Wednesday, August 8, 2018
John Kiriakou, When Twitter Decides Who Speaks (or Not)
John Kiriakou
ensorship has become such a normal part of daily American life that most people either don’t pay attention to it or don’t care. But it’s taken on a life of its own, and it’s beginning to spin out of control. We must take back our constitutional right to freedom of speech and our civil liberties.
Many Americans laughed this week when Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube suspended the accounts of Alex Jones and InfoWars. Jones is well-known for his bombastic, conspiracy-laden, often offensive views on just about everything from the Sandy Hook massacre (no children were killed; they were all “crisis actors”) to the United Nations (it’s a hostile foreign power that maintains a secret army and will launch a war to install a one-world government) to so-called “chemtrails” and space aliens. (In the interest of transparency, I have appeared three times on InfoWars’ The Real News with David Knight. David is a mainstream Libertarian and a great supporter of whistleblowers.)
But the decision to ban Jones was not
funny at all. You don’t have to agree with a single thing the man says
to believe that he has the same fundamental right to freedom of speech
that you and I have. When news of the ban broke on August 6, I was
surprised at how few of my friends objected to it. Indeed, many gloated
over it. I felt exactly the opposite. I was infuriated. And the next
day, on August 7, Twitter permanently banned my friend Peter Van Buren
from the site.
Van Buren is a renowned State Department whistleblower and
24-year Foreign Service veteran who also led a Provincial
Reconstruction Team in Iraq. He has written extensively about waste,
fraud, and abuse at the State Department, and he published a
well-received memoir in 2012 entitled, “We Meant Well: How I Helped to
Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People.” As
Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton tried mightily to fire Van Buren for
that memoir, even though the State Department’s publications review
staff approved its release. She tried to confiscate his pension. Only
after a lawsuit on his behalf by the American Civil Liberties Union and
the Government Accountability Project was he allowed to retire and to
keep his pension.
Twitter, however, doesn’t have to
answer to anybody. It’s a private company and it can do what it wants.
Last week, Van Buren got involved in an acrimonious exchange about
government lying with mainstream journalist Jonathan Katz, a freelancer
who writes primarily for The New York Times, Politico, and Slate. Katz
apparently reported Van Buren to Twitter, which quickly banned him for life,
saying he had “harassed, intimidated, or used fear to silence” Katz. No
such thing ever took place. Because of the permanent nature of the ban,
every one of Van Buren’s tweets from the past seven years has been
deleted.
Twitter’s action turns out to not have been limited to Alex Jones and a buddy of mine. The company went on yesterday to suspend the accounts of Scott Horton, a prominent radio host, director of Antiwar.com,
and great friend of whistleblowers; and Dan McAdams, a highly-respected
former congressional staff member and executive director of the Ron
Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity. I know both of these men well
and I would stake my reputation on their decency, honesty, and
integrity. Twitter suspended them because they came to Van Buren’s aid.
There’s an even worse result from Twitter’s actions. InfoWars this week had promoted a petitionasking
President Trump to pardon Julian Assange. In just 48 hours, the
petition was signed by nearly 40,000 people. It was all but killed when
removed from Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.
There’s a very serious issue at play
here. Put aside your feelings about Alex Jones, about crisis actors, and
about chemtrails. This is an issue of free speech. It’s an issue of
corporate censorship. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and other tech
mega-companies are telling us that they get to decide what we see and don’t see. They get to decide what we say and don’t say.
I won’t live like that. Veteran
Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), a group of retired
intelligence officers, diplomats, military officers, and FBI agents, is
writing a letter to Twitter’s leadership to protest these heavy-handed,
anti-democratic actions. I’m proud to be a member of VIPS and I think
that our collective voice will be heard. But VIPS can’t do it alone.
Twitter and the others must be called to account. I, for one, don’t want
to live like a North Korean, an Iranian, or even an Israeli or a Brit,
where my government or a company tells me what to think or to say. I
will boycott Twitter and speak out against it everywhere until it
remedies these egregious attacks on civil liberties.
John
Kiriakou is a former CIA counterterrorism officer and a former senior
investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John became
the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the
Espionage Act - a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in
prison as a result of his attempts to oppose the Bush administration's
torture program.
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