Interesting event in London on Monday..

Stand Up For Truth

Whistleblowers Speaking Tour, London

Presented by

Birkbeck Interdisciplinary Research in Media and Culture

in collaboration with

* Campaign for Press & Broadcasting Freedom * National Union of Journalists * Media Reform Coalition * Open Rights Group * Public Concern at Work * Whistleblowing International Network

Monday, June 1 at 6:30 p.m.

University of London

Birkbeck, Malet Street, WC1E 7HX (entrance on Torrington Square)

This forum will hear from a delegation that includes U.S. whistleblowers from the National Security Agency (NSA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Justice Department and Pentagon. They’re on a Stand Up For Truth speaking tour.

Among the scheduled speakers is Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg. For a complete list of all seven speakers with background information, please see below.

To book a free ticket, click here.

If you’ll be in the London area on June 1, we hope to see you there! And please pass this invitation along to friends who might want to attend.

This event is free and open to all, but booking is essential. Reserve your place by clicking here.

RootsAction is pleased to be working with another U.S.-based organisation, ExposeFacts.org, to help arrange this Stand Up For Truth event in London.

With best wishes,

The RootsAction.org Team

Supporting organizations for this event:

Speakers at the June 1 event:

Eileen Chubb is one of the Bupa 7 Whistleblowers who lost their jobs after reporting widespread abuse of elderly people in a Bupa care home. The case was the first to use the UK whistleblowing law, PIDA. Chubb founded the charity Compassion In Care, to expose abuse and campaign to protect whistleblowers. More than 3,000 whistleblowers have contacted the charity. Last year BBC Panorama featured the charity's work with whistleblowers and exposing abuse. Her campaign for Edna's Law to replace PIDA and to protect the protectors is gathering major support.

Thomas Drake is a former senior executive at the National Security Agency where he blew the whistle on massive multi-billion dollar fraud, waste and the widespread violations of the rights of citizens through secret mass surveillance programs after 9/11. As retaliation and reprisal, the Obama administration indicted Drake in 2010 as the first whistleblower since Daniel Ellsberg charged with espionage, and Drake faced 35 years in prison, turning him into an Enemy of the State for his oath to defend the Constitution. In 2011, the government’s case against him collapsed and he went free in a plea deal. He is the recipient of the 2011 Ridenhour Truth Telling Prize, and a joint recipient with Jesselyn Radack of the 2011 Sam Adams Associates Integrity in Intelligence Award and the 2012 Hugh M. Hefner First Amendment Award. He is now dedicated to the defense of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Daniel Ellsberg is a former U.S. military analyst who served in Vietnam, worked at the RAND Corporation, and then risked decades in prison to release the top-secret Pentagon Papers to The New York Times and other newspapers in 1971 — thereby adding impetus to the movement to end the Vietnam War. Although Ellsberg faced espionage and other felony charges, the case against him was dismissed because of egregious misconduct by the Nixon administration. Ellsberg has been a strong supporter of modern-day NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and convicted Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning. In 2006, Ellsberg received the Right Livelihood Award (the “alternative Nobel Prize”). In 2012 he became a co-founder of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, and in 2014 he became the founding member of the ExposeFacts advisory board.

Jesselyn Radack is the director of National Security & Human Rights at the Government Accountability Project (GAP), the leading U.S. whistleblower organization. Her program focuses specifically on secrecy, surveillance, torture and discrimination. She has been at the forefront of defending against the government’s unprecedented “war on whistleblowers,” which has also implicated journalists. Among her clients, she represents seven national security and intelligence community employees who have been investigated, charged or prosecuted under the Espionage Act for allegedly mishandling classified information, including Edward Snowden, Thomas Drake, and John Kiriakou. She also represents clients bringing whistleblower retaliation complaints in federal court and various administrative bodies. Previously, she served on the DC Bar Legal Ethics Committee and worked at the Justice Department for seven years, first as a trial attorney and later as a legal ethics advisor. Radack is author of TRAITOR: The Whistleblower & the “American Taliban.”

Coleen Rowley, an attorney and former FBI special agent and division counsel whose May 2002 memo to the FBI Director exposed some of the agency’s pre-9/11 failures, was one of three whistleblowers named as Time magazine’s “Persons of the Year” in 2002. In February 2003, Rowley again wrote to the FBI Director questioning him and other Bush administration officials about the reliability of supposed evidence being used to justify the impending U.S invasion of Iraq. Under sharp criticism for her comments, Rowley stepped down from her legal position to go back to being an FBI Special Agent. She retired from the FBI in 2004 after 24 years with the agency.

