A History of America’s War on Whistleblowers and Journalists Since 9/11

Relevant to today’s suppression of dissent is this article by Joachim Hagopian which was first published on Global Research in January 2015.

With 2014 fresh in our rear view mirror, an honest examination of events and developments of what’s been happening in America to whistleblowers and journalists since 9/11 under the Bush-Obama regime seems a worthwhile review, however disturbing ands foreboding. By definition a whistleblower is an individual who reports an employer’s misconduct. The Whistleblower Protection Act of 1989 (WPA) is a law that protects federal government employees in the United States from retaliatory action for voluntarily disclosing information about dishonest or illegal activities occurring within a government organization. Yet despite these supposed legal protections in place, those who have gone public disclosing illicit and immoral behavior by the federal government have been consistently singled out for discrimination and excessive punishment.

In fact, more American citizens have been indicted for allegedly violating the Espionage Act of 1917 under the current president than all other previous presidents combined. Though the law was designed to punish WWI German spies, and rarely used since for indicting those selling secrets to the enemy or efforts to undermine the American way of life, it is completely obsolete. Yet it is being misused by Obama for purely political purposes to shut down the truth. The Obama administration has also turned down more Freedom of Information Act requests than any other prior presidency with each year the denial rate rising. 2013 was 57% more than the year before, with over half the total requests rejected. Of course Obama’s mantra excuse is always using the “national security” card. He has also jailed more whistleblowers and journalists than any other president. By his over the top, punitive methods, Obama has declared war on the first amendment right to a free press in America, threatening, harassing, indicting and imprisoning those brave enough to speak the truth, accusing them of treason when the president through his administration has repeatedly violated the very Constitution that he has sworn to protect and uphold as the so called leader of the free world. His malevolent attack on free speech is even more incriminating and inexcusable as a Harvard educated lawyer who once taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago.

With their war policies both domestic and abroad one and the same, Obama has carried the totalitarian torch handed him by the Bush-Cheney administration making the United States the world’s worst human rights violator. But then they’re all cast from the same psychopathic mold as mere public front men simply following orders from their oligarch puppet masters who own and control them along with virtually everything else on this planet.

The man who after the Bush nightmare exploited Americans’ desperate need for hope and change campaigned on false promises that his administration would be far more open and transparent than his war criminal predecessor, pledging to be the most open and honest in US history. Instead Obama has only proven to be the most guarded, vindictive and secretive president in US history. With three quarters of Obama’s two term reign of terror completed, let’s look at the lives of a handful of Americans who have bravely spoken out since 9/11, some known and some lesser known. At great danger to themselves these individuals have exercised their legal rights under the Whistleblower Act and/or First Amendment and paid dearly for only doing the right thing. Their courage to expose government waste, corruption, fraud and its diabolical wrongdoing has been met with blatant retribution and extreme punishment that has systematically resulted in their unlawful firing, false imprisonment, character and career assassination and indeed even their political assassination and murder, all for standing up to injustice and wrongdoing for the greater good of Americans and humanity. These brave and honest individuals working in our government and in journalism should be heralded as our national heroes for their bold truth speaking, not silenced, harmed and/or destroyed by our own criminally treasonous rogue government.

The two biggest whistleblowers deservedly receiving the most national and international attention during the last couple years are ex-NSA analyst Edward Snowden, currently a fugitive forced on the run hiding out in Russia, and ex-US Army private Bradley now Chelsea Manning, currently serving three and a half decades of hard time in federal prison. In June 2013 Snowden released documents proving the government leaders to be liars – from Obama’s national security advisor and known perjurer James Clapper to now former National Security Agency (NSA) Director General Alexander (in clear violation of both his sworn oath upholding both the Constitution and his onetime West Point honor code).

Through the Snowden revelations Americans and in fact the entire world have come to realize the US government has been routinely conducting invasive, unlawful surveillance on every single aspect of our not so private lives, brazenly and blatantly violating Fourth Amendment search and seizure laws for decades now. Mr. Snowden pointed out what many of us already suspected, that Big Brother is watching our every move, or minimally has free unlimited access. Despite the reactive government and its controlled Mainstream Media propaganda machine claiming the NSA whistleblower is a traitor as the eighth American charged with violating the Espionage Act who weakened national security and placed Americans in danger, then not delivering a shred of forthcoming evidence, public opinion has neither been swayed nor convinced that he’s the villain. Even the New York Times has followed suit with the majority of Americans beginning 2014 with a favorable New Year op-ed article upgrading its view of Edward Snowden:

When someone reveals that government officials have routinely and deliberately broken the law, that person should not face life in prison at the hands of the same government…

Considering the enormous value of the information he has revealed, and the abuses he has exposed, Mr. Snowden deserves better than a life of permanent exile, fear and flight.

Of course Private Manning working as an intelligence specialist in Iraq saw numerous atrocities and crimes against humanity the US Empire was perpetrating in our name in both Iraq and Afghanistan. In good conscience in 2010 he leaked thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaksbelieving like Daniel Ellsberg four decades earlier that it might force the United States to end its war crimes, perhaps the wars themselves because the American people have the right to know what atrocities are being committed in their name. Rather than protection under the Whistleblower’s Act, like Snowden he too was slammed with treasonous charges and convicted of violating the Espionage Act with the same bogus worn out cries/lies that he also compromised national security and endangered fellow Americans. And also identical to the Snowden outcries, a Pentagon general who conducted a near yearlong investigation of the effects the leaks maintained that not one single death ever resulted from Manning’s releases.

