian environmental activist and anti-globalization author fighting against unsafe GMO food and destructive Seed Domination by Big Ag and Big Chemical Ogilopilies. She is also a leader for the rights of women farmers.

She is one of the leaders and board members of the International Forum on Globalization, (along with Jerry Mander, Edward Goldsmith, Ralph Nader, Jeremy Rifkin, et al.), and a figure of the global solidarity movement known as the alter-globalization movement. She has argued for the wisdom of many traditional practices, as is evident from her interview in the book Vedic Ecology (by Ranchor Prime) that draws upon India's Vedic heritage. She is a member of the scientific committee of the Fundacion IDEAS, Spain's Socialist Party's think tank. She is also a member of the International Organization for a Participatory Society.[5] She received the Right Livelihood Award in 1993, and numerous other prizes, too many to list here.

Dr. Vandana Shiva has fought for changes in the practice and paradigms of agriculture and food. Intellectual property rights, biodiversity, biotechnology, bioethics, genetic engineering are among the fields where Shiva has contributed intellectually and through activist campaigns. She has assisted grassroots organizations of the Green movement in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Ireland, Switzerland, and Austria with campaigns against genetic engineering.
In 1982, she founded the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology, which led to the creation of Navdanya in 1991, a national movement to protect the diversity and integrity of living resources, especially native seed, the promotion of organic farming and fair trade. For last two decades Navdanya has worked with local communities and organizations serving many men and women farmers. Navdanya's efforts have resulted in conservation of more than 2000 rice varieties from all over the country and have established 34 seed banks in 13 states across the country. More than 70,000 farmers are primary members of Navdanya. In 2004 Dr Shiva started Bija Vidyapeeth, an international college for sustainable living in Doon Valley, in collaboration with Schumacher College, U.K.

Time Magazine identified Dr. Shiva as an environmental "hero" in 2003, and Asia Week has called her one of the five most powerful communicators of Asia. Loyola Marymount University has asked her to speak on numerous occasions on the topic of eco-feminism, where she continuously attracts large crowds of interested students.

More of her many accomplishments here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vandana_Shiva

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Jeremy Rifkin: A social theorist, writer, public speaker, political advisor and activist. Jeremy Rifkin is president of the Foundation on Economic Trends and the bestselling author of nineteen books on the impact of scientific and technological changes on the economy, the workforce, society, and the environment. He is President of the TIR Consulting Group LLC which advises national governments, regions, and municipalities on sustainable economic development. He is also the founder and chairperson of the Third Industrial Revolution Global CEO Business Round Table, composed of 100 of the world's leading renewable energy companies, construction companies, architectural firms, real estate companies, IT companies, power and utility companies, and transport and logistics companies. Mr. Rifkin's global economic development team is the largest of its kind in the world and is working with cities, regions, and national governments to develop master plans to transition their economies into post-carbon Third Industrial Revolution infrastructures. His 1998 book "The Biotech Century" pulled the curtain back on the diabolical Chemical Industry buying out Food producers just to sell more chemical pesticides. The reckless gene-spicing and non-labelling of allergen genes like peanuts, for example spliced into tomatoes caused children severe attacks. Mice given GMO food products in high concentrations developed cancer but the industry decided to use them anyway for corn fed to livestock. Later those genes were found in the human food supply. Rifkin warned that the biotech industry was completely out of control and completely unregulated.

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Birgitta Jónsdóttir: A Politician and a member of the Althing, the Icelandic parliament, formerly representing the Citizens' Movement and The Movement, but now representing the Pirate Party.[1][2] Her district is the Reykjavík South Constituency.[1] She was elected to the Icelandic parliament in April 2009 on behalf of a movement aiming for democratic reform beyond party politics of left and right. Birgitta has been an activist and a spokesperson for various groups, such as Wikileaks,[3] Saving Iceland and Friends of Tibet in Iceland. She acts as a spokeswoman for the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative.

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Naomi Klein: is a Canadian author and social activist known for her political analyses and criticism of corporate globalization.[1] She is best known for No Logo, a book that went on to become an international bestseller. Another is the Shock Doctrine. More here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naomi_Klein

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Bianca Jagger: (born Bianca Pérez-Mora Macias, May 2, 1945[6][7][8][9]) is a Nicaraguan-born social and human rights advocate and a former actress and model. Jagger currently serves as a Council of Europe Goodwill Ambassador, Founder and Chair of the Bianca Jagger Human Rights Foundation, Member of the Executive Director's Leadership Council of Amnesty International USA,[10][11] and a Trustee of the Amazon Charitable Trust.[12][13] Over the past thirty years she has written articles and opinion pieces, delivered keynote speeches at conferences and events throughout the world and participated in numerous television and radio debates, about numerous issues including genocide, the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, the war on terror, war crimes against humanity, crimes against future generations, the Former Yugoslavia, Sri Lanka, Central America, Iran, Iraq, India, children and women’s rights, the rights of indigenous peoples, climate change, the rainforest, renewable energy, corporate social responsibility, the ensuing erosion of civil liberties and human rights, and the death penalty.
She was formerly married to Mick Jagger, lead singer of The Rolling Stones.

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Noam Chomsky: Avram Noam Chomsky (/ˈnoʊm ˈtʃɒmski/; born December 7, 1928) is an American linguist, philosopher,[8][9] cognitive scientist, logician,[10][11] political critic, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor (Emeritus) in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years.[12] In addition to his work in linguistics, he has written on war, politics, and mass media, and is the author of over 100 books.[13] Between 1980 and 1992, Chomsky was cited within the field of Arts and Humanities more often than any other living scholar, and eighth overall within the Arts and Humanities Citation Index during the same period.[14][15][16][17] He has been described as a prominent cultural figure, and was voted the "world's top public intellectual" in a 2005 poll.[18]
Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics"[19][20] and a major figure of analytic philosophy.[8] His work has influenced fields such as artificial intelligence, cognitive science, computer science, logic, mathematics, political science, programming language theory and psychology.[21][22] He is credited as the creator or co-creator of the Chomsky hierarchy, the universal grammar theory, and the Chomsky–Schützenberger theorem.
After the publication of his first books on linguistics, Chomsky became a prominent critic of the Vietnam War, and since then has continued to publish books of political criticism. He has become well known for his critiques of U.S. foreign policy,[23] state capitalism[24][25] and the mainstream news media. His media criticism has included Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988), co-written with Edward S. Herman, an analysis articulating the propaganda model theory for examining the media. He describes his views as "fairly traditional anarchist ones, with origins in the Enlightenment and classical liberalism,"[26] and often identifies with anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian socialism.[27]

