Where Are Whistleblowers with Courage?
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By George H. Beres
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Wednesday 18 May 2005
As high school kids, "tattletale" was a label we tried to avoid. Today, it should be worn as a badge of honor. Yet too few have the courage to try it on.
A better word is whistleblower. Early in May, the world reacted to a whistleblower whose revelations could change the course of history. He did not come from here. Instead he created long overdue turmoil for the government of England. What he revealed about disloyal actions of Prime Minister Tony Blair in lying about the necessity of war in Iraq could have even greater impact in the United States, encouraging impeachment actions against George W. Bush.
Law Professor Francis Boyle of the University of Illinois, an authority on international law, told me there is sufficient documentation on Bush's misdeeds as president to justify impeachment several times over. He feels the document that revealed England's role in creating a war-that-did-not-need-to-be is even more damaging to the Bush administration, which led while Blair followed.
Juan Cole, professor of history at the University of Michigan, has monitored Middle East development since before the Iraq War. What emerged from the secret memo made public in England verified for him his worst fears about duplicity in government.
"A top secret British memorandum dated 23 July 2002 summarizes a report to Blair and others in the government by Sir Richard Dearlove," said Cole. The head of the UK Foreign Intelligence Service, Dearlove was known as "C." The document described his report on talks he'd had in Washington:
"There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action is now seen as inevitable. Bush wants to remove Saddam through military action, justified by a conjunction of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. But intelligence and facts are being 'fixed' around the policy."
"Bush," said Cole, "was lying to the American people when he said no final decision had been made on the war."
Godfrey Sperling of the Christian Science Monitor implied as much when he wrote on August 27, 2002: "Indeed, Bush has said he welcomes a debate on Iraq from those in Congress and from the public. But he has made it clear he will make his decision based on what his intelligence people are telling him."
Cole said Dearlove stressed Bush already had decided on a war, and had managed to give British intelligence the firm impression he intended to shape the intelligence to support such a war. He wasn't waiting to make his decision in light of intelligence. He was going to tell intelligence professionals what their conclusions had to be.
Why did intelligence analysts have to tell Bush what he wanted to hear? Because the link between weapons of mass destruction and terrorism was virtually non-existent.
In the memo, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said: "The case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbors, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran."
Cole said justification for war had to come by "fixing the intelligence around the policy. Since the realities did not justify his planned war, Bush was going to make things up."
At the meeting, British Attorney General Lord Goldsmith said the desire for regime change was not a legal basis for military action. Three possible legal bases were self-defense, humanitarian intervention, and United Nations Security Council authorization. In this case, none carried weight.
Lord Goldsmith said the the reports Dearlove and Straw brought back from Washington warned of an illegal war.
"Creators of illegal wars," said Cole, "are war criminals."
Boyle sees release of the bombshell memo in England as giving credence to the legal case for impeachment. In October 2002, following speeches by Vice-President Dick Cheney calling for a preventive war against Iraq, Boyle and former Attorney General Ramsey Clark started a national campaign to impeach Bush, Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Attorney General John Ashcroft.
On March 11, 2003, Rep. John Conyers, ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, which rules on any bill of impeachment, called a meeting to discuss introducing a draft bill of impeachment. Forty legal advisers met with Conyers, Boyle and Clark to review the case for impeachment because of alleged violations of the Constitution, Bill of Rights, Human Rights, the UN Charter and International Law.
Today, there is a second, revised draft bill of impeachment on Capitol Hill, ready for implementation, if that day should come. Boyle feels it has to come because of an expanded military campaign that is imminent, and the prospect of World War III looming.
"A powerful nationwide movement to impeach George W. Bush is but a matter of time," he predicts.
In his book on US Imperialism in the Middle East, Boyle accused Bush of lying to lead the nation to war. He wrote that actions of the Bush administration are an ongoing criminal conspiracy, in violation of the Nuremberg Charter, Nuremberg Judgment and Nuremberg Principles. He describes Bush war policies as "legally akin to those perpetrated by the Nazi regime in pre-World War II Germany."
The administration can't risk taking Boyle lightly. He drafted the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989 and represented Bosnia-Herzegovina at the World Court. He holds a Doctor of Law Magna Cum Laude and a Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard.
Release of the memo in England lends a new sense of urgency to an ongoing attempt to encourage whistleblowers at the highest levels of US government. It is the project of the most famous whistleblower, Daniel Ellsberg of the Pentagon Papers, and retired senator Mike Gravel.
After his 2004 speech in Eugene, Oregon, Ellsberg told me: "We now need a whistleblower with official documents to reveal lies of the incumbent president. These must be documents, nothing of distant history. To do this, one must be ready to risk career and income and face imprisonment. Had there been one with the courage to take the risk at the outset, this unnecessary war could have been prevented."
Recalling how he got on the "hit list" of President Richard Nixon after release of the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg said: "I think Nixon was as capable of fascism as Bush. The difference is that he had a Democratic House and Senate, unlike Bush, and a news media that was more liberal, not compliant like the media of today."
Before escaping imprisonment because of illegal prosecution by Nixon, Ellsberg was pursued by Attorney General John Mitchell, whom he described as having "the same brand of theocratic fanaticism we see in this administration today."
He reminds potential whistleblowers it is not possible for them to work within existing government channels.
"The whistles," he said, "must be blown outside those channels. It's our one way of getting rid of this gang who, while they are mad, also are shrewd."
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George Beres is a retired journalist in Eugene, Oregon. His interaction with Daniel Ellsberg and Sen. Mike Gravel feeds his motivation to encourage US whistleblowers. He is a former manager of the University of Oregon Speakers Bureau.
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