There is something really grotesquely wrong and inverse from the way it naturally should be in America when a whistleblower performing acts of goodwill demonstrating moral conscience to save lives is maltreated with the treasonous tag of traitor and imprisoned for the next thirty five years. Rather than own responsibility for violating international laws and correcting the grave problem as any government operating with any moral compass would do, US government tyranny has it committing yet another grave injustice by in effect destroying the whistleblower’s life, confining Manning for what will likely be most of her remaining life. Private Manning should have won the Nobel Peace Prize for his moral courage and been lauded as a national hero and role model to be emulated in history books for generations to come, not cast away to rot for decades in a prison cell.

John Kiriakou was a CIA officer turned whistleblower who busted the Bush-Cheney-Obama torture practice wide open by contacting the New York Times and an ABC reporter. Though the systemic practice of enhanced interrogation torture that includes waterboarding was officially outlawed under Obama, in reality it only went further underground. That’s why Obama recently refused to prosecute the guilty members of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Alberto Gonzalez regime including the CIA and Special Ops personnel who actively violated international and national laws. But the good man Kiriakou who called the bad men out was the one who was arrested in early 2012 simply for telling the truth while the government for years persisted in its lying game. That’s why Obama throwing the book at John threw him into the slammer where he still remains, not for passing any classified material or even violating the three counts of espionage he initially was charged with that were dropped for lack of evidence. He has been locked up purely for the political purpose to set an example for those honest and courageous enough to tell the nasty heinous truth about what America the rogue state has been propagating with impunity around the world. In his arrogant exceptionalism, Obama continues to operate above the law, defying the Whistleblower Act of 1989 he also promised to uphold. As another heroic patriot, John Kiriakou should be a free man and recognized as the hero he is.

Meanwhile, the US military-national government should be treated as the treasonous killing machine it is and severely punished for its rampant destruction and violation of both international and domestic laws. But unfortunately since 9/11, the oppressors within the militarized Empire apparatus doing the dirty oligarch bidding of the New World Order no longer comply with our nation’s rule of law and instead appear engaged in global depopulation through war, growing complicity of ethnic cleansing in Gaza, Ukraine, Iraq, Syria and Rwanda, widespread globalimpoverishmentbio-warfare and neurotoxin poisoning. The police state killing increasing numbers of innocent, unarmed, law abiding US citizens reflects the overt war on America itself. With events from Ferguson, New York City and throughout America really, the powers-that-be have long been waging successful divide and conquer campaigns, pitting class against class, religion against religion, race against race, region against region, ideology against ideology, police state against citizen.

Though the FBI fails to even acknowledge much less tally each year’s unjustifiable homicides committed by law enforcement agencies across the nation, only “justifiable” ones are counted. From 1992 through 2012 (2012 being the latest account though in 2014 an exponential spike has no doubt occurred), while violent crime in the US has steadily declined, the so called justifiable killings of Americans by police has significantly increased. Plus as law enforcement becomes more militarized with surplus military weapons and equipment from war zones being distributed in recent years to local police departments around the country, the weapon of choice that the militarized police state is currently using to kill US citizens has shifted from officer handguns to automatic rifles. It’s getting so one cannot tell the difference between the police and the military as they have emerged in both appearance and function to be one and the same. They both fight wars, domestic and foreign.

Everything happening here in the United States is simultaneously recurring throughout the Western world. It all is going as planned by that one tenth of one percent that holds virtually the entire planet’s wealth and power along with its seven billion population hostage. In the US the top 20% of American household incomes own over half the country’s wealth (53.5%) and incredibly the top 1% alone more than 40% of all US wealth. With the world’s richest nation’s form of government no longer a democratic republic but an actual oligarchy serving the interests of the privileged financial elite, draconian laws have sprung up on every continent criminalizing free speech and free press. Each passing year more journalists are being jailed or killed throughout the globe. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) just revealed that 60 journalists were killed in action in 2014 while Reporters Without Borders counted the number at 66. CPJ maintains that 220 were imprisoned last year. It’s becoming more dangerous all the time to report the truth.

The Orwellian nightmare of a militarized global security-surveillance-police state means new national security laws are rapidly proliferating all over the world. This last year alone has seen tyrannical parliamentary acts from Australia to Spain being enacted with greater frequency. Clearly the globalists control every war, manufacturing and demonizing enemies at propagandist will. Oligarchs in the form of the international banking cabal have taken over every national government, own and control every transnational corporation, and control every national economy due to increasing dependence on a non-sustainable, bankrupt global economic system dictated and controlled by the cabal. They own and control virtually all global food production, distribution and supply as well as virtually all sources of information through fewer and fewer media outlets, with the agenda to next abolish net neutrality and eliminate the internet as the only viable independent news source for any semblance of truth and accurate information still left available. As highly alarming as this appallingly dark and austere NWO reality fast descending over every corner of the globe appears, unfortunately the worst is yet to come. We citizens of the world must fight back first with the truth by learning and disseminating it, and then with our collective will through nonviolent civil disobedience.

