Wikileaks and Woodrow Wilson

94 years ago yesterday, Woodrow Wilson gave his “Fourteen Points” speech to a joint session of the US Congress.  The speech aimed to give a moral value to the First World War and to set the terms for a world after the war.  I was fascinated to read the very first of those Fourteen Points:

Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international understandings of any kind but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view.

The Fourteen Points became established US policy and Wilson managed to persuade France, Italy and the UK to accept them, too.  No longer, alas.

It seems to me that Wikileaks is simply pursuing what used to be a good US policy.

Remembering What Most Forget

Today, the innocent victims of September 11th, 2001 deserve to be remembered. And they will be, all over the place. Here I choose to remember the victims of September 11th, 1973, the date on which a US-financed and sponsored military coup overthrew the democratically elected government in Chile.

Salvador Allende and the 3-4,000 Chilean victims who died as a result of the US coup deserve to be remembered as much as any in the Twin Towers. Perhaps even more, because the US claims to support democracy and yet they encouraged and assisted the overthrow of democracy in Chile; and perhaps even more, because the US claims to support human rights and yet for decades they supported and assisted the suppression of human rights in Chile by the dictatorship of the fascist General Pinochet.

But how much of this will the American mainstream media choose to remember? Virtually none I bet. So it is up to individuals to make it clear that 3-4,000 Chilean dead are just as abhorrent as 3,000 American dead. And the hypocrisy of the United States is as bad as the terrorism of Al Qaeda — and a lot more powerful.

Crash Test Dummies

The Indian Air Force is about to spend $10 billion on new fighter planes. That’s a lot of employment and corporate profit for whoever wins the bid. They have now disqualified both US proposals, one from Boeing and the other from Lockheed, leaving two European planemakers in the contest.

Now, I don’t have a great deal of interest in these kinds of deals but my attention was caught by this particular paragraph:

“The two European fighters are generally seen as aerodynamically superior, having outperformed both US-made aircraft in tests under the adverse climatic conditions in which they might have to be used, particularly in the high altitudes and low temperatures of northern Kashmir. Experts suggest that the American planes are technologically ten years behind the European ones.

How can that be? How can that be? Don’t the US military-industrial complex get half a trillion dollars each and every year? And they are ten years behind? At least ten Maddof-sized scams are being pulled on the US taxpayer each and every year by these corporations and their bureaucratic brothers.

The true inefficiency of the US state-capitalist system is about equal to the inefficiency of the former-USSR state-capitalist system. We are seeing the warping effect this has on the economy all around us, with massive systemic failures in health care, industrial manufacturing, unemployment, budget deficits and bubbles of every kind. What the hell would happen to the American economy if peace broke out? The War on Terrorism, the War on Drugs, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, etc: these are all vital inputs that drive the machine and the corporations.

And none of this is new; many people have understood this for a long time.  The term “peace dividend” was even floated in the early 1990s after the Ruskies threw in the towel.  But now, two decades later, we find the US ever deeper in the mire.  It is hard to know how to unravel the socialist-style dependence the rest of the US economy has on these unsustainable levels of defense spending. In the end, it is hard to see anything other than a true crash.

Uncle Sam’s Death Mask

Under cover of the US media’s blanket coverage of the disasters in Japan, the brutal medieval princelings of Arabia and the Gulf have shipped troops and police to Bahrain to ensure that democracy cannot flourish in that region.

Nothing in that region happens without at least a nod from Uncle Sam.  Their actions in supplying the nod give the lie to any public speech by Obama or Clinton expressing support for democratic protesters in North Africa and the Near East. In this case, the actions will be deadly while their words are nothing but syrup. Their masks of concern will conspire in the violent deaths of young people, women and children, none of whom want anything but the barrel scrapings from the American Dream.

I can only hope that France and Britain recognize the cowardice of Obama’s administration and thus make their own positive decision to serve democracy and the masses in Libya by forcing Gaddafi’s air power to the ground.  I’m not holding my breath though.

Obama’s Press Conferences Rival Golf as Snooze TV

Screw The Saudis

It was reported yesterday that the great U.S. ally, the barbaric and feudal kingdom of Saudi Arabia, has sent special police forces across the causeway into Bahrain to help the king suppress democracy demonstrators. Such an ally!

