Hail Edward Snowden!-Citizenfour: A Review
Free Chelsea Manning! Hands Off Edward Snowden! Hands Off Julian Assange! Workers Vanguard No. 1060 | 23 January 2015 |
Hail Edward Snowden!-Citizenfour: A Review
Snowden used the alias “Citizenfour” to make contact with Laura Poitras, a writer and filmmaker who for years has tenaciously exposed U.S. surveillance activities. For her courageous truth-telling, Poitras earned a spot on a government watch list. Citizenfour is the third part of her trilogy about how the world has changed since September 11, 2001 under the endless U.S. “war on terror.”
Snowden’s story, which captured the front pages of newspapers across the globe in 2013, is well known. Yet it is riveting to watch it unfold in real time, with Poitras behind the camera as Snowden gives his account to journalists Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill in a Hong Kong hotel room. The film also provokes the disturbing recognition that people feel so powerless in the face of relentless government overreach that Snowden’s exposure of the NSA, which caused a tremendous stir just over a year ago, is now met with little more than a collective shrug of resignation. Worse yet is the acquiescence, expressed in the often-heard line: “If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear.” Tell that to the legions of fighters against class and race inequality in this country whose lives have been wrecked or snuffed out through government surveillance and repression.
Surveillance is a weapon in the arsenal of state repression. Citizenfour reveals that there are 1.2 million people on U.S. watch lists. The small city of Dearborn, Michigan, (population 96,000) has the largest percentage of Arab Americans and Muslim Americans per capita and has thus been racially profiled by law enforcement as the number two place in the country where suspected terrorists reside.
In the aftermath of the cold-blooded killing of black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, where another white cop walked away with a pat on the back, it’s important to recognize the connection between surveillance and racial and political profiling. Protesters against racist American injustice need to be aware that fighters for social change in this country are put on one or another government watch list. And in a nation founded on black chattel slavery, a special place is reserved for fighters for racial equality and opponents of capitalist class rule. As James Baldwin wrote in The Fire Next Time (1962): “People find it very difficult to act on what they know. To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.”
Capitalist Decay and Attacks on the Right to Privacy
The “war on terror” has been a pretext for unfettered force and violence by the American ruling class abroad and at home, from the wars and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq to the shredding of the civil liberties of the U.S. population. In Washington’s “anti-terror” crusade, national security is the trump card to quash democratic rights. First the Republican Bush administration and then the Democrat Barack Obama seized on the September 11, 2001 attacks to institutionalize extraordinary government powers and snooping through such measures as the USA Patriot Act. These are merely the top shelf of an entire arsenal of repressive legislation that includes the 1917 Espionage Act, which has always been used to criminalize dissent and repress labor and leftist opposition to the U.S. government during wartime. Among its first and most prominent victims was Socialist Party leader Eugene V. Debs, jailed for his political speech and agitation against the capitalist slaughter of World War I.
Snowden is threatened with prosecution under the Espionage Act if he were to return to the U.S. from temporary asylum in Russia. Chelsea Manning, who was tortured and now languishes in Leavenworth Prison, was sentenced to 35 years under the Espionage Act. Manning was gone after for letting the world see irrefutable government evidence, documented in its own military logs and diplomatic cables, of heinous U.S. war crimes as well as the everyday depredations of imperialist domination. Snowden was inspired by Manning’s outstanding courage to step forward with his own gigantic trove of information. Curiously, Manning is not mentioned in Poitras’s film, yet it is crucial to link all current struggles for justice with the fight to free victims of government repression. Julian Assange, who published Manning’s material on WikiLeaks, is threatened with U.S. prosecution and remains ensconced in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. We demand: Free Chelsea Manning! Hands off Edward Snowden! Hands off Julian Assange!
The film does show tantalizing evidence of yet another insider with a conscience, who was inspired by Snowden to leak new evidence of U.S. government dirty tricks to Glenn Greenwald. The U.S. government has created its own security nightmare, as disillusioned idealistic servants bite back like the multiheaded Hydra and lift the veil on government secrecy.
