Truth or Treason?

In addition to the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it appears that the Pentagon is launching yet another offensive; this one aimed at Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and his whistleblower website.

Julian Assange

For the sake of those who may have spent the last few months in a cave with their eyes tightly shut and their hands over their ears, Wikileaks has become an international phenomenon of late for its willingness to publish documents leaked by whistleblowers around the world.  Since its first appearance on the internet in 2007, the website claims to have received over a million documents from government and corporate whistleblowers.

The site's founders claim that it was a collaborative effort between "Chinese dissidents, journalists, mathematicians and start-up company technologists, from the US, Taiwan, Europe, Australia and South Africa"  Though the creators of Wikileaks have chosen to remain unidentified, an Australian internet activist and journalist named Julian Assange has been the official (unpaid) spokesman of the site.

Over the past 3 years, the site has shone the light of day on everything from Guantanamo Bay operational procedures to Climategate to internet censorship lists.

So long as those documents were exposing exposing the plight of Chinese dissidents or extra-judicial police killings in Kenya--you know, what other countries are doing wrong--U.S. officials seemed less than concerned about what Wikileaks was doing.  But that all changed earlier this year with the release of a video titled "Collateral Murder".

The video consisted of 39 minutes of unedited gun camera footage from U.S. helicopter gunships that showed the killing of two Reuters journalists along with a number of Iraqi civilians (some of whom were armed though clearly not attacking U.S. forces) as they walked along a Baghdad street.  The video also showed what appeared to be the indiscriminate killing of individuals who tried to come the aid of the wounded including two small children who were severely wounded as they sat in a minivan that was targeted by the pilots.

As unsettling as the video is in its graphic record of an unprovoked attack on mostly unarmed men, an even more disturbing aspect is found in the calloused commentary and laughter of the two pilots who are annihilating the Iraqis from a safe distance.  The video had previously been kept out of the view of the public by Pentagon officials who feared that it might cast American forces in a bad light.

Traitor or Hero?

Earlier this year a 22 year old Army Intelligence Specialist named Bradley Manning leaked the video along with a large number of classified diplomatic cables that provided insight into a side of the Afghanistan War that Pentagon officials preferred not see the light of day.  Among the inconvenient truths that emerged were documentation of incidents of a July 2008 U.S. air raid on an Afghan bridal party near the Pakistan border that killed at least 70 women and an August 2008 air strike on a memorial service that killed at least 90 civilians.  These and other incidents are the tip of an iceberg that make the Collateral Murder video body count seem tame by comparison.

Even more damaging to the Pentagon were the revelations that our supposed ally Pakistan was actually providing material support to the Taliban forces our troops are fighting in Afghanistan.  This and other revelations in the 90,000 pages of leaked documents are threatening to clear away the official Pentagon smokescreen that invariably paints the Afghan war in only the most complimentary terms.

Britain's Guardian newspaper sums up the leak like this:

a devastating portrait of the failing war in Afghanistan, revealing how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents, Taliban attacks have soared and Nato commanders fear neighbouring Pakistan and Iran are fueling the insurgency.       

In an act of hypocrisy that would rival Larry Flynt lecturing the clergy about the dangers of pornography, the Pentagon has admonished Julian Assange that he and his source "might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family."  After all, it's not like Pentagon officials have any innocent blood to account for, right?  In the words of Tom Englehardt:

[we] might reasonably weigh actual blood (those hundreds of unreported civilian casualties of the American war the Guardian highlighted, for example) against prospective blood (possible Afghan informers killed by the Taliban via names combed from the Wikileaks documents) and arrive at quite a different conclusion from [Joint Chiefs] Chairman Mullen

Now the Pentagon has also issued a not so veiled threat to Assange and his support team that they want back whatever data he has and that they'd like to know his whereabouts and that they'd "like his cooperation."

Is this what they have in mind?

This much is clear:  The Pentagon doesn't fear the combined armies of the world.  It fears something far more powerful: The approval of the American public.  No war can hope to continue in the face of a public that has withdrawn its (even tacit) support.  For this reason, a certain amount of propaganda  and covering up is required to keep the flags waving and the lip service flowing.  Seeing too much of the stark reality of what is actually happening--to our troops and those whom we refer to as "collateral damage"--causes the public to start asking dangerous questions like,"Why are our troops over there, again?"

To this end, Julian Assange and Wikileaks have performed a valuable, if not heroic, service to truth-seekers everywhere.  The information contained in the leaked documents doesn't imperil our armed forces, but it certainly imperils those policy makers who require a degree of darkness and secrecy in order protect their own interests.  Things like even unintended atrocities and suffering that cause the public to think are considered "dangerous" and "irresponsible" by those whose power depends upon keeping them hidden.

What frightens the power brokers most of all is the prospect of enough people becoming informed and subsequently withholding their approval through the power of the word "No!"