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Wikileaks: Time to Celebrate, Time to Mourn
It's time to celebrate.
It's a big win for Internet-based indy media that WikiLeaks.org posted its "Afghan War Diary" based on 90,000 leaked U.S. military records detailing a failing war in which U.S. and allied forces have repeatedly killed innocent civilians. This on-the-ground material is vaster than the Daniel Ellsberg-leaked Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War, and was much faster in reaching the public.
Thanks to the Internet and new technologies, it's easier than ever for a whistleblower to anonymously leak documents exposing official abuses and deception, easier to copy and disseminate vast quantities of material, and easier for journalists and citizens to cull through all the data.
I spent hours with Dan Ellsberg this weekend at the Progressive Democrats meeting in Cleveland, where he spoke after a screening of the brilliant documentary, "The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers".
In 1971, it was Henry Kissinger who called Ellsberg "the most dangerous man in America." The movie shows how Ellsberg (aided at times by his own kids and pal Tony Russo) laboriously copied 7,000 pages of classified high-level documents - which exposed that every president from Truman to Johnson had publicly lied about Vietnam. It took many months before a newspaper published the documents and much longer before they all were gathered in a book.
Today, the "most dangerous man in the world" may be Julian Assange of WikiLeaks. At least that's how he's seen by the various governments that have threatened to prosecute him for revealing their secrets. But as a stateless and office-less news organization operating in cyberspace, WikiLeaks is almost untouchable.
Throughout this decade of war, Ellsberg has been an evangelist beseeching government employees to engage in leaking and "unauthorized truth telling". His prayers have now been partially answered - with Assange boasting that the 2004-2009 Afghan war logs constitute "the most comprehensive description of a war to have ever been published during the course of a war."
The Internet has changed the game since the Pentagon Papers, says Assange: "More material can be pushed to bigger audiences, and much sooner."
If Ellsberg is the most important whistle-blower in U.S. history, Internet activist Assange is probably the most important aider-and-abetter of whistle-blowers - using technology that Ellsberg couldn't have imagined as he labored over his now ancient Xerox machine.
Launched less than four years ago with a focus on helping Chinese dissidents, the donation-supported WikiLeaks has continuously posted material embarrassing to business and governments. In April, WikiLeaks posted horrific video of a 2007 U.S. Apache gunship attack in Baghdad that killed a dozen civilians, including two Reuters journalists.
The video leak led to the jailing of 22-year-old Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning - suspected now in the Afghan leak. To its credit, WikiLeaks is raising money for Manning's defense.
This is also a time to mourn.
Because some things don't seem to change - like endless war, based on deceit.
Nearly forty years after the Pentagon Papers were leaked by Democratic military analyst Ellsberg, a Democratic White House seems bent on public deception and cheerleading on behalf of an immoral war that can't be won.
Team Obama decided to escalate the Afghanistan folly, knowing all that the public now has access to thanks to WikiLeaks - such as NATO killing of so many civilians ("blue on white" events); Task Force 373, a "black" special forces unit that sometimes kills kids or Afghan allies as it hunts down insurgents; widespread Afghan animosity toward U.S. forces; allied troops firing on each other ("blue on blue" incidents); a steady increase in Taliban attacks.
All the color-coded military jargon can't obscure the reality that dishonesty often infects the original incident reports or intervenes soon after, before any public statements are issued. Remember the lies about Pat Tillman's death.
From Vietnam through Afghanistan, deceiving the public has been the government's knee-jerk response. The Ellsberg documentary shows U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara going before TV cameras and boldly lying about all the military progress in Vietnam - just minutes after McNamara had told Ellsberg privately that he agreed there'd been no progress.
When Ellsberg leaked the papers, the Nixon White House prosecuted him for espionage and burglarized his psychiatrist's office searching for dirt - after failing in court to prevent newspapers from publishing the papers.
The Obama White House didn't try to stop the New York Times from publishing the Afghan logs (hopeless since WikiLeaks had also provided them to foreign publications - Germany's Der Spiegel and the British Guardian, whose initial coverage focused much more on civilian casualties than did the Times.)
But the Obama administration denounced WikiLeaks as "irresponsible" and non-objective - and argued that the president had announced "a new strategy" for Afghanistan last December "precisely because of the grave situation that had developed over several years." The "new strategy" claim is hardly more credible than Nixon's claim in 1968 that he had a plan to end the Vietnam War.
Asked by Der Speigel whether he, following in Ellsberg's footsteps, was "today's most dangerous man," Assange responded: "The most dangerous men are those who are in charge of war. And they need to be stopped."
Obama recently asked Congress for $33 billion more to pay for his 30,000 increase in U.S. troops to Afghanistan. That vote could happen any day.
Will they be stopped?
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15 Comments so far
Show AllWe must support our baby killers in these stressful times. They're fighting for our freedom. Reporting live from the Vatican, I'm Benny Dick.
I just donated $50 to Wikileaks, and I hope others will donate too:
http://www.wikileaks.org/wiki/Special:Support
What scares me about this Wikileaks thing is that nobody is listening to the tales of incompetence, bad judgment, flagrant misbehavior, corruption, and deceit. In other words, it doesn't matter that the United States has behaved abominably. No one will get in trouble, no one will lose his job, no significant policies will be changed, no one will lose an election because of the truths revealed by Wikileaks. It is as if we are watching another TV drama--like Madmen--and we pay attention for a moment and then go back to whatever we were doing. This war is so far away from most of us--who cares about it? In fact, of course, it really does matter: the economy is linked to the pissing away of our national wealth through arms expenditures, repair of broken bodies, payments to private contractors, bribes and so on. We are hurtling towards an economic abyss precisely because of these endless wars we have been engaged in. What we really need--even more than the revelations about military misconduct--is a way to link failed wars with a failed economy.
