Allan Nairn - International Politics

AMY GOODMAN: As 2010 draws to a close, what is the role of the United States in the world today? From the ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to the cuts in social programs here at home, where is the emerging hope for change around the world?

Today we spend the hour with award-winning investigative journalist and activist Allan Nairn. In 1991, we were both covering Indonesia and occupied East Timor and witnessed and survived the Santa Cruz massacre, in which Indonesian soldiers killed more than 270 Timorese. We survived the massacre, but the soldiers fractured Allan’s skull.

Over the past three decades, he has exposed how the U.S. government has backed paramilitary death squads in El Salvador, in Guatemala, in Haiti. He also uncovered U.S. support for the Indonesian military’s assassinations and torture of civilians. Among other awards, he’s won the Alfred I. duPont Award and the Robert F. Kennedy International Prize for International Reporting, the George Polk Award for his exposé of Pentagon and CIA funding of paramilitary death squads in Haiti, and the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Reporting. He’s just back from China and in the region of Asia over the last year. He’s joining us in our studio today for the hour.

Allan, welcome to Democracy Now!

ALLAN NAIRN: Thanks. Good to be with you.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, it is a tall order to talk about the role of the United States in the world today, but why don’t we start right there?

ALLAN NAIRN: Well, now, as the U.S. is losing its edge economically, it has one clear comparative advantage. And that’s in killing. And it’s using it. Obama has increased the attacks on Afghanistan, Pakistan. Brookings Institution last year estimated that for every one militant, as they put it, killed in Pakistan, the U.S. drones kill 10 civilians. And they said that was OK; they defended the U.S. policy. General Michael Hayden, former head of the CIA, also the National Security Agency, also former director of National Intelligence, said that our default position is to kill our adversaries, referring to the use of the drones. Harold Koh, who’s the legal adviser for the Justice Department, earlier this year at a State Department briefing on the results of the review conference on the International Criminal Court, described the international legal environment that the U.S. had helped shape. And he said this: "No U.S. national can be prosecuted for aggression. We ensure total protection to our American forces and other nationals going forward." So, in that situation, the U.S. defines who the adversaries is. The default U.S. position is to kill the adversary. When you kill the adversary, you kill 10 civilians. What are the survivors, the loved ones of those civilians, supposed to do, when the international legal system is rigged so that there is no peaceful redress, so they have no place to go? It’s unjustified. It’s terrorism by the U.S. law’s own definition.

But it’s also ominous for Americans, especially ominous in a historical moment where the U.S. is losing its edge. Right now it still has the massive military advantage, but how long is that going to last? Other countries have more people to field as troops. Other countries can manufacture weapons more cheaply. The U.S. still has the edge in military technology, but in today’s information age, that can’t last very long. So, if the appeal to decency can’t wake up Americans and make them say stop, maybe the appeal to self-interest and fear can do it.

Imagine a moment not too far in the future—some of the technical magazines just started writing about this—where foreign countries would have the capacity to put drones in the skies over New York, over San Diego, over Alabama, over Chicago. How would Americans feel about that, when the discretion on whether to push the button on the missile and launch it at anyone—at anyone in the U.S.—a member of Congress, a member of the President’s staff, a GI, someone walking down the street—when that discretion lies with someone in some foreign capital, some commander? And imagine how Americans would feel if those overseas controllers of the drones flying in the skies over the U.S. decided to apply American standards; if they decided to apply the Brookings standard that says, OK, if we target one American military planner and we kill 10 civilians, that’s OK; if they decide to apply General Hayden’s standard that, well, it’s our default position to kill these adversaries; and if they decide to apply the U.S. State Department standard, which says no matter what we do, we can’t be prosecuted. That’s the situation that the U.S. is setting up. And it’s going to be increasingly dangerous for Americans as time goes by.

AMY GOODMAN: The international soldier death toll in Afghanistan is, well, I think, as of this broadcast, around 709. Almost 500 of those are U.S. soldiers. It’s the deadliest year in what? We’re coming—we’re in the 10th year, the longest war the U.S. has been involved in, ongoing work, in the history of this country. What about Afghanistan, what you feel needs to be done?

ALLAN NAIRN: Well, it’s interesting that you mention the killings of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. To me, one of the most interesting points that’s made in the documents released by WikiLeaks came out in some of the earlier releases, particularly the Iraq war logs. If you read those, you see that when the U.S. military is reporting on U.S. killings of civilians in Iraq or in Afghanistan, they almost always say, "Well, we did it to protect our forces. Some of our soldiers came under fire. We responded. And we wiped out the house." In some cases, they end up wiping out the whole village compound. "And that’s why those civilians were killed." Or, "There was fire from the ground. Our men were in the air in a helicopter. We returned fire. It turned out that it was a wedding party on the ground, and they were shooting their guns in celebration. But we did it with the intent of protecting our forces."

And there’s a certain logic to that. If you’re a soldier and you’re in combat, naturally you want to protect yourself and protect your friends, and you will do everything possible to do that, including killing someone who you think, who you speculate, might be firing at you or might potentially fire at you. So that inevitably sets up a situation where when you send troops into a country in a hostile situation, when you invade a country, that means—really it means, in a practical sense—that in order to protect your troops, you have to kill civilians, you have to kill them in large numbers. And that’s what the U.S. is doing in Afghanistan. That’s what it did in Iraq. And that’s what it’s setting up to do in a series of other places. It’s an inevitable result of the initial act, of the initial act of invasion, and, in legal terms, what is often the initial act of aggression.

AMY GOODMAN: In Pakistan, you were talking about the drones, and we just read this headline about U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan killing at least 33 people over the last two days. On Tuesday, drones struck a pair of sites in North Waziristan, killing 15 people. Separate attack Monday, 18. U.S. has carried out more than 116 drone attacks this year, more than double the amount from last year. I think the figure of some poll taken in Pakistan, about 59 percent of the people of Pakistan feel the United States is the enemy, yet the United States is pouring billions of dollars to shore up the government of Pakistan.

ALLAN NAIRN: Yeah. That poll would actually suggest that maybe the U.S. image is improving a little, because there have been some other polls where it’s like 70 and 80 percent of Pakistanis saw the U.S. as the main enemy.

What the U.S. is doing with the Pakistan military is remarkable, especially when you compare it with the Iran nuclear situation. The U.S. is saying that, well, maybe we’ll have to invade Iran, or maybe we’ll have to let Israel invade Iran, because Iran is developing nuclear weapons and Iran is a hostile Islamist regime. Well, the U.S. also says, as documented further in the WikiLeaks releases, but it’s said this publicly, that the Taliban in Afghanistan and also the—what are called the Taliban and their allies of Pakistan are backed by the Pakistani military, are backed by the ISI, the Inter Services Intelligence. That is the same Pakistani military that controls the nuclear weapons that Pakistan already has. That is the same Pakistani military that is receiving billions upon billions of dollars in U.S. aid. Yet the U.S. is not saying, "Oh, we have to cut off that Pakistani military. We have to invade Pakistan, because they’re backing the Taliban."

So, the solution for Iran possibly getting a nuclear weapon is to invade Iran. The solution for Pakistan actually having a nuclear weapon and actually backing the Taliban is to give more money to Pakistan. There’s no underlying logic to it, except the logic of sustaining war, of sustaining conflict, of sustaining tension, of having an ongoing drama that provides the top politicians, like Obama, like Bush before him, a chance to prove their toughness, a chance to boost their popularity, and which sustains the vast military complex that chews up so much of the U.S. economy. Once you get beyond that, you can’t come up with a coherent explanation as to why the U.S. should be doing that.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you think the U.S. should do right now with Afghanistan?

ALLAN NAIRN: Get out.

AMY GOODMAN: How?