Justin Schlosberg is a Lecturer in Journalism and Media at Birkbeck College, University of London, and an Edmund J. Safra Network Fellow at Harvard University. His research has critically examined the failures of mainstream journalism in covering national security controversies such as corruption in the British arms trade, the death of intelligence analyst Dr David Kelly, the mass leak of US diplomatic cables in 2010, and the revelations of former NSA contractor Ed Snowden in 2013. Many of these are documented in his first book, Power beyond Scrutiny, described by veteran author and journalist Phil Knightley as “absorbing and revelatory.”

Norman Solomon is the executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy and the coordinator of ExposeFacts. He is the author of a dozen books on media and public policy, including War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. A former associate of the Center for Investigative Reporting, he is a longtime associate of the media watchdog group Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR). Solomon wrote the syndicated weekly “Media Beat” column for 17 years. He is co-founder and coordinator of RootsAction.org, an online action group with more than half a million active supporters.

Additional bits not related to the above:

Thanks to courageous whistleblowers, we have been learning about U.S. and German cooperation in mass surveillance and drone killings.

Click here to tell both governments to end these policies.

The petition you sign will be presented in Berlin by Daniel Ellsberg, Thomas Drake, Coleen Rowley, Jesselyn Radack, and Norman Solomon on the final day of the June 1-7 Stand Up For Truth international week of actions in support of whistleblowers.

As facts have come out, the chief governmental response has been retribution against the whistleblowers and media outlets, including the Associated Press.[1]

But courts have finally begun to push back, striking down some of the illegal bulk data collection[2], and hearing a case challenging Germany's participation in drone wars.

Click here to tell the U.S. and Germany to end the mass surveillance of people, in violation of our basic rights, and to end the practice of blowing people up with missiles from drones.

A parliamentary inquiry in Berlin is exposing a decade-long criminal collaboration by U.S. and German spy agencies, spying on other governments, even as the U.S. has spied on Germany as well. Germany is drastically reducing its cooperation with the NSA, pending investigation into the scandal.[3]

Documents[4] have also emerged which show the satellite relay station at the U.S. military base in Ramstein, Germany serves as “the high-tech heart of America’s drone program,” facilitating Reaper and Predator strikes in the Middle East, Afghanistan, and Africa. A lawsuit argues that it is illegal for the German government to allow the Ramstein base to be used for drone murders abroad, especially after the passage of a 2014 resolution in the European Parliament urging European nations to “oppose and ban the practice of extrajudicial targeted killings” and to “ensure that Member States, in conformity with their legal obligations, do not perpetrate unlawful targeted killings or facilitate such killings by other states.”

Drone wars and mass surveillance have been counterproductive for their announced goals as well as immoral and illegal.[5]

Click here to let the U.S. and German governments know what you think.

After signing the petition, please forward this message to your friends. You can also share it from the webpage after taking the action yourself.

-- The RootsAction.org Team

P.S. RootsAction is an independent online force endorsed by Jim Hightower, Barbara Ehrenreich, Cornel West, Daniel Ellsberg, Glenn Greenwald, Naomi Klein, Bill Fletcher Jr., Laura Flanders, former U.S. Senator James Abourezk, Coleen Rowley, Frances Fox Piven, Lila Garrett, Phil Donahue, Sonali Kolhatkar, and many others.

Footnotes:

1. Huffington Post, “AP CEO Gary Pruitt: DOJ Surveillance Broke Rules, Caused Chilling Effect”

2. Guardian: “Of Snowden and the NSA, only one has acted unlawfully – and it’s not Snowden”

3. Guardian: “Airbus could sue following allegations Germany spied on them for the US”; “German loophole allows BND spy agency to snoop on own people” and “German secret service BND reduces cooperation with NSA”

4. Intercept: “Germany is the Tell-Tale Heart of America’s Drone War” by Jeremy Scahill

5. LobeLog Foreign Policy, “How Assassination Sold Drugs and Promoted Terrorism” and The Intercept, “U.S. Government Designated Prominent Al Jazeera Journalist as “Member of Al Qaeda” and WarIsACrime.org, "Even the Warriors Say the Wars Make Us Less Safe."