WikiLeaks about to hit the fan

Ethiopian journalist on the run – Wikileaks clarifies its role
(By Bram Posthumus, Radio Netherlands Worldwide, 23 September 2011)

Earlier this week, Radio Netherlands ran a story about Ethiopian journalist Argaw Ashine, who had to flee his country after a confidential American diplomatic cable revealed his contacts with the US Embassy in Addis Abeba.

He squarely blames the whistleblowing website Wikileaks for his predicament. I called Wikileak’s spokesman for an explanation. Kristinn Hrafnsson reiterated a previous statement: it was the action by the UK-based newspaper The Guardian to release the decryption key, which opened up wide access to the cables and subsequent cans of worms.

He explained: ‘When former insiders at Wikileaks pointed out how to connect the dots, we were faced with the difficult question: are we going to wait and give the secret services the advantage of having sole access to this material or do we make sure that everyone has access to this information?’ Wikileaks decided on the latter. In security-obsessed Ethiopia, tracing the US diplomatic cable to Mr Ashine was only a matter of time. But once again: ‘It was not our call. It was our media partner, in this case The Guardian that decided to publish.’

Still, as we reported earlier, Mr Ashine and indeed the New York-based Committee to protect Journalists hold Wikileaks “ ultimately responsible”. An audibly exasperated Mr Hrafnsson responded: ‘We have shown so many instances of wrongdoings against journalists in material that we have published without this kind of strong response from the Committee to protect Journalists.’ He added that journalists have suffered fates worse than exile as a result of Wikileaks publications without such a strong reaction.

Meanwhile, Wikileaks has reconsidered its procedures in working with traditional media, as a result of this case. But, according to Wikileaks, there is someone else who could have acted to protect Mr Ashine: the US state department. The State Department was in receipt of information about threats to journalists in Ethiopia, a key US ally in the Horn of Africa. ‘We repeatedly asked for their cooperation, which they denied,’ said Mr Hrafnsson. ‘If they are genuinely concerned about the people they call “their informants”, they should cooperate with us.’

Mr Ashine may be considering legal action against Wikileaks but the spokesman would not be drawn on speculating about a response. He considers it more important to focus on the wider issue of press freedom. ‘It is important for governments that are supporting oppressive governments to link demands for press freedom with aid to those countries.’

Mr Argaw.... said he fled over the weekend after he was summoned for intensive questioning by officials from the Government Communication Affairs Office (GCAO) on two occasions and a third time by the police with regard to the US cable of 26 October 2009.

It was relating attempts to silence the private Amharic language Addis Neger newspaper (in 2009), which has since closed and its editors fled the country .....

..."Mr Argaw was only mentioned in passing in the cable and was not on a list of journalists sent by the CPJ asking that their names be withheld before the cables were published."

Mr Argaw said he did not feel betrayed by the US embassy as the leak was not intentional, but the events of the last week had come as a shock.

While certainly having every sympathy for Mr Ashine's situation, I find it interesting that he has singled out the unredacted Wikileaks tapes as the sole cause of his predicament.

There's the possibility that Mr Ashine might be being used by certain authorities to undermine the credibility of Wikileaks? For their own purposes?

Mr Ashine was named in a 2009 US diplomatic cable, classified as confidential, that reported details of a conversation about an attempt by Ethiopia’s Government Communication Affairs Office (GCAO) to silence journalists working for the country’s largest independent Amharic language newspaper, the Addis Neger.

He says he did not realise that the particulars of the conversation would be transmitted to the US state department. Mr Ashine says that as far as he was concerned, that particular conversation, like many other conversations he has had with foreign diplomats and Ethiopian politicians, was in confidence. He thought no more about it until un-edited versions of the US diplomatic cables hit the media at the beginning of September.

Mr Ashine was furious:

“Yes, it is very irresponsible. Some days ago I was living peacefully in my hometown and I was doing my job peacefully. Now it has created a lot of mess in my life. Unexpectedly I had to leave the country within 48 hours. It is a big mess and I think WikiLeaks is responsible for this. I don’t know what I can do against Wikileaks but I think that legally they are responsible for all this mess against me.”.....

