It’s a sign of how insane the current state of politics has become when David Stockman, the budget director for Ronald Reagan (who was considered a right wing extremist in those days), is advocating policies to curb the debt that would be considered far too progressive by even Obama and the Democrats .
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Scahill is both a good reporter and, unlike most US mainstream correspondents, is unembedded with US troops, so his view is not distorted and thus what he says is always worth paying attention to.
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The latest WikiLeaks release, like the previous ones, have resulted in people taking two contradictory positions. On the one hand there are those who seek to minimize the importance of the release by focusing on the titillating bits of gossip conveyed by diplomatic cable and suggesting, in an oh-so-weary insider tone, that this is the normal business of governments. Such people say that the leaks reveal nothing of value. Glenn Greenwald points out that this is not true (He gives links to all the claims he makes):
In this latest WikiLeaks release — probably the least informative of them all, at least so far — we learned a great deal as well. Juan Cole today details the 10 most important revelations about the Middle East. Scott Horton examines the revelation that the State Department pressured and bullied Germany out of criminally investigating the CIA’s kidnapping of one of their citizens who turned out to be completely innocent. The head of the Bank of England got caught interfering in British politics to induce harsher austerity measures in violation of his duty to remain apolitical and removed from the political process, a scandal resulting in calls for his resignation. British officials, while pretending to conduct a sweeping investigation into the Iraq War, were privately pledging to protect Bush officials from embarrassing disclosures. Hillary Clinton’s State Department ordered U.N. diplomats to collect passwords, emails, and biometric data in order to spy on top U.N. officials and others, likely in violation of the Vienna Treaty of 1961 (see Articles 27 and 30; and, believe me, I know: it’s just “law,” nothing any Serious person believes should constrain our great leaders).
Then we have the other extreme, those who are actually calling for the murder of Julian Assange because of the supposedly serious damage he has done to the US, an odd charge if the release contains nothing of value. I find it chilling that we have reached the stage when it is considered perfectly acceptable for so called ‘respectable’ people to publicly call for the extra-judicial killing of those who have not been found guilty of any crime whatsoever. This kind of speech (“Kill Julian Assange! Hang Bradley Manning! Nuke North Korea! Bomb Iran!”) used to be the preserve of the recognizably lunatic fringe of society, the ravings of drunks and racists and bigots or the just plan stupid. But not anymore. People say these things on TV and in the newspapers and are treated as if they are serious commentators.
Greenwald also takes on those who try to straddle the issue, wanting to preserve their vaguely independent bona fides while still seeking to be seen as ‘respectable’ by the political and media establishment. These people pick on missteps by WikiLeaks to tut-tut about how they should have done it better.
One could respond that it’s good that we know these specific things, but not other things WikiLeaks has released. That’s all well and good; as I’ve said several times, there are reasonable concerns about some specific disclosures here. But in the real world, this ideal, perfectly calibrated subversion of the secrecy regime doesn’t exist. WikiLeaks is it. We have occasional investigative probes of isolated government secrets coming from establishment media outlets (the illegal NSA program, the CIA black sites, the Pentagon propaganda program), along with transparency groups such as the ACLU, CCR, EPIC and EFF valiantly battling through protracted litigation to uncover secrets. But nothing comes close to the blows WikiLeaks has struck in undermining that regime.
The real-world alternative to the current iteration of WikiLeaks is not The Perfect Wikileaks that makes perfect judgments about what should and should not be disclosed, but rather, the ongoing, essentially unchallenged hegemony of the permanent National Security State, for which secrecy is the first article of faith and prime weapon. (My emphasis)
Greenwald highlights the steady perversion of democracy that has happened right before our eyes.
Because we’re supposed to have an open government – a democracy – everything the Government does is presumptively public, and can be legitimately concealed only with compelling justifications. That’s not just some lofty, abstract theory; it’s central to having anything resembling “consent of the governed.”
