The US, and many, many countries, have a long history of getting rid of whistleblowers. Despite the Continental Congress enacting the world’s first whistleblower protection law on July 30, 1777, the US has always tried to suppress their dissent. Google AI: Julian Assange, WikiLeaks is the most prolific in exposing govt, banking and corporate malpractice: Collateral Murder video showing an attack by a US helicopter on 12 unarmed civilians in Baghdad including two Reuters journos; Iraq (400k docs) and Afghanistan (90k docs) war logs; Cablegate diplomatic cables with US diplomats’ frank description of foreign leaders (250k docs); Vault 7, CIA’s covert hacking tools; Guantanamo Files, prisoner abuses (700 docs). WikiLeaks rocks. The author is an active member of WikiLeaks’ Advisory Board. Here are just a few I find important. St Francis School of Law: Edward Snowden: US NSA global surveillance and surveillance of Americans in America. Daniel Ellsberg: Pentagon Papers, a secret US document about failures of the war on Vietnam. Chelsea Manning: Docs exposing detention, abuse, torture of prisoners. Joe Darby: Torture at Abu Ghraib and US black sites, including one in Thailand that may or may not still be active. Plus numerous other govt whistleblowers. The latest is Joe Kent. The Guardian: The report came as Kent, the first senior member of the administration to quit over the war, gave his first media interview since stepping down. Speaking to the rightwing commentator Tucker Carlson, he claimed that dissenting voices were effectively frozen out of the decision-making process that led to US airstrikes on Iran on 28 February. Kent insisted that there was no evidence that Iran was close to gaining a nuclear weapon or posed an imminent threat to the US. “There was no intelligence that said, ‘Hey, on whatever day it was, March 1, the Iranians are going to launch this big sneak attack – they’re going to do some kind of a 9/11, Pearl Harbor, et cetera, they are going to attack one of our bases.’ There was none of that intelligence.” Instead, Kent alleged, Trump’s hand was effectively forced by Israel. “The Israelis drove the decision to take this action,” he said, claiming that prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli officials lobbied the president with claims that did not align with established intelligence channels. Kent added: “I know how this works. I know the Israeli officials – some in intelligence, some in government – will come to US government officials and they will say all kinds of things that we know from our intelligence just simply isn’t true. They’ll say, ‘Hey, I’m giving you a preview, it’s not in intelligence channels yet, but here’s what’s gonna happen,’ and that doesn’t usually come to fruition.” As a Green Beret, Kent saw combat in 11 deployments before retiring to join the CIA. He also endured tragedy: his wife, a navy cryptologist, was killed by a suicide bomber in 2019 in Syria, leaving him with two young sons. Kent, 45, has since remarried.