A US intel contractor. An eager and responsible kid given access to highly classified documents.* Said “kid” was shocked and appalled at what he saw. So, he took photographs. Lots of them.
Then what to do?
He wasn’t Daniel Ellsberg who was able first to contact a few Senators and when after a year and a half that didn’t work to inform the public, he managed to interest the NYTimes and WaPo. Then there was that little matter of his indictment for espionage.
Even if he could have been, did he even want to be a whistle-blower? It’s not as if the American public cared all that much about the content of the Pentagon Papers – the Vietnam War dragged on and a year and a half after the release of the Pentagon Papers, Nixon was re-elected in a landslide.**
Did he even fully comprehend what he was seeing? Or care? Handing the document photos off to a drug addict and dealer childhood friend (the “Snowman”) to sell to the USSR was one way that some of the information would see the light of day someday and somewhere.
It didn’t take long from that April 1975 first sale before Christopher Boyce and the “snowman” were busted and convicted of espionage in 1977. The content of those documents barely and only briefly surfaced publicly. They had been of little interest or value to the USSR that seems to have purchased them hoping that the source could get access to something they wanted.
Boyce could have thwarted a “coup” against another elected liberal government. Could have focused the world’s attention on Australia in the early days of US-Australian surveillance cooperation. Shed a light on US-Australian covert participation in the 1973 Chilean coup. Could have denied Rupert Murdoch his big scoop. (A Murdoch created “scoop” for which he later paid damages to the direct victim, but allowed his co-conspirator to roam free in the US and participate in a right-wing and Holocaust denial cult.)
Boyce could have changed history. Instead he’s but an easily forgotten convicted criminal.
Almost forty years later, it was left not to the “Snowman,” but Edward Snowden to shine that light on Australian-NSA collusion. (Fitting that RT broke this component of the story – but will Putin open those Soviet archives?)
Gough Whitlam fared better than Salvador Allende, Torrijos, Roldos Aguilera, and others ousted from power during those years. The tragedy for Whitlam is that he could see what was being done to his government and by whom but was powerless to stop it. Ordinary Australians bought the right-wing propaganda just as easily as a few years later the Brits signed onto Thatcherism and the Yanks onto the Reagan Revolution.
Those calling for Edward Snowden’s head – on both the left and right – are agents of secrecy, lies, and US and corporate hegemony in support of the haves regardless of whether they are conscious of their participation. Democracy and equity cannot exist in a robust form as long as people so easily succumb to government and corporate propaganda in real time. Getting more difficult to sell that garbage in the western southern hemisphere, but it continues to mostly sell itself in much of the rest of the world.
*It was amusing to observe all the public outrage that a 29 year old high school drop-out could have had access to the NSA “crown jewels.” (As if they call an old geezer and not the fourteen year old kid to fix their computer glitches.) It’s not only not unusual for a young person to have such access, but more of them have yet to lose an innate sense of right and wrong, and therefore, more likely to expose what they have seen. Such people are still extremely rare as the consequences for truths are usually very harsh. It’s why Wikileaks had to be destroyed.
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[Update]** From The Devil And Daniel Ellsberg by Peter Lee, July 9, 2013
In Daniel Ellsberg’s estimation his leak of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 did little, if anything to end the Vietnam War as conducted by Richard Nixon. The U.S. war only ended because of Nixon’s downfall soon after his re-election in 1972, thanks to the antics of his plumbers, the team of extra-legal leak-plugging zealots that Nixon’s coterie unleashed on his enemies.
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Still a good read – McNamara, Faulty Analysis and Rand Corporation.
Slightly off topic — Boyce worked at TRW and had access to real time intel documents in hand as Snowden does.
Chalmers Johnson review is interesting but it should not be forgotten that in real time he mocked the anti-Vietnam protestors. However, he made up for his early failing by writing “Blowback” – not that the US public heeded his informed insight when the real time application arrived. And we at our peril continue to ignore that book and the other two in his trilogy.
Also wanted to note that the US backed destruction of left leaning governments was stealthier and more pervasive after the 1960s. And it hardly began in 1950.
Australia didn’t even make it into Stephen Kinzer’s excellent book Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change From Hawaii To Iraq.