ALLAN NAIRN: Pull the troops out. The only legitimate role would be if you could find a way—and it’s not easy now in a state, in a place that is so devastated and corrupted—if you could find a way to pump in money that would serve as a kind of reparation for the damage that the U.S. has done to Afghanistan and maybe have that money go to rebuild houses and feed hungry people. That would be a justified U.S. role. But the military, the intelligence people, just get them out. They are only making matters worse. They are only making matters worse for the civilian population of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and they’re also only making matters worse for Americans, who worry about being bombed when they’re on an airplane, who worry about car bombs in Times Square. Anyone who seriously looks at this sees, and often says and often writes, that this creates more animosity, more people who want to attack the U.S. So get out, and you save more lives on the ground there, and you also diminish the danger to Americans.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to award-winning investigative journalist and activist Allan Nairn. His articles appear online at allannairn.com. That’s A-L-L-A-N-N-A-I-R-N dot com. We’ll continue with him after break. Stay with us.

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AMY GOODMAN: As we wrap up 2010, we’re spending the hour in a wide-ranging discussion with Allan Nairn—he has just returned from China, he was in Asia for the last year—to get an outside perspective of what’s happening in this country, how people in the other parts of the world see the United States and also what’s happening here at home. Allan Nairn is an award-winning investigative journalist and activist.

Allan, you mentioned the issue of reparations. Expand on that.

ALLAN NAIRN: Well, this came to mind with what happened earlier this year in Haiti, with the earthquake, now the cholera. Haiti, just a few miles from Miami, is in so many ways a devastated place. You know, when Haitians and some well-meaning foreigners who try to help in Haiti look around and try to help, try to rebuild from the earthquake, try to stop the spread of the diarrhea that’s killing thousands, it’s not always clear what they can do. Some steps are evident, but the damage to Haiti has been so massive—the hillsides stripped of trees, the entire national housing stock in such a weak state that it could be knocked down by the shaking of an earthquake that would not do the same damage in another country—they’re starting at a tremendous disadvantage.

Yet Haiti, if you look historically, is one of the great nations of world history. They were a pioneer of democracy. The Haitian slave rebellion that led to the founding of the nation led to the establishment of one of the first republics in the world, a republic that the U.S. Founding Fathers immediately said had to be destroyed because of the destructive example it would set, because of the threat that it might give the slaves in the American South an idea and they might try to rebel and establish—turn America into a republic, a real republic, in which slaves could also have citizenship rights, as opposed to the fake republic which prevailed in the U.S. at that time. Haiti was also the source of great riches, gold in the mountains, riches that were taken by France and used to gild the palaces of Paris and Versailles. And the place was looted, the place was sacked, by France, the U.S., by other foreign interests. And now it’s at one of the lowest economic levels of any place in the world.

And if you look at Haiti, if you look at Afghanistan and other of the world’s poorest places, part of the solution is obviously letting people alone politically and militarily so they can pursue their own solution. You know, China is now being heralded as an example of economic progress. Well, China was an imperial system. They were colonized. And they went through, really, what was in effect a series of revolutions, a series of political revolutions, before they were able to reach the point that they could achieve this rapid economic progress. Can you imagine the United States letting Haiti go through an actual revolution, a social revolution that would change the basic terms of who owns the land, of who owns the property, of who has power? The U.S. won’t even let Haiti have a fair election. When Aristide, the reformist priest, got elected as president, the military ousted him in a coup, and the U.S. came in and backed death squads to institutionalize that. When Aristide later got elected as president, the U.S. kidnapped him and ran him out of the country. So the U.S. won’t even let Haiti have an election, let alone a revolution. But if you look at—so that would be one element, allowing real political freedom, so the Haitians could choose a way out.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean, "allowing"?

ALLAN NAIRN: Well, allowing, not—if the Haitians decide to try to redistribute land, or as—the very modest steps that Aristide tried to take when he was first president, he doubled the minimum wage. He tried to institute a basic Social Security system. This was enough for the U.S. to say, well, a military coup is a better solution. So, stepping back and letting them do what they need to do politically.

But beyond that, the practical solution, and the only reasonable one, would be some kind of massive reparation, some kind of giving back of the modern equivalent of all that gold that was stolen and all the other wealth that was taken out of Haiti over the years.

Now, the immediate response to that, when you say reparations, is people say, "Oh, that’s not reasonable. That’s not fair, because that was done by ancestors. That was done by people in the past. I didn’t—I’m not guilty of robbing Haiti. Why should I pay?" OK, that’s a reasonable argument. But if you want to cancel the old guilt, because you didn’t do it, you didn’t do the crime, you didn’t do the theft, that would also mean that you should also cancel the old inheritance that came down to you from those same ancestors. So, alright, so you don’t have to pay reparations, but that would also mean you have to surrender your unearned inheritance. And if you look realistically at the world, most of what people have comes from what they inherit, not from what they earn themselves.

Take this country. You grow up in the suburbs. You grow up in, you know, a nice neighborhood of New York City. You have good food. You have clean water. You won’t be sickened by your own excrement. You live in a building that’s warm in the winter and cool in the summer. The roads outside are solid and safe. You can go to school for free. You have all these things and more. And you have all this before you have lifted a finger in labor, in work, in earning, in initiative, in free enterprise. You have all this while you’re just a kid sitting there watching cartoons on television. So, obviously, you have a vast inheritance, some of it from your own family, but most of it from the society as a whole, from the rich society.

You know, in this country and in a lot of the rich world, when we talk about issues of equality, there’s always a standard debate goes on, a very sterile debate, between equality of opportunity and equality of result. The right says, "Oh, we can only have—we shouldn’t have equality of result: everybody ends up at the same place. We should only have equality of opportunity: people start from the same place, and then you have a fair race." I tell you, the poor of the world would be thrilled to settle for just equality of opportunity. Forget equality of result. If you really had a regime of equality of opportunity, that would mean all children start from the same place. They all start with nutritious food, with clean water, with free schooling, with a safe home, etc., and then, let the chips fall where they may, run the race. But that is so far from what we have now in the world. It’s obvious. It’s obvious to everyone. In order to achieve that equality of opportunity and in order to be evenhanded in applying the principle of what to do about the theft and the inheritance accumulated by our forefathers, you would need massive reparations, a massive flow of money from the rich world to places like Haiti, to places like Afghanistan. And that’s just through applying consensus principles that everyone accepts.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to award-winning journalist Allan Nairn. Allan, talk about AFRICOM.

ALLAN NAIRN: Well, AFRICOM is the Africa military command that was started by Bush, Jr., and has continued and expanded under Obama. And it’s a remarkable thing. It gets very little publicity, especially in the U.S. But what it does is it sends into the hungriest parts of the world, the countries of—in particular, the countries of north and northeastern Africa, it sends in U.S. Green Berets, drones, CIA operatives. They militarize these societies. They are there ostensibly to fight what they refer to as Islamist terrorism. And so, in these societies where people are stunted from hunger, where it’s a day-to-day struggle for food among vast percentages of the populations, the U.S. is sending in bullets and increasing tensions.

Ethiopia is a good example. Ethiopia is famous as a place with recurring hunger problems. And the U.S. has seized upon it as its key military platform in the region, kind of like the role that Colombia plays for the U.S. in South America. The U.S. backed Ethiopia in an invasion of Somalia. The U.S. is sending covert operatives in constantly, and this in the midst of the worst kind of deprivation. And no one talks about it here. Yet, it’s criminal.

AMY GOODMAN: When President Bush wanted to establish AFRICOM in Africa, he couldn’t get an African country to agree to be its base, so he had to turn to Europe.

ALLAN NAIRN: Yeah, for good reason. But if you look at how things are changing in the world today, the U.S. militarily is in some senses in retreat, and that’s a very good thing. It’s what allowed South America to experiment with democracy in recent years. You have the rise of populist movements in places like Venezuela and Ecuador that would have been impossible in an earlier era, when the U.S. was ready to pounce on any stirring of dissent in Latin America. The U.S. created death squads throughout Central America and also South America in the 1960s and '70s, starting under Democratic administrations, Kennedy and Johnson. But today, in the recent period, U.S. attention has been diverted elsewhere, and it's allowed politics to—some free choice, some free elections, to develop. And it’s a very good thing.