Chomsky asserts that authority, unless justified, is inherently illegitimate, and that the burden of proof is on those in authority. If this burden can't be met, the authority in question should be dismantled. Authority for its own sake is inherently unjustified. An example given by Chomsky of a legitimate authority is that exerted by an adult to prevent a young child from wandering into traffic.[96] He contends that there is little moral difference between chattel slavery and renting one's self to an owner or "wage slavery". He feels that it is an attack on personal integrity that undermines individual freedom. He holds that workers should own and control their workplace, a view held (as he notes) by the Lowell Mill Girls.[97]

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Howard Zinn: Howard Zinn (August 24, 1922 – January 27, 2010) was an American academic historian, author, playwright, and social activist. Before and during his tenure as a political science professor at Boston University from 1964 to 1988 he wrote more than 20 books, which included his best-selling and influential A People's History of the United States.[2] He wrote extensively about the civil rights and anti-war movements, as well as of the labor history of the United States. His memoir, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train, was also the title of a 2004 documentary about Zinn's life and work.[3]

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Major General Smedley Butler [1] (July 30, 1881 – June 21, 1940) was a Major General in the U.S. Marine Corps (the highest rank authorized at that time), an outspoken critic of U.S. military adventurism, and at the time of his death the most decorated Marine in U.S. history. During his 34-year career as a Marine, he participated in military actions in the Philippines, China, in Central America and the Caribbean during the Banana Wars, and France in World War I.
By the end of his career, he had received 16 medals, five for heroism. He is one of 19 men to twice receive the Medal of Honor, one of three to be awarded both the Marine Corps Brevet Medal and the Medal of Honor, and the only marine to be awarded the Brevet Medal and two Medals of Honor, all for separate actions. In his 1935 book "War is a Racket", he described the workings of the military-industrial complex (MIC) and, after retiring from service, became a popular speaker at meetings organized by veterans, pacifists and church groups in the 1930s.

In 1933, he became involved in a controversy known as the Business Plot, when he told a congressional committee that a group of wealthy industrialists were planning a military coup to overthrow Franklin D. Roosevelt. The purported plotters wanted Butler to lead a mass of armed veterans in a march on Washington and then become a dictator. Butler never met with any of the principals, and the individuals supposedly involved all denied the existence of a plot. The media ridiculed the allegations.

In addition to his speeches to pacifist groups, he served from 1935 to 1937 as a spokesman for the American League Against War and Fascism.[54][55] In 1935 he wrote the exposé War Is a Racket, a trenchant condemnation of the profit motive behind warfare. His views on the subject are summarized in the following passage from a 1935 issue of the socialist magazine Common Sense:[14]

"I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and 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 benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents."
Allegations of the Business Plot[edit]

Smedley Butler describes an alleged political conspiracy to overthrow President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933
In November 1934, Butler alleged the existence of a political conspiracy of Wall Street interests to overthrow President Roosevelt, a series of allegations that came to be known in the media as the Business Plot.[56][57] A special committee of the House of Representatives headed by Representatives John W. McCormack of Massachusetts and Samuel Dickstein of New York, who was later alleged to have been a paid agent of the NKVD,[58] heard his testimony in secret.[59] The McCormack-Dickstein committee was a precursor to the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
In November 1934, Butler told the committee that one Gerald P. MacGuire told him that a group of businessmen, supposedly backed by a private army of 500,000 ex-soldiers and others, intended to establish a fascist dictatorship. Butler had been asked to lead it, he said, by MacGuire, who was a bond salesman with Grayson M–P Murphy & Co.

When the committee's final report was released, the Times said the committee "purported to report that a two-month investigation had convinced it that General Butler's story of a Fascist march on Washington was alarmingly true" and "… also alleged that definite proof had been found that the much publicized Fascist march on Washington, which was to have been led by Major. Gen. Smedley D. Butler, retired, according to testimony at a hearing, was actually contemplated".[66]
The McCormack-Dickstein Committee confirmed some of Butler's accusations in its final report. "In the last few weeks of the committee's official life it received evidence showing that certain persons had made an attempt to establish a fascist organization in this country…There is no question that these attempts were discussed, were planned, and might have been placed in execution when and if the financial backers deemed it expedient."[67] [n 1][n 2]

At a televised press conference Butler blows the lid off Wall Street's plan to destroy the USA:

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lNe9X1CLV_U

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Chris Hedges: An American journalist specializing in American politics and society. Hedges is also known as the best-selling author of several books including War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002)—a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction—Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (2009), Death of the Liberal Class (2010) and his most recent New York Times best seller, written with the cartoonist Joe Sacco, "Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt" (2012).
A self-described socialist,[1] Hedges is currently a senior fellow at The Nation Institute in New York City.[2] He spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than fifty countries, and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News, and The New York Times,[3] where he was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years (1990–2005).
In 2002, Hedges was part of the team of reporters at The New York Times awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the paper's coverage of global terrorism. He has taught at Columbia University, New York University, Princeton University[3] and The University of Toronto. He writes a weekly column on Mondays for Truthdig and authored what The New York Times described as "a call to arms" for the first issue of The Occupied Wall Street Journal, the newspaper giving voice to the Occupy Wall Street protests in Zuccotti Park, New York City. He was arrested for demanding foreclosure answers at the entrance to Wall Street banks.

NDAA lawsuit[edit|edit source]
Main article: Hedges v. Obama
In 2012, after the Obama Administration signed the National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA, Hedges sued members of the U.S. government claiming that section 1021 of the law unconstitutionally allowed presidential authority for indefinite detention without habeas corpus. He was later joined in the suit, Hedges v. Obama, by activists including Noam Chomsky and Daniel Ellsberg. In May 2012, Judge Katherine B. Forrest of the Southern District of New York ruled that the counter-terrorism provision of the NDAA is unconstitutional.[23] The Obama administration has appealed the decision.[24]

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Frederick Douglass: (born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, c. February 1818[3] – February 20, 1895) An American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman. After escaping from slavery, he became a leader of the abolitionist movement, gaining note for his dazzling oratory[4] and incisive antislavery writing. After the Civil War, Douglass remained active in the United States' struggle to reach its potential as a "land of the free". Douglass actively supported women's suffrage.

A couple of famous quotes by him are:

"Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them."

"knowledge is the pathway from slavery to freedom."