The increasingly probable assassination of investigative journalist Michael Hastings on June 18th, 2013 involved a high speed car crash caused by an incredibly high heat explosion that occurred prior to ending up “leaning” next to a tree in an LA police photo that shows the new model Mercedes Benz with absolutely no frontal collision damage at all, only a badly burned area confined to the driver’s seat where Michael was burned alive. Neighborhood witnesses describe what they heard as an enormously loud explosion at 4:30 in the morning sounding like “a bomb going off.” The unburned engine was strangely found at a right angle from the car lying 150-180 feet away, consistent with a powerful explosive catapulting it so far a distance from the vehicle. Also consistent with an explosion, there were no skid marks at the accident scene.

Within just a few hours after Hastings’ death, LAPD was rushing to make an open and shut case, calling it a simple accident while emphatically claiming no foul play was involved barely even after any investigation had begun. That kind of knee jerk response smacks of cover-up. Also Michael’s body went straight from the coroner’s office to the local crematory without the family’s consent against their wishes. With his body quickly cremated, any possibility of discovering signs of foul play were instantly and conveniently destroyed, raising only more suspicion.

On the very same day just a few hours before his death, the outspoken reporter was in contact with WikiLeaks lawyer Jennifer Robinson, eager to turn over his latest expose piece on the criminality of US intelligence agencies. Also on that very same day, Michael asked a friend to borrow her car indicating he knew something was not right with his own new model vehicle. Additionally, Hastings was in a rare state of anxiety all day long as he was busily emailing and contacting friends to inform them that the FBI was in fact investigating him and that he may need to lay low for a while. Though the FBI denied that he was ever under investigation, the truth was the FBI lied as he was being investigated right after his most recent Rolling Stone article came out in July 2012 featuring the highly controversial case of the only POW from the Afghanistan War Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl. A 22-page secret FBI report was the result.

Even more striking was a post on WikiLeaks of an internal email from the covert CIA contractor company Stratfor’s Vice President Fred Burton stating, “[CIA Director] Brennan is behind the witch hunts of investigative journalists learning information from inside the beltway sources.”Then Michael Hastings’ wife Elise Jordan confirmed in a CNN interview that former CIA Director Petraeus’ successor John Brennan and his efforts to seal off all leaks to the press was the very hot topic of Hastings’ next exposé. The biggest articles of Hastings’ career in journalism were most unflattering reports about the most powerful military leaders in America – Generals Stanley McCrystal and David Petraeus for Rolling Stone.

In fact, shortly after the McCrystal article was published, the military intelligence commander of Special Operations in Afghanistan’s own career was destroyed when Obama fired McCrystal for trash talking his Commander-in-Chief. There’s evidence that Hastings’ life was threatened while writing that article should his account of McCrystal not be anything more than a fluff n’ puff piece. Several years earlier it was General McCrystal who was the primary player (along with his boss my former West Point roommate the then CentCom commander General John Abizaid) in covering up Pat Tillman’s suspicious death and probable murder since the famous pro football star turned patriotic Army Ranger was renouncing his role as a Bush-Cheney poster boy unwittingly being misused for recruitment for their illegal wars. Tillman was about to blow the lid off the US government’s international drug smuggling operation that had US soldiers guarding the opium fields in Afghanistan. The friendly fire that put three bullet holes in his forehead a la execution style obviously was anything but friendly. Nor was the autopsy doctor who balked for months from acquiescing to the official cover-up version.

Two years later another scathing Hastings article placed General Petraeus in a bad light uncovering the resounding failure of “King David’s War” (as Hastings named his Rolling Stone piece) in 2010 Afghanistan, exposing the general’s lies touting false progress over his second surge in as many wars after the inflated hype had crowned him the savior in Iraq. Hastings’ unfettered truth squarely embarrassed America’s most famous general with the rock star status and presidential ambitions to jump at the chance in 2011 of abandoning his own 37-year military career, his failed combat mission and lost cause war to become the next civilian in charge of the CIA. Hastings’ no-nonsense brand of truth telling journalism made powerful enemies and tragically he paid for it with his life.

Michael Hastings boldly pissed off the elite, exposing their lies in a nation run no different from the mafia, controlled by murdering thugs within a shadowy rogue government that made Hastings their “fair game” target. Silencing him by their brazen undercover method of remote hacking and exploding his automobile was the not-so-subtle message sent to all muckraking journalists who dare print the dirty lowdown truth about the fascist tyranny state since the 9/11 inside coup unleashing the forever war on terror. Even counterterrorism insider Richard Clarke copped the conclusion that it could well have been a hacking hit job. While a militarized police force operating freely with impunity in a security surveillance state is regularly killing off innocent unarmed Americans, a totalitarian federal government is resorting to assassination of its own targeted citizens deemed a threat to the state just to keep any would-be rabblerousers in line and/or neutralized by elimination.