Ironically Australians don’t know this part of the story although the Whitlam dismissal is legendary. In spite of the evidence this is treated as strictly ‘tin-foil hat’ by most Australians whom are even aware of it and completely avoided in the media and retrospective documentaries of the Whitlam administration. Why?
Same reason why Jimmy Carter in the US is still a punchline?
Doubt more than a few in this country were aware of this (and until last week I wasn’t among them). Interesting that Murdoch’s “big scoop” was the last nail in Whitlam’s coffin and later he didn’t mind losing the defamation suit and large payoff to Whitlam. Tinfoil hat territory would be a claim that Murdoch was a US/Australian/British intel asset and they have protected well. (Note – there seems not ever to have been any such speculation.)
It’s human nature to adopt belief systems which, accurate or not, lend themselves to the individual’s preferred narrative of stability, security or prosperity. As Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” The same dependency seems to apply to his comfortable world view.
This is the only explanation I have for the extremely disappointing domestic reaction to Snowden’s NSA revelations; that denial is somehow tangled up with our perceived inability to escape from this intrusion and all that it implies about the state we have collectively invited to “protect” us. In spite of all the forewarning provided by the history of the 20th century we have solemnly sacrificed our autonomy and prosperity for a deeply flawed and clumsy notion of security. May God have mercy upon us for the state will not.
Doubt it’s “human nature.” Culture, heavily dictated by religions and the machinations of the haves, that changes exceedingly slow in the direction of greater equity and equality explains both those that conform and resist change and those that strive in the interests of the many.
Generation after generation of poor slobs making do with less than enough and dreaming of something better while ignoring that like Dorothy in Oz already possess the means to enough if only they were wise enough to use it.
Whatever the explanation the outcome is the same. Fascists promote “freedom” and are believed. We seem a long way from the Enlightenment; a fading glow and not enough to read by.
The artifacts of communitarianism also fade; public parks, public libraries, volunteer fire departments and public assets all anachronisms in a privatised age. The corporations offer shiny things while sharing increasing portions of our notional wealth; a society of lonely debtors in a Randian dystopia cheerfully grateful for the superficial associations of Facebook.
And to think of all the years and money “they” squandered in search of the perfect mind-control drug for the masses when all that was needed were mind-numbing, tiny “smart” mobile phones and Facebook.
I’m not a conspiracy theorist but I can see there may be convergence between the aspirations of the state to power and of the corporations to profit.
Why bother with pharmaceuticals when there are bread and circuses? Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
Serendipity. The tin-foil hat crowd never allows for that. Hence, there is a CT crowd that believes Breitbart was offed because … (to the best of my ability to comprehend from scanning their stuff when a stumbled on it a few weeks ago) a) men his age don’t have sudden and fatal heart attacks (they aren’t too sciency either) and b) Breitbart had the “goods” on Obama that once released would doom his re-election effort (an inadvertent acknowledgment that Breitbart was also too stupid to put a copy of the “goods” in other hands should anything happen to him).
The Right would provide comic relief if it were not such a national embarrassment; like a rude, drunken uncle at Christmas.
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Two elements which played a role in the large percentage of Jews deported from Holland and were murdered in the Nazi death camps.
There were resistance movements at all levels in The Netherlands and even in Israel’s Holocaust Museum a large number of Dutch citizens are honored. Being born in The Netherlands, these were well known facts I learned from my parents and the schools I attended.
Pt. 1 – Read History of the Jews in the Netherlands
Pt. 2 – Read Authority and the pretence of autonomy
“Like many people who had lived through the horrors of the Second World War, Stanley Milgram was appalled that so many ordinary Germans played their part in the nazi death machine in obedience to orders issued by higher ups. Hannah Arendt’s coverage of Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem seemed to confirm that, far from being cruel or sadistic, many nazi officials were mere bureaucrats functioning within an extensive chain of command. How is it possible that otherwise ordinary, decent people can be brought to the point of doing harm to their fellow human beings? They do so, according to Milgram, by subordinating their own wills to those of others, thereby becoming mere agents of the latter. Their ability to reason morally is thus impaired by the felt need to defer to authority.”
Movie “Hannah Arendt” – Misreading ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem’
Quote – “I’d walk over my Grandmother for Richard Nixon.”