In the salad days of its struggle against the yoke of the British monarchy’s colonial rule, the American bourgeoisie fought for the right to privacy and enshrined it as the Fourth Amendment in the original 1791 Bill of Rights. This legal protection against unreasonable searches and seizures by the government grew out of English common law, which enjoined the police or other forces of the Crown from entering a private home without an official writ. This protection was effectively nullified in the American colonies, where royal magistrates and judges routinely issued writs and warrants to allow British soldiers to ransack private homes and seize property without so much as a suspicion of crime.
The legitimization of black chattel slavery in the U.S. Constitution bespeaks the limited, conservative goals of the bourgeois-democratic American Revolution. Nonetheless, the so-called “founding fathers,” leaders from a period when the bourgeoisie was historically progressive, would be outlaws today in the period of advanced capitalist decay. America’s rulers would appear to them as King George loyalists and traitors to their own revolution and citizenry. The U.S. government has long served as the gendarme for reaction worldwide and backed the bloodiest regimes on the planet. The silver-tongued Obama intones “freedom” while shredding democratic rights at home, prosecuting more whistleblowers than all prior presidents combined and directly authorizing assassinations of U.S. citizens abroad.
It’s Gonna Take a Revolution
Glenn Greenwald’s latest book, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State (New York: Henry Holt, 2014), is a good read in conjunction with viewing Poitras’s Citizenfour. The same conversations with Snowden that Poitras captured on film are related in greater detail in Greenwald’s book. Poitras and Greenwald have both moved to other countries to continue their work at greater distance from vindictive and threatening American authorities. Poitras has been detained and had her notes and electronics seized more than 40 times at U.S. airports. Some of Greenwald’s colleagues in the capitalist media howled for him to be prosecuted because he dared print what the government sought to keep under wraps. In a gratuitously vicious move to torment Greenwald, the British authorities, in league with the U.S., detained and terrorized his partner and political collaborator, David Miranda, when he ferried documents from Poitras to Greenwald through London’s Heathrow airport.
Edward Snowden was compelled by his conscience to risk everything he had in life by taking a stand against omnipresent U.S. government surveillance because he thinks people have a right to know what the government is doing and a right to debate and change policy. In this, Snowden shares a moral and political compass with Chelsea Manning. We hail their courageous acts. Despite Manning’s and Snowden’s self-identification as U.S. patriots, their disclosures provide a factual basis for Marxists like us to help working people see through the stupefying fog of patriotism and democracy that is peddled by the bourgeoisie to dull the wits of those they exploit. It is going to take more than leaks and whistles to fundamentally change society. An essential precondition is the understanding that the government is not “ours,” nor can it be made into a neutral arbiter. Rather, it is part of the machine to maintain capitalist class rule, suitably disguised as an expression and tool of “the people.”
Glenn Greenwald expresses the views held by many libertarians, liberals and reformist leftists that the problem with the encroaching police state is simply that it is wildly out of control. Greenwald argues, “The alternative to mass surveillance is not the complete elimination of surveillance. It is, instead, targeted surveillance, aimed only at those for whom there is substantial evidence to believe they are engaged in real wrongdoing.” Asking capitalism’s secret police to play nice is like asking a great white shark to chew softly.
In capitalist society, where a tiny minority of the population lives off the labor of the working class, the rulers will always resort to spying, lying and violence to keep the vast majority down. Anything that challenges property rights and the racial, ethnic, religious and moral prejudices that prop up this whole capitalist system of exploitation and injustice constitutes “wrongdoing.” The liberals are blinded by lofty words like “freedom” and “democracy”—classless terms that snooker working people into believing they have equal rights in an increasingly unequal society. Any talk of achieving freedom that does not involve a struggle for the abolition of classes is simply a lie.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels explained the fundamental difference in purpose between petty-bourgeois democrats and communists in their 1850 “Address of the Central Authority to the [Communist] League.” Against a backdrop of the failed German bourgeois-democratic revolution of 1848, in which the bourgeoisie had gone over to the side of the old reactionary classes against the revolutionary proletariat, Marx and Engels observed:
“Far from desiring to transform the whole of society for the revolutionary proletarians, the democratic petty bourgeois strive for a change in social conditions by means of which the existing society will be made as tolerable and comfortable as possible for them....
