WikiLeaks' Most Terrifying
Revelation: Just How Much Our Government Lies to Us
By Fred Branfman, AlterNet
Posted on January 3, 2011, Printed on January 4, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/149393/
"Try as I may I can not escape the sound of suffering. Perhaps
as an old man I will accept suffering with insouciance. But not now;
men in their prime, if they have convictions are tasked to act on them."
-- Julian Assange, 2007 blog entry
Do you believe that it is in Americans' interest to allow a small
group of U.S. leaders to unilaterally murder, maim, imprison and/or
torture anyone they choose anywhere in the world, without the knowledge
let alone oversight of their citizens or the international community?
And, despite their proven record of failure to protect America -- from
Indochina to Iran to Iraq -- do you believe they should be permitted to
clandestinely expand their war-making without informed public debate?
If so, you are betraying the principles upon which America was founded,
endangering your nation, and displaying a distinctly "unamerican"
subservience to unaccountable authority. But if you oppose autocratic
power, you are called to support Wikileaks and others trying to limit
U.S. Executive Branch mass murder abroad and failure to protect
Americans at home.
These two issues became officially linked for the first time when
former U.S. Afghan commander General Stanley McChrystal explicitly
stated that the murder of civilians increases rather than decreases the
numbers of those committed to killing Americans, and actually
implemented policies -- since reversed by General Petraeus -- to reduce
U.S. murder of civilians. McChrystal said
that “for every innocent person you kill, you create 10 new enemies."
By so doing he made it clear that killing civilians is not only a moral
and war crimes issue, but -- in today's interdependent world -- also
threatens U.S. national security.
As important as is the issue of free speech, it is the question of
whether the U.S. Executive is in fact protecting the American people
through its mass murder abroad that really lies at the heart of the
Wikileaks controversy. Executive Branch officials justify persecuting
and threatening to murder Assange on the grounds that he has damaged
U.S. "national security." If McChrystal is right, however, it is the
past decade of U.S. Executive mass murder in Iraq, Afghanistan and
Pakistan, now revealed beyond any doubt by Wikileaks, that is the real
threat to U.S. national security.
The chilling fact is this: whether you believe that September 11,
2001 was due to incomprehensible fanaticism or genuine grievances, it
seems likely that U.S. leaders’ murder of countless Muslims since 2001
will cause the next 9/11 should, God forbid, it occur, The recent
suicide-bomber in Sweden who came perilously close to succeeding taped
a message saying "so will your children, daughters, brothers, and
sisters die, like our brothers, sisters, and children die."
Similar sentiments were voiced by the Times Square bomber, and it is
likely that those responsible for future American deaths will also be
motivated by revenge for the hundreds of thousands of Muslims for whose
deaths U.S. leaders are responsible since 2001.
This is not, of course, to justify such attacks. Any attacks on
civilians, whether by the Taliban or General Petraeus, are totally
unjustified and crimes of war. But if the issue is how best to enhance
U.S. national security, it is critical to rationally discuss the most
prudent and sensible means of preventing further attacks -- which in
this case is to stop creating huge numbers of people who want to kill
Americans. If General McChrystal is correct, every American should
tremble at the long-term danger to America caused by the last decade of
U.S. war-making in the Muslim world. If only 1/100th of 1% of the
world's 1.6 billion Muslims are moved to want to attack America because
of America's post-9/11 killing of Muslim civilians, for example, the
U.S. Executive will have created a pool of 160,000 Muslims devoted to
murdering Americans.
Nothing is more emblematic of the service Assange is doing Americans
than the July 25 N.Y. Times headline
announcing its publication of the Wikileaks "Afghan War Logs": "View
Is Bleaker Than Official Portrayal Of War In Afghanistan."
The N.Y. Times thus not only acknowledged that Wikileaks had
supplied Americans with vital information about the war that its own
government was denying them, but that this information had not been
provided by the U.S. mass media. If it had been doing its job, after
all, America’s “newspaper of record” not Wikileaks would have long ago
revealed that the Afghan war was "bleaker than official portrayal
of the war." The Guardian newspaper's headline on the same
day drove the point home:
"Massive Leak Of Secret Files Exposes Truth Of Occupation,"
i.e. the truth as opposed to U.S. Executive lies.
