I love the debate in the MSM about whether the great Julian Assange is as virtuous as Daniel Ellsberg. I bet they were trashing Ellsberg 40 years ago, too. Oh but this is so different! Yes, very true. Different times, different weapons. Ellsberg spent nights at a Xerox machine.
Tom Hayden has sent out the following petition on behalf of Wikileaks. I missed the Rolling Stone bit. Good:
We believe that WikiLeaks and those whistleblowers who declassify documents in a time of secret war should be welcomed as defenders of democracy, not demonized as criminals. We support their First Amendment rights and welcome their continued disobedience in response to a long train of official deception.
Our government and its allies in Afghanistan and Pakistan have stretched the labels “national security” and “secrecy” beyond all reasonable definitions, because they wish to keep the realities of these wars hidden from the American people. “National security” is becoming the last refuge of scoundrels. Only consider –
- Our government prohibited the media from photographing the returning remains of our dead soldiers, until public pressure forced a change in policy;
- The Abu Ghraib torture scandal only came to public attention when photographs were leaked by an MP;
- The war in Pakistan is shrouded in secrecy because it violates that country’s sovereignty, results in the killing of innocent civilians, and is deeply unpopular;
- According to the new information from WikiLeaks, our Special Operations Task Force 373 operates outside the ISAF mandate to kidnap and kill targeted insurgents in a repeat of the discredited Phoenix program of the Vietnam era.
- Gen. Stanley McChrystal was forced to resign after a Rolling Stone reporter uncovered attitudes hostile to civilian authority;
- The same Rolling Stone article quoted a top official saying if the truth about these wars was known by the American people, they would be even more unpopular.
Given this context of cover-ups, whistleblowers have been a last resort in keeping democracy alive.
We understand the embarrassment of high officials when exposed, but it is Orwellian for the Pentagon to accuse the WikiLeaks of having “blood on their hands.” We are in the tenth year of a war which has claimed over 1,100 American lives, and where Afghan and Pakistan casualties are obscured deliberately. Many of America’s killed and wounded are listed as non-combat, minimizing the actual toll. WikiLeaks has been careful to delete information which might expose individuals to lethal risk. Those who really have blood on their hands are the authors of this war. We stand with those who expose them.
TOM HAYDEN
REV. GEORGE HUNSINGER, Princeton Theology Seminary [ret.]
ED BACON, All Saints Episcopal
MEDEA BENJAMIN, Cofounder, CODEPINK
TIM CARPENTER, Progressive Democrats of America
ARIEL DORFMAN, Author
PETER DALE SCOTT, Author
DONALD SHRIVER, President of Union Theological Seminary in NYC
JEAN STEIN, Editor/Author
we’re (everyone who posts on Mondoweiss) already on israel’s list of “delegitimizers” now we’re supposed to get on the US government’s list of Wikileaks supporters?
… civil disobedience in the age of chip-implants, biometric tracking, data-mining, voice-recognition technology, Total Information Awareness, etc., is a riskier proposition than in the hippy days of Hayden and smoking a little pot and carrying daisies to stick into rifle barrels
Everyone, who has a bit of conscious, shall honor Wikileaks and it’s sources -the deserves respect and champion medals of humanity.
Wikileaks put out all the data to make the invisible war of Afghanistan visible. See the values of the Wikileaks war event data summed up per year:
Year__EVENTS__FKIA__FWIA__HKIA__HWIA__CKIA__CWIA__EKIA__EWIA____ED2004_____500____21___121___218___297___219___207___333____90___623
2005_____887____62___397___173___482___132___423___890___200___664
2006____2182___125__1031___587__1348___758__1687__2688___243___559
2007____3138___170__1468___924__1934___644__1773__4027___369___888
2008____2465___240__1204___674__1646___766__1895__2771___284___754
2009____4616___425__2606__1116__2344__1144__2443__4434___617__1573
Explanation of columns:
KIA: killed in action
WIA: Wounded in action
F: Friendly (coalition) forces
H: Afghan forces (ANA & ANP)
C: Civilians
E: Enemy (Taliban, resistance & other militia not loyal to Karzai)
ED: Enemies detained
And, yes, 2009, that’s the report of the US military data on the change provided by Obama. Something like 60% more bloodshed in Afghanistan on all sides, that’s what’ result of Obamas new war policies and that’s what the leak is all about. And Obama changed policy. He ordered more death on all sides, but in portions of hundreds of very many small massacres, so the media wouldn’t notice them. In historical terms, Obamas Afghanistan strategy could be dubbed the ‘El Salvador option’.
