Category: General Interest

(Tom: Seems like less of a justice system and more of an enforcement arm for the deep state. Accumulated injustices weaken the social fabric and lead to the destruction of a society so injustice must be rejected at every opportunity.)

The CIA admitted his book contained zero secrets. Then they took every dollar he earned from it. Gagged him for the rest of his life. And the Supreme Court agreed without even letting his lawyers speak. His name was Frank Snepp. And his only crime was telling the truth without asking permission.

So was he a hero? Or a traitor? Read this and decide.

They sent him to Vietnam. Saigon. He became the CIA’s chief strategy analyst there. He studied the enemy. Interrogated high-level prisoners. He was one of the best they had.
He believed in the mission. He served his country.

Then came the end.

April 30, 1975. Saigon fell. North Vietnamese tanks rolled into the city. Helicopters lifting people off rooftops. Total chaos.

Frank was there for all of it. One of the very last Americans pulled off the embassy roof as the city collapsed around him.

For his service, the CIA gave him a medal. The Intelligence Medal of Merit.

But Frank couldn’t celebrate. Because he had seen something that haunted him.

In the panic, America abandoned its own people. South Vietnamese who had worked for the CIA. Informants. Allies. People who risked their lives trusting America. They were left behind. Their files left behind. Left to face the communists alone. Some would be imprisoned. Some would die.

It was a betrayal. A preventable disaster caused by bad leadership.

Frank thought someone should answer for it. He asked the CIA to study what went wrong. An honest accounting. So it would never happen again.

They didn’t want to hear it.

So Frank resigned in 1976. And he decided to write the truth himself.

His book was called Decent Interval. The real story of how Saigon fell, and how America abandoned the people who depended on it.

Now here’s the part that matters.

Frank was careful. Incredibly careful. He had signed a secrecy agreement. He knew the rules. So he protected the secrets.

He named no sources. No spies. No methods. He scrubbed the book clean of anything classified. He went out of his way to endanger nobody.

He was telling a story about failure. Not giving away America’s secrets.

And here’s the stunning part. The government agreed.

When they took him to court, they conceded it. For the purpose of the lawsuit, they admitted the book contained no classified information.

Read that again. The CIA’s own case said the book had no secrets in it.

So what was the crime?

He hadn’t shown it to them first.

That was it. His contract said he had to submit anything he wrote for prepublication review. He hadn’t. So CIA Director Stansfield Turner came after him. Not for leaking secrets. There were none. For publishing a book that embarrassed them, without permission.

And the punishment they wanted was total.

Not a fine. They asked the court to take every penny the book ever earned. The advance. The royalties. All of it. Forever.

The court gave it to them.

Frank appealed. He fought. The ACLU backed him. The Authors League backed him. This was about whether the government could seize a man’s book and silence him for telling an unclassified truth.

It went all the way to the Supreme Court.

Then came one of the strangest moves in the Court’s history.

They ruled against Frank Snepp without ever hearing him. No oral arguments. No chance for his lawyers to stand up and speak. They decided the whole thing in 1980 on the paperwork alone. Almost unheard of for a case this size.

They ruled for the CIA. They handed the government every dollar of Frank’s profits. And they ordered that for the rest of his life, anything Frank Snepp ever wrote about intelligence had to be submitted to the CIA first.

A lifetime gag. On a man who had revealed no secrets.

The government seized nearly $200,000 of his money. For a while he couldn’t even get work as a journalist.

The Court said his book caused “irreparable harm.” Even though his lawyers had been blocked from making the government prove a single specific harm.

But here’s why this should matter to you.

It didn’t end with Frank.

The case is called Snepp v. United States. And it is still the law today.
Because of Frank, every CIA, NSA, and intelligence officer in America must submit their writing for government review for the rest of their lives. Even unclassified writing. Under threat of losing everything.

This is why you almost never hear the truth from inside the system. That wall was built on Frank Snepp’s back. His own name became the leash on everyone who came after him.

There’s no movie about him. He didn’t get rich. He didn’t get a Hollywood ending.