Now there’s a possibility that the U.S. may be forced into a retreat in Asia as the power of China grows. Now, China is a dictatorship. They apply repression on their borders. They back a murderous regime in Burma. They repress the people of Tibet. But they are not anywhere near as aggressive as the U.S. in defining their area of operations as the entire globe and sending in military and intelligence forces into every country on earth. And so, in the face of the rise of China’s power, if the U.S. starts to retreat from Asia, it could provide some tactical possibilities for popular movements. They could start to play one off against the other.

AMY GOODMAN: So you have the United States, a first-rate military power, and yet its economy is seriously slipping. What does that mean—first-rate military power, second-rate economy?

ALLAN NAIRN: Well, it means that, in a certain sense, killing and the use of force abroad becomes even more important for the U.S. than it was before. But even that, even that edge, I think, is—may not last for too long. You know, after Reagan invaded Grenada, he said, "Now the U.S. is standing tall. Now we can be proud." After the U.S. invaded Iraq, Wesley Clark, General Wesley Clark, who became—later became a leading politician in the Democratic Party, said, "This shows that we cannot be challenged. No one can dare to defy us."

Well, Reagan turned out to be right, because after Grenada, the U.S. launched a series of attacks on soft targets, places that couldn’t really defend themselves, like Panama, Nicaragua, many other places. But Clark turned out to be wrong, because the U.S. was essentially defeated in Iraq, essentially rebuffed. What initially looked like a victory turned into a disaster for U.S. power. And now, it’s not the case that the U.S. can just drop a hint to a given country and they have to fear that the U.S. parachuters will be dropping the next day. And that is something that opens up possibilities for the world. It’s something that we have to take advantage of.

AMY GOODMAN: The tax compromise, the bill that was passed, $800—more than $800 billion, who it helped? It extends the Bush-era tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans, reduces the estate tax, in return for a 13-month extension for jobless benefits, a handful of tax credits for low- and moderate-income Americans, at least a quarter of the tax savings going to the wealthiest one percent of the population. The only group that will see taxes increase are the nation’s lowest-paid workers. Talk about who benefits in this country and the trend that’s going on in this country.

ALLAN NAIRN: Well, there’s this remarkable trend now, this mania for what they call "austerity" among the—almost the entire U.S. intelligentsia, everyone saying, "Oh, we have to cut the deficit. We have to cut back."

AMY GOODMAN: The most hit word in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary is the word "austerity" in 2010.

ALLAN NAIRN: And the meaning of austerity, or the usual understanding of that word, is cutting back on luxuries. And that’s a good thing. That would be a good thing if the U.S. were to cut back on luxuries. Well, you can’t cut back on luxuries unless you have luxuries. And the people who really have luxuries are the U.S. rich. But those who push austerity are not talking about cutting back on luxuries for the rich; they’re talking about cutting back on necessities for working people and the poor. So, at a time when the U.S. Department of Agriculture is documenting increasing numbers of American families that report experiencing some days of hunger in their household, at a time when U.S. schools are turning out fewer students who are good at reading and math and logical thinking as compared to—especially as compared to students from other countries, at this precise time, what does the entire U.S. intelligentsia say with one word? Cut Social Security. Cut unemployment insurance. Cut food stamps. Cut the public schools. Cut the opportunity to get higher education. As opposed to saying—real austerity—cut the luxuries of the rich. In a way, it’s a little puzzling, in a way, because the overall economic effect of it is to cut at a time when you should be expanding. In the midst of a recession, conventional capitalist economic theory says, you have to stimulate, you have to expand. Instead, they’re talking about going in exactly the opposite direction.

In a way—I mean, this is just kind of speculation, but there may be some connection to the military troubles the U.S. is having, because, you know, in American politics, and among American intellectuals who deal with politics, you always have to prove you’re a tough guy. You always have to prove you’re willing to be harsh, you’re willing to make the tough choices. And for most of recent history, that’s been proven by backing various wars and invasions and support for repressive regimes overseas. You know, you would prove you were tough-minded by backing that. Now, after what happened to the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan with their military failures, it’s a little embarrassing to go down that route to prove your toughness. So today, to prove you’re tough, you talk about, "Oh, we have to make painful choices on entitlements. We have to make painful choices on Social Security and Medicare." They don’t mean painful for the people who have the money; they mean painful for the people who don’t.

AMY GOODMAN: The United States spends nearly as much on military power as every country in the world combined, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. We spend more than six times as much as the country with the next-highest budget, which is China.

ALLAN NAIRN: Yeah, but that will be—that’s a very interesting state of affairs, because it’ll be hard for the U.S. to sustain that. OK, they spend the money on weaponry, but where are they going to make those weapons? Because the entire movement of U.S. corporations in recent years has been to shift their industrial production of everything overseas, in search of the cheapest, most repressed, most terrorized labor they can find. And military equipment is an industrial good like any other. And before long, it’s going to become increasingly more and more uneconomical for the U.S. to try to make that military equipment domestically, and it’s going to be harder to control that technology.

You know, but that also—that economic shift has some good implications. You know, it’s especially striking when you’ve been overseas for a while and you come back to the U.S. You see that there is—especially among the U.S. upper middle class, there’s this whole lifestyle, this whole green cyber lifestyle where everybody’s got their iPad and their iPod and, you know, their i-this and their i-that. But if you look at what is behind that, you know, the coltan, the minerals that are used to make the components for that, that’s mined in the Congo, where the workers are virtual slaves. The manufacturing of those electronic gadgets is no longer done in the U.S.; it’s done in places like China—the iPhone made in Shanghai, for example. So, what lies behind that is fun for the upper middle class, who are playing with the gadgets; unemployment for the U.S. workers, who don’t make them anymore; virtual slavery for the Congolese workers who are extracting the minerals under the lash.

But on the Chinese end of things and in other comparable economies, it’s a slightly different and more interesting story, in one sense. There’s tremendous exploitation of these Chinese workers. After they shifted away from communism in the strict economic sense and made the capitalist opening, labor rights declined in China. This is according to a study by a corporate-sponsored think tank there. Even under the strict communist dictatorship of Mao, workers in China had more rights than they did in the initial years of the capitalist opening that began with Deng. But now, that picture is starting to change. There are labor shortages in China. There have been a series of actions by workers. They’re not allowed to organize unions, but there have been, in effect, wildcat strikes, riots, workers so driven to despair that they commit suicide—this, in particular, at Foxconn, one of the companies that makes components for the iPhone—all sorts of turmoil around Chinese labor. And in response, the government has had to make big concessions to them. They got severance pay. The migrant workers who come in from the countryside are now allowed certain rights in the city that they didn’t have about the schooling of their children, about social welfare. Without yet having legal unions, they are starting to make progress, and they’re generating upward pressure on wages.

Now, that is profound, because China is such a large and growing production—percentage of world production, that upward pressure on wages out of China is going to ripple everywhere. It’s going to ripple all the way to Indonesia, all the way to Haiti, and all the way to the U.S. This started about two-and-a-half years ago. And even though U.S. labor has been all but crushed politically—and that’s what’s making these attacks on Social Security and the schools and Medicare possible, because labor isn’t—American labor isn’t there to defend them anymore. The middle class that labor helped create is badly weakened. Even though that’s the current situation, there’s kind of a reinforcement coming, and that is upward pressure on wages by the new activity of workers in the very politically repressed China. And this inevitably will be spreading to other places. So it’s actually a very hopeful development to look out for and to look—that people can be looking to take advantage of.