More on the Yes Men

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Jeremy Hammond: Rebel Computer Hacker (on the left in photo next to his younger brother,) is a political activist, web developer and musician from Chicago. He is currently facing federal criminal charges for allegedly publicizing internal files of the private spying agency Stratfor through the whistle-blowing website Wikileaks.[1][2][3] He is the founder of the computer security training website HackThisSite,[4] created in 2003. Statfor, the company he "Hacked" or (Strategic Forcasting) is described as a "shadow CIA". Most of this is from wiki and unverified:

Some emails reveal that Stratfor had been partnering with Shea Morenz, a former Goldman Sachs director, along with other informants, in order to profit from what could be considered insider trading. Stratfor planned to use the intelligence it gathered in order to profit from trading in several worldwide markets. They created an offshore "share structure" known as "StratCap" during 2011, in order to avoid insider trading allegations. The offshore entity, set to launch operations in 2012, is outwardly independent of Stratfor, but CEO George Friedman told his employees that StratCap is secretly integrated with Stratfor.[7][8]
Friedman stated in an email that in order to avoid legal repercussions from these activities, the company would be "retaining a law firm to create a policy for Stratfor on the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act."[8]
Thomas Kavaler, who was once a lawyer for a Stratfor client, had his email and the password to his email account released in the leak. He is married to Judge Preska, who denied Jeremy Hammond's bail; the hearing was held eight months into Hammond's imprisonment. [9] This apparent conflict of interest has led many observers to question the legality of her ruling. [10]

As reported by The Times of India, some of the emails reveal that Stratfor was allegedly hired by Dow Chemical Company to spy on protesters of the Bhopal disaster.[3] Dow Chemical Company responded with a written statement that read: "Major companies are often required to take appropriate action to protect their people and safeguard their facilities," and that it had not broken any laws.[4]

Wikileaks[edit|edit source]
Emails from Fred Burton (Stratfor’s Vice-President for Counterterrorism and Corporate Security, and former Deputy Chief of the Department of State) reveal a United States Government secret indictment against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.[22]
Other emails discredit the rape allegations against Assange.[23]

In November 2012, after being held for eight months without trial, Hammond was denied bail by Judge Preska; who warned that he could face life imprisonment for the Stratfor leak.[44][45]
In February 2013, the defense filed a motion asking presiding Judge Preska to recuse herself from the case on the basis that Preska's husband, Thomas Kavaler, had an email address and password released in the Stratfor disclosure. Additionally, Mr. Kavaler works with many mutual clients of Stratfor, which were also affected by the hack. Hammond’s legal team stated that Mr. Kavaler’s status “as both a victim of the alleged crimes of the accused and an attorney to many other victims creates an appearance of partiality too strong to be disregarded, requiring disqualification.”[46][47]

Barrett Brown: Imprisoned Journalist who routinely investigated the illegal activities of private intel companies hired to do the governments dirty work spying on citizens. He has also given numerous media interviews on the internet group, Anonymous. Some media outlets present him as a spokesman for Anonymous. Brown claims he renounced his links with the group in 2011.[1] Brown is also the founder of Project PM, a "distributed think-tank" that engages in online research.
In 2011, Brown said that 75 names of members of the Zetas drug cartel would be released if a member of the Anonymous group who had been kidnapped was not set free.[2] Brown claims the member was then released and that there was a truce between him and the drug cartel for the moment.

On January 18, 2012, Brown interviewed with the state-run[4] cable news station Russia Today about the cyber attacks by Anonymous and the temporary black out of the US government websites Whitehouse.Gov, DoJ.gov and FBI.gov.[5]

Brown wrote the book "Flock of Dodos: Behind Modern Creationism, Intelligent Design and the Easter Bunny", a comic critique of intelligent design and creationism. He has written for Vanity Fair, National Lampoon, Huffington Post, The Guardian, and other publications.

From the free Barrett Brown site:
Barrett absurdly faces up to 105 years in prison for posting YouTube videos and tweets, copy & pasting a link into a chatroom, and hiding his laptop. His case raises pertinent questions about journalism in the information age and explores untested areas of law.

1. The right to link. The second indictment represents an attempt to criminalize linking. If we allow this to proceed, what does this mean for the rights of internet users worldwide, let alone journalists who link to primary source material? Linking is a basic function of hypertext that gets used every day. It can’t be criminalized. What kind of logic makes a linker responsible for the content and consequences of sharing, leading to false charges of identity theft and fraud?

2. Reporter’s privilege and free speech. The laptops that Barrett is charged with obstruction for concealing contained journalistic sources and work product, including a book-in-progress. The First Amendment is understood as protecting reporters from revealing confidential information or sources, but we are seeing our constitutional values eroded by DOJ investigations into national security leaks. The FBI raid which led to these charges was based on false information, and there was no crime to investigate. It was nothing more than an attempt to stifle Barrett’s reporting on the private/public partnership in surveillance concerns and inhibit his research.

3. Press and information freedom. We believe that Barrett is being persecuted because of his work exposing the activities of private security and intelligence companies that do the government’s dirty work and spy on the public. If citizens are not allowed to research the growing surveillance state, what will happen in the future to privacy, transparency and our civil liberties? His case is having chilling effects on those who would seek to shed light on corruption and abuse among government contractors.

4. Selective prosecution. We think that this case is a prime example of prosecutorial overreach. Despite Aaron Swartz’s suicide, the government is still waging an unjust war on whistleblowers, journalists, and information activists. People are being prosecuted for political acts or merely because the government doesn’t agree with them. Why is Barrett being charged when numerous other people, including established reporters, shared the same link? Moreover, why is the FBI so afraid of the speech of a 5’9″ 150lb writer as to warrant heavily armed raids on his apartment?
.

Martin Luther King, Jr.:(January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) was an American clergyman, activist, and leader in the African-American Civil Rights Movement. He is best known for his role in the advancement of civil rights using nonviolent civil disobedience. King has become a national icon in the history of American progressivism.[1]
A Baptist minister, King became a civil rights activist early in his career. He led the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott and helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957, serving as its first president. With the SCLC, King led an unsuccessful struggle against segregation in Albany, Georgia, in 1962, and organized nonviolent protests in Birmingham, Alabama, that attracted national attention following television news coverage of the brutal police response. King also helped to organize the 1963 March on Washington, where he delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech. There, he established his reputation as one of the greatest orators in American history. He also established his reputation as a radical, and became an object of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's COINTELPRO for the rest of his life. FBI agents investigated him for possible communist ties, recorded his extramarital liaisons and reported on them to government officials, and on one occasion, mailed King a threatening anonymous letter that he interpreted as an attempt to make him commit suicide.
On October 14, 1964, King received the Nobel Peace Prize for combating racial inequality through nonviolence. In 1965, he and the SCLC helped to organize the Selma to Montgomery marches and the following year, he took the movement north to Chicago. In the final years of his life, King expanded his focus to include poverty and the Vietnam War, alienating many of his liberal allies with a 1967 speech titled "Beyond Vietnam". King was planning a national occupation of Washington, D.C., called the Poor People's Campaign. King was assassinated on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee. His death was followed by riots in many U.S. cities. Allegations that James Earl Ray, the man convicted of killing King, had been framed or acted in concert with government agents persisted for decades after the shooting, and the jury of a 1999 civil trial found Loyd Jowers to be complicit in a conspiracy against King.
King was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal posthumously. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day was established as a U.S. federal holiday in 1986. Hundreds of streets in the U.S. have been renamed in his honor. A memorial statue on the National Mall was opened to the public in 2011.

