Ms. Reality Winner is an American Dissident
by Marc Ronell
Ms. Reality Winner was alleged to have warned the American public of interference by Russia in the U.S. 2016 presidential election, the election which brought Donald Trump to power.
Ms. Winner was charged with illegally taking classified documents and of providing those documents to a U.S. news website, The Intercept, before the concerns about U.S. election interference were generally known.
She has sat in jail in Georgia for well over a year, having her bail and liberty denied in a manner which seemed, at best, punitive for having spoken truth to power. Reality deserved both reasonable bail and an immediate, open, and fair hearing.
She received neither.
The U.S. stood silently by while her basic democratic rights were consistently denied. Other individuals, like Paul Manafort, actually accused of the crime of 2016 election tampering and who appeared to be a much greater flight risk, were allowed to post bail only to later be found to be involved in witness tampering.
As Facebook and Google have failed to protect U.S. privacy and electronic rights and freedoms, Ms. Winner stood alone against tacit silence to warn the public of a significant threat to American elections and democracy. The Intercept reporter James Risen noted in a May 9, 2018 article that a U.S. Senate report on the incident implicitly concedes that the leak that Ms. Winner is accused of "helped state officials around the nation begin to address the threat of Russian hacking into the American voting systems."
The American public is now inundated with the news of the Robert Mueller (((investigation))) and the Donald Trump campaign. In the Senate report, Ms. Winner's disclosure was clearly vindicated. Yet people forget that this Mueller investigation and its spotlight on the U.S. 2016 presidential election interference was exposed by one brave woman who made the choice to bring key evidence to light. We owe her recognition for her bravery and a debt of gratitude for her service.
Ms. Winner chose the only avenue actually open to expose the corruption. I write on her behalf because I know first-hand that the U.S. whistleblower program, like the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), is a failure and these programs never offered an avenue of relief to individuals like Reality Winner and Edward Snowden.
At the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), where I serve as regulator and witness blatant criminal activity, the Whistleblower Protection Act and the EEOC are known frauds and put the U.S. regulatory process and public safety in jeopardy. When we report basic criminal activity such as time card fraud to our agency's investigator general, the resulting investigation is reported back to the same accused management chain for disposition. The reports are either ignored or result in retaliation.
Working in my environment, it is easy to understand the concerns that potentially led Ms. Winner to feel an overwhelming need to leak critical safety information to the press in a desperate attempt to patriotically save our country and protect our people. If any of the generals, spy masters, politicians, or federal civil service managers gave a damn about maintaining government secrets and integrity, these responsible parties would ensure that the Whistleblower Protection Act and the EEOC resulted in consequences for guilty supervisors and managers.
The EEOC and whistleblower protection programs must visibly lead to true reform, correction, and repercussions. Until the EEOC and whistleblower protection programs are fixed, students considering studying and working in fields including engineering, as well as software and digital logic design, should beware of the hostile work environment and corruption in the U.S. civil service and its contracting agencies.
Having been denied due process and bail, Reality Winner changed her plea to guilty at the end of June 2018. The change in plea is almost assuredly because of the denial of proper and fair legal process. Please contact your elected representatives and remind them of the retaliation Ms. Reality Winner has suffered for providing proof of the election threat and the failure of our civil service when American liberty and independence were compromised by foreign interference. Ms. Winner deserves her freedom and our gratitude.
For more information, please visit standwithreality.org and couragetoresist.org.
"... for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a Government, which we might expect in a country without Government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer."