Obedience is the True Character Flaw ==== Nov. 22, 2014 If you publicly dissent from and act against prevailing United States orthodoxies and the reigning US power structure, chances are good you will face personal and/or professional defamation and the charge of psychological unreliability and instability. It will be said that there’s something wrong and untrustworthy about you. You will be demonized, dismissed, and demeaned as a marginal, inappropriate, and hyper-alienated oddball, a maladjusted eccentric no one should take seriously. Kill the Messenger Just ask the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg. He committed a great public service by releasing the Pentagon Papers, thousands of pages of Pentagon documents showing that the murderous US policies and practices in Vietnam had nothing to do with Washington’s officially stated noble goals behind the “Vietnam War.” US President Richard Nixon responded by having the FBI break into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist to release embarrassing information about Ellsberg’s personal life. The media took the bait, throwing a shadow of suspicion on the whistleblower’s sanity even as it published the documents he released. Gary Webb Consider also the smaller and more depressing story of Gary Webb, recently told in the movie Kill The Messenger. Webb was the San Jose Mercury News journalist who discovered and in 1996 reported CIA involvement in the selling of crack cocaine in Los Angeles to help finance the US-backed right-wing terrorists knows as the Contras in their bloody war on the popular-revolutionary Sandinista government of Nicaragua during the 1980s. After initially reporting Webb’s findings, the nation’s leading media organizations (including the Washington Post and the New York Times) attacked Webb professionally. They questioned his journalistic integrity. The assault led to Webb’s shunning, demotion, resignation, and, in 2004, his suicide. In 1998, an internal CIA report found that Webb’s carefully gathered findings were accurate. The Justice Department also conducted an internal investigation that vindicated Webb’s findings, long after anyone seemed to care. As Michael Parenti noted, “Webb’s real mistake was not that he wrote falsehoods, but that he ventured too far into the truth.” [1]
Posted on: Mon, 24 Nov 2014 03:22:40 +0000
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