“While the democratic petty bourgeois wish to bring the revolution to a conclusion as quickly as possible…it is our interest and our task to make the revolution permanent, until all more or less possessing classes have been forced out of their position of dominance, the proletariat has conquered state power, and the association of proletarians, not only in one country but in all the dominant countries of the world, has advanced so far that competition among the proletarians in these countries has ceased and that at least the decisive productive forces are concentrated in the hands of the proletarians. For us the issue cannot be the alteration of private property but only its annihilation, not the smoothing over of class antagonisms but the abolition of classes, not the improvement of the existing society but the foundation of a new one.”
This is now but that was then...same struggle, same fight
All Honor To The Media, Pa. 1971 Whistle-Blowers
Free Chelsea Manning! Hands Off Edward Snowden! Hands Off Julian Assange!
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
Whistle-blowers as we painfully know from the Chelsea Manning case and the others prosecuted to the fullest by the Obama Administration are honored more in the breech than in the observance (certainly by an administration that has the “distinction” of prosecuting and convicting more whistle-blowers than any other). This administration is also still hell-bent on coaxing Edward Snowden back to the United States to face the guns of the “justice” system here. But this administration as egregious as their conduct has been when confronted with truth-tellers (what the hell all Snowden, Manning, et.al have done is release the government’s own document for public inspection so the only made-up stuff comes from the government’s own sources) is not the only one that has clamped down on whistle-blowers as headline to this piece makes clear and as the documentary about the heroic work of the Media Eight, 1971, tells us in graphic detail.
Probably the most famous whistle-blower from the Vietnam War period was Daniel Ellsberg and his revelations in the Pentagon Papers (also government documents but the veracity of some of those documents should be approached like you would a rattlesnake. Very carefully.) And he rightly deserves his honorable place in history (as well as kudos for continuing to keep up the good fight in his fervent defense of Chelsea Manning). But those were heady times, frustrating times for those who opposed that generation’s (mine too) endless Vietnam war so that by the late 1960s, early 1970s thoughtful citizens were up to all kinds of things, mostly illegal, to stop the madness of the war machine (sound familiar except then we had thousands ready to do what was necessary).
Ordinary citizens were burning draft cards, supporting such actions, sitting down in draft board offices, spilling blood on the files, protesting in front of every conceivable war-related institution, building mass rallies, committing acts of civil disobedience on the streets trying to shut down the government's war machine, and so on. Citizen-soldiers were going AWOL, refusing orders, particularly orders to Vietnam, fragging, and the Army was half in mutiny. Others were a bit more respectful of the institutions and pursued their angers in legal ways. But here is the rub. They, we, were all under surveillance (sound familiar, again) and that is where the story of the Media Eight intersects what was going on back then. The government, the press, the other media as described in the documentary all took a dive and so ordinary citizens did what ordinary citizens who have gotten “religion” do they took action. The only different from today is that the Media Eight had to actually go and burgle the FBI office putting themselves in immediate personal danger rather than use some computer wizardry to get the information we need to know about. So yes, as the story below expands on, all honor to the heroic Media Eight whistle-blowers. You too have been looked at kindly by history.
*************
Before Edward Snowden, there was the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI. In 1971, eight anti-war activists broke into the FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania. Among them were John and Bonnie Raines frequent anti-war protesters and the parents of three kids.
They were looking for proof that the FBI was involved in surveillance and harassment of civil rights and anti-war groups. And they found it in the over 1,000 documents that they stole and sent to three major newspaper: The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post.
“The story almost never got published,” John told Here & Now’s Robin Young. “Whistle-blowers depend on courageous investigative reporters” And those journalists, it seemed, were scarce.
At the time, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was so powerful that even presidents feared him. Finally, only The Washington Post published copies of the documents. The response was enormous. The public was outraged.
But other than that initial setback, the novice burglars succeeded.
“We had prepared so meticulously,” said Bonnie, who posed as a student from Swarthmore College exploring opportunities for women in the FBI in order to get inside the building during business hours to scout out security measures and the layout of the offices.
“We were very careful in our preparations,” John added. “We were not Don Quixotes, we were not martyrs, we were interested in doing the job we thought we had to do because nobody in Washington was doing that job, namely supervising and holding J.Edgar Hoover of the FBI accountable.”
