Top 10 Most Influential Whistleblowersselfnews Post The following whistleblowers have endured a varying degree of pushback from the system, but are still around to reveal key points of information that make us all question what we are being told by our government and the corporate media. Please listen to the video presentations of the following insiders who have used their positions to educate those on the outside about the machinations of people far more devious than ourselves. They follow in the footsteps of people such as Daniel Ellsberg, and are not the criminals that the U.S. government increasingly charges them as. Rather, these whistleblowers represent the highest level of activism and courage. Jesselyn Radack Radack is a former ethics attorney and adviser to the Justice Department. She had been presented with the first case of a detainee in Afghanistan following 9/11. That detainee was John Walker Lindh, an American citizen labeled The American Taliban. Lindh was set to be interrogated (tortured) without council. Her advice not to pursue that direction went unheeded to the point where her e-mails to the court were deleted, which she had to then resurrect from her computer and present to the media. She subsequently was put on the No-Fly list and was targeted for investigation. Rather than fold, she fought back and wound up going to work for the premier whistleblowing advocacy group, the Government Accountability Project at whistleblower.org, founded in 1977. Thomas Drake (NSA) The world got an historical overview that shed quite a bit of light on the NSA through a former ABC News reporter, James Bamford, when he released two books The Puzzle Palace and Body of Secrets, which lifted the veil and revealed a massive spying structure that far surpasses the capabilities of the CIA. The apparatus Bamford revealed was comprised of programs like Echelon that were suspected of not only massive international spying and data collection, but also domestic operations. Now those suspicions are being confirmed by high-level insiders such as Thomas Drake, who appeared in a Baltimore Sun article that highlighted a $1.2 billion program called Trailblazer which Drake submitted was a program of fraud, waste, and abuse. He was subsequently charged under The Espionage Act and was facing 35 years in prison. Drakes defense team actually hired James Bamford as an expert witness. The case for 10 felony charges against Drake could not stand up, and he reached a misdemeanor plea deal. Drake was the first to come forward under a new climate of aggressive formal indictment for whistleblowers that equates their truth-telling with real espionage such as selling state secrets. William Binney (NSA) Former top NSA mathematician and code breaker, William Binney, has gone on record to publicly reveal the scope of a top-secret surveillance program that has directly targeted everyday Americans following 9/11. He is sounding an alarm about the massive scope of this project that engages in 24/7 warrantless wiretapping of the American population. Thomas Drakes testimony was revealing, but Binney was a 32-year, top-level veteran of the NSA who reveals in the video below the domestic component of a program code named Stellar Wind. With the NSA working to complete its $2 billion fortress of surveillance by September 2013, which can store 100 years worth of electronic information, Binneys concerns that we are heading down the road to totalitarianism ring true. Mark Klein (ATT) A veteran of twenty-two years as an ATT technician, Mark Klein left no doubt about the veracity of an NSA domestic spying program when he revealed how he found secret rooms at a switching center in San Francisco. And he had the documents and blueprints to prove it: Yet, the LA Times editor Dean Baquet killed the story after speaking with Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte and Director of the NSA Gen. Michael Hayden. The story later appeared at the New York Times. Mark Klein recounts his version of events below and how he came to realize that he was being forced to connect the Big Brother machine. It is worth noting that the Electronic Frontier Foundation has spearheaded lawsuits to reveal just what is being done to the American people, but courts recently ruled that warrantless wiretapping can continue. Sibel Edmonds (FBI / 9/11) In the wake of 9/11, Edmonds was enlisted as a translator in the FBI language division to interpret wiretaps conducted inside the United States, having been born in Turkey and speaking several key languages. She describes the language division as the highest security unit in the FBI. She has since become the most classified woman in history, and her efforts to uncover FBI criminality that included, money laundering, narcotic activities, and nuclear black market converg(ing) with terrorist activities led her to be pursued and persecuted to an incredible degree by the Justice Department under John Ashcroft and Robert Mueller invoking state secrets. Her story is harrowing, to say the least; however, she sparked serious doubts among the general population regarding the 9/11 Commission Report and she hasnt stopped. To get a glimpse of the energy and tenacity of Sibel Edmonds, see the video trailer below for the whistleblower documentary Kill The Messenger which can be viewed in 5 parts starting HERE. More of her work can be found at Boiling Frogs. She also set up the National Security Whisleblower Coalition. And what is The American-Turkish council? Susan Lindauer (CIA / 9/11) Susan was a former CIA asset who worked with the Libyan and Iraqi embassies prior to 9/11. Following that day, she began to reveal CIA complicity in Middle East heroin trafficking. Susan subsequently became the second non-Arab citizen to be arrested under the Patriot Act, which culminated in a five-year indictment and near total prison lockdown for one year. In the video below she discusses her revelations about pre-9/11 warnings and all that followed, which eventually got published in her book Extreme Prejudice: The Terrifying Story of the Patriot Act and the Cover-ups of 9/11 and Iraq. Col. Anthony Shaffer (Military) Shaffer is an intelligence agent who claimed that there was deliberate stonewalling of information prior to 9/11 as part of what came to be known as Able Danger. Beyond that, he revealed a culture of infighting between intelligence agencies that, even taken at face value, is concerning for the American taxpayer. Shaffer published his account in Operation Dark Heart. The Department of Defense responded by purchasing the books first, uncensored, 10,000 copy print run (with U.S. taxpayer dollars, by the way). He might have had something important to say. The video below touches upon what that might have been. Joe Banister (IRS) In our article 10 Ways to Stop Being a Slave and Bring Down The Pyramids of Control, IRS resistance was presented last. Here are the questions we asked: Special agent, Joe Banister, exposed the mechanics of what the IRS is and how fundamentally illegal and unconstitutional their tax collection policies and methods are. The system came down HARD on one of its own. His story is instrumental in understanding what happened to the next IRS whistleblower, Sherry Peel Jackson, who took exposure to a whole new level and was pursued ruthlessly for her revelations. The income tax we have been told to believe is a patriotic obligation is itself a complete fraud. The current tax code is 72,000 pages. It is complicated for a reason. If we can wake up to the foundations of this nightmare coercive system, we stand a great chance of restoring power into the hands of the people instead of a tiny few at the top of the pyramid. Caution is warranted, however: the IRS is ready, willing and able to lock you up for a longer term than human trafficking and child porn. So, proceed with caution, but keep courage close at hand. You can see Joe Banister with Ron Paul, below. Bradley Manning (Military) Manning allegedly transmitted state secrets to WikiLeaks: Bradley Mannings case and treatment is at the heart of a new U.S. government mission that equates the revealing of truth as aiding an abetting the enemy, which should serve as an indictment upon the system which pursues truth-tellers like Manning so vehemently. He only sought to expose the horrific collateral damage of the war in which he was enlisted, which has been properly retitled into Collateral Murder. Due to his total lockdown, there is no video we can present of Bradley Manning speaking for himself, but the video he brought out to the public through WikiLeaks says it all: Despite whistleblowers explosive disclosures, the surveillance state has been normalized, as the House has voted to reauthorize the 2008 FISA Amendment Act. And, sadly, many whistleblowers who might have had even more to say have been assassinated by the system they were employed to serve. That alone should serve as a warning to those who have chosen to enter such employment, knowing the level of evil they contract with. The control structure is massive, and growing, so we must listen to the voices who courageously come forth to issue their concerns, especially when those of good conscience are being persecuted as never before. So who did we miss? Add your own with links to the history of what has been revealed. You can read other articles by selfnews Post Here 