I myself generally stay away from single factor theories.

How can the US complain about ...

I myself generally stay away from single factor theories.

Assange gets taste of own medicine
(By Eilis O'Hanlon, The Independent, Commentary, September 25 2011)

Julian Assange may look like a dead ringer for Mr Humphries from Are You Being Served? but that's where the resemblance ends. The camp floorwalker from Grace Brothers' catchphrase was "I'm free", after all, which may not be true of the controversial WikiLeaks founder if his bid to avoid extradition to Sweden on rape charges fails.

Currently he's in Britain, without even a supportive letter from David Norris or Gay Mitchell to keep him company.

In the meantime, the world has the opportunity to read his autobiographical account of his life and times -- though if it's all the same to you, Assange would rather that you didn't, having changed his mind about publishing a memoir. Not that his publishers have taken any notice of that. Canongate is bringing the book out anyway.

It's hard not to appreciate the irony of a man who made his name by putting into the public domain things which other people wanted kept quiet, now demanding that his own pleas for privacy should be respected.

What goes around comes around, and all that. Besides, you'd think he'd be happy to get a chance to publicise his claim that the American government set him up in revenge for releasing 250,000 sensitive diplomatic cables. Instead he has slammed his publishers for its "opportunism and duplicity".

Mmm, has he ever heard the old Shakespearean phrase about being hoist with your own petard?

Maybe he should be a bit more careful about where he puts his petard in future.

I'll note that you choose to cite the Washington Post in your post. If I'm to believe what you say here about the media, this is impossible.

The West Is Trapped In Its Own Propaganda

by Paul Craig Roberts

One of the wishes that readers often express to me came true today (May 11). I was on the mainstream media. It was a program with a worldwide reach – the BBC World Service. There were others on the program as well, and the topic was Hillary Clinton’s remarks (May 10) about the lack of democracy and human rights in China.

I startled the program’s host when I compared Hillary’s remarks to the pot calling the kettle black. I was somewhat taken aback myself by the British BBC program host’s rush to America’s defense and wondered about it as the program continued. Surely, he had heard about Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo detainees, CIA secret torture prisons sprinkled around the world, invasion and destruction of Iraq on the basis of lies and deceptions, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya. Surely, he was aware of Hillary’s hypocrisy as she demonized China but turned a blind eye to Israel, Mubarak, Bahrain and the Saudis. China’s record is not perfect, but is it this bad? Why wasn’t the Chinese Minister for Foreign Affairs criticizing America’s human rights abuses and rigged elections? How come China minds its own business and we don’t?


These questions didn’t go down well. None of the other interviewees or guests thought that Hilary had made a good decision, but even the Chinese guests were not free of the common mindset that frames every issue from the standpoint that the West is the standard by which the rest of the world is judged. By pointing out our own shortcomings, I was challenging that standard. The host and other guests could not escape from the restraints imposed on thought by the role of the West as world standard.

What has happened to the West is that it can see itself and others only through the eyes of its own propaganda. There was a great deal of talk about China’s lack of democracy. As the BBC program was being broadcast, the news intruded that Greeks had again taken to the streets to protest the costs of the bailout of the banks and Wall Street – the rich – being imposed on ordinary people at the expense of their lives and aspirations. The Irish government announced that it was going to confiscate with a tax part of the Irish people’s pension accumulations. It simply did not occur to the host and other guests that these are not democratic outcomes.

It is a strange form of democracy that produces political outcomes that reward the few and punish the many, despite the energetic protests of the many.

Political scientists understand that US electoral outcomes are determined by powerful monied interests that finance the political campaigns and that the bills Congress passes and the President signs are written by these interest groups to serve their narrow interests. Such conclusions are dismissed as cynicism and do not alter the mindset.

While the program’s host and guests were indulging in the West’s democratic and human rights superiority, the American Civil Liberties Union was sending out a bulletin urging its members to oppose legislation now before Congress that would give the current and future Presidents of the United States expanded war authority to use, on their own initiative, military force anywhere in the world independently of the restraints imposed by the US Constitution and international law.