These "Afghan War Logs", like the Iraqi war logs after them, and
much material in Wikileaks' recent release of diplomatic cables, reveal
above all that U.S. Executive war-making is marked by massive deception
of the American people -- particularly lying about (1) the enormous
civilian casualties the U.S. is causing and (2) its claim to be
pursuing a "counter-insurgency strategy" designed to install a
democratic Afghan government. The Times and Guardian
stories describe how these official U.S. documents reveal constant U.S.
Executive Branch lying to the American people.
-- U.S. MURDER OF CIVILIANS: "A huge cache of
secret US military files today provides a devastating portrait of the
failing war in Afghanistan, revealing how coalition forces have killed
hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents," (Guardian) "Incident
by incident, the reports resemble a police blotter of the myriad ways
Afghan civilians were killed -- not just in airstrikes but in ones and
twos -- in shootings on the roads or in the villages, in
misunderstandings or in a cross-fire, or in chaotic moments when Afghan
drivers ventured too close to convoys and checkpoints". (N.Y.
Times) "The Nato coalition in Afghanistan has been using an
undisclosed "black" unit of special forces, Task Force 373, to hunt
down targets for death or detention without trial ... The logs reveal
that TF 373 has also killed civilian men, women and children and even
Afghan police officers who have strayed into its path." (Guardian)
-- REGULAR COVERUPS OF U.S. CIVILIAN MURDER: "The
dead, the reports repeatedly indicate, were not suicide bombers or
insurgents, and many of the cases were not reported to the public at
the time." (N.Y. Times) "War logs show how marines gave
cleaned up accounts of an incident in which they killed 19 civilians
... There would be no punishment." (Guardian) "The logs
detail how US special forces dropped six 2,000 lb bombs on a compound
where they believed a `high-value individual' was hiding, after
`ensuring there were no innocent Afghans in the surrounding area'. A
senior US commander reported that 150 Taliban had been killed. Locals,
however, reported that up to 300 civilians had died." (Guardian)
-- U.S. AND A CORRUPT AFGHAN GOVERNMENT ARE ALIENATING
AFGHAN CIVILIANS AND LOSING THE WAR: "The documents
illustrate in mosaic detail why, after the United States has spent
almost $300 billion on the war in Afghanistan, the Taliban are stronger
than at any time since 2001 ... The reports paint a disheartening
picture of the Afghan police (who) are often described as distrusted,
even loathed, by Afghan civilians. The reports recount episodes of
police brutality, corruption petty and large, extortion and kidnapping
... The toll of the war -- reflected in mounting civilian casualties --
left the Americans seeking cooperation and support from an Afghan
population that grew steadily more exhausted, resentful, fearful and
alienated ... The expanding (U.S.) special operations have stoked
particular resentment among Afghans -- for their lack of coordination
with local forces, the civilian casualties they frequently inflicted
and the lack of the accountability." (N.Y. Times)
When the Iraqi war logs were published 3 months later, they revealed
even more shocking information -- particularly that U.S. soldiers had
handed over Iraqi civilians to Iraqi police, knowing they would be
hideously tortured employing electric drills, acid and other devices
before being savagely murdered. Ellen Knickmeyer, the Washington
Post Bureau chief in Baghdad in 2006, wrote
that these revelations meant that U.S. officials had been lying daily
to the U.S. media
-- and American people -- by saying they were not aware of this mass
murder. U. S. leaders also lied constantly in claiming they were not
tracking civilian casualties, when in fact they were. Since
international law made U.S. leaders responsible for providing law and
order in occupied Iraq, these Wiklileaks cables thus also revealed that
U.S. leaders bear a major responsibility for these warcrimes, among the
worst since the end of WWII.
Both the Wikileaks Iraqi and Afghan War Logs, in short, have
revealed that the entire U.S. Executive is a "vast lying machine",
as journalist David Halberstam described the U.S. military in his affadavit
for the CBS vs. Westmoreland trial. It must be understood that “truth”
vs. “lies” is not even an operational category within the Executive
Branch or military. The purpose of communicating with the public is not
to provide them with truthful information but rather to advance “the
mission”. People who communicate with the public obtain their jobs and
are promoted on the basis of their ability to mislead, deceive, “spin”
and lie. There is no recorded case where Executive Branch officials
have been rewarded for telling the truth to the American people, and
many where they have been punished or lost their jobs for doing so. And
nothing so epitomizes the degradation of democracy in America that the
fact the public expects Executive Branch officials to
lie to them, and that mass media journalists even betray their
profession by defending Executive secrecy and excoriating those who
reveal their lies like Julian Assange.
