Leonard C. Goodman is a Chicago criminal defense attorney and co-owner of the newly independent Reader.
For at least three decades, our national government has primarily served the interests of the one percent—the major donors to the Democratic and Republican parties. To carry on in such an undemocratic fashion in a country that still requires leaders to stand for election, our leaders need to lie with impunity, especially about matters of war. To get away with this, they classify as secret every official document that has the potential to embarrass them or enlighten the people.
Had WikiLeaks existed in 2002, a patriotic officer like Manning might have leaked the official intelligence reports exposing the lies our leaders were telling to get us to go along with the war. Hundreds of thousands of lives could have been saved, and the trillions of dollars spent on the Iraq War could have been used instead to give every American free health care, free college, and a Green New Deal.