Just two weeks prior to Hastings’ untimely demise, Obama had launched his aggressive assault on America’s free press with his shot across the bow confiscating phone records of Associated Press reporters, harassing a Fox journalist as well as internally hacking the computer belonging to former CBS reporter and investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson. In her recent tell-all book Stonewalled, Attkisson chronicles Obama’s profound web of deceit and his aggressive, out for blood lust to destroy all truth tellers. Fresh on the heels of these events came Michael Hastings’ car blowing up. In today’s United States of America, an emboldened, in-our-face pattern of connecting the criminal dots has emerged. Those of us individuals courageous and daring enough to expose the dark ugly truth about what America the no longer free has chillingly degenerated into, are simply being taken out, exterminated by the totalitarian state that hypocritical US leaders like Obama have long accused of Russia and China.

Several months prior to Hastings death in February 2013, another controversial journalist-author and his family turned up suspiciously dead in northern California. Philip Marshall wrote the book published in 2012 called The Big Bamboozle: 9/11 and the War on Terror, dissecting the false flag 9/11 event that launched the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars. Speculation abounds over Marshall’s affiliation back in the Iran Contra days of the 1980’s when controversial CIA pilot Barry Seal was transporting cocaine for the government and later had his pilot license revoked. It was then that fellow pilot Philip Marshall was hired to transport Seal back and forth from Florida to Louisiana. After delving into covert government activities and writing about them for thirty years, Philip Marshall’s third book was an expose linking the Saudi government to the 9/11 inside Bush-Cheney job. The former United Airlines captain makes the case that a US military stand down order was in effect on the day the planes flew into the towers after Washington and Saudi Arabia had been in cahoots for that last 18 months to ensure that with CIA assistance the wire-cutting, Saudi foreign nationals were allowed free access in and out of the US while being trained to fly planes at various flight school locations around the country – in Florida, Arizona and California. Two credible sources, former Senators Bob Kerrey and Bob Graham who headed two separate 9/11 investigations also came up with the same conclusion, that intelligence sources from the Saudi government worked hand in hand with the Bush administration in preparation to pull off the 9/11 attack.

An FBI special agent and attorney Coleen Rowley working out of the Minnesota field office had stumbled upon vital information regarding suspicious activity involving Saudi national Zacarias Moussaoui taking flying lessons. After attempting to alert FBI higher-ups in DC to no avail, she soon went public as a whistleblower testifying before a Senate committee over the inexplicable breakdown in intelligence communications that led directly to 9/11. Specifically she realized that FBI headquarters actually hampered the investigation that may have stopped the 9/11 attack. Of course if the reality from top on down was a planned inside attack, then the FBI would have orders to purposely sabotage any real probe exposing the perpetrators. Coleen wrote a scathing letter to the FBI Director Robert Mueller. Ms. Rowley was one of three women selected as 2002’s Time Magazine’s Persons of the Year for her blowing the whistle on the feds’ failure to do its job. Ever since she has been a strong advocate and activist for government oversight especially once she resigned from the FBI in 2004. Coleen Rowley is another unsung American hero.

Still another courageous woman who became an FBI whistleblower involving 9/11 is Sibel Edmonds. Fluent in both Farsi and Turkish languages, Ms. Edmonds was hired right after 9/11 as a translator of sensitive intelligence documents that confirmed the FBI knew prior to 9/11 of the plan to use airplanes to attack buildings on American soil. Sibel like Coleen is a hardworking activist dedicated to exposing the truth about government improprieties. Utilizing her international contacts, she runs the extremely informative alternative news website BoilingFrogs.com.

With FBI Agent Rowley also privy to the same plan to fly planes into New York City’s Twin Towers, Rowley informed top FBI officials of this terrorist plot even prior to 9/11. Between both Rowley and Edmonds’ testimony, proof exists that the government knew about the attack and chose not to intercept its execution on 9/11. Beyond a question of a doubt, this bit of critical evidence demonstrates at a minimum the federal government’s complicity and more than likely its preplanned inside false flag operation to murder thousands of Americans on that fateful September morning. Of course 9/11 became the contrived diabolical excuse used to justify US invasions and decade long occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq under totally fabricated pretense. Of course it also constitutes crimes against humanity on an unprecedented monstrously gargantuan scale – not only crimes against the American people, but especially against the Iraqi and Afghan citizens who have lost millions of their loved ones in their failed state nations, all compliments of George Bush and Dick Cheney. Right up to this very day wars that America egregiously brought to their homelands are still raging with no end in sight.

Returning to the man recognized as “the leading aviation expert on the 9/11 attack,” Mr. Philip Marshall’s book and his next writing project he had begun must have threatened those high enough in the government who systematically silence anyone bent on uncovering their sinister false flag operations. The neocon administration has too much at stake and too much to lose should the real truth about them be known. What especially makes this story even more tragic is that Marshall’s teenage son and daughter were also shot in the head in their “safe” gated community home. Unsurprisingly, the local police and coroner hastily wrote it off as just another family homicide-suicide by another mentally unstable father estranged from his ex-wife.

Meanwhile right after the tragedy, former NSA officer and outspoken investigative journalist Wayne Madsen (WayneMadsenReport.com) spent a week in California talking to Marshall’s fellow residents in Murphys. The homes are close enough for the next door neighbor to say she could hear Philip whistling inside his house. Yet the police claimed that the homes in the community are too far apart for any neighbors to hear the four gunshots, quickly denying that a silencer was used. Moreover, none of the Marshall family friends and neighbors believe it was a homicide-suicide. Many believe that Philip’s latest work was especially incriminating to the government and that the family was murdered to silence him. Madsen also learned from the local media sources that Calaveras County Sheriff Gary Kuntz is said to be stalling in handing over the critical toxicological report on the family’s bodies as well as the Gunshot Residue report from the bullets fired from Marshall’s 9mm Glock. After conducting his own investigation, Wayne Madsen concluded that he is “100% certain” that the Marshall family was assassinated by the government.