In other words, in the great American "democracy," the president is to become a Caesar.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/roberts/roberts307.html

The Shame of Being an American

by Paul Craig Roberts

The United States government has overestimated the amount of shame that it and American citizens can live down. On February 15 “the indispensable people” had to suffer the hypocrisy of the U.S. Secretary of State delivering a speech about America’s commitment to Internet freedom while the U.S. Department of Justice (sic) brought unconstitutional action against Twitter to reveal any connection between WikiLeaks and Bradley Manning, the American hero who, in keeping with the U.S. Military Code, exposed U.S. government war crimes and who is being held in punishing conditions not permitted by the U.S. Constitution. The corrupt U.S. government is trying to create a “conspiracy” case against Julian Assange in order to punish him for revealing U.S. government documents that prove beyond every doubt the mendacity of the U.S. government.

This is pretty bad, but it pales in comparison to the implications revealed on February 15 in the British newspaper, The Guardian.

The Guardian obtained an interview with “Curveball,” the source for Colin Powell’s speech of total lies to the United Nations about Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction. Colin Powell’s speech created the stage for the illegal American invasion of Iraq. The Guardian describes “Curveball” as “the man who pulled off one of the greatest confidence tricks in the history of modern intelligence.” As The Guardian puts it, “Curveball” “manufactured a tale of dread.”

U.S. “intelligence” never interviewed “Curveball.” The Americans started a war based on second-hand information given to them by incompetent German intelligence, which fell for “Curveball’s” lies that today German intelligence disbelieves.


As the world now knows, Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The Bush/Cheney Regime, of course, knew this, but “Curveball’s” lies were useful to their undeclared agenda. In his interview with The Guardian, “Curveball,” Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, admitted that he made the whole story up. He wanted to do in Saddam Hussein and told whatever fantasy lie he could make up that would serve his purpose.

If the Bush/Cheney Regime had really believed that Saddam Hussein had world-threatening weapons of mass destruction, it would have been a criminal act to concentrate America’s invading force in a small area of Kuwait where a few WMD could have wiped out the entire U.S. invasion force, thus ending the war before it began.


Some Americans are so thoughtless that they would say that Saddam Hussein would never have used the weapons, because we would have done this and that to Iraq, even nuking Baghdad. But why would Saddam Hussein care if he and his regime were already marked for death? Why would a doomed man desist from inflicting an extraordinary defeat on the American Superpower, thus encouraging Arabs everywhere? Moreover, if Saddam Hussein was unwilling to use his WMD against an invading force, when would he ever use them? It was completely obvious to the U.S. government that no such weapons existed. The weapons inspectors made that completely clear to the Bush/Cheney Regime. There were no Iraqi WMD, and everyone in the U.S. government was apprised of that fact.

Why was there no wonder or comment in the “free” media that the White House accused Iraq of possession of terrible weapons of mass destruction, but nevertheless concentrated its invasion force in such a small area that such weapons could easily have wiped out the invading force?

Does democracy really exist in a land where the media is incompetent and the government is unaccountable and lies through its teeth every time if opens its mouth?

“Curveball” represents a new level of immorality. Rafid al-Janabi shares responsibility for one million dead Iraqis, 4 million displaced Iraqis, a destroyed country, 4,754 dead American troops, 40,000 wounded and maimed American troops, $3 trillion of wasted US resources, every dollar of which is a debt burden to the American population and a threat to the dollar as reserve currency, ten years of propaganda and lies about terrorism and al Qaeda connections, an American “war on terror” that is destroying countless lives in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and which has targeted Iran, and which has destroyed the Bill of Rights, the US Constitution, and the civil liberties that they guarantee. And the piece of lying excrement, Rafid al-Janabi, is proud that he brought Saddam Hussein’s downfall at such enormous expense.

Now that Rafid al-Janabi is revealed in the Guardian interview, how safe is he? There are millions of Iraqis capable of exterminating him for their suffering, and tens of thousands of Americans whose lives have been ruined by Rafid al-Janabi’s lies.