But we have completely abandoned that principle; we’ve reversed it. Now, everything the Government does is presumptively secret; only the most ceremonial and empty gestures are made public. That abuse of secrecy powers is vast, deliberate, pervasive, dangerous and destructive. That’s the abuse that WikiLeaks is devoted to destroying, and which its harshest critics – whether intended or not – are helping to preserve.
In this interview with NPR, Der Spiegel reporter Gregor Peter Schmitz, who has been one of those studying the recent WikiLeaks documents for months, says that upcoming reports will reveal a lot of important things and they are not just gossip meant to embarrass the US, as many have been quick to claim. He says, “If you read the whole coverage that is coming out over the next weeks or so, you will realize that this is about important global developments; it’s giving you an insight into, well, basically how the world is perceived and run from an American’s perspective, and I think that is something that the public has a right to know, yeah.”
As time goes by and independent analysts (i.e., people not concerned about being in the good graces of the government) have more opportunities to study the cables, other revelations will surely follow and I will highlight them as they emerge.
The legendary investigative journalist I. F. Stone said, “Every government is run by liars and nothing they say should be believed.” WikiLeaks is striking a blow for openness and transparency, the very essence of democracy.
The critics of WikiLeaks seem to have forgotten what they are entitled to by being members of a democracy, and do not see that WikiLeaks is returning to them something precious that they have mindlessly given away. All those who value those things should support it.
As we see the widespread handwringing among supporters of Obama as to why he seems to be such a lousy negotiator that he keeps overlooking obvious winning strategies for his policies and thus keeps getting rolled by the Republicans, I will repeat what I have said many, many times before, this time in boldface:
When it comes to any policy that the Democrats say they espouse but which hurts the interests of the oligarchy, the Democrats do not want a strategy that will win, they seek one that will lose.
By that measure, they are very, very good negotiators.
Glenn Greenwald has another great article on the strange desire of much of the mainstream US media and its public to be kept in the dark by their government, and their resulting hostility to the WikiLeaks release for telling them the truth.
It is pathetic to see how desperate the New York Times is to be viewed with approval by the US government that they treat the White House as if it were the editor-in-chief of the newspaper. It is no wonder that WikiLeaks did not give them the original documents this time around.
In a fascinating interview, WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange tells Andy Greenberg of Forbes that early next year, WikiLeaks will release documents that will reveal the corrupt practices of a major US bank.
Early next year, Julian Assange says, a major American bank will suddenly find itself turned inside out. Tens of thousands of its internal documents will be exposed on Wikileaks.org with no polite requests for executives’ response or other forewarnings. The data dump will lay bare the finance firm’s secrets on the Web for every customer, every competitor, every regulator to examine and pass judgment on.
…
Sitting for a rare interview in a London garden flat on a rainy November day, he compares what he is ready to unleash to the damning e-mails that poured out of the Enron trial: a comprehensive vivisection of corporate bad behavior. “You could call it the ecosystem of corruption,” he says, refusing to characterize the coming release in more detail. “But it’s also all the regular decision making that turns a blind eye to and supports unethical practices: the oversight that’s not done, the priorities of executives, how they think they’re fulfilling their own self-interest.”
This is serious. It is one thing to challenge the US and other governments. They are merely the second tier of global leadership. Although it has targeted big business before, the oligarchy in the US, especially the financial sector, is the top tier and they will not like being in the crosshairs of WikiLeaks. You can be sure that they will tell their clients (Obama, the Democratic and Republican leaderships, and the corporate US media) to take whatever action is necessary to thwart WikiLeaks’s efforts.
The article also has a great deal of interesting information on plans for a huge growth in WikiLeaks-type services all over the world.
I am surprised that some are treating the latest WikiLeaks documents as containing mere gossip. It is always a mistake to listen to what the mainstream US media analysts say because they seek to minimize US culpability in order to preserve their access. It is far too early to say what all the documents reveal and it will have to await the slow examination by people who seek the truth and not to protect governments. As these independent analysts start to pore over them, new revelations will emerge.