I’m lacking words to express my feelings. So, here is a cartoon, which express what I view on Obama and Afghanistan:
Change? Yes, we can! More mincemeat!
Sorry for these repeated nasty words on Obama and Afghanistan. I’m still grasping for air. I’m upset. Really upset.
What good is the extolled US democracy without an informed citizenry?
Why not just stamp all government communications “secret?” Wikileaks
helps put teeth in our First Amendment despite the ever-increasing effort
to make it toothless. The other thing we desperately need is real political campaign funding reform. And a SCOTUS that recognizes corporations are legal fictions, not human citizens.
The people who actually commit atrocious crimes of mass murder and causing immense misery to hundreds of thousands, or even millions of fellow human beings, get off scot free, while those courageous souls who publicly expose these crimes are hunted down like criminals.
The sad truth is that Assange’s (and Manning’s) actions are unlikely to significantly move the debate in the right direction (OUT!). Still, they are heroes in every sense, and Obama, far more articulate and intelligent than his predecessor, is nevertheless the villain, perpetuating Bush’s crimes with gusto, fearing no backlash from the “left” that mostly supports him.
It reminds me of the contrast in corporate accountability between China and the United States.
In an effort to maximize profit, when a Chinese milk producer/distributor attempted to cut corners by using contaminated milk powder, a move which resulted in numerous deaths, the owners of the company were sentenced to death.
Now, contrast that with the Virginia mine collapse, the oil spill in the Gulf, the stock market crash, the real estate crash and the thousands of jobs lost, homes foreclosed, families destroyed as a consequence, all the while the US government either turned a blind eye, or rewarded the perpetrators for their crimes. Meanwhile, no one can account for the billions upon billions of dollars that the government forked out to “bailout” several industries. Not even the government itself knows where that money went. Millions of dollars in bonuses to the criminals that got us all into this mess, and yet China — that evil communist behemoth — is the one that actually does the right thing, the just thing. It boggles the mind.
Several years ago, I read a comment on a blog whose name I don’t recall, it read: “In the Bush administration you fail your way up”. That holds true in today’s Obama administration, as well.
That’s Caaamunism for you. Crushing free enterprise. Ain’tcha glad you’re an American, and can live free.
Too bad there were not more Private Mannings in Hitler’s Army. Now that takes courage and moral integrity!
This stuff puts American soldiers at risk, much more than our relationship with Israel.
@Schwartzman
You are right, that puts some people at risk. So far I agree.
But I disagree in another point. “This stuff” puts not American soldiers at risk, in opposite, it’ll help them to get out. The real risk is, that American leaders will face blame and prosecution for inciting a war of aggression and war crimes.
Our relationship with Israel puts American soldiers at risk, as Beiden and Petreaus pointed out, each in a moment of rare candor; and as was pointed out to the US congress and shown on CSPAN, the same relationship was the principal motive behind the 9/11 attack–this was also the conclusion of the 9/11 Commission, although this specific was edited out of the final Commission report via generalization that all foreign policy results in negative blowback.
They would not be at risk had they not been put “over there” by following neoconservative foreign policy.
More than our relationship with Israel? Mmm, I would debate that. The Iraq war was pushed hard by neoconservatives and Israeli leaders and over 4,000 soldiers have died, tens of thousands wounded and many more are on multiple tours of duty. A co-worker of mine, inactive for many years, a 38 year old with a wife and three kids was called up to go to Iraq.
I place the blame for this war squarely on the shoulders of those in the Lobby and the necons who support Israel and who lobbied for this war putting American soldiers at risk.
Yes, the same ones who are now pushing for a war on Iran.
Exactly, they sure are.
After reading Marc Thiessen calling for the kidnapping and/or assassination of Julian Assange, I was reminded of the fact that Nixon’s thugs plotted to firebomb the Brookings Institution to destroy the Pentagon Papers, which they believed were hidden in Brookings’ offices.
@Jelperman
There is a difference. Then they just wanted to firebomb papers. Now they are going to take out persons world wide.
Hopefully Julian will find it’s way to Iran, where they will surely protect him rom the evil forces.
Assange is one brave man. If he knew what he was getting himself into — and it seems that he did know — then he is quite courageous. Through his actions, he’s already excluded himself from ever visiting the US or boarding a US registered aircraft. The vigilantes-for-hire the government could unleash on him don’t factor into that threat.
Nonetheless, he is a smart man and seems to have predicted this response as he seems to have some form of “insurance” up his sleeve.
He also has a Plan B to keep getting out the leaks in case he is “taken out.”
RE: “National security” is becoming the last refuge of scoundrels. – Hayden petition
MY COMMENT: Bravo! Good one!
