[Last Update: Dec. 14]
There is a a lot of disturbing news emanating from the Wikileaks story, but perhaps the scariest aspect regarding the latest release of classified documents comes from an email that was sent to students at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs from the Office of Career Services. It said that the office received a call from an alumnus at SIPA with a warning:
“He recommends that you DO NOT post links to these documents nor make comments on social media sites such as Facebook or through Twitter. Engaging in these activities would call into question your ability to deal with confidential information, which is part of most positions with the federal government.”
In a story titled, “Don’t Look, Don’t Read”, the New York Times says:
In a classic case of shutting the barn door after the horse has left, the Obama administration and the Department of Defense have ordered the hundreds of thousands of federal employees and contractors not to view the secret cables and other classified documents published by Wikileaks and news organizations around the world unless the workers have the required security clearance or authorization.
“Classified information, whether or not already posted on public websites or disclosed to the media, remains classified, and must be treated as such by federal employees and contractors, until it is declassified by an appropriate U.S. Government authority,” said the notice sent on Friday afternoon by the Office of Management and Budget, which is part of the White House, to agency and department heads, urging them to distribute it to their staff.
I think this is the first case I’ve ever heard of where everyday citizens have been threatened not to read a newspaper or website or to comment on it in personal conversations. And this despite the fact that the information is not only already leaked, but become the top story for every national and international media source in the past week. It appears that the State Department has decided that if it can’t stuff the genie back in the bottle, they’ll threaten it, demanding people to remain willfully ignorant of important news about their nation’s leaders and set aside their First Amendment rights if they ever want to get a job in their chosen field.
This reminds me of the movie The Ring, in which anyone who dares look at the disturbing images on a cursed video tape gets a phone call from the ghost of a young girl who informs the watcher that they’re going to die within the next week. But instead of the video tape being filled with what looks like outtakes of a Nine Inch Nails video, the disturbing images in this case consist of abuses and international crimes committed by United States politicians and other powerful leaders, who far from being embarrassed at being exposed, are empowering the state apparatus to make phone calls telling the viewer of the material that their career in this recession-driven economy will be killed.
So what exactly are these dangerous truths from Pandora’s Box so nefarious that the State Department feels they need to channel Jack Nicholson’s character from a “A Few Good Men”? Here’s a list:
* Iraqi officials believe Saudi Arabia, not Iran, is the greatest threat to a unified Iraq. “Iraqi contacts assess that the Saudi goal (and that of most other Sunni Arab states, to varying degrees) is to enhance Sunni influence, dilute Shia dominance and promote the formation of a weak and fractured Iraqi government.””
* The State Department pressured Germany out of criminally investigating the CIA’s kidnapping and torture of their citizens who turned out to be completely innocent.
* The United States also pressured Spain to suppress arrest warrants for three US soldiers involved in the death of Spanish television cameraman José Couso in Baghdad and to drop investigations of the use of their airport for secret CIA rendition and Guantánamo torture.
* The Obama Administration has been trying many different deals in order to persuade different countries to take prisoners from Guantamino Bay, including telling Slovenia they would have to take a prisoner if they wanted to meet with Obama. Jon Stewart called it the “Take a prisoner, Leave a prisoner” program.
* Many Arab Leaders have been calling on the United States to attack Iran, including the King of Saudi Arabia, who urged the U.S. to “cut off the head of the snake.” In December 2005, the Saudi king expressed his anger that the Bush administration had ignored his advice against going to war, and argued “that whereas in the past the U.S., Saudi Arabia and Saddam Hussein had agreed on the need to contain Iran, U.S. policy had now given Iraq to Iran as a ‘gift on a golden platter.’ ” The ambassador from Israel said Obama had 6 to 18 months “in which stopping Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons might still be viable.” After that, “any military solution would result in unacceptable collateral damage.” The United States also believes that Iran has acquired missiles from North Korea that will allow them to strike Europe. China repeatedly refused to act on detailed information regarding the shipments of missile parts from North Korea to Beijing, where they were loaded aboard Iran Air flights to Tehran.
* Hillary Clinton says that Washington has found it to be “an ongoing challenge to persuade Saudi officials to treat terrorist financing emanating from Saudi Arabia as a strategic priority” and “Donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.” As Jon Stewart put it “So one of our main allies is the War on Terror is also one of the main funders of our War on Terror’s enemy while also saying not for nothing but if you were thinking of opening another front on the war on terror, hey, that’s good with us.”
