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THE TEXTS OF THESE ENCLOSURES APPEAR IMMEDIATELY BELOW:
Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence Award for 2010 to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks
It seems altogether fitting and proper that this year's award be presented in London, where Edmund Burke coined the expression "Fourth Estate." Comparing the function of the press to that of the three Houses then in Parliament, Burke said: "... but in the Reporters Gallery yonder, there sits a Fourth Estate more important far than they all."
The year was 1787 -- the year the U.S. Constitution was adopted. The First Amendment, approved four years later, aimed at ensuring that the press would be free of government interference. That was then.
With the Fourth Estate now on life support, there is a high premium on the fledgling Fifth Estate, which uses the ether and is not susceptible of government or corporation control. Small wonder that governments with lots to hide feel very threatened.
It has been said: "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free." WikiLeaks is helping make that possible by publishing documents that do not lie.
Last spring, when we chose WikiLeaks and Julian Assange for this award, Julian said he would accept only "on behalf or our sources, without which WikiLeaks' contributions are of no significance."
We do not know if Pvt. Bradley Manning gave WikiLeaks the gun-barrel video of July 12, 2007 called "Collateral Murder." Whoever did provide that graphic footage, showing the brutality of the celebrated "surge" in Iraq, was certainly far more a patriot than the "mainstream" journalist embedded in that same Army unit. He suppressed what happened in Baghdad that day, dismissed it as simply "one bad day in a surge that was filled with such days," and then had the temerity to lavish praise on the unit in a book he called "The Good Soldiers."
Julian is right to emphasize that the world is deeply indebted to patriotic truth-tellers like the sources who provided the gun-barrel footage and the many documents on Afghanistan and Iraq to WikiLeaks. We hope to have a chance to honor them in person in the future.
Today we honor WikiLeaks and one of its leaders, Julian Assange, for their ingenuity in creating a new highway by which important documentary evidence can make its way, quickly and confidentially, through the ether and into our in-boxes. Long live the Fifth Estate!
Presented this 23rd day of October 2010 in London, England by admirers of the example set by former CIA analyst, Sam Adams.
ENCLOSURE B
Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence
Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence is a movement of former CIA colleagues and other associates of former intelligence analyst Sam Adams, who hold up his example as a model for those in intelligence who would aspire to the courage to speak truth to power. In honoring his memory, SAAII confers an award each year to a person exemplifying Sam Adam's courage, persistence, and devotion to truth -- no matter the consequences.
It was Adams who discovered in 1967 that there were more than a half-million Vietnamese Communists under arms -- roughly twice the number that the U.S. command in Saigon would admit to, lest Americans learn that claims of "progress" were bogus. As proven later in court, Gen. William Westmoreland had put an artificial limit on the number Army intelligence was allowed to carry on its books. The reason? His deputy, Gen. Creighton Abrams put it down in writing -- letting the cat out of the bag.
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