Nothing Like a Good Smear

Trey Smith

When, many years ago, I first read about the Nixon administration’s infamous break-in to the office of Daniel Ellberg’s psychiatrist as a means to discredit the Pentagon Papers leak, I was baffled by the motivation. The Pentagon Papers revealed systematic lying on the part of the U.S. Government to the American public about the Vietnam War. Why, I wondered with a not insubstantial amount of naïveté, would public revelations about Ellsberg’s personality and psyche have any impact on how those leaks were perceived?

But the answer to that is obvious, as Nixon well knew: by demonizing Ellsberg personally, even those inclined to defend the leak would be reluctant to be associated with him. If Ellsberg became associated in the public mind not with his noble exposure of government lies but rather with “strange” psychological drives or bizarre sexual fantasies — the sort of thing one is supposed to reveal to one’s psychoanalyst — then he would become a figure of derision, an embarrassment, and nobody would want anything to do with him for fear of having his foibles reflect negatively on them. You smear the messenger, and the message is smeared along with him — or, just as good, the message is forgotten and the messenger is abandoned to whatever punishments are doled out.
~ from A Reminder About WikiLeaks by Glenn Greenwald ~

Greenwald references Ellsberg as his way of showing that the same kind of campaign is being utilized today against Julian Assange and Bradley Manning. And the smear campaigns against these two have worked remarkably well -- support for both has waned considerably.

The crazy portion of these shenanigans partly has to do with the unreal expectations of the general populace. Too many people expect whistleblowers to be saints! As soon as it is learned that a whistleblower is subject to same human foibles and travails as the rest of us, too many people turn away. Too many folks won't even look at the damning information that has been uncovered.

That's precisely what the powers that be count on. If they can bloody the nose of a whistleblower, then the people will react in disgust to the blood!