It is thus impossible to overstate the importance of the Wikileaks
documentation of these lies to the American people. When a journalist
reports a U.S. government misdeed, government officials automatically
deny it and many Americans are unsure whom to believe. But Wikileaks
has revealed official government documents that prove U.S.
leaders’ lying and commission of crimes of war. The fact that the U.S.
has covered up its mass murder of civilians, and that this is
contributing to its losing the war, is thus no longer open to serious
question. The callous and careerist politicians and journalists who
daily ignore U.S. mass murder, while calling for Assange's arrest or
execution, shame themselves, their children, and their profession by
their indifference to non-American human suffering and obsequious
toadying to illegitimate Executive power.
And the Wikileaks documents reveal something even more important:
the entirely bogus nature of U.S. claims that Assange has damaged U.S.
"national security", e.g. by revealing information that could help the
“enemy.” It is obvious that the "enemy" knows whether those murdered by
the U.S. are civilians. The U.S. Executive clearly claims it is only
killing “insurgents” to keep its murder of civilians a secret from the American
people, fearing it would face protests that could tie its hands if it
became known.
The Wikileaks documents, though they date from 2009 and before, also
shed important light on what is occurring today under General David
Petraeus.
It is important to remember, after all, that the Wikileaks
controversy is not primarily about the past or abstract legal issues,
but what is happening to actual human beings today.
As you read these words countless Afghan and Pakistani villagers are
huddling in their homes, terrorized by U.S. war-making, as General
Petraeus's brutal offensive into southern Afghanistan, met by an
increase in the Taliban's resort to roadside bombs and assassination,
has caused the Red Cross to issue an unusual alarm
saying that conditions are at their worst for Afghan civilians in 30
years, i.e. as bad as during the Russian invasion. A Canadian press report
indicates that Kandahar's main hospital is overflowing with civilian
casualties, and that "on some days, the floor is red with
blood".
Petraeus has tripled
air strikes, brought in 9,000 U.S.
assassins who are conducting round-the-clock murder, and introduced
an unprecedented number of night-time raids recalling Nazi movies from
the 1940s -- as screaming U.S. soldiers break into people's homes,
terrorize women and children, and kill, wound, torture or imprison men
indefinitely without a trial or any chance to prove their innocence.
Even the U.S.-installed Afghan President Hamid Karzai is so appalled
that he has begged
the U.S. to curtail its airstrikes and night raids, saying, “the
raiding homes at night. Terrible. Terrible. A serious cause of the
Afghan people's disenchantment with NATO and with the Afghan government
… How can you measure the consequences of it in terms of the loss of
life of children and women because you have captured Talib A. And who
is this Talib A? Is he so important to have 10 more people killed,
civilians? Who determines that?”
Petraeus has firmly refused to end what this Afghan leader describes
as the General’s responsibility for civilian murder, making a further
mockery of his claim to be bringing “democracy” to Afghanistan.
Particularly significant are the many first-person reports in the
Wikileaks "Afghan War Logs" of U.S. murder of innocent civilians at
U.S. checkpoints -- which flesh out McChrystal's March 2010 admission
that "we have shot an amazing number of people, but to my
knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat."
For this raises a basic question about Petraeus's vast escalation of
U.S. airstrikes. If U.S. forces have murdered countless innocent
civilians at checkpoints, where they can at least see those they are
killing face-to-face, how many more innocent civilians is Petraeus
killing from from the air, in bombing raids where those below can
barely be seen?
And these Wikileaks documents also shed important light on how
Petraeus's massive escalation into both southern Afghanistan and
Pakistan, where he has dramatically escalated both U.S. drone and
ground assassination, is weakening rather than strengthening long-term
U.S. national security. Just as the Taliban is far stronger today after
the U.S. has wasted $300 billion and thousands of American lives over
the last 10 years, Petraeus's tactics are strengthening not weakening
America's enemies over the long run. If he murders enough people in
southern Afghanistan, the General may be able to claim some short-term
successes there. But there is no serious question that his tactics are
sowing a long-term whirlwind which not only threatens the stability of
the Afghan and Pakistani governments, but pose a long-term threat to
Americans at home.
