Follow on TwitterU.S. Officials Privately Admit They Overstated Damage Inflicted By WikiLeaks
Reuters is reporting that Internal U.S. government reviews confirm what many of us had cynically assumed all along: that the US government was intentionally embellishing the damage done to US interests abroad by WikiLeaks documents:
A congressional official briefed on the reviews said the administration felt compelled to say publicly that the revelations had seriously damaged American interests in order to bolster legal efforts to shut down the WikiLeaks website and bring charges against the leakers.
“I think they just want to present the toughest front they can muster,” the official said.
But State Department officials have privately told Congress they expect overall damage to U.S. foreign policy to be containable, said the official, one of two congressional aides familiar with the briefings who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity.
“We were told (the impact of WikiLeaks revelations) was embarrassing but not damaging,” said the official, who attended a briefing given in late 2010 by State Department officials.
Ironically, it is precisely attempts like these — by government officials to mislead the American public — that has made whistleblower groups like WikiLeaks all the more essential to the viability of our democracy.
I suspect this Administration is most concerned about the leaks exposing its own, or its predecessor’s, wrongdoings. This Administration has gone to great lengths to cover-up and to squash any investigation — any judicial proceeding — against the Bush Administration for its alleged criminal activities.
They have got to be worried that the leaked documents could end up incriminating government officials in such a way as to push the entire topic of government accountability back into the public discourse.
For instance, it has been long reported that WikiLeaks is holding potentially incriminating military documents on Guantanamo Bay, where detainees were allegedly subjected to torture. What if these documents were to provide an iron-clad case against the highest-levels of the Bush Administration?
The US is a signatory to the UN Convention Against Torture — a binding agreement ratified under President Ronald Reagan. The Obama Administration therefore has very clear legal obligations that it has long been evading. Whenever there are indications or allegations of torture, it is incumbent on the Administration to investigate. It is NOT merely an option to mull over for its potential political ramifications. It is the RULE-OF-LAW.
Here are those legal obligations:
A State Party’s Undertakings
Most of the provisions of the Torture Convention deal with the obligations of the States parties. These obligations may be summarized as follows:
(i) Each State party shall take effective legislative, administrative, judicial or other measures to prevent acts of torture. The prohibition against torture shall be absolute and shall be upheld also in a state of war and in other exceptional circumstances (article 2);
(ii) No State party may expel or extradite a person to a State where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture (article 3);
(iii) Each State party shall ensure that acts of torture are serious criminal offences within its legal system (article 4);
(iv) Each State party shall, on certain conditions, take a person suspected of the offence of torture into custody and make a preliminary inquiry into the facts (article 6);
(v) Each State party shall either extradite a person suspected of the offence of torture or submit the case to its own authorities for prosecution (article 7);
(vi) Each State party shall ensure that its authorities make investigations when there is reasonable ground to believe that an act of torture has been committed (article 12);
(vii) Each State party shall ensure that an individual who alleges that he has been subjected to torture will have his case examined by the competent authorities (article 13);
(viii) Each State party shall ensure to victims of torture an enforceable right to fair and adequate compensation (article 14).
By not only evading their required responsibility to investigate torture, but by aggressively threatening other nations to end their investigations and criminal proceedings, President Obama and his Attorney General are themselves violating international law.
After George W. Bush boasted, during his recent memoir tour, that he authorized water boarding, Amnesty International’s Senior Director Claudio Cordone issued a pointed statement saying:
“Under international law, the former President’s admission to having authorized acts that amount to torture are enough to trigger the USA’s obligations to investigate his admissions and if substantiated, to prosecute him,”
“His admissions also highlight once again the absence of accountability for the crimes under international law of torture and enforced disappearance committed by the USA.” [...]
“Under international law, anyone involved in torture must be brought to justice, and that does not exclude former President George W Bush. In the absence of a US investigation, other states must step in and carry out such an investigation themselves.”
The Obama Administration and the DOJ would obviously prefer to aid and abet the Bush Administration in evading justice in complete secrecy — hidden away from all public scrutiny.
The last thing they want is for WikiLeaks to publish documents that so undeniably incriminate upper level administration officials — either Bush’s, or Obama’s — that they in turn feel public pressure to actually do the unthinkable: to hold the political class accountable to the rule-of-law.
Julian Assange: Western Newspapers Hesitant To Publish Israel-Related Leaks
In a new, largely unreported Al Jazeera interview (with Julian Assange’s responses overdubbed in Arabic), the WikiLeaks founder reveals that he intends to release 3,700 documents pertaining to Israel.
2,700 of these documents, he said, originate from within Israel, and include “Sensitive and classified documents” on the 2006 military excursion into Lebanon (which resulted in the deaths of over 1,200 Lebanese — mostly civilians, and 160 Israelis — mostly soldiers).
The documents also contain information on Mossad assassinations, including the murder of Hamas militant Mahmud al-Mabhuh in Dubai, as well as “a Lebanese military leader in Damascus by sniper bullets.”
The Peninsula , a Qatari newspaper, translated a small portion of the interview into English. When the interviewer confronted Assange about an accusation (apparently lodged by a former colleague of his) of having cut a secret deal with Israel not to publish their secret files, Assange responded:
This is not true. We have been accused as being agents of Iran and CIA by this former colleague who was working for Germany in the past and was dismissed from his job after we published American military documents related to Germany.
We were the biggest institution receiving official funding from the US but after we released a video tape about killing people in cold blood in Iraq in 2007, the funding stopped and we had to depend on individuals for finance.