A piece in the Santa Barbara View mentioned that during the editing and pre-marketing phase of publishing his 9/11 book, Philip Marshall displayed signs of paranoia. When one is actually being targeted for extermination through intimidation and harassment, to fear for your life is clearly not a paranoid delusion. Yet skeptics readily buy in to the official spin that targeted assassination victims are simply unstable and deranged, going off the deep end in this case killing his own family, the family dog and himself. Of course professionals who murder for a living are skilled at setting it up so suicide is always the most plausible explanation. Government thugs who operate like the mafia wouldn’t have it any other way. Those who kill for a living and have every possible resource available to enable them to get away with their sins can always make a crime scene appear like a suicide. Criminal rogue elements within the US government have been doing it for a very long time. So another truth teller and his two innocent children must bite the dust so the actual perpetrators can go free, untouched by their own evildoing.

Of course the 33-year old Hastings and 54-year old Marshall are not the only American writers likely murdered for exposing the sinister truth about the US government. In his 1996 Dark Alliance, an expose series for the San Jose Mercury News, Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist Gary Webb singlehandedly uncovered the Iran Contra scandal during Reagan’s 1980’s that supplied crack cocaine to South Central Los Angeles, resulting in the crack epidemic still raging in America’s urban ghettos. Webb’s ongoing investigative work exposed the illicit, morally reprehensible Contra Cocaine scandal that the CIA was running a decade earlier exchanging money and guns for Latin American drugs to finance the Contra insurgency operations fighting against the democratically elected Nicaraguan Sandinista government. Of course the Contras weren’t the “freedom fighters” Reagan idolized at all but US funded drug cartel mercenaries consisting of death squad commandos trained and led by CIA and US Special Operations forces that brutally terrorized and massacred thousands of Nicaraguans during the eighties Contra War.

A decade after Webb’s tragic death, his harrowing story was cinematically portrayed in the 2014 film “Kill the Messenger.” The Sacramento coroner that performed Webb’s autopsy quickly ruled his death a suicide despite a passing reference to the unusual occurrence of a suicide involving two bullets to the head. One shot from behind went out through Webb’s jaw so the likely murderer ensured the hit was successfully finalized by sending the second .35 caliber bullet straight into his brain. Prior to his demise, Webb had received a number of death threats and witnessed men in flight leaving his home as he pulled into his driveway. Those who believe Webb did commit suicide cite that he was broke, jobless, down on his luck and soon to be evicted from his apartment. Oh, and his motorcycle was stolen the day before he shot himself twice. Feds once again have ways to arrange circumstances so their official suicide spin gets bought.

Two years after the newspaper articles, Gary Webb published his book Dark Alliance in 1998 and continued working on another book uncovering the CIA and its clandestine operations right up till his execution style murder. Of course the big three mainstream presstitutes, the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Washington Post thoroughly trashed Webb’s controversial findings as unsubstantiated, amateurish journalism, making a mockery of both the veracity of his investigation and his unjustifiably maligned reputation. Eventually his editor at the Mercurysuccumbed to the national pressure from the oligarch owned and operated Big Media and canned him. Subsequently the San Jose editor was rewarded for discriminately distancing the paper’s parent company Knight Ridder from the forsaken media pariah Webb. Similar to Hastings’ fate, the CIA is believed responsible for killing the journalist who was bent on exposing the evil that US intelligence forces perpetrate by shooting him twice in the back of his head in December 2004 as fatal retribution.

Gary Webb’s unveiling news was predated more than a decade earlier by Senator John Kerry’s 1985 investigation uncovering the reality that the US government knew about the drug connection between the CIA and Contra funding. Webb’s much criticized accounting was vindicated by the CIA’s own Inspector General Frederick Hitz’ 1998 reports that clearly confirmed CIA’s active involvement. Webb’s work also paved the way to learning that President Reagan and top administration officials knew and actively supported the illegal drug for money and weapons starting in the early 1980’s, placing the CIA along with National Security Council point man Lt. Colonel Oliver North in charge of the drug smuggling operation headquartered in the White House basement. This sordid covert operation right under Reagan’s powdered white nose had CIA fingerprints all over it, led by none other than former CIA chief and then VP turned President George H.W. Bush himself.

The Massachusetts Congressman who appointed me to West Point, Edward Boland, sponsored the Boland Amendment that prohibited military assistance to the Contras until 1986. Yet despite this Congressional restriction, it failed to stop CIA man Bush from secretly and illegally funding the Contra War through the lucrative drug trade. The staging area for resupplying the Contra terrorists during the 1980’s became Ilopongo Air Force Base in El Salvador. It was there that many CIA flights picking up large shipments of cocaine were then flown for drop off to America.

