Don’t gag whistleblowers, for they are a vital part of democracy

Daniel Ellsberg appearing before the US Senate judiciary subcommittee in Washington, DC in 1973. Photograph: Everett/Shutterstock

War is a lie. Terrorism is a lie. The state is an embodiment of lies, damn lies, and statistics. As Winston Smith, the main character in George Orwell’s mind-blowing political novel 1984, finds out, even dissent is a lie.

Can governments that call themselves democratic lie to the people? Lies and deception are the antithesis of democracy, yet they are part of government. Should conscientious officials who are privy to the lies uttered by governments remain silent if the lies result in devastating consequences? This question has given birth to whistleblowers. Democracy lovers call them heroes; governments call them traitors.

One such hero was Daniel Ellsberg, one of the world’s famous whistleblowers. He died last Friday at the age of 92. He became famous after he leaked the Pentagon Papers, which exposed the US government’s lies about the Vietnam War. The evidence he had contradicted the US account of the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which the US administration under President Lyndon B Johnson used as an excuse to enter the Vietnam War. The US had claimed that two US Navy destroyers were attacked by North Vietnamese forces in the Gulf of Tonkin. The 1964 incident was fake news created by the US.

After Ellsberg, who worked as a military analyst on national security issues for the Pentagon and the think tank RAND Corporation, exposed the US lies in 1971, the then National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger called him “the most dangerous man in America who must be stopped at all costs”.
He was privy to the military documents that told a story different from the sugar-coated stories the US government regularly put out to keep in check the growing public disenchantment with the war.

With the leaked documents making headlines in the New York Times and other newspapers, a legal battle began in the US Supreme Court over freedom of speech and national security. In what was seen as a victory for the people’s right to know, the court ruled that the media had the right to publish the materials leaked by Ellsberg.
But the witch hunt continued. In 1973, the US government filed charges against him, accusing him of theft and conspiracy. The charges carried a prison term of 115 years. The case was dismissed after the defence proved the prosecution’s illegal evidence gathering.

After the legal battles were over, Ellsberg became an anti-war activist and remained so till his death, exposing the US government’s lies that had led to the deaths of millions of people, including children and non-combatants, in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and other places.

Ellsberg is no more, but his legacy lives on. Whistleblowing did not start with Ellsberg. It had a long history. In the United States, the process began in the early years of independence, with ten American sailors petitioning the Continental Congress in 1777 seeking protection from punishment for revealing that a US navy commodore was torturing captive British soldiers.
It is heartening to note that in Sri Lanka, the proposed anti-corruption bill has a chapter dealing with the protection of whistleblowers, who should be seen as an unseen institution preserving the health of the state and the welfare of the people.

Over time, government lies have become more sophisticated, as has been seen in George W. Bush’s weapons of mass destruction claim, which he trotted out to invade Iraq. In a war situation, the side that controls the media gets away with lying. This is evident in Israel’s oppression of the people in occupied Palestine, with the victims—the Palestinians—being portrayed as aggressors in most Western media. It is also evident in Ukraine, with almost all Western media outlets blacking out Russia’s version of the war story to authenticate the war propaganda.

When governments continue with their lies to wage wars and indulge in corruption, whistleblowers are the only hope we, the people, have to be assured that the government we elect is true to the sacred compact called the social contract. Today, the transparency required of the government is highly compromised, with the authorities interpreting national security in such a way as to shield their crimes. As a result, we are betrayed by the very people we elect to govern us.

Even corruption is covered up on grounds of national security, as was evident in the infamous Yamama arms deal involving the payment of a billion-dollar bribe by British Aerospace (BAE Systems) to a Saudi Arabian prince. Citing national security concerns, the then British Prime Minister Tony Blair in the 1990s stopped investigations by Britain’s anti-corruption authorities into the 43 billion sterling pound deal.

True, national security concerns require that certain state affairs be kept secret. That is why many democratic states have state secret laws. According to these laws, classified documents are only made public after a certain period of time, usually 20 years. But with the people having little or no means to ascertain whether secrecy or classification is justified in the name of national security, politicians in power tend to abuse secrecy laws.

Today, no state can claim to be a true democracy. Even countries that proudly proclaim themselves as the world’s freest nations hide many things from their people, who are supposed to be the depository of sovereignty according to their constitutions. Usually, national security is their excuse to justify their democracy-killing crime of gagging the whistleblowers.
As a result, from a high-security prison in Britain, Julian Assange, the co-founder of the whistleblower website, WikiLeaks, is fighting a battle to save himself from a life sentence in the United States, which sees him as a threat to its national security.

Although it is more or less dormant today, WikiLeaks in its heyday exposed what the US should not have done as a democratic state. The website exposed the US military’s excesses in Iraq and Afghanistan. It has released a video that showed a US Apache helicopter firing on and killing several people in Baghdad, including two Reuter journalists. It released some 9000 secret files, which provided evidence that in Afghanistan more civilians have died in US military operations than officially acknowledged. Documents published by WikiLeaks revealed that Guantanamo detainees were subjected to torture and other forms of abuse.

If not for WikiLeaks, the world would not have known that the US, which preaches good behaviour to other states, is itself a rogue state.
Although whistleblowers are considered a threat to national security, they uphold democracy by exposing the secretive nature of the state. In fact, by exposing lies, they promote the truth in an exercise that will help hold governments accountable and ensure that politicians in power are acting in the best interests of their citizens. The people should not accept whatever the government says without questioning it.