King delivered a 17-minute speech, later known as "I Have a Dream". In the speech's most famous passage—in which he departed from his prepared text, possibly at the prompting of Mahalia Jackson, who shouted behind him, "Tell them about the dream!"[92][93]—King said:
I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.'
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
I have a dream today.
I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification; one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.
I have a dream today.[94]
"I Have a Dream" came to be regarded as one of the finest speeches in the history of American oratory.[95] The March, and especially King's speech, helped put civil rights at the top of the liberal political agenda in the United States and facilitated passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.[96][97]

Here's King's little known Vietnam Speech:

MLKs: Beyond Vietnam

And here was the conclusion of a Memphis Court who tried the Murder of MLK in 1999:

http://www.thekingcenter.org/assassination-conspiracy-trial

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John Perkins: An American author who was recommended reading for Union members since he revealed the forces fighting organized labor. His best known book is Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (2004), in which Perkins claims to have played a role in the process of economic colonization of Third World countries on behalf of what he portrays as a cabal of corporations, banks, and the United States government.

He spent the 1970s working for the Boston strategic-consulting firm Chas. T. Main, where he was employed, according to his own account, after first being screened by the National Security Agency (NSA) and subsequently hired by Einar Greve,[2] a member of the firm (alleged by Perkins to have been acting as an NSA liaison, a claim which Greve has denied).

Perkins's time at Chas T. Main, an engineering consultancy, provides the basis for his subsequent published claims that, as an "economic hit man", he was charged with inducing developing countries to borrow large amounts of money, designated to pay for questionable infrastructure investments, but ultimately with a view to making the debt-laden countries more dependent, economically and politically, upon the West.

He claims that if that he failed at this mission, as Economic Hit Men did fail in Iran and elsewhere, that other hit men called "Jackals" would materialise and perpetuate harassment and violence upon targets resisting the national loans. If that failed, then the military would show up. Most of these loans always wound up in the pockets of Wall Street under the guise of "rebuilding" the third world, but the countries targeted still had to pay the debt back to International Banks.

The book was a runaway best seller.

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Helen Thomas (August 4, 1920 – July 20, 2013) was an Intrepid Reporter afraid of no politician. She was an American author and former news service reporter, member of the White House press corps and opinion columnist. She worked for the United Press and post-1958 successor United Press International (UPI) for 57 years, first as a correspondent, and later as White House bureau manager. She was a columnist for Hearst Newspapers from 2000 to 2010, writing on national affairs and the White House. She covered the administrations of ten U.S. presidents—from the final years of the Eisenhower administration to the second year of the Obama administration.

Thomas was the first female officer of the National Press Club, the first female member and president of the White House Correspondents' Association, and the first female member of the Gridiron Club. She wrote six books; her latest, with co-author Craig Crawford, is Listen Up, Mr. President: Everything You Always Wanted Your President to Know and Do (2009). Thomas retired on June 7, 2010, following controversial comments she made about Israel, Israeli Jews and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.[1]

More excerpts from wiki:

George W. Bush administration[edit]
During President George W. Bush's first term, Thomas reacted to then-Press Secretary Ari Fleisher's statements about arms shipments to the terrorists by asking: "Where do the Israelis get their arms?" He responded "There's a difference Helen, and that is —". "What is the difference?", she asked. He responded: "The targeting of innocents through the use of terror, which is a common enemy for Yasir Arafat and for the people of Israel, as well as —". She interrupted him, saying: "Palestinian people are fighting for their land." He responded: "I think that the killing of innocents is a category entirely different. Justifying killing of innocents for land is an argument in support of terrorism."[vague][24]

In January 2003, following a speech at a Society of Professional Journalists banquet, Thomas told an autograph-seeker, "I'm covering the worst president in American history." The autograph-seeker was a sports writer for The Daily Breeze and her comments were published. After that she was not called upon during a press conference for the first time in over four decades.

Traditionally, Thomas sat in the front row and asked the first question during White House press conferences. However, according to Thomas in a 2006 Daily Show interview, this ended because she no longer represented a wire service.[26] During the Bush administration, Thomas was moved to the back row during press conferences; She was called upon at briefings on a daily basis but no longer ended Presidential news conferences saying, "Thank you, Mr. President." When asked why she was seated in the back row, she said, "they didn’t like me…I ask too mean questions."[27]

On March 21, 2006, Thomas was called upon directly by President Bush for the first time in three years. Thomas asked Bush about the War in Iraq:
I'd like to ask you, Mr. President, [about] your decision to invade Iraq … Every reason given, publicly at least, has turned out not to be true. My question is: Why did you really want to go to war? …. You have said it wasn't oil…quest for oil, it hasn't been Israel, or anything else. What was it?

Bush responded by discussing the War on Terror, and stated as a reason for the invasion that Saddam Hussein chose to deny inspectors[clarification needed] and not to disclose required information.[28] Thomas was criticized by some commentators for her exchange with Bush.[citation needed]

In July 2006, she told The Hill, "The day Dick Cheney is going to run for president, I'll kill myself. All we need is another liar… I think he'd like to run, but it would be a sad day for the country if he does."[29]

At the July 18, 2006, White House press briefing, Thomas remarked, "The United States … could have stopped the bombardment of Lebanon. We have that much control with the Israelis… we have gone for collective punishment against all of Lebanon and Palestine." Press Secretary Tony Snow responded, "Thank you for the Hezbollah view."[30] Other members of the press weighed in.

In a press conference on November 30, 2007, Thomas questioned White House Press Secretary Dana Perino as to why Americans should depend on General David Petraeus in determining when to re-deploy U.S troops from Iraq. Perino began to answer when Thomas interjected with "You mean how many more people we kill?" Perino immediately took offense, responding:
Helen, I find it really unfortunate that you use your front row position, bestowed upon you by your colleagues, to make such statements. This is a…it is an honor and a privilege to be in the briefing room, and to suggest that we, the United States, are killing innocent people is just absurd and very offensive.[32]

Obama administration[edit]

On February 9, 2009, Thomas was present in the front row for newly elected President Obama's first news conference. President Obama called on her with the statement, "Helen. I'm excited, this is my inaugural moment,"[34] seemingly a reference to her long-term presence in the White House Press Corps.[35] Thomas asked if any Middle Eastern country possessed nuclear weapons. Obama replied that he didn't want to "speculate" on the matter.

