The annual Whistleblower Summit & Film Festival last week continues to empower whistleblowers and advocates and encourages others to stand for truth. Film presentations began July 23 and the panel program begins Sunday with the program extending to Aug. 1. Because of the continuing pandemic this year's expanded, video-only program replaces the traditional live presentations on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC.
The event presented more than 50 film screenings and panel presentations over ten days.
The films focus on whistleblowing, free speech/press freedom, civil and human rights, or social justice themes. Check out Film Festival Flix to see the titles, which are also listed below.
This year's keynote speaker on July 30 was former U.S. Department of Defense analyst Daniel Ellsberg, thereby marking the 50th year anniversary of his courageous release of what are now known as "The Pentagon Papers" disclosing scandalous aspects of the Pentagon's secret operations during the then-raging Vietnam War.
Ellsberg, shown at left in a photo by the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, which now houses his collected papers, made disclosures first via the New York Times and later via other news organizations that risked federal
prosecution. The late U.S. Sen. Mike Gravel (D-Alaska), right, who died last month, helped publicize the revelations by reading them on the Senate floor.
Ellsberg delivered highly newsworthy remarks praising the need for whistleblowers currently and described his goal in the Pentagon Papers of showing that four previous presidents to Richard Nixon, who took office in January 1969, had been lying to the American people about the horrific and then-ongoing Vietnam War. Therefore, he said he hoped, the public, Congress and other institutions would scrutinize Nixon with the strong suspicion that he might be lying also about the war.
Ellsberg suggested that the charge of second-degree murder, sometimes described as homicide with "depraved indifference," might be valid against former President Trump and others who deliberately downplayed the coronavirus to advance their political agendas. He said at least half of the more than 600,000 American deaths from Covid-19 are probably attributable to Trump's policies of minimizing warnings and preventive measures.
He noted also deadly threats to Americans and those around the world to disasters caused by climate change, which he described as similarly downplayed by officials for political reasons.
He praised whistleblowers who risk everything to help the public. Also, he noted with alarm what he called a dangerous tendency by American policymakers almost across the political spectrum to describe China and Russia as "the enemy." He said such name calling increases the chances of nuclear war.
Among those in the audience for Ellsberg, who received a lifetime achievement award for his whistleblowing, were other Summit and Film Festival honorees. This year's expanded Pillar Award ceremony recognizes notable civil and human rights champions among politicians, community activists and journalists — including documentary filmmakers.
Madison Mosier accepted an award on behalf of her late father, Sen. Gravel. Another honoree was former Defense Department contractor Reality Winner, who was recently released from prison after being convicted on espionage charges for releasing in 2017 to The Intercept news site documents showing that Russians had interfered in the 2016 election to help Trump win. She is currently under home detention and was limited in her comments as a condition of release. But she thanked the Summit leaders for lifting her spirits after what her attorney described as an especially difficult prison term, in which she suffered from Covid-19.
This year's Summit and Festival included more than 30 documentary films and shorts, plus special segments. The segments include sessions led by the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ), a co-host of the event, and the Government Accountability Project and the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), both long-time partners at the Summit. A day-long segment on July 30 by the National Whistleblower Center, another major partner, features prominent U.S. elected and appointed officials regarded as welcoming to whistleblowers and their causes.
The main organizers of the event are former ACORN whistleblowers Michael McCray and Marcel Reid, who were both honored earlier this year by the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners at the world's largest anti-fraud conference. The two were among the "ACORN 8" activists who helped expose gross corruption and self-dealing in the inner circle of leadership at the community activist organization ACORN.
The Summit is organized in collaboration with such longtime partners as the Pacifica Foundation.
Click here for the schedule, also visible at https://filmfestivalflix.com/Whistleblower/Purchase-Tickets/%20. The panels were free, with film views purchased either individually or with a full-conference pass.
Our Justice Integrity Project, a member of the Summit host committee for a half dozen years, opened the panel segment on July 25 with a major panel on Watergate that featured former Washington Post editor Barry Sussman and two critics of the Post's coverage, authors Jim Hougan and John O'Connor.