It is said by US foreign policy wonks that the US needs Saudi Arabia in its fights against terrorism and Iran. Such nonsense! We know perfectly well that the Kingdom is the largest giver of funds to the jihadists, that 80%+ of the 9/11 bombers came from Saudi Arabia, and that the Kingdom is one of the worst places in the world for human rights failures. For those reasons alone, we should cut them adrift as they can hardly do the West any more harm than they do already.

Moreover, it is the Kingdom that needs OUR help to survive against their enemies and to buy their oil.  We just need the courage to tell them to go to hell and then sit back and watch them crawl back into our corner (or collapse).

Obama Care

At the Guardian’s Comment Is Free website, Joshua Trevino has a must-red right-on piece on the abject failure of Obama’s foreign policy.

The real tragedy of the president’s epic mishandling of Egypt is not merely the sceptical-at-best Egypt that will emerge. It’s that Egypt is merely the latest episode in a pattern laid down by Barack Obama in the first two years of his presidency. In just two years, he has faced multiple crises of liberty, democracy and the American national interest abroad – and he has failed each test. Even rhetorical support for those seeking freedom, the bare minimum a president can do, is strikingly absent except under duress.

The plain and pathetic reality is that Barack Obama chooses the existing regime over any alternative, and/or against the American ally, every time. Ask the Hondurans who ejected their Chavista president. Ask the Falkland islanders sold out by the Secretary of State Clinton intoning on the “Malvinas”. Ask the east European Nato members stripped of a full American deterrent in the name of a Russia “reset”. Ask the Tunisians who received not a word of endorsement as they ejected Ben Ali. Ask the Iranians who fought and died for their freedom in the hot summer of 2009.

And now, ask the Egyptians who gather, once again, in Tahrir Square as you read this.

To shout “Shame!” seems hardly enough.

Publicly Supporting Torturers

The US has always tended to the strong-man theory of governance outside the US itself. Let “democracy” be a useful but distant aim, but let’s have stability before freedom.  That’s how Mubarak, as the present example, has survived for so long.

But now, with Suleiman, the US is publicly supporting a person who’s only known background — and well-know at that — is as a torturer and a willing assistant to the US’s illegal rendition program where terrorism “suspects” were herded on CIA flights from one torturing regime to another.

With Suleiman there are no peace treaties to hide behind, no stable borders with Israel. Just torture.

Perhaps we should welcome this new transparency in American foreign policy?

Obama’s Brave New World

I am one of those who believe that the various Wikileaks document dumps of the past year or so are pivotal historic events.  They are key events by the very nature of the leaks and publication themselves made doubly important by the content of the documents.  Of equal importance is the reaction of the key players within the American empire — and that reaction has been disturbingly authoritarian.

I don’t just mean the very public calls for the execution of Julian Assange, and the political arguments being established for unilateral action by the US in some other nation to seize Assange and his team.

I also don’t just mean the un-American anti-freedom activities of Amazon and Paypal acting as surrogates for Joe Lieberman and Homeboy Security.

But I also mean the insidious Big Brother nature of the State Department telling students that to read any coverage of the leaked cables threatens their future employment with the US Government. And I mean the Brave New World news-speak of the Defense Department telling all their millions of employees and contractors that to read anything about the leaked material — even coverage in mainstream media — opens them to the threat of severe disciplinary action.

I know this is the futile kicking of a dying empire, but that doesn’t make their claws any less dangerous today.

 

The Real Revelation From Wikileaks

There has been endless ink spilled this week on and about the latest release by Wikileaks of diplomatic correspondence that we were never supposed to see.  There have been the predictable hoorahs from progressives and predictable hang-’em-high sentiments from the right and from governments.  Amid the thousands of column inches I picked out Glenn Greenwald’s interesting piece in Salon.

The WikiLeaks disclosure has revealed not only numerous government secrets, but also the driving mentality of major factions in our political and media class.  Simply put, there are few countries in the world with citizenries and especially media outlets more devoted to serving, protecting and venerating government authorities than the U.S. Indeed, I don’t quite recall any entity producing as much bipartisan contempt across the American political spectrum as WikiLeaks has:  as usual, for authoritarian minds, those who expose secrets are far more hated than those in power who commit heinous acts using secrecy as their principal weapon.

