In this foreword from The Assassination Complex,a unique book about drone warfare, the whistleblower explains why leaking information about wrongdoing is a vital act of resistance‘I’ve been waiting 40 years for someone like you.” Those were the first words Daniel Ellsberg spoke to me when we met last year. Dan and I felt an instant kinship; we both knew what it meant to risk so much – and to be irrevocably changed – by revealing secret truths.
One of the challenges of being a whistleblower is living with the knowledge that people continue to sit, and just as you did,at those desks, in that unit, and throughout the agency; who see what you saw and comply in silence,without resistance or complaint. They learn to live not just with untruths but with unnecessary untruths, hazardous untruths, or corrosive untruths. It is a double tragedy: what begins as a survival strategy ends with the compromise of the human being it sought to preserve and the diminishing of the democracy meant to justify the sacrifice.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com