Conditional freedom

By David Brooks

From the Mexican newspaper La Jornada

NEW YORK CITY – Every day, dissidents from various nations come to the United States to denounce before academic forums, human rights organizations and official institutions such as the U.S. Congress that their governments violate the rights to freedom of expression and the press.

They ask for solidarity to pressure their governments to respect international conventions on the issue and are applauded for their valor, while the U.S. government proclaims itself the world’s guardian of those basic rights, promotes freedom of expression as part of its diplomatic rhetoric (especially against countries that are not aligned with Washington) and organizes forums in which it includes the use of the new cybernetic media as new tools of "freedom."

But it’s likely that what is needed most is for American journalists and promoters of free expression to travel to other countries to solicit the solidarity of other people and confront the growing repression and limitation of freedom of expression that has been imposed here during the past decade.

In fact, what’s most difficult in the U.S. instance is that here, as opposed to other countries where the violation of those rights is clear, the official myth of freedom of expression prevails.

The limits of that freedom are revealed when it comes to very delicate issues, where the right of society to know what its government is doing is subordinated to what the government dictates as necessary "to protect" that society. It’s called "national security."

Perhaps the event that showed those limits most clearly was the case of Bradley Manning, who has accepted responsibility for the largest leakage of secret official documents in U.S. history. The government has put him on trial for disclosing to his compatriots the story behind the wars waged in their name.

"This trial is not simply the prosecution of a 25-year-old soldier who had the temerity to report to the outside world the indiscriminate slaughter, war crimes, torture and abuse that are carried out by our government and our occupation forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is a concerted effort by the security and surveillance state to extinguish what is left of a free press, one that has the constitutional right to expose crimes by those in power," writes veteran journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner Chris Hedges.

Hedges, who was a war reporter for The New York Times and covered conflicts from the Arab world to Latin America, wrote in Truthdig.com that, from now on, individuals who dare to try to bring the truth to the public will be, as in Manning’s case, accused of "aiding the enemy."

He added that "all those within the system who publicly reveal facts that challenge the official narrative will be imprisoned, as was John Kiriakou, the former CIA analyst who for exposing the U.S. government’s use of torture began serving a 30-month prison term […] There is a word for states that create these kinds of information vacuums: totalitarian."

We should remember cases like the recent suicide of cybernetic activist Aaron Swartz, who used his digital talents to reveal and expose attempts by the government and business to control the Internet and killed himself when facing a trial that could result in his imprisonment for decades.

Or Jeremy Hammon, who faces 30 months in prison for allegedly hacking the [corporate security agency] Stratfor site. Or the former official of the National Security Agency Thomas Drake, who was investigated for revealing the secret compilation of data on American citizens.

Then there is Julian Assange, who claims that the United States seeks to extradite and try him for his revelations in Wikileaks. His fear is not groundless, especially when many high officials and legislators accuse him of attempting against U.S. national security. Vice President Joe Biden once called him a "high-tech terrorist."

These cases, especially Manning’s, have one objective, according to some law experts: to intimidate and even frighten informants and journalists who consider exposing information about matters of "national security."

Hedges, along with documentary maker Michael Moore, the intellectual Noam Chomsky and Daniel Ellsberg, the famous official who leaked the Pentagon Papers – until now the largest leakage of secret documents – during the Vietnam War, have joined lawsuits against the government for a law that, they claim, can be used against journalists by criminalizing any interaction with those considered to be "enemies" of the United States, under threat of indefinite military detention.

Another law allows the seizure of the personal communications of Americans by government agencies without judicial authorization.

Those efforts are not limited to U.S. territory. For example, there’s the case of Abdulelah Haider Shaye, the Yemeni journalist who in 2009 disclosed an American air attack that killed 14 women and 21 and children. He is in a Yemeni prison due to Obama’s pressure to keep the president of Yemen from pardoning him, The Nation revealed last year.
The weekly said that, while the Obama administration spouts rhetoric about freedom of the press, "it has undermined the rights of journalists and the informants who help them, whose work sometimes has placed the government in a negative light."

In view of Obama’s promise to make his government "the most transparent in history," many are asking if that’s determined by the government or the people. "Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost," Thomas Jefferson maintained.

In other words, freedom conditioned by the authorities is not freedom.