Their actions led directly to the Church Committee hearings, the country’s first congressional investigation of American intelligence agencies. And later, the discovery of Cointellpro, short for Counterintelligence Program, which Hoover ran to secretly collect information on civil rights activists and groups the FBI deemed potentially disruptive to the bureau.
When the job was done, the commission disbanded and the eight members rarely spoke.
“We had to go into hiding of course,” said John. “J. Edgar Hoover sent 200 agents to try and find the Citizens Commission and they flooded the city of Philadelphia. So we knew we needed to go deep underground and the best place to go underground, of course, is in plain sight and we were able to do that here in Philadelphia because there were thousands of resistors back then. I mean our country was in fire in 1970 and 1971. So we decided as a group, the eight of us, that we needed to disappear from the public discourse and return to our private lives and we did that.”
The couple remained active, had a fourth child and raised their family, never revealing what they had done. “We did tell our children when they were older teenagers,” said Bonnie. Accustomed to their parent’s activism, they weren’t shocked. Actually, Bonnie recalls, “they were quite proud.” She hopes that among her four children and seven grandchildren there is a legacy of activism.
Does this include breaking the law? “Yes,” both parents say. “When the law becomes the instrument of the crime, then the only way you can stop that crime is to break that law. We found that out in the civil rights movement in the laws of segregation,” said John.
While the Commission’s goal was not to be “Don Quixotes,” the film’s trailer suggests an element of heroism in their act. And while some may argue the Commission’s burglary was similar to Snowden’s, other’s say it’s a different time. Some say, in a post-9/11 world, we need to be more protective of the nation’s security.
“I believe our nation is driven by an excessive fear,” John said. “Yes, we have to worry about the terrorists, but even more we have to worry about how to protect the values of our nation that make our nation worth valuing and worth securing. The second president of the United States, John Adams, said something very wise in his time and it’s still true in our time. He said, ‘A people that would sacrifice liberty to gain security, deserve neither.’ What he said back then, those many, many hundreds of years ago, remain true today.”
This is now but that was then...same struggle, same fight
All Honor To The Media, Pa. 1971 Whistle-Blowers
Free Chelsea Manning! Hands Off Edward Snowden! Hands Off Julian Assange!
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
Whistle-blowers as we painfully know from the Chelsea Manning case and the others prosecuted to the fullest by the Obama Administration are honored more in the breech than in the observance (certainly by an administration that has the “distinction” of prosecuting and convicting more whistle-blowers than any other). This administration is also still hell-bent on coaxing Edward Snowden back to the United States to face the guns of the “justice” system here. But this administration as egregious as their conduct has been when confronted with truth-tellers (what the hell all Snowden, Manning, et.al have done is release the government’s own document for public inspection so the only made-up stuff comes from the government’s own sources) is not the only one that has clamped down on whistle-blowers as headline to this piece makes clear and as the documentary about the heroic work of the Media Eight, 1971, tells us in graphic detail.
Probably the most famous whistle-blower from the Vietnam War period was Daniel Ellsberg and his revelations in the Pentagon Papers (also government documents but the veracity of some of those documents should be approached like you would a rattlesnake. Very carefully.) And he rightly deserves his honorable place in history (as well as kudos for continuing to keep up the good fight in his fervent defense of Chelsea Manning). But those were heady times, frustrating times for those who opposed that generation’s (mine too) endless Vietnam war so that by the late 1960s, early 1970s thoughtful citizens were up to all kinds of things, mostly illegal, to stop the madness of the war machine (sound familiar except then we had thousands ready to do what was necessary).
Ordinary citizens were burning draft cards, supporting such actions, sitting down in draft board offices, spilling blood on the files, protesting in front of every conceivable war-related institution, building mass rallies, committing acts of civil disobedience on the streets trying to shut down the government's war machine, and so on. Citizen-soldiers were going AWOL, refusing orders, particularly orders to Vietnam, fragging, and the Army was half in mutiny. Others were a bit more respectful of the institutions and pursued their angers in legal ways. But here is the rub. They, we, were all under surveillance (sound familiar, again) and that is where the story of the Media Eight intersects what was going on back then. The government, the press, the other media as described in the documentary all took a dive and so ordinary citizens did what ordinary citizens who have gotten “religion” do they took action. The only different from today is that the Media Eight had to actually go and burgle the FBI office putting themselves in immediate personal danger rather than use some computer wizardry to get the information we need to know about. So yes, as the story below expands on, all honor to the heroic Media Eight whistle-blowers. You too have been looked at kindly by history.