Why does the U.S. government pursue Julian Assange and WikiLeaks for telling the truth when “Curveball,” whose lies wiped out huge numbers of people along with America’s reputation, thinks he can start a political party in Iraq? If the piece of excrement, Rafid al-Janabi, is not killed the minute he appears in Iraq, it will be a miracle.

So we are left to contemplate that a totally incompetent American government has bought enormous instability to its puppet states in the Middle East, because it desperately wanted to believe faulty “intelligence” from Germany that an immoralist provided evidence that Saddam Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction.

And America is a superpower, an indispensable nation.

What a total joke!

http://www.lewrockwell.com/roberts/roberts293.html

Western Civilization Has Shed Its Values

by Paul Craig Roberts

December 6, 2010

Western Civilization no longer upholds the values it proclaims, so what is the basis for its claim to virtue?

For example, the US print and TV media and the US government have made it completely clear that they have no regard for the First Amendment. Consider CNN’s Wolf Blitzer’s reaction to the leaked diplomatic cables that reveal how the US government uses deceptions, bribes, and threats to control other governments and to deceive the American and other publics. Blitzer is outraged that information revealing the US government’s improprieties reached the people, or some of them. As Alexander Cockburn wrote, Blitzer demanded that the US government take the necessary steps to make certain that journalists and the American people never again find out what their government is up to.

The disregard for the First Amendment is well established in the US media, which functions as a propaganda ministry for the government. Remember the NSA leak given to the New York Times that the George W. Bush regime was violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and spying on Americans without obtaining warrants from the FISA court? The New York Times spiked the story for one year and did not release it until after Bush’s reelection. By then, the Bush regime had fabricated a legal doctrine that "authorized" Bush to violate US law.

Glenn Greenwald writing at Salon has exposed the absence of moral standards among WikiLeaks’ critics. WikiLeaks’ critics could not make it clearer that they do not believe in accountable government. And to make certain that the government is not held accountable, WikiLeaks’ critics are calling for every possible police state measure, including extra-judicial murder, to stamp out anyone who makes information available that enables the citizenry to hold government accountable.

The US government definitely does not believe in accountable government. Among the first things the Obama regime did was to make certain that there would be no investigation into the Bush regime’s use of lies, fabricated "intelligence," and deception of the American public and the United Nations in order to further its agenda of conquering the independent Muslim states in the Middle East and turning them into US puppets. The Obama regime also made certain that no member of the Bush regime would be held accountable for violating US and international laws, for torturing detainees, for war crimes, for privacy violations or for any of the other criminal acts of the Bush regime.

As the cables leaked by a patriotic American to WikiLeaks reveal, the US government was even able to prevent accountable government in the UK by having British prime minister Brown "fix" the official Chilcot Inquiry into the deceptions used by former prime minister Tony Blair to lead the British into serving as mercenaries in America’s wars. The US was able to do this, because the British prime minister does not believe in accountable government either.

The leaked documents show that the last thing the US government wants anywhere is a government that is accountable to its own citizens instead of to the US government.

The US government’s frontal assault on freedom of information goes well beyond WikiLeaks and shutting down its host servers. In a December 2 editorial, "Wave goodbye to Internet freedom," the Washington Times reports that Federal Communications Commission chairman Julius Genachowski has "outlined a plan to expand the federal government’s power over the Internet."

The obvious, but unasked, question is: Why does the US government fear the American people and believe that only news that is managed and spun by the government is fit to print? Is there an agenda afoot to turn citizens into subjects?

Perhaps the most discouraging development is the accusation that is being spread via the Internet that Julian Assange is a dupe or even a covert agent used by the CIA and Mossad to spread disinformation that furthers US and Israeli agendas. This accusation might come from intelligence services striving to protect governments by discrediting the leaked information. However, it has gained traction because some of the cables contain false information. Some have concluded, incorrectly, that the false information was put into the documents for the purpose of being leaked.


There is another explanation for the false information. Diplomats concerned with advancing their careers learn to tell their bosses what they want to hear, whether true or false. Diplomats understand that the US government has agendas that it cannot declare and that they are expected to support these agendas by sending in reports that validate the undeclared agendas. For example, the US government cannot openly say that it is endeavoring to create a climate of opinion that gives the US a green light for eliminating the independent Iranian government and re-establishing an American puppet state. US "diplomats," a.k.a., spies, understand this and fabricate the information that supports the agenda.

