It's time to celebrate.
It's a big win for Internet-based indy media that WikiLeaks.org posted its "Afghan War Diary," which is based on 90,000 leaked U.S. military records and details 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?
Jeff Cohen is the director of the Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College.
Follow Jeff Cohen on Twitter: www.twitter.com/jeffcot
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The increasingly obtuse and out-of-touch with reality obama administration is blaming the messenger for their own colossal and criminal obscenities. Obama's unconscionable stupidity and lack of understanding of history is frightening. Wars no longer work. The first such war to prove this was WW1. None of the wars fought throughout the 20th century had achieved their objective. WW1 destroyed Germany which led to WW2. This time, the short-term winner, the US, through the Marshal Plan, however predatory, the Plan managed to stave off the repeat of yet another German collapse, because the US needed a viable ally in its race for global hegemony.
The US's wars fought throughout the 20th century achieved none of their intended, beyond a few, short-lived results.
Vietnam was the first obvious to all the world, but the warmongers, proof of the inanity of wars, courtesy of TV.
The internet has rendered the media irrelevant. Mainly for having abandoned the principals of journalists such a Mr. Cronkite.
How can Obama's boys say that Wikileaks is non-objective? Because they didn't consult with the inept administration which, if any, documents should be revealed? Because we see the liars with their pants around their ankles?
It's time that the US learned the non-secret of China's success. Negotiations cost very little. A skilled team makes all the parties to the talks win.
Obama cannot be trusted to a second term.
Report: Afghan leaks dangerously expose informants' identities
'Someone could get killed in the next few days,' ex-intelligence officer tells paper
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38441360/ns/world_news-south_and_central_asia/
Corroborating:
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/
THIS is just one of many reason why you don't release classified info, even with good intentions. Mark my words, Manning will have blood on his hands, and knowing the Taliban, a LOT of blood.
You know absolutely nothing about me other than the fact that I don't support Manning's release of classified documents, a position I've stated freely and repeatedly on this site since the story broke. All of "your kind" are so outraged by the war and innocents being killed unless the person that causes those deaths happens to be a cause célèbre of the left.
Your hypocrisy is a joke.
Our government has nothing like that on our own soil . But it has staged coups in Latin America to put right wing governments in power that at any cost, however bloody and cruel, will sign their resources and industries into American corporate hands. It's a long list, and also includes Iran with our Shah.. And now there's Gitmo with CIA interrogations...foreign interrogation centers.
My point is, how will we look in future films when this history is judged? And because of personal debt, few of us feel we can do much. I don't think our GIs cared whether the German citizens were right wing or left...certainly the victims didn't. The point was, they were Germans. And after years of Del Monte, Pepsico, GE, Halliburton, ad infinitum, the violence was done in our name and we can't blame it all on Kissinger or Bush. We are Americans.
Sadly, they will be demonized, it has already started, by changing "the message" to how they have help the enemy. BS & Nonsense. We need more WikiLeaks and we need more whistle-blowers.
But most of all we need an informed public that care more about our global behavior than any reality show or sitcom...
Endless war, based on self-deceit? If it takes fabrication to fortify a fight, then what is it all for?
A “reality” sustained by falsehood isn’t reality. And neither are the ideologies being referenced by those involved. Since even those on the same side of the struggle, differ by degrees.
“the color-coded military jargon can't obscure the reality that”
given the opportunity to question both sides openly about their understandings. Its effectively a case of brown on brown.
“The most dangerous men are those who”
believe that their rendition of reality is real. If it was real, why the need to forge facts to support it?
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/37647573#37647573
"I think it's worth mentioning a very new and ominous development in our country," Ellsberg continued. "I think he would not be safe even physically, entirely, wherever he is. ... We have a president who has announced that he feels he has the right to use special operations operatives against anyone abroad that he thinks is associated with terrorism."
Update: A New York Times article Saturday notes, "In 17 months in office, President Obama has already outdone every previous president in pursuing leak prosecutions."
Scott Shane reports for the Times that the "Obama administration is proving more aggressive than the Bush administration in seeking to punish unauthorized leaks" and that "[h]is administration has taken actions that might have provoked sharp political criticism for his predecessor, George W. Bush, who was often in public fights with the press."
Guys like Glen Greenwald has been sounding the alarm about things like Obama's whistle blower prosecution for a year, and yet places like the daily Kos continue to host 100's of diaries with cute photo albums of "my president".
Our species is doomed.
The suggestion by many on this site that there should be no secrets in war is childlike in its naivete.
Then think about this "war on terror" and tell me who the real terrorists are....
Afghanistan, we'd be calling them Death Squads, which is what they are, and talking about Sate Sponsored Terrorism. All we have is the DOD's vague claims that they are targeting insurgents, and even vaguer
reports of dead kids or no reports at all. Studies show that dead kids turn peacefull farmers into very blood
thirsty insurgents at an alarming rate. Can't think of a better way to make people hate us, can you??
Americans have been brainwashed into believing our government is democratic.
If we Americans want to be better we must wake from the slumber and take responsibility for what our government is doing in our name.
Another poster responded to my post writing, ‘Of course, "Seventhrama", if he's not actually IN the United States, then the SCOTUS has absolutely NO jurisdiction...’ My concern was simply to understand if international laws or treaties could come into play when international organizations take it upon themselves to become the conscious of other nations. Alternatively, as you have stated, ‘How would it then be any different than a news organization editing video and releasing just enough to paint a picture’. Whether or not such issues will find their way to the U. S. judiciary is yet to be seen.
As Daniel Ellsburg stated, "We have a president who has announced that he feels he has the right to use special operations operatives against anyone abroad that he thinks is associated with terrorism." (This includes Americans.)
And the New York Times states "Obama administration is proving more aggressive than the Bush administration in seeking to punish unauthorized leaks".
The information provided to the public by WikiLeaks is not up-to-the-minute details on where the soldiers are at this moment. The video and documents are historic facts showing the prosecution of this war.
The complete LACK of transparency and the dogged vigilance of this administration to SUPPRESS free speech should come as a SHOCK to all people.
Remember the G20 in Pittsburgh 2009? This is Obama's America of transparency and free speech:
http://realmedianews.com/new-world-order/pittsburgh-g20-usa-un-new-world-order-martial-law-379000-troops-global-bank-riots-protest-bilderberg
Peaceful students threatened with dogs and tear-gassed.
Get to used to war everybody, because its not merely just, salutary and productive. It's so much more than all that. It's REALISTIC!
And no wonder, when those who have the agency and apparent motive to thwart it fail to do so.