AMY GOODMAN: Allan, we have to break. When we come back, I want to ask you about WikiLeaks, the largest release of secret documents in the history of this country. We’re speaking with award-winning journalist, activist, Allan Nairn. He lives overseas, has just come back for a week to this country, returning to Asia in just a few days. If you’d like a copy of today’s show, you can go to our website at democracynow.org. We’ll be back with Allan in a minute.

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AMY GOODMAN: We’re spending the hour with the award-winning investigative journalist and activist Allan Nairn. Allan survived the Santa Cruz massacre in 1991 in East Timor, when Indonesian troops armed with U.S. M-16s opened fire on thousands of innocent Timorese. They killed more than 270 Timorese. They fractured Allan’s skull. Ultimately, 10 years later, East Timor won its independence and became the newest nation in the world.

Allan has has been covering the world for years, has won many journalistic prizes for his coverage of U.S. involvement in supporting death squads in El Salvador and exposing the G2, Guatemalan intelligence, in Guatemala during the 1980s, exposing CIA-Pentagon support of death squads in Haiti, the FRAP, and lives overseas in Asia, in Malaysia, in Indonesia, in China, in Burma. He has just returned from Thailand and other places, here for a week or two.

Allan, WikiLeaks—what is the significance of this whistleblowing website? By the way, AP, other news organizations, though they often—they had referred to it as a whistleblowing website, have now officially dropped the term "whistleblowing" because it has too positive connotations. But talk about the significance of WikiLeaks.

ALLAN NAIRN: Well, it’s a very good thing. People should realize, though, it only scratches the surface. These documents that are released, they’re a very low level of classification, so it’s not as if the deepest, darkest secrets of the U.S. government are out there. These documents, which have produced what people regard as quite a few shocking headlines, are the most commonplace matters of U.S. operations, so common that literally hundreds of thousands of people had routine access to these documents. And apparently, Private Bradley Manning decided to download them and leak them to WikiLeaks. And by the way, he’s the real protagonist in this. He’s the real hero. And he’s imprisoned without charge under horrible conditions. People should be supporting him.

There’s talk now, there are reports, that the U.S. is looking to indict Assange on conspiracy. Obama’s Justice Department, Holder, is reportedly, according to theNew York Times, trying to do this. And they’re looking at a charge that would say it’s conspiracy because Assange encouraged Manning to leak the documents. He didn’t just passively receive them; he encouraged him. Well, if they indict him for that, they should also indict me, because I have done that, as well. They say that it’s a crime of conspiracy to solicit classified U.S. material in that way. Well, I have done that. I have done that on numerous occasions. And I’ll now tell Attorney General Holder, you can come and arrest me, too.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, like many investigative journalists.

ALLAN NAIRN: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s what investigative journalists do, right?

ALLAN NAIRN: Exactly.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain what the process is, for someone to understand, when you want to get information.

ALLAN NAIRN: And while he’s at it—and while he’s at it, he’ll also have to come for a lot of the staff of the New York Times and the Washington Post, who, you know, several times a week publish classified material, usually leaked out of self-interested motives to justify this or that government policy. I mean, when you get classified material, sometimes it’s just handed to you. But I would say, you know, maybe about half the time, you have to work for it. You have to—you talk to somebody who knows about something, and they say, "Yeah, that’s true." And then you say, "Oh, well, is there any documentation on that?" And they say, "Well, there is, as a matter of fact." And, "Well, can you get it?" By the case they’re apparently building against Assange, that constitutes conspiracy.

If they go along this route, it’s just another step toward the U.S. renouncing the recently developed, through popular struggle, tradition of civil liberties and real rule of law. I mean, the U.S. has accomplished a lot in the rule of law. There’s a lot of impartial judging that takes place now and then in American society. But the current trend is against it.

Another related front, the Supreme Court decision on what they call "material support for terrorism." This was argued by then-Solicitor General Kagan before she joined the Supreme Court as an Obama appointee. And this Supreme Court decision this year said, essentially, hat if you even talk to people from an organization that’s on the U.S. terrorist list and tell them to lay down their arms, tell them to respect human rights—you say anything of substance to them, you can be prosecuted as giving a material support to terrorism, because you’re merely speaking to them. Now, if you seriously applied that precedent, you would have to indict every U.S. taxpayer, because they’re giving funds to the U.S. government, which is killing civilians, which is the definition of terrorism. But even more narrowly, if you just looked at groups that are on the terrorist list, you know, the IRA was on the terrorist list for years. Congressman Peter King was a big supporter of the IRA. Now he’s the one who’s leading the anti-Muslim hearings in Congress.

AMY GOODMAN: But what about this?

ALLAN NAIRN: Never talk of prosecuting him. Just last week, there was a conference at which four or five members of the Bush cabinet—including Mukasey, the attorney general; Fragos Townsend, the counterterrorism chief; Bolton, the U.N. ambassador; Ridge, the Homeland Security chief—came out in support of an organization called the MEK, which is currently on the terrorism list. This was a group that attacked Iran with support from Saddam Hussein, and they’re still against Iran, so these Bush people want to back them. And by the standard of the Supreme Court decision that Kagan advocated, all these former Bush cabinet people should now be indicted and arrested. It’s farcical. That’s the direction that Obama, continuing the trend, is bringing U.S. law.

AMY GOODMAN: Allan, we only have three minutes. We spoke to you in Indonesia recently when the Indonesian military, when the government was threatening to arrest you because you had released documents from the Kopassus, the feared military unit in Indonesia. Can you talk about—in fact, WikiLeaks has just exposed, by releasing documents showing the battle within the Obama administration to restore aid to the Indonesian military. I’d like you to talk briefly about that and then your assessment of President Obama.

ALLAN NAIRN: I did a piece exposing assassinations by the Indonesian military in Aceh. The military then said they would arrest me, and a capture order went out to military intelligence bases to seize me extrajudicially. But before they were able to do that, it was canceled from the top, because the president and the cabinet decided it would be too politically risky to do that.

Later, I released documents from Kopassus, the U.S.-backed special forces, which show that in West Papua, which is under de facto occupation by the military, the Kopassus targets civilians. They have a 15-person enemies list who they go after, and they’re all civilians. It’s headed by the chief of the local Baptist church.

In January, I’m going to be releasing more documents, more secret documents from Kopassus and the Indonesian military, and these deal—these documents basically lay out the entire—with names and details, the entire covert intelligence network they have in Papua and elsewhere. So, they should know—if Kopassus is listening to this, they should know that their intelligence network is now blown. They’ve got to shut it down, because the names of their people are out. And other documents classified as top secret, sangat rahasia, deal with the armed rebels in Papua, the OPM, and they basically show that the armed rebels don’t have many arms. Yet they are the justification for the Indonesian military presence there.

AMY GOODMAN: Yet, the United States restored military aid. President Obama restored military aid to Kopassus.

ALLAN NAIRN: Yeah, he went there personally. And he made a political statement in one of his speeches, which basically endorsed the Indonesian military occupation of Papua. And within days, a secret, a covert, threatening message went out to activists across Papua, essentially telling them, "Abandon all hope. Obama is on our side now."

AMY GOODMAN: What about President Obama?

ALLAN NAIRN: Well, as we said in the discussion last year at this time, he has kept the machine set on "kill." He’s continued backing for the dozens of repressive regimes. He’s upped the killings in Pakistan and Afghanistan. You know, when you compare the Democrats and the Republicans on core issues of preventing preventable death, shifting funds to stop hunger, of killing of civilians, there’s no difference. But we have some democratic rights in this country, and people have to organize to stop that. You know, on the basic issues, there’s not—

AMY GOODMAN: We have 30 seconds.