Even a 27-year senior special FBI agent who headed the Los Angeles, Memphis and Dallas field offices, the late Ted Gunderson, ruled Gary Webb’s death a murder and the possibility of it being a suicide “impossible.” During the last several decades of his life, Gunderson’s snooping around for the truth exposing the pervasive criminality within his own rogue elements of the FBI and CIA more than likely led to his eventual death in July 2011. During the three decades since retiring from the FBI, Ted Gunderson investigated the JFK assassination, Marilyn Monroe’s likely murder, 9/11 as an inside job, chemtrails, the Iran-Conta scandal, the Oklahoma City bombing, the Illuminati and the NWO agenda, the Bush crime family, Satanism, child kidnapping and ritualistic abuse and sacrifice. As a longtime government whistleblower and bestselling author possessing impeccable FBI credentials and decades of expert investigative experience, Gunderson made many enemies within the government. Mr. Gunderson’s treating physician of many years, Dr. Edward Lucidi, also examined Ted’s body after his July 2011 death, and concluded that Gunderson had been periodically poisoned with arsenic that eventually triggered his bladder cancer that ultimately spread to kill him.

The longtime New World Order advocate and oligarch George Herbert Walker Bush has CIA links dating all the way back to the 1961 Bay of Pigs scandal. Though once a Skull and Bones secret society initiate at Yale like his father before him and his junior namesake after, graduation in 1948 meant moving with his wife and George Jr. to Texas where he became an even richer oil man. In the early 1960’s HW worked as a CIA recruiter for the Bay of Pigs operation. It was his involvement in the CIA training of Cuban exiles in guerilla warfare in preparation for the Bay of Pigs that H.W. met anti-Castro Cuban, naturalized American citizen, drug trafficker, career CIA employee and lifelong friend Felix Rodriguez (alias Max Gomez) who was responsible for Che Guevara’s capture and killing and would surface decades later in a key role in the Iran Contra affair. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s controversial JFK assassination memo dated November 29th, 1963, a mere seven days after the Kennedy murder, explicitly names the CIA’s “George H.W. Bush” for his direct JFK involvement placing him in Dallas at the time the ill-fated president was ambushed at Dealey Plaza. There is even a photo of Bush in front of the same book depository where the “lone gunman” patsy Lee Harvey Oswald allegedly fired from the second floor.

President Kennedy was indeed the most famous would-be whistleblower in-the-making during the 1000 days of his short-lived presidency. In reaction to the embarrassment of the botched Bay of Pigs scandal he inherited from the Eisenhower administration, Kennedy’s bold design included “splintering the CIA,” abolishing its covert operations and bringing home all of the US military advisors assigned to Vietnam. Thus, Kennedy intended to avoid further conflict in Southeast Asia that his successor turned into the longest running war in American history, that is, up until this century’s George W. Bush-Obama’s Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. After the October 1962 Missile Crisis was resolved when Premier Khrushchev dismantled Soviet missiles in Cuba, and then the Soviet construction of the Berlin wall separating Communist East Germany from West Germany, JFK sought to improve relations with the Soviet Union with the ultimate aim of ending the dangerous cold war. Both his stance on Vietnam and the cold war placed him in direct conflict with the shadowy power structure lurking all around him.

At the time of his murder, President John Kennedy was about to break with such powerful Council on Foreign Relations elitist globalists aka “wise men” as Dean Acheson, Averell Harriman (George HW’s Nazi financier father Prescott’s lifelong business partner) and JFK recently fired (over the Bay of Pigs fiasco) CIA Director Allen Dulles who were all longtime chief presidential advisors and additionally chief Vietnam War proponents/architects. Though surrounded and overwhelmingly outnumbered by his Vice President Johnson, Secretary of State Rusk and Defense Secretary McNamara who all backed the CFR advisors’ views along with his ultra-pro-war hawk Chiefs of Staff, against the rising tide Kennedy was determined to withdraw all troops from Southeast Asia.

But perhaps JFK’s final blow that determined his tragic fate came when he issued Executive Order 11110 in June 1963 returning the power to create money back over to the US Treasury with instructions “to issue silver certificates against any silver bullion, silver, or standard silver dollars in the Treasury.” This move would have usurped the power, profit and fraudulent Ponzi scheme that the banking cabal wields through the nonfederal privatized Federal Reserve. The Eastern Establishment of Wall Street Bankers bolstered by the pervasive governmental influence of the CFR would not tolerate such monumental loss of wealth and power from their longtime coffers. Thus, a number of JFK investigators have concluded that the deposed CIA Director Dulles played a leading role in the assassination and cover-up against the one man who perhaps would have been the greatest whistleblower in US history.

Of course once Kennedy was forcibly removed from power, Texan Lyndon Johnson became president, the Federal Reserve continued its theft controlling the flow of paper fiat money and all those CFR “wise guys” continued prodding LBJ into full scale escalation in Vietnam despite knowing in advance that the war was unwinnable per revelations from the Pentagon Papers released later by renowned whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg. Ellsberg’s biggest regret was waiting until 1971 to go public. The sobering lesson of losing near 60,000 Americans and over three million Southeast Asians estimated dead because the elite wanted a war the US would lose by design was doomed to repeat itself indefinitely with more false flag crimes of the twenty-first century in the 9/11 disgraceful tragedy, then the preplanned Afghanistan and Iraq Wars where millions more continue dying in vain to this day because oligarchs always love profiteering forever from their self-made war on terror. As insiders aware of the demonic destruction and plundering of all earthly life at their hands, we must all become whistleblowers and stand up to this evil tide that has ruled over humanity for far too many centuries by the inhuman psychopaths in megalomaniacal control.