* The US military covered up the killing of 41 civilians, including 14 women and 21 children, during a cluster bomb attack in south Yemen in December 2009. Yemen’s President Ali Abdullah Saleh told General Petraeus that his government would “continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours” since cluster bombs are highly controversial due to their high degree of collateral damage, as shown by the fact that the bomb killed 3 times as many civilians as alleged al-Qaida members. That’s why it’s banned by most of Europe and Africa as well as Canada, Mexico, Japan, and Australia.
* Discussions between Saudi Arabia and a US Ambassador noted that the Saudis arrested some 250 men on their way to join extremists in Afghanistan after being inspired by stories and photos of the torture in Abu Ghraib, where prisoners and their family members were raped, tortured and killed by Americans, including children.
* The British Government gave secret assurances that it would “protect US interests” at the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war.
* Harmad Karzai, the Afghani president the U.S. supports despite having stolen the last election, ordered the release of several dangerous criminals and drug traffickers. A U.S. official also called Karzai’s brother, Ahmad Wali, a corrupt drug dealer, which was already well known.
* The head of the Bank of England, Merbyn King, secretly co-authored the coalition strategy to enact a far more dramatic deficit-reduction program than any politician had advocated in violation of his duty to remain out of the political process and of the rules he himself imposed on his colleagues. The scandal has resulted in a former member of the bank’s financial committee to call for his resignation.
* An Israeli general admitted that Israel’s narrow focus on its qualitative military edge often conflicts with the global interests of the United States.
* An interior minister in Afghanistan begged the U.S. embassy to “quash” a scandal involving foreign contractors employed to train Afghan policemen who took drugs and paid for young “dancing boys” to entertain them. The official warned that the story would “endanger lives” and was particularly concerned that a video of the incident might be made public, but US diplomats correctly argued it would just cause an “overreaction” and make the story worse. The article about the incident was published in July by the Washington Post, which made little of the affair, saying it was an incident of “questionable management oversight” in which foreign DynCorp workers “hired a teenage boy to perform a tribal dance at a company farewell party”.
* Donald Rumsfeld knowingly lied when he said things were “calming” down following the 2006 attack on Shia’s al-Askari mosque in Samarra. Military troops reported gunmen attacking, open street fighting between Shia and Sunni militias, rocket-propelled grenade attacks on mosques, assassinations and kidnappings.
* The man who is expected to be China’s next head of government said in 2007 that China’s GDP figures are “man-made” and therefore unreliable.
* Both Hillary Clinton’s and Condaliza Rice’s State Department ordered diplomats to the U.N. to collect passwords, emails, and DNA samples in order to spy on top U.N. officials and others, probably violating the Vienna Treaty of 1961. Clinton responded by attacking Wikileaks, saying: “This is not just an attack on America’s foreign policy interests. It is an attack on the international community….” As noted in a New York Times article, that’s rather exaggerated.
Before this latest cache of cables, Wikileaks had also formerly showed evidence that the U.S. military formally adopted a policy of turning a blind eye to systematic, pervasive torture and other abuses by Iraqi forces.
Oh, and by an amazing coincidence, Sweden has suddenly charged Assange with the rape of two women. The charges involve Assange failing to use condoms with two women, the first of whom got angry over the fact that he was staying with her when he slept with the second woman. This first woman, a self-proclaimed “femininst,” persuaded the second woman to file rape charges against him, which were dismissed several months ago but has just now been reopened by a different prosecutor. It turns out that she also wrote ‘7 Steps to Legal Revenge’ on her website, explaining how women can use courts to get back on unfaithful lovers. Step 7 says: “Go to it and keep your goal in sight. Make sure your victim suffers just as you did.” She has mysteriously left Sweden for the Middle East, joining a Christian group helping Palestinians. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that the “Men in Black” gave her two options: Help sink Assange or get prosecuted for Malicious Prosecution, and she decided she didn’t want to do either.
Joe Lieberman managed to push Amazon into dropping Wikileaks, after which Wikileaks moved to a Seattle-based software company named Tabeau, which shortly afterwards dropped them as well thanks to Lieberman.
Wikileaks has allied itself with several newspapers, including the New York Times and the Guardian, allowing the newspapers to publish the information before he even posts it to his own site so that any attempt by various governments to prosecute him would be forced to prosecute those newspapers as well. Although Lieberman at first balked at the idea of suing the New York Times, he has since changed his position and is now advocating the New York Times be subjected to “a very intense inquiry by the Justice Department.”
One might think that the mainstream media, whose supposed job it is to inform the public about important events regarding the criminal actions of elected officials in a free society, would be using the opportunity to create a public debate about the systematic abuse of power that government officials have engaged in, but instead they have completely reversed their roles, automatically taking the side of the government and have instead focused the debate on Wikileaks and its founder Julian Assange.
