The twenty-first century witnessed a new age of whistleblowing in the United States. Disclosures by Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and others have stoked heated public debates about the ethics of ...exposing institutional secrets, with roots in a longer history of state insiders revealing privileged information. Bringing together contributors from a range of disciplines to consider political, legal, and cultural dimensions,Whistleblowing Nation is a pathbreaking history of national security disclosures and state secrecy from World War I to the present. The contributors explore the complex politics, motives, and ideologies behind the revelation of state secrets that threaten the status quo, challenging reductive characterizations of whistleblowers as heroes or traitors. They examine the dynamics of state retaliation, political backlash, and civic contests over the legitimacy and significance of the exposure and the whistleblower. The volume considers the growing power of the executive branch and its consequences for First Amendment rights, the protection and prosecution of whistleblowers, and the rise of vast classification and censorship regimes within the national-security state. Featuring analyses from leading historians, literary scholars, legal experts, and political scientists,Whistleblowing Nation sheds new light on the tension of secrecy and transparency, security and civil liberties, and the politics of truth and falsehood.
This international history of the origins and nature of 'cold war' offers the first systematic examination of the complex relationship between the United States and Italy, and of American debates ...about warfare in the years between World War II and the Korean War. Kaeten Mistry reveals how the defeat of the Marxist left in the 1948 Italian election was perceived as a victory for the United States amidst a 'war short of war', as defined by influential planner George Kennan, becoming an allegory for cold war in American minds. The book analyses how political warfare sought to employ covert operations, overt tactics and propaganda in a co-ordinated offensive against international communism. Charting the critical contribution of a broad network of local, religious, civic, labour, and business groups, Mistry reveals how the notion of a specific American success paved the way for a problematic future for US-Italian relations and American political warfare.
“I saw it first as a problem, next as a stalemate,” explained Daniel Ellsberg in his 2002 memoir on U.S. involvement in Vietnam, “then as a moral and political disaster, a crime.” When he had come to ...consider it “a crime,” he resolved “to expose and resist it, and to try to end it immediately” by releasing the Pentagon Papers, sacrificing a position at the heart of the U.S. national security establishment and “accepting the prospect of a life behind bars.” A criminal offense and custodial sentence were also on Richard Nixon’s mind in mid-June 1971, after the New York
The Italian election of April 1948 represented the first occasion on which the CIA intervened to influence events abroad. Understanding of the operation has been shaped by three dissimilar approaches ...that have been critical, celebratory, and stressed continuity. These approaches have, in turn, fuelled a series of useful myths around the episode. Agency declarations of greater 'openness' after the Cold War promised to advance historiographical debates on this - and other - interventions through the declassification of records, although proved a false dawn. This article offers an alternative method to analyse the case through a broader international frame of inquiry that considers CIA action in the context of both American and Italian efforts during the election. In so doing, it challenges the useful myths around 1948.
This article analyzes US intervention in the Italian election of 1948 and the influence of the campaign on attempts to formulate a comprehensive, coordinated strategy to defeat Soviet Communism. The ...approach, which looked to utilize 'all means short of war', was subsequently dubbed 'Political Warfare'. Due to the improvised nature of intervention in Italy, the US Ambassador in Rome, James C. Dunn, played a particularly significant role through his efforts on the ground and in helping to encourage a 'perception of victory' that surrounded the final outcome. The campaign in Italy contributed to the core of an emerging Political Warfare strategy, but one that overlooked the crucial contribution of Italian actors, which in the long term compromised both Italian-American relations and US attempts at expanding Political Warfare.
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