By Sally Dugman
We people who care about integrity, truth, honesty, decency, fairness and justice get satisfaction from our like-minded whistle blowers who lay their lives on the line and sometimes endure incredible hardships on account of sharing secretive, shameful truths like this: here:
Wikileaks: Document dumps that shook the world, and here:
Wikileaks reveals video showing US air crew shooting down Iraqi civilians
July 12, 2007, Baghdad airstrike
Excerpted from the latter link:
On July 12, 2007, a series of air-to-ground attacks were conducted by a team of two U.S. AH-64 Apache helicopters in Al-Amin al-Thaniyah, New Baghdad, during the Iraqi insurgency which followed the invasion of Iraq. On April 5, 2010, the attacks received worldwide coverage and controversy following the release of 39 minutes of classified gunsight footage by WikiLeaks. The video, which WikiLeaks titled Collateral Murder, showed the crew firing on a group of people and killing several of them, including two Reuters journalists, and then laughing at some of the casualties, all of whom were civilians. An anonymous U.S. military official confirmed the authenticity of the footage, which provoked global discussion on the legality and morality of the attacks.
I personally happen to know that this sort of travesty happened quite frequently in that war such as Marines being shot at from their rooftop location from a single apartment in a tall apartment building across the street and their being told to indiscriminately fire into all of the apartments since it wasn’t a situation in which it could be determined as to which apartment held the shooter. Thus, elderly grandmothers fixing meals for their baby grandchildren, the children and other noncombatant civilians were immediately gunned down by U.S. Marines located across the street as a, I suppose, form of collective punishment for the one daring shooter.
At the same time, I do have my favorite whistle blowers with whom I identify and one of my best ones happens to be Mordechai Vanunu, an openly proactive peace activist and a nuclear technician who took it upon himself to publicly inform the world that Israel had nuclear bomb capabilities. So what did he get in return?
Here’s his punishment: Excerpted from
He was subsequently lured to Italy by the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad, where he was drugged and abducted. He was secretly transported to Israel and ultimately convicted in a trial that was held behind closed doors.
Vanunu spent 18 years in prison, including more than 11 in solitary confinement, though no such restriction is mentioned in Israel’s penal code, nor imposed by his verdict. Released from prison in 2004, he was further subjected to a broad array of restrictions on his speech and his movement and arrested several times for violations of his parole terms, giving interviews to foreign journalists and attempting to leave Israel. He claims to have suffered from “cruel and barbaric treatment” at the hands of prison authorities and suggests that things would have been different if he had not converted to Christianity.[6]
His own Israeli parents disowned him and he was adopted by an elderly U.S. Quaker couple who, although physically far away from him, ideologically chose to be close to and emotionally support him as well as they could on behalf of both him AND his stance.
He got solace from that occurrence and from other parts of his life such as his writing poetry like this one, my favorite poem of his, which reminds of how easy it is to become part of a murderous war machine when simply obeying orders from higher up authority figures.I’M YOUR SPY
Mordechai Vanunu
I am the clerk, the technician, the mechanic,
the driver.
They said, Do this, do that, don’t look left
or right,
don’t read the text. Don’t look at the whole
machine. You
are only responsible for this one bolt. For this
one rubber-stamp.
This is your only concern. Don’t bother
with what is above you.
Don’t try to think for us. Go on, drive. Keep
going. On, on.
So they thought, the big ones, the smart ones,
the futurologists.
There is nothing to fear. Not to worry.
Everything is ticking just fine.
Our little clerk is a diligent worker. He’s a
simple mechanic.
He’s a little man.
Little men’s ears don’t hear, their eyes
don’t see.
We have heads, they don’t
Answer them, said he to himself, said the
little man,
the man with a head of his own. Who is in
charge? Who knows
where this train is going?
Where is their head? I too have a head.
Why do I see the whole engine.
Why do I see the precipice —
is there a driver on this train?
The clerk driver technician mechanic
looked up.
He stepped back and saw — what a monster.
Can’t believe it. Rubbed his eyes and — yes,
it’s there all right. I’m all right. I do see
the monster. I’m part of the system.
I signed this form. Only now I am reading the
rest of it.
This bolt is part of a bomb. This bolt is me.
How
did I fail to see, and how do the others go on
fitting bolts. Who else knows?
Who has seen? Who has heard — The
emperor really is naked.
I see him. Why me? It’s not for me. It’s too big.
Rise and cry out. Rise and tell the people.
You can.
I, the bolt, the technician, mechanic —
Yes, you.
You are the secret agent of the people. You are
the eyes of the nation.
Agent-spy, tell us what you’ve seen. Tell us
what the insiders, the clever ones, have
hidden from us.
Without you, there is only the precipice.
Only catastrophe.
I have no choice. I’m a little man, a citizen,
one of the people,
but I’ll do what I have to. I’ve heard the voice
of my conscience
and there is nowhere to hide.
The world is small, small for Big Brother.
I’m your mission. I’m doing my duty. Take
it from me.
Come and see for yourselves. Lighten my
burden. Stop the train.
Get off the train. The next stop — nuclear
disaster. The next book,
the next machine. No. There is no such thing.
——————-
In addition, I want to know about how is it my U.S. President’s business that Iran has nuclear medicine making capabilities such as my friend received to drink, a radioactive substance, to study his digestive tract last year.
So, too, the best way to prevent nuclear war might just well be opposed countries like India and Pakistan, Israel and Iran, USA and Russia, etc., having roughly equal war capacity and caution about starting a nuclear war that would likely kill the majority of all life on our planet.
So, yes, I’m thankful to know from Mordechai Vanunu that Israel has nuclear bomb capacity. Likewise, I’m glad to learn from the nuclear overseeing agency and Tulsi Gabbard’s assessment of Iran’s nuclear capacity that Iran’s leadership had no intention to develop a nuclear bomb, although that choice might have changed now that Israel has directly and overtly attacked that country. So, we’ll have to wait and see about outcomes now that Trump joined in on the assault against Iran, which upsets the ante, of course, for other lands like Turkey, Egypt, Russia, China and so on to join in the start of a third world war.
Sally Dugman writes from and lives in MA, USA.
23 June 2025
Source: countercurrents.org