Edward Snowden was not exaggerating when he said about a fellow NSA whistleblower, “If there hadn’t been a Thomas Drake, there couldn’t have been an Edward Snowden.” Ever since the National Security Agency and federal prosecutors tried to crush Tom Drake a decade ago, he’s been a beacon of truth-telling integrity for challenging widespread government surveillance. The RootsAction Education Fund has been proud to work with him for many years. Now, he’s facing a new kind of crisis. He urgently needs -- and deserves -- our help. When Tom sent us a new essay days ago -- titled “Is the U.S. Withering Away?” -- he added a personal note in italics at the bottom. We’ve moved it up to the top because of its importance. In the past, half of each donated dollar went to Tom Drake, while the other half supported the Whistleblowers Public Education Campaign that he chairs. But this time, every single dollar you donate will go directly to Tom to help him in his current serious health struggle. You’re invited to make a tax-deductible donation so that Tom’s vital work can go on.   Here is Tom Drake’s new essay, beginning with what he had written at the bottom of it: As a postscript I would like to share something quite personal. You may have noticed that I have not published a whole lot in support of the RootsAction Education Fund for well over the past year and half or so. In September 2022 I retired after taking an extended vacation and realizing as I looked back on the previous 10 months plus that something was not quite right with my health. I ended up getting a full checkup with blood draws during the third week in October 2022. The very next day I was admitted to a local hospital with severe anemia with lots of blood transfusions and ended up staying for two and half weeks. It was determined after biopsies and scans that I have non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma that is also infecting my bone marrow and kidneys. Ended up having tubes put in both kidneys. Also began an immunotherapy and chemo combination treatment regimen. However, after a couple of months it was determined that progress was limited and my oncology doctor determined (after a second opinion and recommendation for the very latest protocol treatment for my particular form of lymphoma with the National Institutes of Health [NIH] lymphoma unit) that a new treatment regimen would consist of a pill that I take daily. Given I am retired, I now live on a fixed income and even with Medicare the medical deductibles add up fast. The special pills I take are also extremely expensive as each one is well over $30 and now must take one every day! So, life has thrown another ringer at me, and I now must prioritize taking on the lymphoma each and every day inside of me. I will begin with a hard question regarding the future of the United States. Can we the people keep the United States a Constitutional Republic (for all its faults and foibles and original sins) as Benjamin Franklin purportedly stated after the Constitutional Convention (when asked what was created behind closed doors), as a continuing Grand Experiment? Or alternatively will we end up in the dustbins of history like all empires eventually do? Part of my civic awakening as a teenager in the 1970s was seeing the war in Vietnam play out on TV and on the front page of newspapers, hearing about the Pentagon Papers and Daniel Ellsberg, the Watergate scandal and President Nixon resigning as President because Congress was about to impeach him due to all his perfidious actions and violating the law. I also listened with rapt attention to the Church Committee (as well other committees and commissions) over many months of hearings disclosing years of government crimes against humanity, the severe abuse of power, treachery, unlawful surveillance and secret domestic and foreign executive action (including approved assassinations) by the CIA, FBI, military and NSA. As it turns out, the Church Committee findings actually helped lead to the creation of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence to ostensibly provide oversight over the secret side of government and the sprawling national security apparatus. In addition, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) was also signed into law to help rein in the secret side of government from going off rails as lots of spying on Americans took place absent any warrant.
Let’s now jump forward to 2023. It is clear from any passing read of the daily front-page news today that an alarming minority in the United Sates are bent on attacking democracy and the rule of Law and turning to outlaw-fare, revenge-driven politics, conspiracy projection, internal “enemy” fear mongering and vengeful abuse of power while embracing punitive theo-nationalism mixed with a resurrected form of American fascism. The threat is that real.
