"You never volunteer to be a whistleblower; it falls into your lap." (Wayne Madsen)
This year's annual Whistleblower Summit, held on Zoom in combination with a dynamic film festival, featured a world-class panel, organized by the well-known activist and attorney Andrew Kreig, "Telling Stories Almost Too Big to Hear."
The four panelists, all expert whistleblowers who have spoken truth to power, included Charlotte Dennett, author of The Crash of Flight 3804, the story of her investigations into the death of her father in a plane crash en route to report on his work investigating the huge oilindustries in the Middle East.
Wayne Madsen, author of 18 books and master investigative reporter, began this segment of his career with "an A to Z encyclopedia of covert groups focused on the most sensitive issues on Earth, encompassing the intelligence backgrounds of U.S. politicians and judges before they were elected to office."
Former Alabama governor Don Siegelman told his story of a meteoric career up the political ranks in the bright red state of Alabama despite his extremely progressive background and how Karl Rove and his cronies stepped in to ruin him even as he was being short-listed as a Democratic candidate for president in the 2004 general election. He has recently published an amazing memoir, Stealing Our Democracy: How the Political Assassination of a Governor Threatens Our Nation.
Dr. William Pepper, a close associate of both Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1960s, told an amazing life story of investigating the assassinations of both, risking his life in the process.
The truths that emerged, unsurprising in the present explosive climate, are nonetheless shocking, disillusioning, and must be repeated as epochal events in history, now recorded only in the authors' writings, some enlightened blogs, presentations like this one, and even the National Enquirer, whose founder had CIA connections. But the media large and small have either contradicted or ignored this history for the most part.
I repeat, it must be told and remembered, as all panelists emphasized. Despite enlightened protective legislation passed in recent years by Congress, whistleblowers continue to pay dearly for the truths they reveal, risking career and the wellbeing of their families as well as their own lives. Assassination is a last resort when all other debilitating repression is stymied.
And it happens again and again.
Charlotte Dennett led off, relating the story of her father, a spy concentrating on the Trans-Arabia oil pipeline, and revealed the CIA's dedicated rule that "We must control Saudi Arabia at all costs."
Backtracking to 1972 on issues she delves deeply into in her publications, she spoke of the former Soviet Union's struggles to control the oil trade in the Middle East and Asia. A visionary in this context, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter's national security advisor later, led efforts to establish the Trilateral Commission in 1972. His motive was to destabilize the USSR with a "Soviet Vietnam."
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