On July 1, 2009, Thomas commented on the Obama administration's handling of the press, "we have had some control but not this control. I mean I'm amazed, I'm amazed at you people who call for openness and transparency and you have controlled…".[36][37][38] She also said that not even Richard Nixon tried to control the press as much as President Obama.[39]

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Michael Mahon Hastings: (January 28, 1980 – June 18, 2013) was an American journalist, author, contributing editor to Rolling Stone, and reporter for BuzzFeed. He was raised in New York, Canada, and Vermont, and attended New York University. Hastings rose to prominence with his coverage of the Iraq War for Newsweek in the 2000s. After his fiancee, Andrea Parhamovich, was killed when her car was ambushed in Iraq, Hastings wrote his first book, I Lost My Love in Baghdad: A Modern War Story (2008), a memoir about his relationship with Parhamovich and the violent insurgency that took her life.
He received the George Polk Award for "The Runaway General" (2010), a Rolling Stone profile of General Stanley McChrystal, commander of NATO's International Security Assistance Force in the Afghanistan war. The article documented the widespread contempt for civilian officials in the US government by the general and his staff and resulted in McChrystal's resignation. Hastings followed up with The Operators (2012), a detailed book account of his month-long stay with McChrystal in Europe and Afghanistan.
Hastings became a vocal critic of the surveillance state during the investigation of reporters by the US Department of Justice in 2013, referring to the restrictions on the freedom of the press by the Obama administration as a "war" on journalism. His last story, "Why Democrats Love To Spy On Americans", was published by BuzzFeed on June 7. Hastings died in a very suspicious fiery high-speed automobile crash on June 18, 2013 in Los Angeles, California after telling friends that he had an Earthshaking big story coming out and that he "had to go off the radar for a while."

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Joesph Heller: A bomber crew member who flew 60 dangerous missions in WWII. Catch-22 is a satirical and somewhat historical novel by him about the insanity of the MIC trying to get everyone killed all the time. After he survived three times longer than the average airman in European aerial warfare, Heller decided it was time for payback. His enduring epic is set during World War II in 1943[2] and is frequently cited as one of the great literary works of the twentieth century.[3] It uses a distinctive non-chronological third-person omniscient narration, describing events from different characters' points of view and out of sequence so that the time line develops along with the plot.
The novel follows Captain John Yossarian, a U.S. Army Air Forces B-25 bombardier. Most of the events in the book occur while the fictional 256th squadron is based on the island of Pianosa, in the Mediterranean Sea west of Italy. The novel looks into the experiences of Yossarian and the other airmen in the camp, and their attempts to keep their sanity in order to fulfill their service requirements, so that they can return home. The phrase "Catch-22", "a problematic situation for which the only solution is denied by a circumstance inherent in the problem or by a rule,"[4] has entered the English language.

Among other things, Catch-22 is a general critique of bureaucratic operation and reasoning. Resulting from its specific use in the book, the phrase "Catch-22" is common idiomatic usage meaning "a no-win situation" or "a double bind" of any type. Within the book, "Catch-22" is a military rule, the self-contradictory circular logic that, for example, prevents anyone from avoiding combat missions. The narrator explains:

"There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he were sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle, "That's some catch, that Catch-22."

Other forms of Catch-22 are invoked throughout the novel to justify various bureaucratic actions. At one point, victims of harassment by military police quote the MPs' explanation of one of Catch-22's provisions: "Catch-22 states that agents enforcing Catch-22 need not prove that Catch-22 actually contains whatever provision the accused violator is accused of violating." Another character explains: "Catch-22 says they have a right to do anything we can't stop them from doing."
Yossarian comes to realize that Catch-22 does not actually exist, but because the powers that be claim it does, and the world believes it does, it nevertheless has potent effects. Indeed, because it does not exist, there is no way it can be repealed, undone, overthrown, or denounced. The combination of force with specious and spurious legalistic justification is one of the book's primary motifs.

Yossarian comes to fear his commanding officers more than he fears the Germans attempting to shoot him down and he feels that "they" are "out to get him." Key among the reasons Yossarian fears his commanders more than the enemy is that as he flies more missions, Colonel Cathcart increases the number of required combat missions before a soldier may return home; he reaches the magic number only to have it retroactively raised. He comes to despair of ever getting home and is greatly relieved when he is sent to the hospital for a condition that is almost jaundice. In Yossarian's words:

"The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he's on, and that includes Colonel Cathcart. And don't you forget that, because the longer you remember it, the longer you might live."[8]

While the military's enemies are Germans, none appear in the story as an enemy combatant. This ironic situation is epitomized in the single appearance of German personnel in the novel, who act as pilots employed by the squadron's Mess Officer, Milo Minderbinder, to bomb the American encampment on Pianosa. This predicament indicates a tension between traditional motives for violence and the modern economic machine, which seems to generate violence simply as another means to profit, quite independent of geographical or ideological constraints. Heller emphasizes the danger of profit seeking by portraying Milo without “evil intent;" Milo’s actions are portrayed as the result of greed, not malice.[9] Milo steals morphine out of the first aid kits in the airplanes to sell on the black market and engages in Racketeering "Cornering the Cotton Market of Egypt" for example, with bombers among other acts of smuggling and theft using government planes for personal profit.

Catch 22 was banned in many countries, military establishments, and schools over the years. A school board in Strongsville, OH refused to allow the book to be taught in high school English classrooms in 1972. It also refused to consider Cat’s Cradle as a substitute text and removed both books from the school library. The issue eventually led to a 1976 District Court ruling overturning the ban in Minarcini v. Strongsville.

List of Themes/Motifs:
Sanity and insanity[10]
Heroes and heroism[10]
Absurdity and inefficiency of bureaucracy[10]
Power of bureaucracy[11]
Questioning/Loss of religious faith[11]
Impotence of language[11]
Inevitability of death[11]
Distortion of justice[12]
Concept of Catch-22[12]
Greed[12]
Personal integrity[12]
Capitalism and its amorality[13]

…

Luther Martin: Representative for Maryland and dissenting Anti-Federalist. Was shocked at the attempt by the elite to overthrow the existing government in secret in 1787, and swore to tell the people what Washington, Madison and Hamilton were up to. The rich were terrified of the people screwed by Hamilton's bank bailouts and after Shay's Rebellion almost saw Philidelphia captured by angry citizens, they were ready to instal a police state.

Martin warned we were ill-advised to install a President King who would plot against the people in concert with the Senate: He said we were crazy to put men into a chamber for six year terms instead of the current one-year terms; men who would no longer be paid by their states and move away from their constituents to a corrupt political city, and who could not be recalled for any reason by their state for misbehaviour. He said we were going to lose our freedom under the reintroduction of a hated standing army and that we would suffer under the despotism of a Supreme Court with no citizen jury.