In my opinion, the most important of all the cables leaked is the secret directive sent by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to 33 US embassies and consulates ordering US diplomats to provide credit card numbers, email addresses, phone, fax and pager numbers, frequent-flyer account numbers and biographic and biometric information including DNA information on UN officials from the Secretary General down, including "heads of peace operations and political field missions."

The directive has been characterized as the spy directive, but this is an unusual kind of spying. Usually, spying focuses on what other governments think, how they are likely to vote on US initiatives, who can be bribed, and on sexual affairs that could be used to blackmail acquiescence to US agendas.

In contrast, the information requested in the secret directive is the kind of information that would be used to steal a person’s identity.

Why does the US government want information that would enable it to steal the identities of UN officials and impersonate them?

The US government loves to pretend that its acts of naked aggression are acts of liberation mandated by "the world community." The world community has been less supportive of US aggression since it learned that the Bush regime lied about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Consequently, the UN has not given Washington the green light Washington wants for a military assault on Iran. Neither has the UN given Washington the extreme sanctions that it wants the world community to impose on Iran.

As the UN refused Washington’s menu of sanctions, Washington unilaterally added its own sanction package to the UN sanctions, to the dismay of the Russians and other governments who believed that they had arrived at a compromise with Washington over the Iran sanctions issue.

Could it be that Washington wants to be able to impersonate UN officials and country delegates so that it can compromise them by involving them in fake terrorist plots, communications with terrorists real or contrived, money laundering, sex scandals and other such means of suborning their cooperation with Washington’s agendas? All the CIA has to do is to call a Taliban or Hamas chief on a UN official’s telephone number or send a compromising fax with a UN official’s fax number or have operatives pay for visits to prostitutes with a UN official’s credit card number.

The report in the Guardian on December 2 that the CIA drew up the UN spy directive signed off by Hillary Clinton is a good indication that the United States government intended to compromise the United Nations and turn the organization, as it has done with so many governments, into a compliant instrument of American policy.

Perhaps there is another plausible explanation of why the US government desired information that would enable it to impersonate UN officials, but as a person who had a 25-year career in Washington I cannot think of what it might be.


http://www.lewrockwell.com/roberts/roberts286.html

Julian Assange: The Unauthorised Autobiography - review
(David Leigh, The Guardian, 26 September 2011)

Marsupials are pouched animals, mostly from Australia, that give birth to their young in an unfinished state. What we have here is a weird marsupial hybrid. It's part Australian WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, and part Scottish novelist and ghostwriter Andrew O'Hagan. This mixed-up creature has given birth to an unfinished draft, dragged out of its pouch and published before its maturity under the wacky title The Unauthorised Autobiography. Assange hasn't really been well-served by his publisher's behaviour. It's the result of what seems to be a characteristic Assange imbroglio in which he will neither give back his £412,000 publisher's advance, nor deliver a finally approved manuscript. But the decision by Canongate's Jamie Byng to publish regardless, although understandable, has produced an unsatisfactory book.

The ghostwriter and his subject hadn't yet really gelled by the time of this draft. It's easy to see the fictionalising hand of O'Hagan in an early chapter about Assange's hippy boyhood in northern Queensland. It begins, soulfully: "For most people, childhood is a climate. In my case, it is perfectly hot and humid with nothing above us but blue sky …" But a later section on the Aussie hacker's souring partnership with the journalists who were to print his leaked US secrets is much more raw. The opening reads like Assange sounding off verbatim on a bad day, in a sentence full of bile and misogyny: "Vanity in a newspaper man is like perfume on a whore: they use it to fend off a dark whiff of themselves." For by the time we reach this second half of the book, O'Hagan's mediating intelligence seems to have retreated, and the digital recorder is doing much of the work. Perhaps the ghost got weary, locked up in a chilly East Anglian winter with his monologuing subject, who is currently confined there on bail, fighting extradition on Swedish sex allegations.