Wolf Blitzer said:
“And WikiLeaks has engaged in this contemptible behavior, and it will put a chill on conversations with U.S. diplomats especially in the gulf region where this is so sensitive. You know, they have the Saudi king quoted, you know, cut off the head of that snake telling the United States to go after Iran. To have the Yemenis quoted in this way, to have others, Abu Dhabi quoted in this way is going to make them very, very reluctant to have straight conversations with any sort of ambassador.”
And that’s supposed to be a bad thing.
Joe Klein of Time Magazine writes:
“If a single foreign national is rounded up and put in jail because of a leaked cable, this entire, anarchic exercise in “freedom” stands as a human disaster. Assange is a criminal. He’s the one who should be in jail.”
Sarah Palin repeated the lie that Assange “has blood on his hands” and criticized the White House for not acting sooner, asking “Why was he not pursued with the same urgency we pursue al Qaeda and Taliban leaders?” Aside from her implication that Assange should be assassinated, she also called him a “traitor” despite the inconvenient fact that Assange is an Australian national. U.S. officials have actually conceded that there is no evidence that the documents have led to anyone’s death.
That didn’t stop John Hawkins from writing an article entitled “5 Reasons the CIA Should Have Already Killed Julian Assange”
Newt Gingrich says, “Information warfare is warfare. Julian Assange is engaged in warfare. Information terrorism, which leads to people getting killed is terrorism. And Julian Assange is engaged in terrorism. He should be treated as an enemy combatant and WikiLeaks should be closed down permanently and decisively.”
Democratic operative Bob Beckel said on Fox News, “I’m not for the death penalty, so…there’s only one way to do it: illegally shoot the son of a bitch.”
The highly influential conservative writer, Marc Thiessen, wrote that “Assange is a non-U.S. person operating outside the territory of the United States. This means the government has a wide range of options for dealing with him. It can employ not only law enforcement, but also intelligence and military assets, to bring Assange to justice and put his criminal syndicate out of business.” Eva Rodriguez asks, “Did my colleague, Marc Thiessen, just call for a drone strike in Iceland?” Thiessen said no.
Even Huckabee came right out and said, “Whoever in our government leaked that information is guilty of treason, and I think anything less than execution is too kind a penalty.”
Let’s put this in perspective.
James O’Keefe broke Maryland law when he videotaped ACORN officials without their knowledge. Maryland’s Wiretapping and Electronic Surveillance Act prohibits both surreptitious recordings and disclosure of those recordings, with a prison sentence of five years and a $10,000 fine. He lied to ACORN officials when he portrayed himself as a saint trying to save his girlfriend from a life of prostitution, recorded their reactions, fraudulently edited out the footage of how he set them up, and then lied to Fox News and other media officials by falsely claiming that he was dressed as a pimp. One particular ACORN official was caught apparently going along with an illegal activity but then called the police as soon as O’Keefe left, although that never came to light until much later. Both Republicans and Democrats in Congress reacted with unprecedented speed and immediately voted to suspend all funding to ACORN, which ultimately destroyed the organization. O’Keefe went on to get arrested for attempting to tamper with Mary Landrieu’s phone, was given a slap on the wrist, and then immediately proceeded to yet another attempt to break the same law in a ridiculous attempt to admittedly smear a correspondent from CNN. I haven’t noticed too many reporters in the mainstream media getting upset about this.
Then there was the case of Climate Gate, in which hackers illegally stole private emails from climate scientists and then posted it on Russian servers immediately prior to the Copenhagen Summit in an obvious attempt to engineer a political disaster for the conference. Wikileaks published these emails but rather than attack Wikileaks for “indiscriminate dumping,” right-wingers took the phrases out of context and effectively manipulated public opinion to believe that the entire scientific community was in on a gigantic world hoax to fool people into changing from fossil fuels to order to save the human species from unimaginable personal devastation. It worked. It doesn’t matter that three separate official investigations cleared everyone at East Anglia of any wrongdoing, nor does the fact that other media investigations by AP, Reuters, Factcheck.org and Politifact.com have also independently cleared them. Republican House Representative and Top Energy Chair Candidate for the Energy Committee Fred Upton has called for congressional hearings on Climategate. But if anyone can determine if the science is fraudulent, it’s climate deniers since their own 2006 climate report was plagiarized from textbooks, Wikipedia, and the writings of one of the scientists criticized in the report.
So, for most people in the world of politics and media, it’s all right to not only break wiretap and privacy laws regarding private citizens but also fraudulently edit and misrepresent them so as to propagandize the public with lies in order to manufacture political consent. In these cases, the mainstream media will typically, as Creationists call it, “teach the controversy,” usually minimalizing or downright eliminating the part about how the material was fraudulently edited so as to cover up their own shoddy preliminary reporting on the subject. As long as it fits into the mainstream media’s “left vs. right” narrative, anything is legitimate news.