But he refused to let the story die. He became an investigative journalist anyway. Won a Peabody Award. Kept telling the truth. Even wrote a second book, about what they did to him.

They took his money. They took his silence. They turned his name into a law.

But they never got him to say the truth wasn’t worth it.

So what do you think. Hero who told the truth? Or traitor who broke his oath?

We get the government we tolerate. If we want a better government we need to not allow what we do not want.

From a Citizens Party email to me:

Something funny happened on the way to a police state…

Unprecedented scrutiny from people pressure has delayed the ASIO bill.

The bill expanding ASIO’s secret police powers is still tied up in the Senate, months after it was set to be waved through by the major parties.

With Parliament now risen for the winter recess, the next opportunity to debate the bill is when Parliament resumes in mid-August.

Concerned Australians who lobbied against this bill should appreciate that their efforts have had a major impact, upsetting the usually smooth process by which the major parties have colluded for decades to march Australia down the path to a police state.

Production line

At last count more than 100 security laws have passed Parliament since 2002, when the Howard government first put up seven bills in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attack that severely undermined civil liberties in the name of “security”.

At first all of Howard’s bills were going to be waved through, over the protests of Constitutional experts, because too many politicians are cowards when it comes to responding to “threat” narratives, going along with enacting draconian powers so as not to be accused of being “weak” on the ostensible threat.

At the time, the Citizens Party intervened and mobilised opposition all across Australia from organisations and individuals who didn’t accept that the “threat” justified cancelling the people’s civil rights.

This opposition, directed at Parliament through phone calls and emails, empowered previously timid politicians to speak up, which stopped the bills from being waved through and instead sparked a huge debate that lasted more than 18 months.

Even Liberal Party Senator David Jull broke with his party, writing in his chairman’s foreword to a report on Howard’s ASIO bill (which originally enacted the powers that the current ASIO bill seeks to expand) that “The Bill, in its original form, would undermine key legal rights and erode the civil liberties that make Australia a leading democracy.”

Labor leader Simon Crean decided to take a stand, accusing Howard of trying to establish a “police state”; Labor’s Member for Grayndler Anthony Albanese went further in a fiery speech in 2003, quoting Hitler’s Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering and likening the proposed ASIO powers to the Nazis.

However, Howard and the Murdoch media relentlessly attacked Labor as weak on national security, especially as Crean-led Labor also opposed the 2003 Iraq invasion, so eventually Labor relented and passed the laws, but only after insisting on a sunset clause for the ASIO powers.

Once Labor capitulated, and especially after Crean was toppled as leader, the party put up no more fights against such laws; the most they did was complain about the erosion of civil liberties and say they would improve them when they were in government, but they never did.

This is how more than 100 draconian security laws have been enacted since 2002, including powers for intelligence agencies to spy on all Australians online, and a sinister 2014 law that jails journalists for ten years for reporting on an ASIO operation.

It’s become a smooth production line—until this year.

People pressure

Because of a lack of media scrutiny, the Citizens Party only discovered the ASIO bill in January, at the same time as Albanese called a special sitting of Parliament to ram through his hate crimes bill.

Albanese’s hate crimes bill sparked unprecedented opposition for its assault on free speech and due process, however, because for the first time in two decades a security bill received real scrutiny. Albanese only passed a version of it through a dirty deal with the Liberals that split the Coalition and cost Sussan Ley her job.

In the climate of extra awareness, the Citizens Party was also able to draw unprecedented attention to ASIO’s powers, including the bizarre fact that Albanese originally likened the powers to the Nazis, but now as prime minister is pushing to expand them.

Pressure from the people directed at Parliament has forced the major parties on to the back foot, upsetting the smooth production line: in April they backflipped on their original intent to remove the sunset clause to “normalise” the powers; and they still haven’t been able to pass the bill.

The next opportunity for the Senate to debate the ASIO Bill No. 2 will be the mid-August setting, so keep calling and emailing your Senators to insist they oppose this bill. Click here for their contact details. https://citizensparty.org.au/campaign/repeal-asio-powers#contact-senators