Silencing the truth-tellers.

• Author: Hightower, Jim
• Position: Vox Populist

Speaking truth to power is an essential virtue for the well being of a democratic republic. And those rare citizens who do it deserve our praise.

Meet Lieutenant Colonel Danny Davis, a forty-eight-year-old career Army man who fought in both the first and second Iraq wars and has had two year-long deployments in the Afghanistan War. Over the years, this soldier often saw top commanders try to put a positive light on a negative military situation, but in our ongoing quagmire in Afghanistan, he noticed that the candor gap had become a chasm, with the brass going from spin to outright lies.

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So he became a whistleblower, daring to call out even General David Petraeus, the former top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, who now heads the CIA.

Last year, Petraeus told Congress that the Taliban's momentum had been "arrested," that our progress there was "significant," and that the mission was "on the right azimuth" to succeed. That went against everything Davis himself was experiencing, what the ground forces were telling him, what classified intelligence assessments were revealing, and--most significantly--what casualty statistics were showing.

"You can't spin the fact that more men are getting blown up every year," he says.

Davis launched a truth-telling mission in January, going to the media and Congress. In a scathing article in The Armed Forces Journal, he asked point blank: "How many more men must die in support of a mission that is not succeeding?"

Davis received glowing performance evaluations as a soldier. Here's one: "His maturity, tenacity, and judgment can be counted on in even the hardest of situations." But now, he says resignedly, "I'm going to get nuked."

In the months ahead, watch what happens to Lieutenant Colonel Davis.

Don't expect the commander in chief to have his back. With an executive excess that would have given pause even to the Bush-Cheney regime, the White House and Justice Department have been trying to silence truth-tellers who dare to reveal government misdeeds to journalists. Every President hates leaks, but this one...