The lack of a final edit does other disservices to Assange's story. The narrative stops too abruptly, before publication in the Guardian and the New York Times of the third and most important set of leaks he had acquired (the state department cables), and the subsequent legal pursuit of Assange on the sex complaints. It's padded out instead with unnecessary chunks of the cables themselves, which can be read elsewhere. The unresolved criminal allegations, inevitably, make him censor a defensive account of sex with two Swedish fans. It's all very well calling a woman "neurotic", but did he deliberately tear a condom as she alleged?

Furthermore, a nervous Canongate libel lawyer, no longer able presumably to rely on Assange as a future witness, appears to have simply chopped out chunks of detail when Assange abuses those he doesn't like. This censorship muddies what could have been a lively, if defamatory, narrative, and pointlessly withholds many of the names. I myself, for example, who clashed with Assange during the Guardian saga, and co-authored a book he didn't care for, am anonymised throughout, transparently enough, as "the news reporter". Yet Bill Keller, then editor of the New York Times and considered presumably to be libel-proof under US free-speech laws, remains relentlessly vituperated against under his own name.

A final fact-check would have removed a crop of stupid errors. It must have been a transcription mistake that turned Heather Brooke into "the 'Independent' journalist" rather than the independent journalist she is. And Oscar Wilde with his rent-boys was not "sleeping with panthers", he was feasting with panthers.

For all its drawbacks, the memoir does add some good detail to the increasingly well-trodden field of Assange studies (it's the fifth book so far). The passage in which he meets his biological father, a bohemian Sydney actor, for the first time in his 20s, is genuinely poignant: "I found myself getting sort of angry … There on shelf after shelf were the exact same books as those I had bought and read myself … If I had only known him, I might just have picked his books down from the shelf … I was forced to make myself up as I went along."

And there's a telling section in which Assange, perhaps unwittingly, reveals why he seeks out unquestioning disciples, and quarrels with so many others: "Opponents past and present have the same essential weakness about them – first they want to use you, then they want to be you, then they want to snuff you out. It's a pattern that stretches in my life from toytown feds to hacks at the Guardian … Usually it ends with these people enumerating one's personal faults, a shocking, ungrateful, unmanly effort, to be filed under despicable in my book … I've been meeting [these people] all my life."

This seems to be a cry coming from a truly threatened personality, in fear of being overwhelmed and extinguished. People have criticised Assange for being preposterously grandiose and lashing out at imagined "enemies". Perhaps they should have been kinder, for there is clearly something else at work here.

It's a shame Assange couldn't get on with the Guardian. As he has the grace occasionally to recognise in this book, people there share some of his beliefs – free speech, investigative journalism, standing up to big corporations and murderous governments, the potentially liberating quality of the internet. And his idea for WikiLeaks provided an exhilarating addition to the world's journalistic possibilities. It was a neat tool – as an uncensorable global publisher of last resort, and as an electronic outlet for leaking the new kinds of huge database the computer age is bringing into existence. But unmediated leaking on a random basis, even of gigabits of purloined documents, cannot ever revolutionise all the world's power relationships. There Assange shows, regrettably, that he is living in a fantasy world.

Behind his high-sounding talk of quantum mechanics and global conspiracies, there lies a more familiar and heartfelt cry: "If only people knew what was really going on, they'd do something about it!" One sympathises. But these very memoirs demonstrate the opposite. Nothing much happened after Assange threw back the curtain to reveal his sensationally leaked Baghdad helicopter gunship video, with US pilots mowing down Reuters employees and young children in a burst of incompetent cannon-fire. As Assange (or O'Hagan) concedes: "It vexes me when the world won't listen."

That was what forced him to accept an offer from some of the world's major newspapers to make sense of the rest of his material, publish it under the authority of their own names and grant him a share of the credibility slowly built up over 190 years of reputable reporting. Thanks to that imaginative transaction, he rocketed briefly to worldwide fame. These marsupial memoirs of his seem unlikely to increase his prospects of becoming the messiah of the information age. Maybe, sadly, even the reverse.

Marsupials are pouched animals, mostly from Australia, that give birth to their young in an unfinished state.