Very good analysis, drosera.
GLUELICKER: I agree. Great post, Drosera.
Stories need traction. People are way too comfortable, or uncomfortable enough, with their unemployment checks and $400 apartments to bother about world issues.
Politicians are all liars anyway, many might say.
Constant meaningful engagement is the only way to keep the elitists in check. We have Fox making sure the elitists are always in power. They are making real engagement of the people twice as difficult with their misinformation - it is a set of smoke and mirrors in addition to the set of the governments smoke and mirrors that so many comfortable people want to believe.
Ailes is singlehandedly tipping the scales of this fragile democracy towards self destruction. There will be never be any traction on a TV channel called Fox Watch, which exposes them for what they are - Because Fox is white, it is looking after my interest, and so Fox is right. And MSNBC is selling Lohan, and a variety of their corporate shit, with the exception of Olbermann, who cant do it all alone.
The Meek shall not inherit the earth- they will be dead and gone by the time the water crisis is over, because Bush is buying all the Freshwater in the world.
Love
Zero
"Obama recently asked Congress for $33 billion more to pay for his 30,000 increase in U.S. troops to Afghanistan. That vote could happen any day.
"Will they be stopped?"
Eventually, yes. Just not right now. Obama and his stage door assassins must be in a red-faced homicidal rage, wanting Assange dead, dead, dead.
It's Orwellian for the administration to call this leak improving transparency as 'irresponsible' and 'not objective'...the whole point of a 'free press' is to publish information 'free' from censorship.
Next leaks will be called 'unauthorized truth telling'.
Technology can change lives in so many ways. From radio to television to the Internet, it can keep us informed in so many ways thought otherwise impossible. It can also keep us feeling powerless and possibly further brainwashed depending on which sources of information. If every site and tv channel could be as honest and informative as this site and wikileaks, we wouldn't be stuck in Afghanistan by now.
While comparison to the Pentagon Papers is inevitable, there is absolutely no reason to believe that the "war logs" will have any effect whatsoever. Polls have shown that the majority of U.S. consumers (nee citizens) have been against the war in Afghanistan for years. It hasn't mattered one bit. The military-industrial complex--without any checks or oversight--grinds the Earth to dust to defend capitalist/imperialist projects around the globe.
What will come of this is more undeniable evidence that we no longer live in a democracy, as any paltry up-tick in anti-war sentiment will be whitewashed or overlooked by the mainstream media until, after some days or weeks, it's all back to business as usual. I mean, just look at any mainstream media coverage of this! There is no moral outrage; no fourth estate function calling the war-makers and war criminals to task or trial.
Sorry to be so negative, but I don't believe this will change things at all because the United States is a very sick, sick nation, an empire on the life support of borrowed money. Everyone watching out for "I, me, mine," while "we, us, and ours" are systematically disenfranchised and disposessed.
This is an outstanding article by Jeff Cohen as usual. The question asks is right on the mark. "Will they (those running this insane war) be stopped?' That is the supreme question.
AD
Sorry, the MSM ensures they will not be stopped. The question on CNN's 'poll' for a couple of days was something like--'Will the Wikileaks harm coalition efforts in Afghanistan?' Yes/No?
More war, more oil spills, more discouragement, more corruption. It is very, very hard to imagine the type of citizen response it will take to rock this corporate world. At the end of the day, 1,000,000 people could be incarcerated protesting and CNN would ask the question in a poll: "Have mass arrests harmed coalition efforts....?" Yes/No.
Won't the US more likely collapse and/or be overtaken by events than by a social movement of concerned citizens suddenly coming out of a mass coma like a new-left dawn-of-the-dead, rising up in righteous indignation?
Keep trying, but let's consider the most likely scenario; for example, when failed industrial nation states collapse, both politically and economically, they are typically run by ruthless elites with wheels missing. That can go on for decades complete with bread lines, massive political repression, corruption, etc.
The endless war machine still exists.
Human-munching profiteers carry on.
A killer government still enlists.
as if war is something that is won.
As a prize for how much death to dare.
To not gain the world and lose everything,
War results are the corpses rotting stare.
So lets surge again for the final fling.
Stupid strategies are a lame excuse.
To fail to make an independent state.
When all along the game is a ruse.
To steal resources and to dominate.
For every success in unlawful conquest,
a price is paid in eternal ledgers
another burden made inside the beast
a weight hauled by the empires sledges.
Every failure will be fully deserved,
Since that is what it exactly takes,
to limit the war hubris unreserved,
that calls suffering caused to be just mistakes.
Read Chris Floyd on this Wikileaks flapdoodle. He's far more informed and realistic than anything I've seen on CD about it, and there've been about a dozen pieces on it the past couple days. Check out his Empire Burlesque for some strong coffee. Bottom line: this won't lead to anything that matters, except the Obamanoids deeper entrenchment in Afghanistan. No one will be investigated or prosecuted (remember Bush/Cheney?), more funding will flow unimpeded, and the murder and mayhem will go on unabated. American exceptionalism endlessly shoved down the throats of whistle blowers and dissidents everywhere!