Telling The Truth Can Now Be Treason

By James Donahue

It seems that the bill that President Barack Obama just signed, extending the Patriot Act for another four years, contained a few pages designed to block whistleblowers and journalists from spilling the beans about the misdeeds of high government and military officials.

This is being revealed on the Internet in a well circulated report by Susan Lindaner, a former news reporter, researcher for U. S. News and World Report, and press secretary and speech writer for Senator Carol Braun of Illinois.

Lindaner also is the author of Extreme Prejudice: The Terrifying Story of the Patriot Act and the Cover-Ups of 9-11 and Iraq. In the book Lindaner tells how she was personally jailed on charges of acting as an agent for the Iraqi Intelligence Service after she attempted to warn President George W. Bush and his staff that Saddam Hussein did not possess weapons of mass destruction

Lindaner also claims to have had foreknowledge of the 9-11 attacks but was unable to get officials in high government office to act on it.

In her Internet article, Lindaner says the Patriot Act is “a law that equates free speech with sedition. It’s got a big agenda with 7,000 pages of Machiavellian code designed to interrupt individual questioning of government policy.

“In this brave new world, free speech under the Bill of Rights, effectively has been declared a threat to government controls for maintaining stability.” She charges that the act “has become the premiere weapon to attack whistle blowers and dissidents who challenge the comfort of political leaders hiding inconvenient truths from the public. It’s all a rage on Capitol Hill, as leaders strive to score TV ratings, while demagogging their ‘outstanding leadership performance’ on everything from national security to environmental policy.”

In a nutshell, Lindaner warns that because of the Patriot Act, the act of telling the truth may now be declared treason. The artificial War on Terror, a declaration of war against a vague enemy lacking both nationality and face, now has produced a government policy that allows presidents, cabinet members, elected legislators, military generals and all other high ranking officials to hide whatever they choose behind the cloak of national security.

This may explain why investigative journalism has all but disappeared in the United States. Our nightly televised news broadcasts are limited to disasters, spectacular events, feature fluff and political handouts received by the Washington Press Corps. Even the once strong-hitting television news magazines like CBS’s 60-Minutes and ABC’s 20-20 have lost the punch they once had.

In the place of truth has risen the new phenomenon of conspiracy theories. A suspicious band of Internet writers, collectively piecing together tid-bits of information that doesn’t fit the “official” story handed out by our government, has been generating theories as to what may have really happened.

We fear the Internet theorists may be getting closer to the truth than historians will ever tell. As long as it stands, the Patriot Act will see to that.