Finally, the legacy of the CFR Skull and Bones assassinations, criminal theft made legal and false flag wars continue to live on even today through the ongoing malevolence perpetrated by the Bush family. Prior to murderously pulling off the coup of the century with stolen fraudulent elections and the demonic 9/11 inside job, the silver spooned Skull and Bones lifer George W. Bush had already proven he was likely a psychopathic rapist. Meet Margie Schoedinger, a 38-year old married African American woman who filed rape charges against President George W. Bush in December 2002. Other than her hometown Fort Bend, Texas newspaper, not one other US media outlet even bothered to cover the plaintiff’s criminal lawsuit filed in the Harris County Civil Court against the standing US president. With so much attention focused on Monica Lewinsky’s illicit affair with his predecessor Clinton, and then violent acts of rape, torture and harassment allegedly committed on multiple occasions by then Texas Governor George W. Bush, to have a complete media blackout refusing to report such serious criminal offenses indicates the absolute power of the Bush cabal for controlling and completely shutting off the flow of important information in America. Then to ensure the demonic truth about Bush never sees the light of day, nine months later Margie Schoedinger was silenced, found dead from a gunshot wound to the head, her death ruled a suicide. Though women rarely commit suicide with guns, choosing drug overdose as their means, no further follow of either the repeated sexual assaults or the death was ever launched despite records showing that Bush made her life a living hell. Whether she did herself in or not, her killer was most likely the leader of the free world and with that kind of power, hardly anyone dared to notice.

There was no indication that Margie Schoedinger was mentally imbalanced, nor did she ever seek publicity. She had known Bush two decades earlier having dated Bush when still a minor. The peculiar, spectacular and horrifying circumstances of the rape charges and then more strange circumstances surrounding the victim’s death again drew virtually no response from the press. Only one single UK paper the New Nation serving the black community of London published an article about her alleged suicide. Back prior to the current cold war with Russia, its foreign news service Pravda also picked up and ran the story as well.

Records on file indicate that allegations that George Bush and FBI agents regularly harassed and threatened both Margie and her husband for months prior to her death. On the night of October 26th, 2000, three of Bush’s FBI henchmen apparently arrived at her home. When Margie contacted the Sugar Land police, the police arrived showing deference to the thug henchman and acted accusatory toward Margie and her husband. Then later the Sugar Land police lied, denying they had any record of said incident. Ms. Schoedinger made statements on record that Bush and company did more than just threaten to ruin and destroy her. In addition to allegedly committing sex crimes toward both Margie and her husband, on multiple occasions she allegedly had been drugged and gang raped. Apparently she was even hospitalized for having a miscarriage alleged to be Bush’s baby and was met at the hospital by FBI for further intimidation. Bush ensured that her academic degree was denied, her bank account deleted, her husband’s employment terminated, ultimately recommending that she was better off committing suicide. That this tragedy never was fully covered by the press, nor allegations ever followed up with any real investigation, nor any justice even remotely served, all this offers true testimony of how privilege, wealth and fame in America grants the diabolical elite the power to literally get away with rape and murder in destroying innocent victims’ lives. With his illegal wars based on lies, the untold suffering that the psychopathic Bush crime family has inflicted on this earth goes far beyond any measure in words.

For brevity sake, I presented the stories of just a few whistleblowers and journalists who have come forth with inside knowledge and expertise exposing government corruption, lies, misdeeds and injustice. Hundreds more have also paid the heavy price for speaking the truth. Too many have died, always obscured by more lies portending suicide as the cause of death. Recently an anonymous source volunteered that ex-Navy Seal Michael Calabrese was found floating vertically in the Chesapeake Bay waters, evidence he was a drowning victim whose body was purposely weighed down. The source claimed that Calabrese was his supervisor while they both installed demolition explosives and release switches inside the World Trade Center vending machines in both towers during the weeks leading up to 9/11. Calabrese was said to be writing his version of events as a would-be whistleblower but was silenced before his time like all the rest. Nearly a dozen have died mysteriously that had inside knowledge regarding the BP oil spill. The list goes on and on. Clearly, this government of ours will stop at nothing to ensure the evil truth stays hidden.

Though a number of whistleblowers and truth exposing journalists have made the ultimate sacrifice, it’s both fair and important to point out the fact that hundreds of honest and brave individuals have gone public with crucial need-to-know information and are still living amongst us alive and well. Jesselyn Radack is a Yale educated whistleblowing attorney who disclosed injustice when American Taliban John Walker Lindh was denied due process by the FBI during his interrogation. His family had already hired an attorney to represent him. As a young lawyer working in the State Department providing on call legal counsel to federal agencies in December 2001, Jesselyn Radack recommended that the FBI not proceed with questioning Lindh if he had an attorney. However, the overzealous FBI interrogators went ahead anyway without his attorney present. As the case moved forward, Ms. Radack later learned that transcripts of her consultation documents were missing from Lindh’s official file. When she inquired and ensured all the documentation was then included, she was suddenly asked to resign her position in the State Department. Ultimately in good conscience, she made the decision to go public contacting a New York Times reporter. With her career being derailed and threatened, she was then abruptly terminated from her next job at a private law firm. In the end through months of anguish and adversity, Jesselyn Radack’s ethical principles and resolve triumphed over the petty vengeful federal bureaucrats out to destroy her.