He stormed out and refused to sign the Constitution without a Bill of Rights, and broke the convention's signed oath of secrecy that Mad-Man Madison made everyone sign before being admitted. Martin went straight to the press and warned the people not to ratify this powerful central government with a crazy central bank and insane electoral college scheme designed to strip citizens of any meaningful representation. Before this abomination was ratified, there were 2,000 representatives for the people: One rep existed for about 300 citizens. Now, in CA, there is only one rep for 740,000 citizens, and virtually ZERO chance of you ever talking to one.

Source: the Actual Anti-Federalist writings...

…

George Carlin (May 12, 1937 – June 22, 2008) was an American stand-up comedian, social critic, satirist, actor, and writer/author who won five Grammy Awards for his comedy albums.[1] Carlin was noted for his black humor as well as his thoughts on politics, the English language, psychology, religion, and various taboo subjects. Carlin and his "Seven Dirty Words" comedy routine were central to the 1978 U.S. Supreme Court case F.C.C. v. Pacifica Foundation, in which a 5–4 decision by the justices affirmed the government's power to regulate indecent material on the public airwaves.

The first of his 14 stand-up comedy specials for HBO was filmed in 1977. From the late 1980s, Carlin's routines focused on socio-cultural criticism of modern American society. He often commented on contemporary political issues in the United States and satirized the excesses of American culture. In 2004, Carlin placed second on the Comedy Central list of the 100 greatest stand-up comedians of all time, ahead of Lenny Bruce and behind Richard Pryor.[2] He was a frequent performer and guest host on The Tonight Show during the three-decade Johnny Carson era, and hosted the first episode of Saturday Night Live. His final HBO special, It's Bad for Ya, was filmed less than four months before his death. In 2008, he was posthumously awarded the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor.

Last Audio of George Carlin

Transcript: George Carlin - The Real
Owners Of America
6-24-08

"There’s a reason that education sucks, and it’s the same reason it will never ever ever be fixed. It’s never going to get any better, don’t look for it. Be happy with what you’ve got. Because the owners of this country don’t want that. I’m talking about the real owners now, the big, wealthy, business interests that control all things and make the big decisions.

Forget the politicians, they’re irrelevant.

Politicians are put there to give you that idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land, they own and control the corporations, and they’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the State Houses, and the City Halls. They’ve got the judges in their back pockets. And they own all the big media companies so they control just about all the news and information you get to hear.

They’ve got you by the balls.

They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want; they want more for themselves and less for everybody else. But I’ll tell you what they don’t want—they don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interest. You know something, they don’t want people that are smart enough to sit around their kitchen table and figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago.

They don’t want that, you know what they want?

They want obedient workers, obedient workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it.

And now they’re coming for your social security money.

They want your fucking retirement money; they want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all from you sooner or later because they own this fucking place. It’s a big club and you ain’t in it! You and I are not in the Big Club. By the way, it’s the same big club they use to beat you in the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head with their media telling you what to believe, what to believe, what to think and what to buy.

The table is tilted folks, the game is rigged.

Nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care. Good honest hard working people, white collar, blue collar, it doesn’t matter what color shirt you have on. Good honest hard working people continue, these are people of modest means, continue to elect these rich cocksuckers who don’t give a fuck about them. They don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t give a fuck about…give a fuck about you! They don’t care about you at all, at all, at all.

And nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care.

That’s what the owners count on, the fact that Americans are and will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white, and blue dick that’s being jammed up their assholes everyday. Because the owners of this country know the truth, it’s called the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.

…

^{ama-gi, a Sumerian cuneiform

expressing the emancipation of slaves

and release from peonage through

the cancellation of debts}

…

Thomas Sankara: The Robin Hood of Africa, (December 21, 1949 – October 15, 1987), freed slaves tolerated by the French Colonialists, liberated women from forced marriages and harems, made education available to everyone, ran off the banksters and carpetbaggers and started a green revolution planting millions of trees. He was a Burkinabé military captain, Marxist revolutionary, Pan-Africanist theorist, and President of Burkina Faso from 1983 to 1987 who lived like a pauper. Viewed as a charismatic and iconic figure of revolution, he is commonly referred to as "Africa's Che Guevara".[1][3][4][5]

Sankara seized power in a 1983 popularly supported coup at the age of 33, with the goal of eliminating corruption and the dominance of the former French colonial power.[1][6] He immediately launched the most ambitious program for social and economic change ever attempted on the African continent.[6] To symbolize this new autonomy and rebirth, he even renamed the country from the French colonial Upper Volta to Burkina Faso ("Land of Upright Men").[6] His foreign policies were centered around anti-imperialism, with his government eschewing all foreign aid, pushing for odious debt reduction, nationalizing all land and mineral wealth, and averting the power and influence of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank.

His domestic policies were focused on preventing famine with agrarian self-sufficiency and land reform, prioritizing education with a nation-wide literacy campaign, and promoting public health by vaccinating 2.5 million children against meningitis, yellow fever and measles.[7] Other components of his national agenda included planting over ten million trees to halt the growing desertification of the Sahel, doubling wheat production by redistributing land from feudal landlords to peasants, suspending rural poll taxes and domestic rents, and establishing an ambitious road and rail construction program to "tie the nation together".[6] On the localized level Sankara also called on every village to build a medical dispensary and had over 350 communities construct schools with their own labour. Moreover, his commitment to women's rights led him to outlaw female genital mutilation, forced marriages and polygamy, while appointing females to high governmental positions and encouraging them to work outside the home and stay in school even if pregnant.[6]

In order to achieve this radical transformation of society, he increasingly exerted authoritarian control over the nation, eventually banning unions and a free press, which he believed could stand in the way of his plans.[6] To counter his opposition in towns and workplaces around the country, he also tried corrupt officials, counter-revolutionaries and "lazy workers" in peoples revolutionary tribunals.[6] Additionally, as an admirer of Fidel Castro's Cuban Revolution, Sankara set up Cuban-style Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDRs).[1]

His revolutionary programs for African self-reliance made him an icon to many of Africa's poor.[6] Sankara remained popular with most of his country's impoverished citizens. However his policies alienated and antagonised the vested interests of an array of groups, which included the small but powerful Burkinabé middle class, the tribal leaders whom he stripped of the long-held traditional right to forced labour and tribute payments, and France and its ally the Ivory Coast.[1][8] As a result, he was overthrown and assassinated in a coup d'état led by the French-backed Blaise Compaoré on October 15, 1987.

