FUSsa-talk Mailing List: Fwd: ZCom Update: John Pilger on Wikileaks

[Robert Tapp (tappx001]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Robert Tapp <tappx001 [at] umn.edu>
> Date: August 20, 2010 5:20:17 PM CDT
> To: Humanist Institute Discussion Group Discussion Group <hidisc [at] 
> humanistinstitute.org>
> 
> 
> John Pilger's column today should be of interest for pulling together much on 
> Wikileaks  that we all should be getting out. 
> 
> Begin forwarded message:
> 
>> From: info [at] zcommunications.org
>> Date: August 20, 2010 4:21:35 PM CDT
>> 
>> Subject: ZCom Update: John Pilger on Wikileaks
>> 
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>> Michael Albert 
>> Chris Spannos 
>> for ZCom
>> 
>> Why Wikileaks Must Be Protected
>> 
>> 
>> By John Pilger
>> Thursday, August 19, 2010
>>  
>>  
>> On 26 July, Wikileaks released thousands of secret US military files on the 
>> war in Afghanistan. Cover-ups, a secret assassination unit and the killing 
>> of civilians are documented. In file after file, the brutalities echo the 
>> colonial past. From Malaya and Vietnam to Bloody Sunday and Basra, little 
>> has changed. The difference is that today there is an extraordinary way of 
>> knowing how faraway societies are routinely ravaged in our name. Wikileaks 
>> has acquired records of six years of civilian killing for both Afghanistan 
>> and Iraq, of which those published in the Guardian, Der Spiegel and the New 
>> York Times are a fraction.
>>  
>> There is understandably hysteria on high, with demands that the Wikileaks  
>> founder Julian Assange is “hunted down” and “rendered”. In Washington, I 
>> interviewed a senior Defence Department official and asked, “Can you give a 
>> guarantee that the editors of Wikileaks and the editor in chief, who is not 
>> American, will not be subjected to the kind of manhunt that we read about in 
>> the media?” He replied, “It’s not my position to give guarantees on 
>> anything”. He referred me to the “ongoing criminal investigation” of a US 
>> soldier, Bradley Manning, an alleged whistleblower. In a nation that claims 
>> its constitution protects truth-tellers, the Obama administration is 
>> pursuing and prosecuting more whistleblowers than any of its modern 
>> predecessors. A Pentagon document states bluntly that US intelligence 
>> intends to “fatally marginalise” Wikileaks. The preferred tactic is smear, 
>> with corporate journalists ever ready to play their part.
>>  
>> On 31 July, the American celebrity reporter Christiane Amanapour interviewed 
>> Secretary of Defence Robert Gates on the ABC network. She invited Gates to 
>> describe to her viewers his “anger” at Wikileaks. She  echoed the Pentagon 
>> line that “this leak has blood on its hands”, thereby cueing Gates to find 
>> Wikileaks “guilty” of “moral culpability”. Such hypocrisy coming from a 
>> regime drenched in the blood of the people of Afghanistan and Iraq – as its 
>> own files make clear – is apparently not for journalistic enquiry. This is 
>> hardly surprising now that a new and fearless form of public accountability, 
>> which Wikileaks represents, threatens not only the war-makers but their 
>> apologists.
>>  
>> Their current propaganda is that Wikileaks is “irresponsible”. Earlier this 
>> year, before it released the cockpit video of an American Apache gunship 
>> killing 19 civilians in Iraq, including journalists and children, Wikileaks 
>> sent people to Baghdad to find the families of the victims in order to 
>> prepare them. Prior to the release of last month’s Afghan War Logs, 
>> Wikileaks wrote to the White House asking that it identify names that might 
>> draw reprisals. There was no reply. More than 15,000 files were withheld and 
>> these, says Assange, will not be released until they have been scrutinised 
>> “line by line” so that names of those at risk can be deleted. 
>>  
>> The pressure on Assange himself seems unrelenting. In his homeland, 
>> Australia, the shadow foreign minister, Julie Bishop, has said that if her 
>> right-wing coalition wins the general election on 21 August, “appropriate 
>> action” will be taken “if an Australian citizen has deliberately undertake 
>> an activity that could put at risk the lives of Australian forces in 
>> Afghanistan or undermine our operations in any way”. The Australian role in 
>> Afghanistan,  effectively mercenary in the service of Washington, has 
>> produced two striking results: the massacre of five children in a village in 
>> Oruzgan province and the overwhelming disapproval of the majority of 
>> Australians.
>>  
>> Last May, following the release of the Apache footage, Assange had his 
>> Australian passport temporarily confiscated when he returned home. The Labor 
>> government in Canberra denies it has received requests from Washington to 
>> detain him and spy on the Wikileaks network. The Cameron government also 
>> denies this. They would, wouldn’t they?  Assange, who came to London last 
>> month to work on exposing the war logs, has had to leave Britain hastily 
>> for, as puts it, “safer climes”.   
>>  
>> On 16 August, the Guardian, citing Daniel Ellsberg, described the great 
>> Israeli whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu as “the pre-eminent hero of the 
>> nuclear age”. Vanunu, who alerted the world to Israel’s secret nuclear 
>> weapons, was kidnapped by the Israelis and incarcerated for 18 years after 
>> he was left unprotected by the London Sunday Times, which had published the 
>> documents he supplied. In 1983, another heroic whistleblower, Sarah Tisdall, 
>> a Foreign Office clerical officer, sent documents to the Guardian that 
>> disclosed how the Thatcher government planned to spin the arrival of 
>> American cruise missiles in Britain. The Guardian complied with a court 
>> order to hand over the documents, and Tisdall went to prison. 
>>  
>> In one sense, the Wikileaks revelations shame the dominant section of 
>> journalism devoted merely to taking down what cynical and malign power tells 
>> it. This is state stenography, not journalism. Look on the Wikileaks site 
>> and read a Ministry of Defence document that describes the “threat” of real 
>> journalism. And so it should be a threat. Having published skilfully the 
>> Wikileaks expose of a fraudulent war, the Guardian should now give its most 
>> powerful and unreserved editorial support to the protection of Julian 
>> Assange and his colleagues, whose truth-telling is as important as any in my 
>> lifetime.  
>>  
>> I like Julian Assange’s dust-dry wit. When I asked him if it was more 
>> difficult to publish secret information in Britain, he replied, “When we 
>> look at Official Secrets Act labelled documents we see that they state it is 
>> offence to retain the information and an offence to destroy the information. 
>> So the only possible outcome we have is to publish the information.”
>>  
>> I
>>