ALLAN NAIRN: There’s not that much difference between the choice that an American has and the choice that a person in repressive Burma or repressive China or repressive Indonesia has. In none of those countries, including the U.S., can you choose to alter the basic policies. You vote for Democrat, you vote for Republican, you get the same thing on state murder, on preventable death. But we here have the right to rebel. We have to use it.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to leave it there. Allan Nairn, award-winning investigative journalist and activist. We will link to his articles at allannairn.comon our website, democracynow.org.

Jung

"The foundation of all mental illness is the unwillingness to experience legitimate suffering."--Carl Jung.

We are One

I do wonder how long it’ll take before we, human beings, assimilate objective realities. "Assimilate" in such a way that people live their lives conscious of protecting such realities because they are essential for human development. Without speech and the trust to speak freely, we are no more human than ants. 

Speech is an objective reality that has to be protected now that it has resurfaced with such force in the person of Julian Assange and wikileaks. It must be protected and practiced not only by the media but also by people in every institution. To speak freely makes individuals strong and societies powerful. Language and the freedom to use it has been taken hostage by the academy and power institutions that have established that only people with credentials are given the opportunity to speak. A housewife like me would not have a chance to speak in those places! Every human being is worth being heard, every human being should feel free to express him and herself without fear of being made fun of, without fear of making a fool of him or herself because they don’t have a degree or the supposed education to know about the subject.

We are human enough to know. All of us. Everywhere. A child should be able to cry in front of a camera and let the world know about his and her despair because of the tremendous violence that they are being submitted within the family, the society, the nation and the world at large. Children are not put in front of the camera because those in power shy away from essence looking at them and telling them the truth about the consequences of their actions. We should make many films in which children tell their story not because they’ll sell more or have some success but because adults need to remember what it is like to be in essence and how vulnerable they are to our unconsciousness. 

Women should be allowed to speak. Men should start speaking one day. Real men. Men who have not yet lost contact with their own self and who can tell their true story.

We’ve become such great artists that we can fool anyone and make them believe that we still hold enough integrity and humaneness worth the presidency of the United States, like Barack Obama, who  betrayed what he stood for while looking for the election. We still hold with intense hope to such figures of authority convinced that they’ll bring the change that we are unable to step up to and actualize for our selves. No one can give us what we are not ready to have and replacing authority figures for our own authority is a step that we must give our selves if we are to become more than ants in a nest. The human dream is still a dream from which we are woken up every once in a while by figures like Ghandi, who can stop the occupation of power by sitting patiently on the pavement of any road. There is a Ghandi in every human being but there’s also a Hitler and from the ego ness of a Hitler to the surrenderance of a Ghandi are all the necessary lifetimes that justify a life. It is not necessary to be Ghandi to know the Ghandi within one’s self or to be Hitler to know the fascist within. Most of us practice both of them most of the time as if the script of existence had already been written and every play is the repetition of the same story, but experienced by each individual.  What is truly naïve about individualism is that those invaded with it are convinced that our lives are absolutely unique to only ourselves and don’t realize that life is the same for us all. Our particular plays are just flowers from the same plant. We are each a different thread in its tapestry but the tapestry in which we weave cannot be changed by us. The stages we must go through are determined. Each individual life is like a flower from a plant but the soil and sun and moon that embrace our days and nights are beyond ourselves until we come to meet them with our death: The death of individualism and the birth of consciousness, not necessarily physical death.

Life is turned upside down and upwards when we take that step for when we are centred in our individualism or egotism everything that we meet is dishonoured by our presence, dishonoured and swallowed as if it existed only as Maya, as illusion. We never reach true love when we seek from our ego. When the ego begins to die everything that we meet is honoured by our presence and left untouched to fulfil its own process, only that instead of the process continuing as a descending octave, it becomes an ascending octave. A conscious being is the presence of another dimension in the dimension of illusion. Objectivity in the subject, objectifies the subject. Illusion is the world of individualism. When our being is in our ego we confront the illusion of our karma. When we step beyond our ego into our wholeness, we confront the reality of our destiny.

“Our” destiny is “ours”. We are connected to each other. Every man and woman is affecting every other man and woman, every human being that has ever lived is within every human being that is alive today. Most of us have to “fight” to be acknowledged because we haven’t acknowledged the presence of every other human being within our selves. “Being” is the being of the whole of humanity in each individual. Were we conscious of this, things would certainly change because we would be working for the weaving of love in people’s lives and not their destruction. It is in the mind frame of individualism that private property exists as such and the struggle to "submit" others is its expression. The ego must dress itself with possessions because it does not posses itself. Dressing one’s self up with material "possessions" or "status" is the way the ego or an immature individual reveals his and her imaginary picture to the people around him who have been the soil for it to develop it. This is a “natural” process. Every human being is born within a family, society, nation and “the” world and each sphere of development is conditioned by the consciousness that that individual acquires in his and her passage through those spheres. The family conditions the individual differently to how they are conditioned in the school, university, military, company, bar… each place with its particular people has its own conditioning and meaning and they are all necessary, all could be wonderful, all be completely different if we could live them without the individualism that determines the hierarchic excesses of authoritarian power. 

It's sad to see a man that cannot be a father because he holds up an imaginary picture of himself that doesn’t allow his emotions to be expressed. My father was like that and my husbands were harmed no less. Equally sad is a teacher that cannot extend out his or her arms to embrace the students because we are afraid that they’ll manipulate them sexually. And the boss of every factory doing his best to produce enough to pay people’s income is equally sorrowful when he or she consider themselves worthy of a thousand times more profit than the workers. All these are aspects of the individualistically centred state of consciousness in which we happen to be immersed. Capitalism is the epitome of individualism and communism the epitome of individualism. Communism as has been lived, is individualism imposing communism, not consciousness of the whole allowing for Democracy. In both systems as experienced thus far, the individualistic mentality has overpowered the outcome. It is not that people in either system did not hope or aim for a different result, it is that the people in either system were still too self centred for it to work. There are equally "human" "beings" in both systems, trying to figure our selves out. The earth belongs to all of us and holding up a "nationality" to take away from others is an aspect of our unconsciousness. Third world countries are rich and their people are still hungry, first world countries are not so rich anymore and their people are equally suffering. We are all suffering the unconsciousness of our individualism.

To be “identified” with our nationality is very different to being conscious of our nationality. It is beautiful to be conscious of our nationality, our society and our family, but to be identified with any one of them is the illusion that submits our karma into recurrence. To be free of the identification is what opens the road to "creation" or a new, non recurring possibility: life. To allow our ego to reflect itself in the mirror of the nation and let it to be used against other human beings in criminal assassination is the expression of our lack of individual freedom or the maturity to act against crime in no matter what context. Our world is so upside down and backwards that we take teenagers to wars to carry out crimes precisely because they are too young to stand up for the human being, too young and immature to have understood the power of their own life or that of others and still living under the shadow of their family, social and national sphere without having yet developed the consciousness of the human sphere within themselves to kill other young people as young and innocent as themselves. Patriarchy never reveals itself as crudely as in the act of old men sending young men to war so that they can remain the alpha men longer. They remain in power because they discard the men who could confront them long before they are old enough to do so and they do it when they are young because they are as vulnerable as women. 

A young man should not be asked to kill before he has given birth or had a wife or worked because just as the video shows, they are young and immature enough to laugh while they take other people’s lives away. It is very different when a mature human being is called upon to act against crime. Young people today don’t even know what is the value of the life they are supposed to be protecting, for their lives were as shattered in the military as the lives they destroy. The military institution and all its techniques is designed to squash the individual just like in cults, so that the soldiers give up their lives for the authority in power. Young people are innocent and beautiful enough to think that if they give up their lives the world will be a better place but until they realize that they are just being manipulated by power, they will continue to act against the human being.

Life is the stage in which we are meant to actualize our humaneness. Every human act adds to the development of our self, individually and humanly, “humanly” as in “worldly”, not just socially. Today we must go beyond our “socially” into our “humanly”. When we confront the human with what we are within the family, the society and the nation, it is very easy to realize how far each one of us is from consciousness.