But when an advocacy group dedicated to political transparency publishes classified information on the government abuses of political elites which embarrasses both parties — much of which had no right to be classified in the first place — in order to shine a light on the political realities of the world so that citizens actually have the ability to understand and make decisions on how to govern in a free and open democracy, in that case, said group is “contemptible,” has become a “traitor” to a nation they never lived in nor pledged any loyalty to, and should be declared an “enemy combatant” to be systematically assassinated without the need of any inconvenient trials.
Although this is a bit of a side topic, I’d also like to post an article written by Thomas Friedman in which he imagines what a cable of a Chinese official exposed by Wikileaks would look like:
Washington Embassy, People’s Republic of China, to Ministry of Foreign Affairs Beijing, TOP SECRET/Subject: America today.
Things are going well here for China. America remains a deeply politically polarized country, which is certainly helpful for our goal of overtaking the U.S. as the world’s most powerful economy and nation. But we’re particularly optimistic because the Americans are polarized over all the wrong things.
There is a willful self-destructiveness in the air here as if America has all the time and money in the world for petty politics. They fight over things like — we are not making this up — how and where an airport security officer can touch them. They are fighting — we are happy to report — over the latest nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia. It seems as if the Republicans are so interested in weakening President Obama that they are going to scuttle a treaty that would have fostered closer U.S.-Russian cooperation on issues like Iran. And since anything that brings Russia and America closer could end up isolating us, we are grateful to Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona for putting our interests ahead of America’s and blocking Senate ratification of the treaty. The ambassador has invited Senator Kyl and his wife for dinner at Mr. Kao’s Chinese restaurant to praise him for his steadfastness in protecting America’s (read: our) interests.
Americans just had what they call an “election.” Best we could tell it involved one congressman trying to raise more money than the other (all from businesses they are supposed to be regulating) so he could tell bigger lies on TV more often about the other guy before the other guy could do it to him. This leaves us relieved. It means America will do nothing serious to fix its structural problems: a ballooning deficit, declining educational performance, crumbling infrastructure and diminished immigration of new talent.
The ambassador recently took what the Americans call a fast train — the Acela — from Washington to New York City. Our bullet train from Beijing to Tianjin would have made the trip in 90 minutes. His took three hours — and it was on time! Along the way the ambassador used his cellphone to call his embassy office, and in one hour he experienced 12 dropped calls — again, we are not making this up. We have a joke in the embassy: “When someone calls you from China today it sounds like they are next door. And when someone calls you from next door in America, it sounds like they are calling from China!” Those of us who worked in China’s embassy in Zambia often note that Africa’s cellphone service was better than America’s.
But the Americans are oblivious. They travel abroad so rarely that they don’t see how far they are falling behind. Which is why we at the embassy find it funny that Americans are now fighting over how “exceptional” they are. Once again, we are not making this up. On the front page of The Washington Post on Monday there was an article noting that Republicans Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee are denouncing Obama for denying “American exceptionalism.” The Americans have replaced working to be exceptional with talking about how exceptional they still are. They don’t seem to understand that you can’t declare yourself “exceptional,” only others can bestow that adjective upon you.
In foreign policy, we see no chance of Obama extricating U.S. forces from Afghanistan. He knows the Republicans will call him a wimp if he does, so America will keep hemorrhaging $190 million a day there. Therefore, America will lack the military means to challenge us anywhere else, particularly on North Korea, where our lunatic friends continue to yank America’s chain every six months so that the Americans have to come and beg us to calm things down. By the time the Americans do get out of Afghanistan, the Afghans will surely hate them so much that China’s mining companies already operating there should be able to buy up the rest of Afghanistan’s rare minerals.
Most of the Republicans just elected to Congress do not believe what their scientists tell them about man-made climate change. America’s politicians are mostly lawyers — not engineers or scientists like ours — so they’ll just say crazy things about science and nobody calls them on it. It’s good. It means they will not support any bill to spur clean energy innovation, which is central to our next five-year plan. And this ensures that our efforts to dominate the wind, solar, nuclear and electric car industries will not be challenged by America.
Finally, record numbers of U.S. high school students are now studying Chinese, which should guarantee us a steady supply of cheap labor that speaks our language here, as we use our $2.3 trillion in reserves to quietly buy up U.S. factories. In sum, things are going well for China in America.
Thank goodness the Americans can’t read our diplomatic cables.
Embassy Washington.
