• The US government told me Bin Laden read my book. But what is it not telling us? Greg Palast
    http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/21/us--government-osama-bin-laden-book

    No, the evidence did not show that President Bush knew about the 9/11 attack in advance. But here was something still quite damning: we learned that the Bush family connection to the Bin Laden family business might have been a shield against government probes. Did Bin Laden, reading that, make a note to himself to thank the Bushes for their unintended protection? I assumed the FBI would deny the authenticity of the document. Instead of denying that the Bin Laden investigation had been spiked, the FBI spokesman told Newsnight these chilling words: “There are a lot of things the intelligence community knows and other people ought not to know.”

    Ought not to know? What else ought we not to know? What else is government hiding from us – and when will it kill us?

    The US government has charged Edward Snowden with “willful communication of classified communications and intelligence information to an unauthorised person”. CIA agent Jeffrey A Sterling has just received a three-year sentence for passing information to a reporter. This suggests that, today, Newsnight’s releasing the FBI document would land me or my informants in the slammer.

    Why? Is there really a fear that terrorists will read our information? Well, in my case at least, I know Bin Laden probably did in fact read secret national security documents – in my book. Did he learn some great state secret that would allow him to escape? Obviously not. Did Bin Laden learn the secret that our leaders are incompetent and craven and that our intelligence agencies are poisoned by commercial and political interests? I suspect he knew that already.

    Finding that Bin Laden read my book, with its several chapters revealing state secrets, confirms for me that the new official war on whistleblowers and reporters is not about keeping information out of the hands of terrorists, but making sure that “the public ought not to know” where the fools at the helm are leading us .

    #corruption #etats-unis