He shines a hot spotlight at the media:

[W]e have the group which — so very revealingly — is the angriest and most offended about the WikiLeaks disclosures:  the American media … On CNN last night, Wolf Blitzer was beside himself with rage over the fact that the U.S. Government had failed to keep all these things secret from him … Blitzer demanded assurances that the Government has taken the necessary steps to prevent him, the media generally and the citizenry from finding out any more secrets:  “Do we know yet if they’ve [done] that fix? In other words, somebody right now who has top secret or secret security clerics can no longer download information onto a C.D. or a thumb drive? Has that been fixed already?”  The central concern of Blitzer — one of our nation’s most  honored “journalists” – is making sure that nobody learns what the U.S. Government is up to …

It’s just so revealing that the sole criticism of the Government allowed to be heard is that they haven’t done enough to keep us all in the dark.

Greenwald notes another group, those with a close tie to government, that is fronting many of these attacks on Wikileaks:

It’s hardly surprising that people … who work for the Government and depend upon staying in its good graces are screeching all sorts of fear-mongering claims … That’s what the Government, its enablers and royal court hangers-on do:  you wind them up and they insist that any restraints on, or exposure of, the U.S. Government will help the Terrorists get us, and subject us to other scary dangers.

Finally, Greenwald notes that much of the reactionary response ignores the rule of law:

First we have the group demanding that Julian Assange be murdered without any charges, trial or due process … The way in which so many political commentators so routinely and casually call for the eradication of human beings without a shred of due process is nothing short of demented … After a decade’s worth of American invasions, bombings, occupations, checkpoint shootings, drone attacks, assassinations and civilian slaughter, the notion that the U.S. Government can and should murder whomever it wants is more frequent and unrestrained than ever …

These are usually the same people, of course, who brand themselves “pro-life” and Crusaders for the Sanctity of Human Life and/or who deride Islamic extremists for their disregard for human life.

Greenwald notes that there can be dangers in leaks of such magnitude. However, he is clear that:

[O]ur government and political culture is so far toward the extreme pole of excessive, improper secrecy that that is clearly the far more significant threat … It’s staggering to watch anyone walk around acting as though the real threat is from excessive disclosures when the impenetrable, always-growing Wall of Secrecy is what has enabled virtually every abuse and transgression of the U.S. government over the last two decades at least.

And he concludes:

WikiLeaks, for whatever its flaws, is one of the very few entities shining a vitally needed light on all of this.  It’s hardly surprising, then, that those factions — and their hordes of spokespeople, followers and enablers — see WikiLeaks as a force for evil.  That’s evidence of how much good they are doing.

I couldn’t agree more.

 

Your Tax Dollars At Work

Having failed through the judicial route to shut down publication of an expose, the CIA is negotiating to buy the entire first-run printing of 10,000. When purchased they will be pulped, according to the Guardian.

And so it is for Anthony Shaffer, thanks to the Pentagon’s desire to buy up all 10,000 copies of the first printing of his new book, Operation Dark Heart. And then pulp them.  The US defence department is scrambling to dispose of the book , which threatens to be a highly embarrassing expose by Anthony Shaffer, a  former intelligence officer, of secret operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and of how the US military top brass missed the opportunity to win the war against the Taliban.  The department of defence is in talks with St Martin’s Press to purchase the entire first print run on the grounds of national security.  The publisher is content to sell the books but the two sides are in a grinding dispute over what should appear in a censored version and when it should be released …

The Pentagon is using Shaffer’s status as a reserve officer to block him from speaking to the press, but a source close to the publication of the book said that some of the sensitive material had been removed but the defence department was still seeking to purge it of other information that is 20 years old or even in the public domain.  For that reason, there is suspicion that the defence department is less concerned with the nitty gritty of classified material than its broader story of intelligence forays in to Pakistan and his claim that top US military leaders blew an opportunity to win the war years ago.

Should they really be using your tax dollars to help whitewash the intelligence community?