Ms. Radack has come full circle as she is now the National Security and Human Rights Director of the Government Accountability Project (GAP) in Washington DC. As a bestselling author and a regular contributor of op-ed articles to the New York TimesWall Street Journal andWashington Post, Jesselyn is a formidable force for good, representing and protecting the rights of likeminded insiders determined to serve justice by making an honest difference. Seven of the eight national security employee whistleblowers who have been charged under Obama with violating the Espionage Act have been among her clients, including Edward Snowden, John Kiriakou and a former CIA analyst-NSA contractor turned whistleblower and activist colleague with Jesselyn at GAP Sir Thomas Drake.

A 10-year Air Force veteran in intelligence, Thomas Drake began working as a CIA analyst and NSA contractor for 12 years before joining the NSA fulltime. He observed enormous taxpayer dollars being wasted and proceeded to address his concerns through proper channels only to be ignored. Harassment followed as soon as he approached the Department of Defense and NSA Inspector Generals. Falsely accused of leaking classified documents during the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping scandal, as a last resort Thomas contacted a Baltimore Sun reporter who wrote a series of award winning articles on the waste no one in the government would do anything about. Drake was then raked over the coals, bogusly charged with breaking espionage laws. His home raided, computers confiscated and held for hours under interrogation, the Justice Department (DOJ) was out for his blood, threatening he would spend the rest of his life behind bars. Drake fought back, refusing “to plea bargain with the truth.” By this time Obama was in power. Thomas learned that the new president only paid lip service to vowing to protect whistleblowers when in April 2010 he was indicted on 10 counts, 5 under the Espionage Act. With only three other previous cases in US history, Thomas Drake would be the first of Obama’s eight charged with that archaic lynchpin. Despite no evidence of turning over classified documents, he was charged with “retention” of them. As an NSA employee, of course he would hold classified info, but he never leaked any. Again determined to make him an example for others, the government spent years trying to build a case against him but couldn’t because he never broke any laws.

After Jesselyn and her colleague at GAP authored an op-ed piece defending Drake, Thomas elected to have the Government Accounting Project formally represent him. With media advocacy pressuring the Justice Department without a valid case to back off, finally defeated by the court of public opinion, the feds tucked their tail between their legs and folded. Thomas Drake beat the rap and was finally a cleared, free man with the highest honor for a whistleblower bestowed upon him – the Ridenhour Prize for Truth-Telling. Four days before scheduled trial, all counts were dropped. The heroic victor walked away copping to a misdemeanor “exceeding authorized use of a computer” and one year on probation. Talk about petty politics. The government was shamed into submission and defeat. Drake is an inspiration to all Americans for standing up to evil and righteously staring it down. In the end, he remains a champion of our Constitution. He and Radack make a great tag team for justice against tyranny.

Over many decades the oligarchs have been engaged in the systematic dumbing down and killing of the global population, utilizing the nonstop barrage of false disinformation and propaganda to induce fear and compliance, of course with Americans always the last to know. Alarms going off in recent years by concerned citizens admonishing their fellow humans to wake up before it’s too late have largely fallen on deaf ears. 24/7 state sponsored propaganda inducing a societal stupor and insular ignorance have effectively prevented the masses from heeding any warnings to detox off the modern opiate – diversionary media deception delivered through the likes of Kim Kardashian’s latest wardrobe malfunction, upcoming Super Bowl hype, the latest video game or hi-tech toy or big screen blockbuster smash em’ up pyrotechnics. These are the fascist state’s arsenal of tools being utilized to numb, saturate and desensitize humans to violence, death and suffering, lulling us all into a glazed over sleep while previously invisible shackles and chains one day soon will visually and irreversibly materialize. We suddenly will wake up only to find ourselves bound and gagged in total bondage and enslavement, with whatever illusion of liberty or freedom of choice we thought we had, vanished and stolen in the night while we slept.

It becomes incumbent upon us to realize the danger of passivity, complacency, ignorance and fear is not the answer. The individuals highlighted here have sacrificed their freedom and life to make a difference. Their courage and integrity should be celebrated and honored. Their grossly unjust hardship will not be in vain only if their truth and bravery inspire us to also seek and tell the truth. This presentation calls upon all of us to become whistleblowers fighting all our might for our lost freedoms. 2015 marks a New Year to make a positive difference by spreading the word as truth activists empowered to continue the noble work and accomplishments that these very brave and valiant souls have paved for us. If we all do our part as truth telling whistleblowers, the truth shall set us all free.

Joachim Hagopian is a West Point graduate and former US Army officer. He has written a manuscript based on his unique military experience entitled “Don’t Let The Bastards Getcha Down.” It examines and focuses on US international relations, leadership and national security issues. After the military, Joachim earned a masters degree in Clinical Psychology and worked as a licensed therapist in the mental health field for more than a quarter century. He now concentrates on his writing.


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Articles by: Joachim Hagopian

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