The session title was Pentagon Papers and Watergate Revelations After Five Decades: What’s the Rest of the Story?
Sussman, right, was Washington Post city editor when DC police arrested burglars for breaking into a suite of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office and residential complex in Washington, DC. Sussman was soon named special Watergate editor, helping direct the coverage that won a Pulitzer grand prize for the newspaper. In 1974, he authored The Great Cover-up: Nixon and the Scandal of Watergate, a best-seller and widely praised account whose fifth edition will be published at the end of this year with an update focused on the enduring lessons for today of the abuses of presidential power that the scandal uncovered.
This panel was rare because critics such as Hougan and O'Connor of the Post's coverage almost never appear alongside the most noted Watergate-era journalists or officials.
Hougan, former Washington editor of Harper's Magazine, and O'Connor, a prominent San Francisco attorney who represented the late former FBI Associate Director Mark Felt, are at
the forefront of such criticism, which tends to focus on the role of the CIA and on other elements of the scandal that critics regard as under-reported by major news organizations.
In 1984, Hougan, shown at left, authored Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA. By then, he had authored two previous books, with one focused on private spies affecting American civic and government operations. In Secret Agenda, he reported that "accounts of the break-in have been deliberately falsified by a CIA cover story" and that "The President was spied upon by his own intelligence agents." He reported also,
"False evidence was planted for the FBI to find...Sexual espionage and not election politics was at the heart of it all."
Hougan's book is one of a score or so volumes since then illuminating such themes. Another pioneering effort was Silent Coup by the late Len Colodny and his co-author Robert Gettlin in 1991 (republished in 2015). These books included accounts by CIA-affiliated burglary participants such as G. Gordon Liddy and James McCord, and accounts by whistleblowers and historians. One multi-year research project by USA Today DC Enterprise Editor Ray Locker, who as a Tampa-based reporter had met Colodny, resulted in Nixon's Gamble (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016) and Haig's Coup: How Richard Nixon's Closest Aide Forced Him From Office (University of Nebraska Press, 2019). Both Gettlin, now retired from a career in journalism and as an executive in a federal inspector general's office, and Locker have spoken at previous Whistleblower Summit conferences.
In O'Connor's Postgate published in 2019, he argued that famed Washington Post reporter and editor Bob Woodward and his powerful allies within the news and publishing industries "betrayed" Woodward's' source Mark Felt, who became O'Connor's client beginning in 2005 after O'Connor confirmed that the aging and memory-impaired former FBI executive had been "Deep Throat."
O'Connor, left, argues that
Woodward and his allies have sought to diminish Felt through malicious tactics to preserve what O'Connor describes as "historically significant misrepresentations woven throughout the Post's Watergate journalism."
The 64-minute panel was organized and moderated by this editor (Andrew Kreig), a former newspaper reporter during the 1970s and more recently director of the Justice Integrity Project, and, among other civic volunteer efforts, a member of the Colodny Collection Board of Advisors at Texas A & M University. The advisory board includes the university's liberal arts college dean, Dr. Jerry Jones, among the 24 author, historian and other research members. The collection houses some 500 tape-recorded interviews by Colodny
and his co-author Gettlin of key figures in the scandal and its follow-ups.
Colodny died last month in Florida after working exhaustively for many years to help new researchers, including this editor and the university. Colodny and the university have been digitizing the research to make the materials more widely available, including via the site Watergate.com.
Shown below at the bottom of an appendix is additional information on this panel's participants, their credentials and their views.
More generally, the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) published on Friday a lengthy account of the program, including a special focus on its own SPJ panel presentation July 27. That panel describes new government restrictions on reporters' access to newsmaking officials and public records. The SPJ account, a listing of the films being shown and other event details are provided on a runover-page below.
The film program began on July 23 and continues through the weekend before the opening plenary session July 26. The schedule is here. Each film will be available at the scheduled release time and date, and available for viewing also 72 hours after its release window.