A U.N. map just published
by the Wall Street Journal has revealed that the Taliban, using
classic guerrilla tactics, has moved into northern and western
Afghanistan as Petraeus has moved south, giving them control of more
territory than ever. “Internal United Nations maps show a marked
deterioration of the security situation in Afghanistan during this
year's fighting season, countering the Obama administration's
optimistic assessments of military progress since the surge of
additional American forces began a year ago”, the Journal
reported.
The N.Y. Times has reported
how various insurgent groups in Pakistan have responded to Petraeus's
tactics by coordinating and cooperating for the first time, vastly
increasing the threat they pose to the Pakistani state. It is also
obvious that Petraeus cannot possible]y kill more "insurgents" than he
is creating if he continues to provoke the 41 million Pashtuns on both
sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border to want to fight America. The
population of North and South Vietnam combined during the Vietnam war
was only 31 million, after all, and provided a manpower pool large
enough to outlast 500,000 Americans.
In the end, however, the most profound questions for Americans
raised by the Wikileaks documents go far beyond the Muslim world. If we
can free our minds of a lifetime of official propaganda identifying the
U.S. Executive with the American people, the evidence is overwhelming
that in foreign and military policy the U.S. Executive Branch is an
undemocratic institution that does not represent its own citizens. It
operates largely independent of Congress, the Judiciary or a mass media
which has largely become an arm of Executive power, broadcasting its
lies far more often than it exposes them.
A few months before President Obama's December 2009 decision to send
30,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan, for example, only 24%
of Americans wanted to send more and 43% wanted to decrease the
number. Their wishes were ignored, as are the opinions of Americans
today who, by a margin
of 63 to 32, oppose U.S. war-making in Afghanistan. And, Bob Woodward’s
Obama’s Wars revealed, even the President is largely a
figurehead when it comes to Executive war-making. Woodward documents
how the military thwarted Obama’s clear desire to begin a major pullout
from Afghanistan in the summer of 2011. Last month, Obama was
humiliated by being forced to endorse a hypothetical 2014 pullout date.
Most Americans would agree with the statement in the Declaration of
Independence that governments derive "their just powers from
the consent of the governed." But the governed can only give
their consent if they are informed as to what they
are agreeing to. This is obvious in our daily life. I cannot be said to
have "consented" to buy your laptop if you deceived me by not telling
me it was broken. One of our most basic legal principles is that a
contract is null and void if it was obtained under false pretenses. By
revealing massive U.S. Executive deceit Wikileaks has thus revealed
that it does not legitimately represent the American people.
These Wikileaks documents thus raise the most fundamental question
citizens can ask themselves: to what extent to citizens of a democracy
owe their allegiance to autocratic leaders who obtain the consent of
their citizens through massive duplicity? And to what extent can they
trust either their judgement or their decency?
Americans may find themselves increasingly pondering such questions
in coming years, as economic decline and future terrorist attacks cause
U.S. elites to bring home the authoritarian mindset that has caused so
much damage abroad. It seems certain that American democracy will face
greater challenges than at any time since the country's founding.
But that is a long-term question. The key question now is whether
Americans can hear the sound of suffering their leaders are causing
abroad, as at this very moment innocent men, women and children are
being murdered and maimed in what the Red Cross describes as the
greatest civilian carnage since the Russians invaded 30 years ago.
Julian Assange should be applauded not persecuted for hearing the
sound of their suffering.
Do we?
Fred Branfman exposed the U.S. Executive's Secret Air War in
Laos, which illegally and savagely murdered tens of thousands of
innocent Laotian peasants. He has written frequently on Executive
war-making for Alternet in recent years. See www.trulyalive.org for
more information on his activities.
© 2011 Independent Media Institute.
All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/149393/
==================================================
WikiLeaks' Most Terrifying Revelation:
Just How Much Our Government Lies to Us By Fred Branfman, AlterNet
Posted on January 3, 2011, Printed on January 4, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/149393/ "Try as I may I can not escape
the sound of suffering. Perhaps as an old man I will accept suffering
with insouciance.... more
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