Actualizing our humaneness simply means living as decent a life as possible. Life is people. We are woven into each other as part and parcel of our selves. Those that loved us never leave, nor do those that didn’t love us. In time we realize that every one of them was doing their best and so were we.  Individualism as an aspect of a mistakenly developed essence "breeds" crime. Individuality as an aspect of a mature essence breeds integrity, responsibility, consciousness. Nature is the stage in which people can actualize their humaneness and the destruction of nature is another expression of our unconsciousness, of the criminality of our selfishness gone mad. Nature is one with the human being like the bones and muscles and blood are one with the individual. Nature is our “human body” and how we treat it simply reflects our consciousness of our selves. Just like individuals go through phases of self-destruction, drugs and crime against themselves and others and eventually settle into less destructive forms of themselves, if lucky, the human being is in a phase of unconscious destructiveness of our Earth or “human body”. For the majority of us nothing means anything but "money". Everything represents status for the ego, not the richness of a world that is meant to be shared and protected. Everything falls under the theatre of power for the egos of the privileged in "turn" to be exhilarated with them selves. The ego breeds envy, it lives in its imaginary power owning more than others and submitting every one else to its false authority conditioned by the economic, political or emotional dependency others have. Love is not "love" when it is a form of submission and dependency and there is no law if people are submitted by it instead of being freed because of it. The purpose of laws is to make us more conscious of each other. The economic and political difficulties we are facing, as much as the social and psychological problems people are suffering, are not the reflection of our external reality, our external reality is the expression of our inner reality: the state of our lack of consciousness. Society forms the individual but the individual must be able to cross the karmic conditioning of family, society and nation and step into the human and re-experience the family, society and nation consciously. Human progress depends on the ability of each generation to step beyond its conditionings. 

Religion use to be the sphere of the spiritual in times past but religion today is the sphere of the multiple dimensions of the individual human being and politics is the external expression of the consciousness of those dimensions within the individuals. We create institutions to hold the progress of our consciousness in each generation but when the "institution" turns against our selves and muzzles our spirit pretending to keep us from expressing our selves freely and communicate, we have allowed power to keep our essences from developing and enroll in a tremendously dangerous road to destruction. The mass suicide in cults already proved that to us. Every religion is a system meant to pave the way for each individual to walk out of individualism into consciousness of the whole. Religion as the "opium" of the people is such because in the authoritarian god that condones every crime and stimulates every submission to false authority, IS an opium. 

We are walking from I to US. That is religion. And politics is the actualization of that consciousness in our lives. We elect dictators because we reflect in the power of one individual the egocentric reality of our own lives, in our societies. We follow gurus because we have no command of our inner authority or being. We submit to work in factories for a lifetime because we are unable to overcome our dependence on other authorities. We resign the possibility of creative “work” because our I cannot express itself not only verbally through freedom of speech but in no other way for "work" and "creativity" is "owned" by the privileged in power. Our lives are dedicated to make the over-inflated people in power become richer than their "being"can handle. The addiction to drugs everywhere is an aspect of that inability. The poverty of the masses is counteracted by the excesses of power and the party of madness leaves everybody equally wasted. Change needs to happen not because we are some making others suffer but because everyone is suffering unnecessarily. 

The actors of the world, the artists, remain silent at the hands of those in power if they are to make their bread, filled with riches if they play the game. The “creativity” of the human being is placed at the hands of very few privileged artists. In the sphere of the I, of the self, of Our Self, we are as depressed as a young addict. The suffering of women at no matter what age is still hard to name, raped by their fathers, sold and abducted from their countries to serve as whores in the developed countries, the men being slaughtered in wars, and the so called “decent people” who avoid that destiny and profit from it are so corrupt that they never smile with sincerity but  are always ready for the show.

We are far from living a decent life but a decent life in which children can grow up to creativity and the development our our selves is our right as human beings. No one has to submit to anyone else. Everything belongs to all of us for We are One. 

Merry Christmas!

Emotions are usually kept in place but in times like this they tend to reach down deeper than normally and we long for each other's company more intensely. It's a good thing that we are forced to remember that it's never too late to love.


I would like to wish the few silent but constant visitors to this blog a very merry christmas and new year, to all in the Fellowship blog and all in the Fellowship of Friends Cult, who, beyond our many differences and intense struggles, were the people I shared twenty years of my life and who continue to be as present in it as when I joined.  Time passes but people don't. We might not see each other or have regular contact but once we've connected we can no longer disconnect and continue to act on each other's lives indefinitely.


For those of us who know that that connectedness is what life is about and who are not trying to buffer the suffering, it's a welcoming experience.


Best wishes to us all.

United Nations

2010-12-23 UN & IACHR Joint Statement on Wikileaks

Submitted by GeorgieBC on Wed, 12/22/2010 - 22:32

The UN Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of the Right to Freedom of Opinion and Expression and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression issued a joint statement on December 21st.

In light of ongoing developments related to the release of diplomatic cables by the organization Wikileaks, and the publication of information contained in those cables by mainstream news organizations, the United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Opinion and Expression and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression see fit to recall a number of international legal principles. The rapporteurs call upon States and other relevant actors to keep these principles in mind when responding to the aforementioned developments.

1. The right to access information held by public authorities is a fundamental human right subject to a strict regime of exceptions. The right to access to information protects the right of every person to access public information and to know what governments are doing on their behalf. It is a right that has received particular attention from the international community, given its importance to the consolidation, functioning and preservation of democratic regimes. Without the protection of this right, it is impossible for citizens to know the truth, demand accountability and fully exercise their right to political participation. National authorities should take active steps to ensure the principle of maximum transparency, address the culture of secrecy that still prevails in many countries and increase the amount of information subject to routine disclosure.

2. At the same time, the right of access to information should be subject to a narrowly tailored system of exceptions to protect overriding public and private interests such as national security and the rights and security of other persons. Secrecy laws should define national security precisely and indicate clearly the criteria which should be used in determining whether or not information can be declared secret. Exceptions to access to information on national security or other grounds should apply only where there is a risk of substantial harm to the protected interest and where that harm is greater than the overall public interest in having access to the information. In accordance with international standards, information regarding human rights violations should not be considered secret or classified.

3. Public authorities and their staff bear sole responsibility for protecting the confidentiality of legitimately classified information under their control. Other individuals, including journalists, media workers and civil society representatives, who receive and disseminate classified information because they believe it is in the public interest, should not be subject to liability unless they committed fraud or another crime to obtain the information. In addition, government "whistleblowers" releasing information on violations of the law, on wrongdoing by public bodies, on a serious threat to health, safety or the environment, or on a breach of human rights or humanitarian law should be protected against legal, administrative or employment-related sanctions if they act in good faith. Any attempt to impose subsequent liability on those who disseminate classified information should be grounded in previously established laws enforced by impartial and independent legal systems with full respect for due process guarantees, including the right to appeal.

4. Direct or indirect government interference in or pressure exerted upon any expression or information transmitted through any means of oral, written, artistic, visual or electronic communication must be prohibited by law when it is aimed at influencing content. Such illegitimate interference includes politically motivated legal cases brought against journalists and independent media, and blocking of websites and web domains on political grounds. Calls by public officials for illegitimate retributive action are not acceptable.

5. Filtering systems which are not end-user controlled – whether imposed by a government or commercial service provider – are a form of prior censorship and cannot be justified. Corporations that provide Internet services should make an effort to ensure that they respect the rights of their clients to use the Internet without arbitrary interference.

6. Self-regulatory mechanisms for journalists have played an important role in fostering greater awareness about how to report on and address difficult and controversial subjects. Special journalistic responsibility is called for when reporting information from confidential sources that may affect valuable interests such as fundamental rights or the security of other persons. Ethical codes for journalists should therefore provide for an evaluation of the public interest in obtaining such information. Such codes can also provide useful guidance for new forms of communication and for new media organizations, which should likewise voluntarily adopt ethical best practices to ensure that the information made available is accurate, fairly presented and does not cause substantial harm to legally protected interests such as human rights.