A week before his murder, he declared: "While revolutionaries as individuals can be murdered, you cannot kill ideas."[1]

…

Gregory Palast: A New York Times-bestselling author[2] and a freelance journalist for the British Broadcasting Corporation[3] as well as the British newspaper The Observer.[4] His work frequently focuses on corporate malfeasance but has also been known to work with labor unions and consumer advocacy groups. Notably, he has claimed to have uncovered evidence that Florida Governor Jeb Bush, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, and Florida Elections Unit Chief Clay Roberts, along with the ChoicePoint corporation, rigged the ballots during the US Presidential Election of 2000 and again in 2004 when, he argued, the problems and machinations from 2000 continued, and that challenger John Kerry actually would have won if not for disproportional "spoilage" of Democratic votes.[5]

Sibel Deniz Edmonds is a former Federal Bureau of Investigation translator and founder of the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition (NSWBC). Edmonds gained public attention following her firing from her position as a language specialist at the FBI's Washington Field Office in March 2002. She had accused a colleague of covering up illicit activity involving foreign nationals, alleged serious security breaches and cover-ups and that intelligence had been deliberately suppressed, endangering national security. Her later claims gained her awards and fame as a whistleblower.[1]
In March 2012, she published a memoir, titled Classified Woman – The Sibel Edmonds Story.[2]
Edmonds testified before the 9/11 Commission, but her testimony was excluded from the official 567 page 9/11 Commission Report.[3]
Edmonds is also the founder and publisher of the Boiling Frogs Post, an online media site that aims to offer nonpartisan investigative journalism.[4]

In June 2009 interviewed by Brad Friedman on the The Mike Malloy Show, Edmonds has stated : "I have information about things that our government has lied to us about. I know. For example, to say that since the fall of the Soviet Union we ceased all of our intimate relationship with Bin Laden and the Taliban - those things can be proven as lies, very easily, based on the information they classified in my case, because we did carry very intimate relationship with these people, and it involves Central Asia, all the way up to September 11."[35]
In 2012, she published an autobiography called Classified Woman – The Sibel Edmonds Story: A Memoir.
Highlighting and Investigating Waste, Fraud, Abuse and Corruption in Afghanistan following the U.S. Intervention[edit source | editbeta]

Edmonds has drawn important attention to issues of corruption, waste, fraud and abuse in Afghanistan. This includes the U.S. taxpayer funded Kabul Bank, and its scandalous collapse, involving the disappearance of hundreds of millions of dollars and the controversial, elite Afghans linked to the Karzai family including Ahmed Wali Karzai, Mahmud Karzai, Hamid Karzai and others. Edmonds has also raised concerns about controversial Members of the U.S. Congress involved in Afghanistan, including Conservative, Republican former Congressman Donald L. Ritter of Pennsylvania for his role in Afghanistan, following the U.S. intervention, and Ritter's close and complex business associations with Mahmud Karzai and other Afghans who have been the subject of investigative reports by independent news media sources or financial auditors.

Micheal Ruppert: Truth-Telling Cop who claims CIA enables drug-trafficing. On November 15, 1996, then Director of Central Intelligence John Deutch visited Los Angeles' Locke High School for a town hall meeting. At the meeting, Ruppert publicly confronted Deutch, saying that in his experience as an LAPD narcotics officer he had seen evidence of CIA complicity in drug dealing.[11]

Ruppert went on to become an investigator and journalist,[12] and established the publication From The Wilderness, a watchdog publication that exposed governmental corruption, including his experience with CIA drug dealing activities.[13]

Ruppert is the author of Crossing The Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil,[14] published in September 2004. Crossing The Rubicon claims that Vice President Dick Cheney, the US government, and Wall Street had a well-developed awareness of and colluded with the perpetrators of 9/11.

Ruppert appears in the documentary films The 911 Report You Never Saw - The Great Conspiracy, Peak Oil - Imposed by Nature,[15] Zeitgeist: Moving Forward, The End of Suburbia, American Drug War: The Last White Hope and Collapse.

Katharine Gun: The Spy who tried to stop a War. Katharine Teresa Gun (born Katharine Teresa Harwood in 1974) is a former British[1] translator for Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), a British intelligence agency. In 2003, she became publicly known for leaking top-secret information to the press concerning illegal activities in the push for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Gun, who was raised in Taiwan, worked as a Mandarin Chinese-to-English translator for GCHQ. On 31 January 2003, she received an e-mail from a USA National Security Agency official named Frank Koza. This email requested aid in a secret and illegal operation to bug the United Nations offices of six nations: Angola, Bulgaria, Cameroon, Chile, Guinea, and Pakistan. These were the six "swing nations" on the UN Security Council that could determine whether the UN approved the invasion of Iraq. The plan allegedly violated the Vienna Conventions, which regulate global diplomacy.

Gun admitted leaking the email to The Observer but said she did it "with a clear conscience", hoping to prevent the war. "I have no regrets and I would do it again", she said. In a BBC interview with Jeremy Paxman, she admitted that she had not raised the matter with staff counsellors as she "honestly didn't think that would have had any practical effect."[2] After her revelation, GCHQ terminated her employment.
Fallout[edit source | editbeta]

On 13 November 2003, Gun was charged with an offence under section 1 of the Official Secrets Act 1989. Her case became a cause célèbre among activists, and many people stepped forward to urge the government to drop the case. Among them were the Reverend Jesse Jackson, Daniel Ellsberg (the US government official who leaked the Pentagon Papers), and actor Sean Penn, who described her as "a hero of the human spirit". Gun planned to plead "not guilty", saying in her defence that she acted to prevent imminent loss of life in a war she considered illegal.

The case came to court on 25 February 2004. Within half an hour, the case was dropped because the prosecution declined to offer evidence. The reasons for the prosecution dropping the case are unclear. The day before the trial, Gun's defence team had asked the government for any records of advice about the legality of the war that it had received during the run-up to the war. A full trial might have exposed any such documents to public scrutiny as the defence were expected to argue that trying to stop an illegal act (that of an illegal war of aggression) trumped Gun's obligations under the Official Secrets Act 1989. Speculation was rife in the media that the prosecution service had bowed to political pressure to drop the case so that any such documents would remain secret. However, a Government spokesman said that the decision to drop the case had been made before the defence's demands had been submitted. (The Guardian newspaper had reported plans to drop the case the previous week.[citation needed]) On the day of the court case, Gun was quoted as saying:
I'm just baffled that in the 21st century we as human beings are still dropping bombs on each other as a means to resolve issues.
Gun received the Sam Adams Award for 2003 and was supported in her case by the UK human rights pressure group Liberty and in the U.S. by the Institute for Public Accuracy. Following the dropping of the case, Liberty commented:

"One wonders whether disclosure in this criminal trial might have been a little too embarrassing."
Two years after her trial, Katharine Gun wrote an article "Iran: Time To Leak" (20 March 2006) which asks whistleblowers to make public information about plans for a potential war against Iran. She states:
I urge those in a position to do so to disclose information which relates to this planned aggression; legal advice, meetings between the White House and other intelligence agencies, assessments of Iran’s threat level (or better yet, evidence that assessments have been altered), troop deployments and army notifications. Don’t let "the intelligence and the facts be fixed around the policy" this time.