The Jerusalem Post published the following on Assange’s revelation as to why we haven’t seen more Israel-related leaks:
Assange said only a small number of documents related to Israel have been published so far because newspapers in the West that had exclusive rights to publish the material were hesitant to publish sensitive information about Israel …
“The Guardian, El-Pais and Le Monde have published only two percent of the files related to Israel due to the sensitive relations between Germany, France and Israel. Even New York Times could not publish more due to the sensitivities related to the Jewish community in the US,” [Assange] added.
It’s rather astonishing to think that the New York Times would publish sensitive information on its own country, the United States of America, but would refrain from publishing sensitive information on a foreign country, Israel. What are we to make of that?
This unfortunately will continue to be a huge problem for WikiLeaks, OpenLeaks, and other whistleblower groups. By giving the main stream media exclusive rights to the leak information — essentially the power to serve as middlemen between the documents and the discerning public — they are effectively allowing the corporate-owned media establishment to serve as ideological gatekeepers.
And as we learned from the run-up to the Iraq war, and a long string of other failures over the last decade, the establishment media most often chooses complicity over serving as a check on government power.
In the spirit of promoting true transparency, whistleblower groups should never again entrust just a few major publications in the main stream media to play such a vital role.
Time Magazine’s 2010 Person Of Year: People Vote Julian Assange, Establishment Crowns Mark Zuckerberg
Here’s how Time Magazine’s Managing Editor Richard Stengel, in his letter, leads up to his justification for the 2010 Time Magazine’s Person of the Year Award:
There is an erosion of trust in authority, a decentralizing of power and at the same time, perhaps, a greater faith in one another. Our sense of identity is more variable, while our sense of privacy is expanding. What was once considered intimate is now shared among millions with a keystroke.
After reading that, you’re thinking Julian Assange — I mean, right? Erosion of trust in authority? Decentralizing of power? How the hell does a Facebook account promote these populist virtues?
Answer: It doesn’t.
In fact, the Feds admit to using Facebook, and its forerunner MySpace, to better monitor us, and to better determine who we communicate with; to learn about what we may or may not be up to. If anything, Facebook helps the power establishment — governments and corporations (prospective employers) — to keep their power centralized; to better control the masses, who willfully participate in these social sites.
Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, by contrast, have literally turned the establishment on its head. It has foisted transparency onto the world’s only super power, as well as every other entrenched power entity — across all governments and corporations. WikiLeaks has left them scrambling to devise ways — legal or not — in which they might squash the whistleblower group, and restore their veil of secrecy — under from which they thrive.
Whereas Elliot Ness took the ever-powerful mafia leader Al Capone down using a simple tax evasion charge, Assange has revolutionized withering democracies, by merely instituting transparency. In doing so, Assange is redistributing power from the highly-secretive power elitists back to the people. Julian Assange has proven that information is in fact power, and he has found a legal way — using the protection accorded to him under the 1st Amendment — of putting the information back into the hands of the people.
How fitting that the people overwhelmingly voted for Julian Assange as Time Magazine’s Person of the Year. And the power establishment — as represented by Richard Stengel — vetoed the people’s wishes and chose Mark Zuckerberg instead.
What The World Has Been Waiting For: Greater Transparency
WikiLeaks has provided the people of the world with something they have sought since the existence of omnipotent empires: greater transparency. The group has succeeded in creating a replicable model that utilizes encryption technologies and the world wide web to expose the inner-workings of the world’s most powerful governments and their corporate bedfellows. In pulling [...]
Watch: BBC Reports ‘Hacktivist’ Groups Moving From DDoS Attacks To Journalism
Here’s an interesting BBC World News America clip that documents how a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack actually works. The news program then brings on Jeff Jarvis, author and Professor of Journalism at the City University of New York, and Tom Blanton, Executive Director of the National Security Archives. They discuss WikiLeaks and the hacktivist groups [...]
Watch: Ron Paul Defends WikiLeaks To US Congress
Representative Ron Paul (R-Texas) — the self-pronounced Libertarian — takes the floor of Congress to defend whistleblower group WikiLeaks and its right to publish the information it has lawfully obtained. This really is a must-watch speech. Paul calls out his fellow politicians for jumping the propaganda bandwagon and in doing so, jeopardizing America’s 1st Amendment [...]
Watch: First Interview With Mastermind Of ‘Anonymous’ Hacker Group
RT just released an exclusive interview with the mastermind of the ‘Anonymous’ hacker group. The group has for some time been conducting something of a cyber war using distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against anti-piracy groups — including Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). They refer to their [...]
MSNBC Pundits Push False Narrative On WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange
On MSNBC’s Jansing & Co, host Chris Jansing, The Washington Post Editorial Page’s Jonathan Capehart, and former GOP Congresswoman Susan Molinari attempt to create a fictitious narrative for WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange. They claim he’s anti-American, anti-Capitalist, and a hypocrite on his transparency agenda, seeing as how he’s ‘on the run’ from his own personal transparency. They [...]
A Final Nail In The Public Option Coffin: Nancy Pelosi
The Democratic Party’s betrayal of the Left is effectively complete: Speaker Pelosi (D-Calif.) showed flexibility Tuesday on the public option, acknowledging the political reality that such a plan probably couldn’t make it through the Senate. A public plan, Speaker Pelosi said at a press conference, is meant to “hold insurance companies accountable and increase competition,” [...]
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