‹ 2010-12-23 Peninsula:WikiLeaks to release Israel documents in six monthsup

Julian Assange with David Frost

http://english.aljazeera.net/programmes/frostovertheworld/2010/12/201012228384924314.html

Mark LeVine - On wikileaks

http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2010/12/2010129102245193184.html WikiLeaks: Call of Duty

Leaks have made it harder for Western governments to dupe their citizens into accepting potential future wars. Mark LeVine Last Modified: 09 Dec 2010 15:40 GMT Email Article Print Article Share Article Send Feedback

Ice Cube, just another sad example of how, with too few exceptions, hiphop has gone from being  the "CNN of the streets" to the "ho" of the corporations [EPA] For professional historians the publication of the vast trove of diplomatic cables is a bittersweet affair. No one outside of the Washington establishment and the myriad foreign leaders shamed by revelations of their penchant for hatred, hubris and pedestrian peccadillos can seriously argue that the release of these classified documents has done anything but good for the cause of peace and political transparency. Whether about Iraq, Afghanistan, or the minuate of American diplomacy, they have shed crucial light on some of the most important issues of the day and will make it much harder for Western or Middle Eastern governments to lie to their people about so many aspects of the various wars on/of terror in the future. Indeed, if there's anyone who deserves the next Nobel Peace Prize more than the courageous American soldier, Bradley Manning, who is alleged to have given the documents to Wikileaks in the first place, I'd like to know. At the very least, given what a mockery President Obama has made of the principles for which the prize is supposed to stand - evidence of which, like pressuring Spain to drop criminal investigations into Bush administration torture, have only come to light thanks to the latest WikiLeaks release - the Nobel Committee should demand his medal back and give it to Manning or whoever the leaker is. A new approach to diplomacy-honesty and transparency Already, thanks to WikiLeaks, citizens in the West and Middle East know more than they were ever supposed to about how corrupt, misguided, incompetent and mendacious, are their leaders and the policies pursued in their name. As each new revelation comes to light, I can't help thinking, why was this secret in the first place? Wouldn't it be better if American and other diplomats shared their concerns openly rather than hiding them from the public? How about everyone telling the truth for once and letting the people decide? Aren't Italians better off knowing that the American Ambassador thinks Berlusconi is too old to party like a rock star and too corrupt to be trusted with his country's leadership? Shouldn't Americans know that the Saudis continue to funnel huge sums of money to militants and that Pakistanis are refusing to hand over nuclear fuel they long ago promised to give up? Wouldn't Mexicans be better off knowing just what the US thinks of their anti-drug efforts, and Americans better off knowing just how badly the drug war is proceeding? And certainly the news that Saudi Arabia, at least, supports attacking Iran has already led Iran to tone down its rhetoric and seek to reassure its neighbors of its peaceable intentions. As far as I can see, the best development that could come out of Wikigate would be that diplomats around the world begin tweeting their previously secret observations on a daily basis, so that everyone knows where everyone else stands and governments can no longer hide behind diplomatic courtesy to continue with the all-too-often reprehensible "business as usual". The world has never needed honesty more than it does today. Looking for shelter in an increasingly dangerous world If there's anyone who doesn't think the world - and particularly the United States - desperately needs WikiLeaks, I offer you "Exhibit A" of why this is the case: the star-studded official trailer for the "Call of Duty: Black Ops" first person shooter video game. Regular readers of this column might recall my November 16 article, "Nowhere Left to Run," where I discussed the cultural implications of "Black Ops" after spotting a poster for the game in a Berlin subway around the time of its release. Since then I have seen the trailer, whose slogan is "There's a soldier in all of us" and features both ordinary people - a secretary, fry cook, hotel concierge, and the like - along with celebrities like Los Angeles Lakers guard Kobe Bryant, and late night American talk show host Jimmy Kimmel. After watching the trailer I was so exasperated I emailed a colleague at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies here at Lund and asked him, "Where is Ice Cube when you need him?" His reply stunned me: "LoL you don't know where Ice Cube is? He's doing the voice of Bowman in 'Black Ops'..." In case you're not a hiphop fan, once upon a time Ice Cube was the terror of law abiding white citizens across America as a member of the highly political gangsta rap group NWA. In fact, their song "F*** Da Police" almost got them into as much trouble with the US government as is Julian Assange today. But those days are long forgotten. Today Mr. Cube spends his time, when not playing secret service agents in movies, providing the voice for one of the lead characters in "Black Ops." But it's not just hiphop that's prostituted itself to violence and big corporations. The rock n' roll establishment has equally shamed itself, as none other than the Rolling Stones allowed their song "Gimme Shelter," one of the most important anti-war songs of the Vietnam era, to be used as the soundtrack for the trailer, which shows Kobe Bryant smiling widely as he and innumerable other "ordinary" people blast away an unseen enemy in a clearly Middle Eastern landscape (not surprisingly, digital sales of the song and other Stones hits spiked in the wake of the trailer's release). A chilling view of american culture and values The "Black Ops" trailer makes for chilling viewing, as it tells viewers - successfully, apparently, given the record - breaking sales of the game - that they can derive great pleasure from taking a break from life to pretend to kills people half way around the world. Perhaps most troubling, the colours and landscape of the trailer are eerily reminiscent of the infamous killing of a dozen Iraqis by a US helicopter crew, some of whom are laughing as they fire missiles at their targets. Not surprisingly, the only reason we know of this event is because WikiLeaks put the classified video, dubbed "collateral murder," into the public domain last April, in one of the releases that first made the organisation (in)famous. Apparently Bryant, Kimmel, Cube, the Stones and the designers of "Black Ops" are all either ignorant of, or more likely unmoved, by the reality that ordinary Americans - fry cooks, secretaries, concierges and other working class people - have been forced to answer the "call of duty" for extended tours in Iraq and now Afghanistan during the last decade, where many have been forced into precisely the life and death situations of extreme violence that Bryant and his famous friends were no doubt paid handsomely to pretend so thoroughly to enjoy. This is the mindset, at all levels of American society, against which the truths revealed by the hundreds of thousands of WikiLeak documents must stand. And the potential for changing peoples' minds is clearly disturbing enough to the US government that it has begun, when not calling for Assange's arrest and worse to warn students at elite institutions like Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs that they risk never being hired by the State Department if they even mention the WikiLeaks documents on any social media sites in which they participate. Like the corrupt law firm that hired innocent newbie attorney Tom Cruise in the movie "The Firm," the last thing the Government wants is for prospective employees to understand what it's really up to until they're sucked in too deep to change it. Truths that must Be learned-the sooner the better Chances are, if your government is telling you not to read something, you should be reading it twice as closely. The detailing of all the problems the Bush and Obama administrations have had in executing policies in the Muslim world have done an invaluable service to any citizen who wants to understand whether the government's claims as well as aims in the war on terror are both reasonable and feasible on the ground (sadly, it seems more often than not, the answer is they are not). Certainly, I will urge my own students to read the various WikiLeak documents and compare them with documents we have from wars past, to gain greater insight into the continuities and changes in war-making, diplomacy, and the motivations behind both over the course of modern history. But if the release of over countless classified documents has given the world a "banquet of secrets" to feast upon (as Timothy Garton Ash put it in The Guardian), historians might be tempted to wonder what scraps we will be left to scrounge over when it comes time to write histories of the events covered by the various WikiLeaks documents with the nuance and perspective that only comes from a certain amount of historical distance from the events in question. And it's not merely professional jealousy by people used to having largely exclusive access to the historical record-- after all, who but historians is willing to sit in dusty archives for years searching through hundreds of thousands of documents for a few gems that can advance the state of knowledge on a topic? With easily searchable data bases, now - Heaven forbid! - anyone can be an historian, rendering judgment on events and motivations that members of the previously closed historians' guild normally have to wait decades to get access to. Or can they? Despite the huge volume of cables and documents released by WikiLeaks, they only offer a very partial account of the realities they discussed. The often unguarded and even eloquent language of the writers of the dispatches does not change the fact that they were written by US government employees (whether soldiers or diplomats) for their superiors, addressing issues from an American perspective and a set of interests that can't be assumed to match those of the myriad other actors in the dramas these documents reflect. History's lesson: multiple perspectives provide the best view No matter how much we think we can learn about the realities of the Afpak, Iraqi or larger Middle Eastern conflicts from WikiLeaks, the limited perspective of the documents WikiLeaks has been able to obtain reveals that there is still an incredible amount to learn before we come close to having the full picture of the history-making events of the last decade. And unless there are British, French, Iraqi, Afghan and other soldiers with a similar access to classified documents and a reckless disregard for their own future, it is likely that the full accounting of the "Wikiwars" will likely wait until the historians of tomorrow are finally allowed to peruse the far larger volume of documents that governments will work even harder than before to keep out of the public domain. Mark LeVine is a professor of history at UC Irvine and senior visiting researcher at the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies at Lund University in Sweden. His most recent books are Heavy Metal Islam (Random House) and Impossible Peace: Israel/Palestine Since 1989 (Zed Books). The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