Paul Craig Roberts: Paul Craig Roberts (born April 3, 1939) is an American economist and a columnist for Creators Syndicate. He served as an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration and was noted as a co-founder of Reaganomics.[1] He is a former editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and Scripps Howard News Service. He has testified before congressional committees on 30 occasions on issues of economic policy.

During the 21st century, Roberts has frequently published in Counterpunch, writing extensively about the effects of the Bush (and later Obama) administrations related to the War on Terror, which he says have destroyed the US Constitution's protections of Americans' civil liberties, such as habeas corpus and due process. He has taken positions different from former Republican allies, opposing the War on Drugs and the War on Terror, and criticizing Israel's policies and actions against the Palestinians.[2]

Criticism of Bush[edit source | editbeta]
Roberts opposed the Iraq War and wrote frequently on the subject. On May 18, 2005, in response to the publication of the "Downing Street memo," Roberts wrote an article calling for Bush's impeachment for lying to Congress about the case for war.
Roberts also criticized a potential Bush administration attack on Iran. In an August 15, 2005 article, he stated "Bush…dismisses all facts and assurances and is willing to attack Iran based on nothing but Israel's paranoia."[citation needed]
Although his criticisms of Bush often seemed to align him with the political left, Roberts continues to explain Ronald Reagan's two goals—to end stagflation and the cold war. Roberts has written that "true conservatives" were the "first victims" of the neocons of the Bush administration.[9] He has said that supporters of George W. Bush "are brownshirts with the same low intelligence and morals as Hitler's enthusiastic supporters."[10]

more about Craig's Views...

More Protestors and Truth-Tellers Hall of Fame:

Rachel Corrie: Rachel Aliene Corrie (April 10, 1979 – March 16, 2003) from Olympia, Washington, was an American peace activist[1] and member of the pro-Palestinian group called International Solidarity Movement (ISM). [2] She was crushed to death by an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) armored bulldozer in Rafah, in the southern part of the Gaza Strip under contested circumstances[1][3] during the height of the second Palestinian intifada[4]
She had come to Gaza as part of her senior-year college assignment to connect her home town with Rafah in a sister cities project.[5] While there she had engaged with other ISM activists in efforts to non-violently prevent the Israeli army's demolition of the homes of Palestinian people.[1][6][7]
Less than two months after her arrival,[5] on March 16, 2003, Corrie was killed after a three-hour confrontation between two bulldozers and eight ISM activists.[3][8] Wearing a bright orange fluorescent jacket and, until shortly before her death, using a megaphone, she was killed while standing in the path of a bulldozer that she believed was about to demolish the house of local pharmacist Samir Nasralla's family whom she had befriended.[9] She was run over twice by the bulldozer resulting in a fractured skull, shattered ribs and punctured lungs.[10]
The exact nature of her death and the culpability of the bulldozer operator are disputed, with eyewitnesses saying that the Israeli soldier operating the bulldozer deliberately ran over Corrie, and the Israeli government saying that it was an accident since the bulldozer operator could not see her.[11][12][13][14]
In 2005 Corrie's parents filed a civil lawsuit against the state of Israel. The lawsuit charged Israel with not conducting a full and credible investigation into the case and with responsibility for her death,[15] contending that she had either been intentionally killed or that the soldiers had acted with reckless neglect.[3] They sued for a symbolic one U.S. dollar in damages to make the point that their case was about justice for their daughter and the Palestinian cause she had been defending.[16]
In August 2012, an Israeli court rejected their suit[3] and upheld the results of Israel's 2003 military investigation, ruling that the Israeli government was not responsible for Corrie's death. The ruling, the Israeli justice system, and the investigation it exonerated have been criticized.[17][18][19]
Rachel Corrie's life has been memorialized in several tributes, including the play My Name Is Rachel Corrie and the cantata The Skies are Weeping. Her collected writings were published in 2008 under the title Let Me Stand Alone, opening "a window on the maturation of a young woman seeking to make the world a better place".[20] The Rachel Corrie Foundation for Peace and Justice has been established to continue her work.

more about corrie...

Tim DeChristopher: Tim DeChristopher is an American climate activist and co-founder of the environmental group Peaceful Uprising. On December 19, 2008 he protested a Bureau of Land Management oil and gas lease auction of 116 parcels of public land in Utah's redrock country by successfully bidding on 14 parcels of land (totaling 22,500 acres) for $1.8 million with no intention to pay for them.[2] DeChristopher was removed from the auction by federal agents, taken into custody, and questioned. DeChristopher served 21 months in prison, from July 2011[3] through April 2013.[4]
Saying they had been rushed into auction with insufficient environmental and scientific review, the United States Department of the Interior canceled many of the leases shortly after the auction and a subsequent court injunction.[5]

"Common Dreams"

Truth-Tellers Hall of Fame:

(Regular posters to the stories at CD)

RedRaven-Sounds: RR, here's where I'm putting a bio about you (the pic is just a placeholder and can be changed if you have another pic somewhere.) It will end with this blue link to your own private page:
more from RedRaven-Sounds

…

readytotransform: R, here's where I'm putting a blurb about you here. It will end with this blue link to your own private page:
more from readytotransform

…

lucitanian:

The pen name Lucitanian came from an amalgam of ideas. Lusitanian, as in resident of (Lusitania or Hispania Lusitania old Roman provincial name) Portugal south of the Douro river. Also the name of a beautiful breed of horse originally from Portugal.

I live in Aveiro which is about 70 km south of Porto.

The sinking of the Lusitania, May, 1915. – Was an infamous and pivotal conspiracy, still shrouded in some mystery in the fog of time, which brought the US into the 1st WW against the Germans despite reluctance and American popular support. http://www.english.emory.edu/LostPoets/Lusitaniapapers.html

Luce is Italian for light.

I want to shine light on things from my perspective, after a long life of travelling the world and now retired here in Northern Portugal. I was born in Iraq to a Scottish father and a German mother, and then brought up mostly in South America, Uruguay and Chile, but then sent to school as an adolescent reprobate to Scotland, where I went on to study economics. My early working life was spent in France, Switzerland, and London, but at about 25 years of age I moved out to Asia and spent the rest of my working life between Japan and Hong Kong, before retiring in Europe.

My life is shared with my Japanese wife, my best friend, the love of my life, my partner. We now run a rural guest house where we welcome people from all over the world.

I write for practice and pleasure. I write because I am concerned with what I see and for all the people on this planet. I write because I think I have seen and experienced much in my life that can help “shine a little light” on what others see or cannot see from their perspective. Buddhist philosophy, which I try to study, sees the individual as already possessing all the necessary faculties to be totally enlightened. Everything we need to know we know, what is missing to achieve enlightenment is simply the lifting of the many veils of self delusion, the denial of the grasping ego, and most of all the opening of the mind to the infinite power of compassion.