Also quite clear from the 6 January 2021 Committee Final Report that former president Trump turned the government into a vast crime syndicate and criminal enterprise. In so doing, he also ensconced himself at the top as THE Don -- utterly betraying his special oath to “preserve, protect and defend” the Constitution by subverting and suborning rule of law while leading a comprehensive and wide-ranging confederate coup against the heart and core of American governance in attempting to interfere and overturn the peaceful transition of power between administrations.
With respect to the slow wheels of justice, a jury DID return a guilty verdict of seditious conspiracy and evidence tampering for Stewart Rhodes and co-defendant Kelly Meggs of the Oath Keepers, while others were found guilty of obstructing an official government proceeding. And they call themselves Oath Keepers? In reality, they are oath breakers who plotted and acted in an attempted coup to violently overthrow the peaceful Constitutional transfer of power based on the really Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen. Yet Trump is the biggest liar, chief inciter and most unlawful insurrectionist of them all.
What’s under attack that is such threat to our democracy? I will quote Captain America in the Marvel Age comic series from 2000-2005 called the Spider-Man Team-Up: “Because in America we have the freedom to speak out about what we believe in, to offer up new ideas about how to do things. The freedom to make changes and to make a difference. To make ourselves better…and hopefully make things better for everyone else in the process.” -- Captain America
What if the freedom is turned inside out and upside down to strip away our rights and liberties that give us that same freedom? And yet while also reflecting on the life and legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., I re-remembered his call to action and the continuing struggle to defend and protect that all are created equal with universal and inalienable rights as human beings against the stark abuses of power, and also against those who prey on taking the rights of others away from them. Here’s one of my favorite quotes from MLK:
“There is nothing more dangerous than to build a society with a large segment of people in that society who feel that they have no stake in it; who feel that that have nothing to lose. People who have stake in their society, protect that society, but when they don't have it, they unconsciously want to destroy it.” -- Martin Luther King Jr.
We must also listen to history or tempt fate in repeating history, if we don’t learn from it. In 1861 eleven Senators and three Representatives got expelled from Congress for failing to recognize Lincoln’s election AND supporting a full-blown insurrection against the United States by the Confederate States of America seceding from the Union.
And yet the 6 January 2021 Insurrection is turning into the new Lost Cause for America, embraced by a majority of the Republican Party built on fabricated lie after fabulist lie. And yet even the Capitol tour today in Washington, DC makes no mention of what happened on 6 January 2021, as if that day is elided and memory holed from history -- when, in fact, on that day a failed coup and attempted insurrection against the Constitution and our Republic to turn over an election won by Joe Biden actually took place.
And also old enough to then remember when in 2021, 147 members of Congress attempted to willfully overturn an election, through voting or supporting the Trump-led insurrection, actively enabled by his confederates. Regardless of the context, the goal was the same in both 1861 and 2021 -- while flying under the same despicable flag.
And also don’t forget that 118 CURRENT Republican members in the House of Representatives (of those 147) violated their oaths by voting to overturn Biden’s electoral victory. I will mince no words here and call them out as free-range liars and deniers, who enabled the insurrectionists and who crave an alien form of government opposed to the core democratic norms and the Constitutional rule of law. And now that Republicans are in charge of the House of Representatives, they want to engage in unending “investigations” driven by revenge and victimhood. We are seeing the ruse of authoritarianism and the use of public power to benefit their own narrow and highly personalized political interests as they weaponize their representation of the people. And in order to maintain control they must capture anti-corruption systems and other independent institutions and processes that could serve as a check so they can remain above the law as so many voted and operated outside the guardrails of democracy as they crash right through them. And so political extremists, conspiracists and faux populists are ascendant, turning into authoritarians, institutional kleptocrats and theo-nationalists, who have all gained this traction in recent years -- yet do NOT speak for the vast majority of Americans. Therefore this seductively dangerous appeal for weaponizing politics and raw power as the governing principle is now increasingly showing up as autocracy, and this demands re-evolving democracy in the face of these real threats to the heart of the American experience based on our foundations. Also seeing the reckless disregard for truth across society with lots of people mainlining lies and propaganda -- allergic to reality, while setting aside objective truth and projecting spin and “other” replacement narratives. I am painfully aware of the abuse of state power when I called out criminal government wrongdoing, the super-secret mass surveillance regime, billions in fraud and the profound intelligence failures at the highest levels of government protected by blanket of national security after 9/11, when the United States unchained itself from the constraints of the Constitution in secret. I know the high price it truly takes to keep our freedoms as you can never, ever take them for granted.