Interview with J. Assange

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBJOBl1G3Kc

WikiLeaks in Moral Court

Submitted by knowledgeempire on Thu, 12/02/2010 - 08:32

It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.
   - Albert Einstein

Evidence

It's time to review the mother of all arguments raised against WikiLeaks and come to a simple conclusion based on fact.

The argument against WikiLeaks concludes that WikiLeaks must be condemned for its actions. Here's the coup de force:

Real people die when sources and methods are leaked.

The assumption being made here is simple enough: Murder is wrong.

But let's be more specific. Maybe murder is only wrong when innocent people are killed. Fair enough, So let's assume, further, that killing innocent people is wrong and even concede the possibility that Iraqi or Afghan troops may have deserved to die. Let's grant, for sake of argument, that they deserved what they got. Let's only count civilians.

If murdering innocent people is wrong, then we can essentially measure evil, or moral culpability, by measuring whether an action promotes or discourages murder. By this measure, WikiLeaks is on high moral ground, for the motivation underlying the leaks comes from an attempt to save lives and not an attempt to end them. The purpose of the leaks is to reveal war crimes and hopefully minimize the escalating body count.

But let's not get too flowery here. Forget motivations. Motivations can't be seen or proven, and in any case, they may fail to achieve their desired results. So we have to look at the results of our actions and not merely their intended goals.

Again, WikiLeaks comes out on top here, and does so for two main reasons.

• First, there is no hard evidence that lives have actually been lost as a result of the leaked documents, so measuring morality through results leaves us at a loss in our attempts to villainize WikiLeaks. If such evidence exists, it should be presented.

"But wait! The mere possibility of death should suffice!"

OK. So here's the rule we will live by: If our action is likely to cause retaliation, and hence murder, we should not commit that action. If we commit it, we should be condemned.

This argument fails even if we ignore the death tolls in Iraq and Afghanistan. If the argument is good, we should prosecute every investigative journalist ever to leak information about the wrongdoings of government. Those leaks anger a lot of people and have without a doubt motivated retaliation. By this standard, we should condemn Noam Chomsky, the BBC, NBC, The Guardian, Amnesty International, and so on. These entities have all provided plenty of fuel for retaliation with their investigative reports, their pleas for ending genocide, and so on--all that free speech / free press stuff.

Hence if providing fuel for retaliation (i.e., dirt) is our criterion for punitive justice, we must either condemn all accusatory 'information disseminators' or none at all.

• The second reason why WikiLeaks' moral status comes out on top when we look at the results of all actions is that any possible retaliation versus Afghan informants shies in the face of Iraq's and Afghanistan's body count.The leaked documents illuminate criminal methods that are being used in order to commit these murders and thus serve as evidence for the very accusation being made against their opponents. The numbers speak for themselves:<1>

Casualties in Afghanistan
Civilians killed: 8,813
Civilians seriously injured: 15,863
Journalists killed: 19
Total killed: 19,629
Total injured: 48,644

Casualties in Iraq
Civilians killed: 864,531
Civilians seriously injured: 1,556,156
Contractors killed: 933
Contractors seriously injured: 10,569
Journalists killed: 142
Total killed in Iraq: 900,338
Total injured in Iraq: 1,690,903

. .

Let us revisit the premise then:

Real people die when sources and methods are leaked.

We can only assume that the term "realpeople" here refers to American people. If it referred to people in general, then WikiLeaks would be praised for its actions. Leaked video and documents reveal military activities that clearly qualify as war crimes if anything does.These casualties didn't happened as a result of accidental death. They weren't even a result of mere criminal negligence. Bringing these facts to light is as close as we can get to a real trial, for now.

It seems the only way to successfully refute Wikileaks' position is to argue that foreign lives are worth less than American lives. Who will be the first to stand up and declare this? WikiLeaks opponents might as well say it out loud, for it is an obvious assumption and logical consequence of their position. No other assumption saves our opponents from outright contradiction.

The only way to successfully condemn WikiLeaks is to declare that foreign lives are less valuable than American lives. This declaration must be made by the opponents unless they wish to change their position on WikiLeaks, for a simple body-count reveals the obvious asymmetry in the comparison and it even reveals a profound hypocrisy: To stand up for human life while engaging in mass-murder is logically laughable. To condemn the entity that tries to stop you is even worse.

Yet the most tragic reason to support WikiLeaks comes with a third and final argument that I don't like at all, but it must be stated, even if it has an obvious flaw. The flaw is the false assumption that American lives are more valuable than Afghan lives. Even if we assume this to be true for sake of argument, it turns out that we must side with WikiLeaks. The reason for this is that the informants whose lives are allegedly in danger are Afghan informants. If we don't care about Afghan lives, then why push the accusation against WikiLeaks?

Verdict

Enough with the false assumptions. We care about all innocent life, in principle. And if one innocent life is as valuable as any other, we can only base our moral judgment on the number of murders that have provably been committed by each side.

Civilian Body Count so Far
WikiLeaks: approximately 0
America: approximately 873,000

So let's revisit the question: If we don't care about Afghan lives, then why push the accusation against WikiLeaks? The truth is, America does care about (some) American lives (the ones that carry out the killing), and those lives are in danger too, thanks to... thanks to what? The leaks? Does such a large chunk of the world now hate America because WikiLeaks revealed what America is doing, or do they hate America because of what America is doing? I'm thinking America-hatred probably has more to do with the whole mass murder thing.

This brings us to the real reason why WikiLeaks is being condemned. The truth is... the problem. The truth is the problem. If the truth weren't what it is, they wouldn't have to hide it. If the armed forces weren't raping, collecting dead bodies (and body parts), and things like that, they wouldn't be in this mess. They wouldn't have to threaten the messenger and turn their backs on what little remains of The Constitution.

Hence

It's never OK to kill the messenger for exposing the crime. When so many people are dying, it's our moral imperative to condemn the criminal and praise the messenger. When the choice is between ending genocide and putting our own lives at risk, it's also our moral imperative to be messengers when we can. Real lives are at stake.

Either we must allow the human race to exterminate itself, or we must forgo certain liberties which are very dear to us, more especially the liberty to kill foreigners whenever we feel so disposed.

A clear choice must be made[:] the choice between Reason and Death. And by 'Reason' I mean willingness to submit to law as declared by an international authority. I fear that mankind may choose Death. I hope I am mistaken. <2>