Here’s a great article on the Wikileaks debacle, and other police state practices.
Ellsberg, Vanunu, Assange, Manning — these are the real heroes.
So much meaningless war but there are a few heroes.
Assange is just the spokesman. Wikileaks is a large collaborative operation run by volunteer committees. Personalisation is always the first mass media tactic, and pathologisation the next.
I have seen some attacks on Assange that are so peculiar they are almost comical. Some of them come from what I would normally think of as ‘our side’, the anti-war side. But ‘our side’ contains quite a few right-wing cranks, sort of small-scale Pat Buchanan types but without the constant mass media glare to make them moderate their statements. For instance, ‘Veterans Today’ senior editor Gordon Duff. This is one of those operations so dominated by one man that it seems a little phony as an online newspaper. But his version may amuse you because of its loopiness:
link to veteranstoday.com
Rowan,
You got to admit, Gordon Duff’s got some interesting ideas, though.
I’m not asking you to agree with him, nor am I saying that I agree with him. But, what would your rebuttal be to the thrust of his argument?
Yes, what is the response to this observation:
“When Joe Biden and General Petraeus both reported that Israel was endangering American troops, the classified portion of this involved Israeli operations in Afghanistan, which are extensive. Why would General Petraeus have gone to congress about Israel if he didn’t have documents? We couldn’t manage to leak those also? They are all over Washington, anyone could pick them up. They just don’t. Ask Oliver Stone why.
Hundreds of pages of reports of Israeli and Indian operatives in Pakistan’s region called Baluchistan were tossed out also. Their involvement in terrorism, not only against Iran but working directly with the Taliban in Pakistan was there but not included. So much wasn’t included.
Nothing involving drug flights being serviced by Israeli companies was released. It was in the files. If we really want to leak things, they are out there. It can get bloody.”
I found nothing on the subject in Wikileaks.
I’m not sure who is playing devil’s advocate here against whom, but just taking the questions at face value, I would say first of all that like conspirologists in general, this man Duff has not got any specific hard evidence to back up anything he says. Much of what he is complaining about is unrelated to the issue, and in a perverse way this fact itself is part of his complaint, i.e. why doesn’t the Wikileaks material talk about x, y and z? As far as I can see, the answer is that most of the things he is interested in, if they exist, would be in CIA and State Dept reports, not in army intelligence reports, which is what these obviously are. To me these look like the remainder of Bradley Manning’s material, correlated at CENTCOM during routine army field intelligence analysis, which is what Manning did.
What other countries has Wikileaks leaked on?
um… Britain, Germany, Canada and China, at least, just to go by their contents page:
link to wikileaks.org
Yeah, I just read the url, but thanks Rowan. Here’s a take from an Israeli about Wikileaks and Israel:
link to usefulwork.com
… the answer is that most of the things he is interested in, if they exist, would be in CIA and State Dept reports, not in army intelligence reports …
Rowan, there is at lot of overlap, indeed duplication of intelligence gathering *. It’s not like there are clear delineations of responsibility for each genre of information. The army or Centcom or whoever would most definitely be on the lookout for x, y and z
* And with good reason. As Gen. Wotsisname (the new intelligence czar) said the other day, “One man’s duplication is another man’s competitive analysis”. :-) i.e. It’s a good way to check to see if you are being diddled. :-)
From what I understand, the wiki material is classified “secret” and above that is “top secret” and apparently there are still higher levels of classification for which presumably the leakers didn’t have access. Most of the material that leaked is fairly well known anyway–the government just has a mania for classifying even the obvious sometimes, especially if it’s embarrassing, so it can tell flagrant lies without contradicting itself even if nobody believes them. So without endorsing Duff’s conspiracy theory , any really juicy stuff is probably going to be classified at a much higher level than “secret”.
Moonkoon, the demarcation is an inevitable result of the fact that each intelligence agency only has immediate access to its own sources, not to those of any other agency. Material correlated at CENTCOM is material that arrives there as a result of being collected in the field by army intelligence. Material collected by CIA or State Dept, on the other hand, does not go to CENTCOM but to Arlington or Foggy Bottom (love that name), as the case may be. Although there are occasional media flaps about this, the material is never pooled. Inter-agency requests can be made through the intelligence intranet, but not at random or en masse. Only the National Security Council at the white house has automatic rights to see the digests of the products of all the agencies. The idea of appointing a Director of National Intelligence was to give him some inter-agency powers, but even so, the demarcations remain, for very good reason.
Now Wikileaks does not have some sort of magic funnel into the NSC or the DNI’s office; it is dependent on the sources it happens to have, which in this case are obviously lower-level, like Manning. What you see is what they get.
