Doug Thompson is correct that we do not want another homegrown terrorist like Timothy McVeigh (June 16), but I take exception to Doug’s claim “only a crackpot could have imagined 20 years ago” programs like the NSA’s PRISM. I have been warning people of such developments for twice that long only to be told, “Don’t be so paranoid.”
During the early 1970s I worked with a group of whistle-blowers, Vietnam War veterans who tried to tell us the truth of the war: that U.S. military policy was responsible for tragedies like the My Lai massacre and many more that never made the news. (The vets’ accounts have recently been corroborated by researcher Nick Turse in his book “Kill Anything that Moves.” Turse gained access to National Archive files on the war, until they disappeared after he began publishing his discoveries.)
The vets blew the whistle on an invasion of Laos in 1971 and maybe even the use of nuclear weapons a year later.
(Was that Nixon’s never disclosed “secret plan” to end the war?) You never heard of these plans because the news media believed the Pentagon’s denials. Military planning had to be changed and these whistle-blowing vets needed to be stopped.
So Nixon’s Justice Department (which includes the FBI) indicted the vets’ southern leaders for conspiracy to riot at the 1972 national conventions. They, and all of us associated with them, were called terrorists and worse, all based on lies and fear. The indictment of the Gainesville 8 rested almost entirely on the lies of an FBI informer and provocateur from right here in Fayetteville named Bill Lemmer.
I knew Lemmer. I saw him in action. I worked on the Gainesville 8 defense team so read FBI reports by Lemmer’s control agents. And I vowed to blow the whistle on how the vets were treated and discredited. It took me almost 40 years because of the harassment and pressure exerted to silence me, including death threats. My home was illegally searched at least twice that I know of.
At other times, material has been taken from my home and computer. I know that at least the FBI, CIA, and Trilateral Commission poked around in my life. I don’t have space here to substantiate any of these claims. It took me 600 pages to tell just the vets’ part of the story in my book “Combat by Trial.”
My own (unpublished) part convinced me that our government will go to any lengths to silence whistleblowers as it is currently doing to Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning. As recently as 2004 the swiftboaters used the Pentagon’s lies about Vietnam to sink John Kerry’s presidential hopes. Our secretary of state was one of those whistleblowing vets. Kerry was a national officer in and spokesman for Vietnam Veterans Against the War.
I was not being “paranoid.” I was speaking from personal experience. And now the spies come for you, coming with 21st century technology and fewer legal protections.
NANCY MILLER SAUNDERS
Durham
Opinion, Pages 5 on 06/26/2013