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The Six Names You Won't Hear at the Democratic National Convention

Joe Biden summed up the essence of Obama’s reelection campaign months ago. “Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive." These duel sentiments will be showcased at the DNC over the next few days, the slightest glimmers of hope amplified to...

Joe Biden summed up the essence of Obama's reelection campaign months ago. "Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive." These duel sentiments will be showcased at the DNC over the next few days, the slightest glimmers of hope amplified to thunderous ovations and the details of bin Laden's murder propelled to cartoonish levels of patriotic testosterone, not seen since Hogan defeated Slaughter at the seventh Wrestlemania. But while you’ll hear much about bin Laden, there are some names you probably will not hear from the scheduled speakers.

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Bradley Manning

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The solider alleged to have leaked classified material to WikiLeaks, most notably an unedited video depicting an American helicopter shooting at unarmed civilians faces 22 charges that could land the young man in prison for the rest of his life. As Manning typed to hacker Adrian Lamo, who ended up snitching him out, prior to the leak: "hypothetical question: if you had free reign over classified networks for long periods of time … say, 8–9 months … and you saw incredible things, awful things … things that belonged in the public domain, and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington DC … what would you do?" Manning, allegedly, concluded that the public service was worth the risk and, in addition to solitary confinement, he was subjected to treatment that the UN special rapporteur on torture decried as, well, torture. In March of 2011, Hilary Clinton's spokesperson called the government's treatment of Manning "ridiculous, counterproductive and stupid," and then he was forced to step down.

When asked about Manning at a fundraiser last year, Obama casually dismissed him as guilty, "We’re a nation of laws. We don’t individually make our own decisions about how the laws operate… He broke the law." When a Manning supporter compared his case to Daniel Ellsberg, leaker of the Pentagon Papers, Obama shot back. "It wasn’t the same thing. What Ellsberg released wasn’t classified in the same way." He was right about that: what Ellsberg leaked was top secret..

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Julian Assange

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The founder and face of WikiLeaks has enraged Western politicians, shamed journalists, and helped fan the flames of the Arab Spring. Whatever one thinks about Assange's leadership capabilities, vision, or the allegations of sexual assault that hover around him, it's impossible to deny that the American government has been instrumental in the witchhunt that aims to destroy his organization.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs explained that, "Wikileaks and people that disseminate information to people like this are criminals," Attorney General Eric Holder suggested we may need new legislation to combat the group, and the Pentagon added WikiLeaks to its list of enemies. In 2008, the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Center commissioned a report – since leaked – detailing methods to, potentially, wipe out the organization. Alleged leaker Bradley Manning's arrest and subsequent solitary confinement stands as an example to those who willingly support WikiLeaks and increased transparency.

Abdulelah Haider Shaye

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The Yemeni journalist was scheduled to be pardoned for alleged terrorist connections, but remained imprisoned after President Obama expressed concern to Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh about his looming release. Shaye is a respected and fearless reporter who has interviewed many members of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. These interviews adding up to al-Qaeda support is a tough-sell, which brings us to Shaye's true crime: After the Yemeni government claimed credit for a strike that killed terrorists, Shaye went to the scene, snapped photos of the wreckage, and carried out his own investigation. He concluded that the attack was actually carried out by the United States, killed a number of civilians, and may have hit no actual terrorists. The Pentagon denied involvement in Yemen, a country that it isn't at war with, but WikiLeaks later released cables that described Yemeni officials joking about the agreement with the United States to pretend the bombs weren't American.

John Kiriakou

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Who says the Obama administration never prosecuted anyone from the Bush administration? They got the former CIA agent Kiriakou, not for torture, but for blowing the whistle on the illegal practice. According to the indictment, he allegedly violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act for disclosing the identity of a covert officer, allegedly violated the Espionage Act for leaking national defense information, and lied to a CIA review board. In addition to authoring an illuminating book on his time with the CIA in 2010 called The Reluctant Spy, Kiriakou, 47, was the first official within the government to confirm what many expected: that information was being gleaned from prisoners who had been waterboarded. In 2007 Kiriakou told ABC News that, although he supported the enhanced techniques and was aware of the fact they were being used, he had changed his position "because we're Americans and we're better than that."

Thomas Drake

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The administration’s War on Whistleblowers was dealt an uppercut last June, when their case against Drake, a former National Security Agency executive and decorated Navy veteran, fell apart in court. The espionage charges required the administration to prove that Drake knowingly endangered the United States when he exceeded his authorization level on a government computer. After pleading guilty to one charge, a misdemeanor violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, Drake became the 2011 recipient of the Ridenhour Prize for Truth-Telling and a co-recipient of the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence award.

Drake certainly was not a spy: he was gathering information to back up an Inspector General complaint that the NSA had wasted a billion dollars on outsourcing a data-mining computer program that could have been better handled within the organization. Even more worrisome, Drake claimed that the program, TrailBlazer, committed wholesale violations on Americans’ privacy in ways that an alternative program, ThinThread, wouldn’t have. As Marcy Wheeler wrote after the charges collapsed, "After DOJ has spent over four years investigating Thomas Drake and over a year trying to prosecute him, in part, for possession of two unclassified documents, DOJ should probably worry more about people reporting on its own waste and abuse than using the Espionage Act to criminalize whistleblowing."

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Abdulrahman al-Awlaki

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The American teenager who was killed by a drone strike in Yemen last October, and became the most notorious symbol of the administration’s unmanned war. Abdulrahman was the son of Anwar al-Awlaki, an alleged al-Qaeda supporter whose death sentence – carried out by drone two weeks prior – Eric Holder defends. An administration official called Awlaki a bystander who was “in the wrong place at the wrong time”; the attack was intended to kill Ibrahim al-Banna, an Egyptian bombmaker, but missed him. This past Sunday a drone strike in Yemen killed nobody but civilians: in total, thirteen died, including women and children.

Nasr Abdullah, a Yemeni activist, was quoted shortly after the attack, ""I would not be surprised if a hundred tribesmen joined the lines of al Qaeda as a result of the latest drone mistake. This part of Yemen takes revenge very seriously." Al-Awlaki’s relatives launched their own revenge in July in a D.C. Federal District Court, when they filed a wrongful-death suit against Leon E. Panetta, the secretary of defense, David H. Petraeus, the director of the C.I.A, and two senior military officials. "The killings violated fundamental rights afforded to all U.S. citizens, including the right not to be deprived of life without due process of law," the complaint says. When questioned about the death of Abdulraham Awlaki by drone, New York Representative Peter King told Salon last week, ""In any war, there's collateral damage. That's life. That's life and it's death and it's reality; you'd better accept it. Look, I'm not going to argue all night."

Now back to the convention. Four more years! Four more years!

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