If I may say so myself, it seems to me Citizen was playing the devil’s advocate. And there’s nothing wrong with that. I was merely interested in hearing your (Rowan) personal assessment of the article. It was a case of intellectual curiosity on my part, I suppose. No games. I was just interested in exchanging ideas and hearing what a fellow traveler had to say.
I have to add: Manning said he also had access to a vast quantity of State Dept cables. How he had this access I don’t know, but since it is Manning himself who says he had it, this doesn’t imply another source with greater access than his.
… I bet they were trashing Ellsberg 40 years ago, too. …
That’s wasn’t the impression I got at the time. The only person who was being trashed by the media that I had access to was Nixon. And I fell for it, hook line and sinker.
I suppose all we need now to complete the story is the capture of a gang attempting to get the “dirt” on Assange, and who are found to be acting on Obama’s personal instructions. :-)
I had the same impression at the time, moonkoon.
How people change–Rumsfeld would have supported Wikileaks in 1960.
This is partly a reply to Schwartzman’s comment up near the start of the thread (presently No.6).
… This stuff puts American soldiers at risk, …
I don’t know that it puts US/NATO/others forces at any greater risk than they already endure, but Mr. Assange’s suggestion to US authorities that they tell him which of the people named in the documents are US informers, would have definitely have put the informers at grave risk.
Assange: … we told them that we were going through a harm minimisation process and offered them the chance to point out names of informers …
link to abc.net.au
If he expects US officials to spill the beans about which of the people named in the documents are informers, then Mr Assange can’t take umbrage at my request that he divulge the names of the donors that enable his august truth crusading venture to sally forth. Can he?
As far as I’m concerned Mr. Assange is still what he used to be. He used to be a wannabe script kiddie fake.
Control L *, eh? Julian? Those Saudis are so easy to fool aren’t they. :-)
All that hacking and only got fined $2,100, Phew!. Lucky, you must have had a good lawyer. :-)
* Control L is a Unix command that clears the screen. It was the “magic” key combination that the group that Mr. Assange was knocking around with at the time are supposed to have used to access mucho Saudi cash. :-) Give me a break!
Here is a huge file attacking Wikileaks, compiled in March by someone calling themselves Arthur Zbygniew, mainly based on Wayne Madsen’s subscribers-only newsletter, which I do not trust at all:
link to arthurzbygniew.blogspot.com
Israeli authorities have decided to extend from 50 to 70 years the time state archives remain classified, the head of the archives said.
With regard to the issue of placing US personnel at risk, for all that I have sympathy for those in the US Armed Services who are there because they can’t find employment, the fundamental fact is that they are engaged in an illegal war of occupation. That they are in harm’s way because of the criminal acts of those who administer the Empire means only that the political, military and economic ‘leadership’ of the US has the greater culpability, but does not absolve low-ranking military from their role in furtherance of the crime in which they participate.
The sooner the US is defeated and run out of Afghanistan the better. I really, really wish that could be accomplished without more kids being killed — of all nationalities, by the way — but it can’t.
Apparently the war is being handed over to the Tongans.
link to scoop.co.nz
The British can’t beat the Afghans. (Fourth try, is it, or fifth?) The U.S. can’t beat the Afghans. The rest of NATO plus Australians and others can’t beat the Afghans. The Soviet Union couldn’t beat the Afghans. Maybe the Tongans can do it.
Wikileaks is supposed to be a danger because it possibly exposes Afghanistani agents in the pay of the US much the way the US military does when it encourages newspeople to videotape Afghanistanis cooperating with the US. Apparently it was also okay when the White House leaked that Valerie Palme was CIA and instantly put all her foreign resources at risk.
Signed.
The Tongans… this sounds like Hunter Thomson’s 300-pound Samoan attorney.
Now this is interesting — and quite correct, I looked and the file is there all right:
Expert Cautions about Intelligence Trap in WikiLeaks ‘Insurance’ File
Fars News Agency, Aug 4 2010
An Iranian IT expert warned here on Wednesday that a mysterious download file posted by the WikiLeaks website, labeled as ‘Insurance’, is likely a spy software used for identifying the information centers of the US’s foes. Hossein Mohammadi told FNA on Wednesday:
It just struck me that quite probably the encrypted file contains all the material that Gordon Duff, Wayne Madsen, etc are complaining is missing: all the State Dept stuff that directly implicates the Mossad, which as I said on another thread is definitely out there playing black ops, along with the Indians. So Wikileaks is saying, if anything happens to our wunderkind Julian, then you are going to see stuff you ain’t seen before :-)