Democracy also fundamentally relies on civic society having a shared basis of facts. If we cannot agree on the facts, how are we to make decisions and policies together? It is already difficult enough to do so now with all the disinformation, misinformation and frankly propaganda circling with its toxicity within the country and especially on social media. Building a better future is also not made by faux fear mongering, unquestioned loyalty, shilling for shadow brokers and shelling out political scripts for grift, demanding fealty, or promoting selective snippets of revisionist manifest history.
This kind of shape-shifting chimera can only exist on a shimmering hollow foundation of sand for a laundered house of cards while all too often characterized by temporary sleight of hand handouts, magically mythic MAGA signs, tacit political purges as well as xenophobic and patriotic appeals to naked unquestioned nationalism.
A sustainable future is also not made by issuing “free” passes, bumper sticking slogans of empire, or projecting first-order fire and fury while also dismantling real progress from the past and putting up great walls between us to further isolate us from each other. This kind of dismal future only serves to unravel the very fabric of our Republic, erode democracy and invade our inalienable rights while inviting more conflict, division and triumphalist mythology.
Facts do matter because America is not just some bigly new billowy gleaming white alabaster tent filled with hot air and lined by shiny candy and confetti, where all that most anybody receives (unless you are somebody) are some orange-colored empty calorie crumbs that feed a false high but really run the country into new lows.
We experienced four years when former President Trump got to hand out white bread and big top circus tickets for the spectators, turning civic society into a hear-me-sing, three-ring spectacle of a confidence game show staged as crass political theater led by the chief carnival barker posing for the base as a stunt sport. What I call Trumpocracy cannot substitute for real democracy -- no matter how it’s packaged or presented and foisted off in public.
It’s we the people in all our diversity -- living near and far -- who will continue to create a better society together for all.
Some of us have lived that dystopian and inverted future of a rabbit hole deconstructed democracy already. And so the real question for us as the people is what kind of future do we really want to keep? What will we individually and collectively do to secure the promise of the Grand Experiment? If not, we enter a very different kind of future at our own peril. And that is why I continue to speak up, as my continuing duty to warn and expose the direct and indirect threats to public safety and health, the body politic, violations of law and wrongdoing -- as the highest calling in keeping people out of harm’s way -- in the public interest. -- Thomas Drake __________________________
PS from the RootsAction Education Fund: Whether or not the rare whistleblowers at places like the NSA go to prison, a key official goal is to drive them close to the poverty line for the rest of their lives, deprived of pensions and rendered unemployable for all but low-paid jobs. Thomas Drake remains deeply in financial debt. At the same time -- morally, politically and ethically -- we are in his debt. We owe him so much because he stood up for civil liberties and human decency.
Let’s help repay that debt to Tom Drake, who exposed extreme mass surveillance by the NSA.
Living in what is supposed to be a democracy, we get vital information because of the courage of whistleblowers.
You can make a tax-deductible contribution in support of Tom Drake.
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Background:
>> Jane Mayer, The New Yorker: Thomas Drake -- "The Secret Sharer"
>> Daily Beast: “U.S. Intelligence Shuts Down Damning Report on Whistleblower Retaliation”
>> Thomas Drake and other whistleblowers at Cato Institute forum: “The NSA & the Road to 9/11: Lessons Learned & Unlearned”
>> “The Constitution and Conscience: NSA’s Thomas Drake”: Video of speech
>> Jesselyn Radack, The New York Times: “Whistleblowers Deserve Protection Not Prison” | 