*************
The Husband And Wife Who Burgled The FBI
John and Bonnie Raines are pictured with their three children in Glen Lake, Michigan circa August 1969. (1971film.com)
Before Edward Snowden, there was the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI. In 1971, eight anti-war activists broke into the FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania. Among them were John and Bonnie Raines frequent anti-war protesters and the parents of three kids.
They were looking for proof that the FBI was involved in surveillance and harassment of civil rights and anti-war groups. And they found it in the over 1,000 documents that they stole and sent to three major newspaper: The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post.
“The story almost never got published,” John told Here & Now’s Robin Young. “Whistle-blowers depend on courageous investigative reporters” And those journalists, it seemed, were scarce.
At the time, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was so powerful that even presidents feared him. Finally, only The Washington Post published copies of the documents. The response was enormous. The public was outraged.
“When the law becomes the instrument of the crime, then the only way you can stop that crime is to break that law.”
In a world where personal phones are locked with finger scans, it’s hard to imagine that these eight ordinary people could pull off such a major heist, especially considering they couldn’t even pick the lock on the first door they tried.
– John Raines
But other than that initial setback, the novice burglars succeeded.
“We had prepared so meticulously,” said Bonnie, who posed as a student from Swarthmore College exploring opportunities for women in the FBI in order to get inside the building during business hours to scout out security measures and the layout of the offices.
“We were very careful in our preparations,” John added. “We were not Don Quixotes, we were not martyrs, we were interested in doing the job we thought we had to do because nobody in Washington was doing that job, namely supervising and holding J.Edgar Hoover of the FBI accountable.”
Their actions led directly to the Church Committee hearings, the country’s first congressional investigation of American intelligence agencies. And later, the discovery of Cointellpro, short for Counterintelligence Program, which Hoover ran to secretly collect information on civil rights activists and groups the FBI deemed potentially disruptive to the bureau.
When the job was done, the commission disbanded and the eight members rarely spoke.
“We had to go into hiding of course,” said John. “J. Edgar Hoover sent 200 agents to try and find the Citizens Commission and they flooded the city of Philadelphia. So we knew we needed to go deep underground and the best place to go underground, of course, is in plain sight and we were able to do that here in Philadelphia because there were thousands of resistors back then. I mean our country was in fire in 1970 and 1971. So we decided as a group, the eight of us, that we needed to disappear from the public discourse and return to our private lives and we did that.”
The couple remained active, had a fourth child and raised their family, never revealing what they had done. “We did tell our children when they were older teenagers,” said Bonnie. Accustomed to their parent’s activism, they weren’t shocked. Actually, Bonnie recalls, “they were quite proud.” She hopes that among her four children and seven grandchildren there is a legacy of activism.
Does this include breaking the law? “Yes,” both parents say. “When the law becomes the instrument of the crime, then the only way you can stop that crime is to break that law. We found that out in the civil rights movement in the laws of segregation,” said John.
“A people that would sacrifice liberty to gain security, deserve neither.”
Now, 43 years later, their story is being told in the new documentary “1971,” which opens in New York today.
– John Adams
While the Commission’s goal was not to be “Don Quixotes,” the film’s trailer suggests an element of heroism in their act. And while some may argue the Commission’s burglary was similar to Snowden’s, other’s say it’s a different time. Some say, in a post-9/11 world, we need to be more protective of the nation’s security.
“I believe our nation is driven by an excessive fear,” John said. “Yes, we have to worry about the terrorists, but even more we have to worry about how to protect the values of our nation that make our nation worth valuing and worth securing. The second president of the United States, John Adams, said something very wise in his time and it’s still true in our time. He said, ‘A people that would sacrifice liberty to gain security, deserve neither.’ What he said back then, those many, many hundreds of years ago, remain true today.”
Watch the trailer for '1971':
Guests
- John and Bonnie Raines, husband and wife who participated in the 1971 burglary of the FBI office in Media, Penn.
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