Dear Progressive Reader,

October 7 marked the twenty-first anniversary of the attack on Afghanistan that launched a two-decades-long “war on terror.” As David Bacon and I noted in the text accompanying his photo essay in The Progressive last year, “more than 775,000 U.S. troops were deployed to Afghanistan, nearly 2,500 were killed, and 21,000 were wounded. Hundreds of thousands of Afghans have died in the war since 2001. The monetary cost of the war to the United States exceeded $2.3 trillion.” The Progressive opposed that war, as we have opposed all instances of U.S. military aggression since this magazine’s founding in 1909. As Howard Zinn clearly stated in the first days following the 2001 bombing of Afghanistan, “War is terrorism, magnified a hundred times.”

One result of the secretive nature of U.S. political and military interventions was the creation of a new form of Internet journalism – WikiLeaks. First launched in 2006, the WikiLeaks website has released hundreds of thousands of documents and images that expose war crimes by U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the efforts of political leaders in the United States to influence governments around the globe. A 2010 release of secret government cable traffic fueled many uprisings in the Arab Spring. “The year 2010 may well be remembered as a watershed year when activists and journalists used new technology to speak truth to power and, in so doing, pushed for greater respect for human rights,” wrote Amnesty International's secretary general Salil Shetty in a 2011 report.

Today, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange sits in a prison in England as the United States government attempts to extradite him to face trial and a possible 170-year prison sentence in this country for revealing many of these secrets. As Mark Fiore illustrates this week, “Assange’s case is not just about one man. It is also about news outlets like The New York Times and The Guardian, which published scores of stories based on information they were given by WikiLeaks.” The implications for both press freedom and government whistleblowers (including those who provided material to WikiLeaks) is significant. As the Government Accountability Project, a major whistleblower-support organization, said in a press release, “[Assange’s] prosecution raises serious concerns for both national security whistleblowers and journalists.” Across the globe and around the United States, protests continue in opposition to the efforts to bring Assange to trial in the United States, including a rally scheduled for today in Washington, D.C., outside of the offices of the U.S. Department of Justice.

Jeff Abbott reports this week on the continuing criminalization of human rights defenders and anti-corruption activists in Central America; Saurav Sarkar describes the anti-union tactic by Starbucks’s management of calling the local police to menace demonstrators; Sarah Lahm looks at efforts by Minnesota nurses to address working conditions; and David Rosen examines what is happening to housing and the reality of the “American Dream.” Plus, Jonathan Friedman of PEN America takes on the current wave of book bans around the United States as an assault on public education; and Kristen Lagasse Burke writes about why we must secure the right to contraception in advance of rightwing threats and attacks.

Finally, October 6 was the one-hundred-and-fifth anniversary of the birth of legendary civil rights and feminist activist Fannie Lou Hamer. Her story was powerfully told in a 2021 biography by Keisha N. Blain that I reviewed for The Progressive last fall. As scholar and author Barbara Ransby wrote for The Progressive in 2004, “The beauty of Hamer's leadership is embodied in a simple concept: Poor and disenfranchised people have the right to speak for themselves. And the duty of those with privilege is not to preach to, or about, them but to support them in making their own case.”

Please keep reading, and we will keep bringing you important articles on these and other issues of our time.

Sincerely,

Norman Stockwell
Publisher

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