Scott Horton discusses one such cable that reveals how the US government put pressure on Germany to help cover up the barbaric treatment meted out to Khaled El-Masri, a German grocer who, because of mistaken identity, was abducted and tortured by the CIA.
Over the Christmas-New Year’s holiday in 2003, Khaled El-Masri traveled by bus to Skopje, Macedonia. There he was apprehended by border guards who noted the similarity of his name to that of Khalid al-Masri, an Al Qaeda agent linked to the Hamburg cell where the 9/11 attacks were plotted. Despite El-Masri’s protests that he was not al-Masri, he was beaten, stripped naked, shot full of drugs, given an enema and a diaper, and flown first to Baghdad and then to the notorious “salt pit,” the CIA’s secret interrogation facility in Afghanistan. At the salt pit, he was repeatedly beaten, drugged, and subjected to a strange food regime that he supposed was part of an experiment that his captors were performing on him. Throughout this time, El-Masri insisted that he had been falsely imprisoned, and the CIA slowly established that he was who he claimed to be. Over many further weeks of bickering over what to do, a number of CIA figures apparently argued that, though innocent, the best course was to continue to hold him incommunicado because he “knew too much.”
Thanks to Wikileaks, the names of the agents who tortured him are now known and they can face prosecution (not in the US of course, which excuses and protects its torturers) if they happen to go a country that has independent, human-rights respecting prosecutors, a species that seems to have gone extinct here.
President Obama is proposing a two-year freeze on the salaries of all civilian federal employees. This is a purely symbolic gesture that will do little to address the deficit, although it will hurt the people at the receiving end of the freeze. He of course panders to the military by exempting them from the freeze. When this move is coupled with Obama’s inevitable capitulation on extending the tax breaks for the wealthy (which actually does impact the deficit considerably) it will just add to the overwhelming evidence that both parties exist to serve the oligarchy.
It looks like Obama has given up even pretending that he cares about anyone other than the rich.
One of the things that I find amusing about the reaction of the US government to the latest WikiLeaks release is its outrage that its private communications have been expropriated. How dare people read what Washington and its ambassadors abroad say to each other! This is rich coming from a government whose massive eavesdropping on everybody’s private lives and communications without legal warrant is the least of its assaults on individual liberties and privacy. Those who justify these actions by saying that “If you have done nothing wrong, then you should have nothing to hide” should apply that rule to everyone.
Here are the some sources for the WIkiLeaks documents and analysis:
WIkiLeaks
The Guardian
Der Spiegel
The always readable Justin Raimondo comments on the leaks.
An interesting sidelight is that WikiLeaks did not give the source documents to the New York Times this time. They had to get it from the Guardian. This is not surprising since the NYT is so subservient to the US government and went out of its way to smear Assange and disparage WikiLeaks. What a comedown from its heyday of the Pentagon Papers as the vehicle of choice for leakers. It now has to beg others to avoid getting scooped.
As rumored, WikiLeaks has released a new batch of documents. The Guardian has probably the best coverage of what is in the documents.
A small sample:
The cables published today reveal how the US uses its embassies as part of a global espionage network, with diplomats tasked to obtain not just information from the people they meet, but personal details, such as frequent flyer numbers, credit card details and even DNA material.
Classified “human intelligence directives” issued in the name of Clinton or her predecessor, Condoleezza Rice, instruct officials to gather information on military installations, weapons markings, vehicle details of political leaders as well as iris scans, fingerprints and DNA.
The most controversial target was the UN leadership. That directive requested the specification of telecoms and IT systems used by top officials and their staff and details of “private VIP networks used for official communication, to include upgrades, security measures, passwords, personal encryption keys”.
PJ Crowley, the state department spokesman in Washington, said: “Let me assure you: our diplomats are just that, diplomats. They do not engage in intelligence activities. They represent our country around the world, maintain open and transparent contact with other governments as well as public and private figures, and report home. That’s what diplomats have done for hundreds of years.”