Friday 29th of November 2024
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take a leak...

clintonite...

From Robert Fisk...

Back in the First World War or the Second World War or Vietnam, you wrote your military reports on paper. They may have been typed in triplicate but you could number your copies, trace any spy and prevent the leaks. The Pentagon Papers was actually written on paper. You needed to find a mole to get them. But paper could always be destroyed, weeded, trashed, all copies destroyed. At the end of the 1914-18 war, for example, a British second lieutenant shot a Chinese man after Chinese workers had looted a French military train. The Chinese man had pulled a knife on the soldier. But during the 1930s, the British soldier's file was "weeded" three times and so no trace of the incident survives. A faint ghost of it remains only in a regimental war diary which records Chinese involvement in the looting of "French provision trains". The only reason I know of the killing is that my father was the British lieutenant and told me the story before he died. No WikiLeaks then.

But I do suspect this massive hoard of material from the Iraq war has serious implications for journalists as well as armies. What is the future of the Seymour Hershes and the old-style investigative journalism that The Sunday Times used to practise? What is the point of sending teams of reporters to examine war crimes and meet military "deep throats", if almost half a million secret military documents are going to float up in front of you on a screen?

We still haven't got to the bottom of the WikiLeaks story, and I rather suspect that there are more than just a few US soldiers involved in this latest revelation. Who knows if it doesn't go close to the top? In its investigations, for example, al-Jazeera found an extract from a run-of-the-mill Pentagon press conference in November 2005. Peter Pace, the uninspiring chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is briefing journalists on how soldiers should react to the cruel treatment of prisoners, pointing out proudly that an American soldier's duty is to intervene if he sees evidence of torture. Then the camera moves to the far more sinister figure of Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who suddenly interrupts – almost in a mutter, and to Pace's consternation – "I don't think you mean they (American soldiers) have an obligation to physically stop it. It's to report it."

The significance of this remark – cryptically sadistic in its way – was lost on the journos, of course. But the secret Frago 242 memo now makes much more sense of the press conference. Presumably sent by General Ricardo Sanchez, this is the instruction that tells soldiers: "Provided the initial report confirms US forces were not involved in the detainee abuse, no further investigation will be conducted unless directed by HHQ [Higher Headquarters]." Abu Ghraib happened under Sanchez's watch in Iraq. It was also Sanchez, by the way, who couldn't explain to me at a press conference why his troops had killed Saddam's sons in a gun battle in Mosul rather than capture them.

So Sanchez's message, it seems, must have had Rumsfeld's imprimatur.

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-the-shaming-of-america-2115111.html

the sins of war...

WASHINGTON, Oct. 22 (Xinhua) -- U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Friday strongly condemned Wikileaks' imminent disclosure of tens of thousands of classified documents on Iraq war.

Clinton said she condemned "in the most clear terms" the disclosure of any classified information that will put the lives of Americans and others at risk.

But Clinton, speaking at a joint press conference with Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi, refused to get into the details of the documents.

Some of the secret files showed that U.S. military gave secret orders not to investigate torture by Iraqi authorities, according to the website of al-Jazeera English Channel.

The satellite channel said it has obtained details of the nearly 400,000 classified U.S. documents on Iraq war, which is reportedly the biggest leak of military secrets in history.

Clinton said the disclosure could threaten U.S. "national security and the national security of those with whom we are working."

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/world/2010-10/23/c_13571278.htm

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Defence Minister Stephen Smith says the release of almost 400,000 US documents about the Iraq War could create a security risk for Australia.

The whistleblowing website WikiLeaks has published classified material that suggests US commanders ignored torture conducted by Iraqi security forces.

Defence set up a taskforce to go through classified documents about the Afghanistan war released by the website earlier this year, and Mr Smith says the same taskforce will go through the latest documents.

"It's an early history and we have no troops or forces or personnel militarily in Iraq, and so therefore the danger in that respect is less," he said.

"It still does potentially give people an insight into the way into which we do operations and it does potentially put people at risk who have assisted us in the past.

"We'll go through that painstaking course and treat it in exactly the same way we've treated the earlier unauthorised disclosure of classified military information."

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/10/24/3046716.htm

a cloaked life....

Several WikiLeaks colleagues say he alone decided to release the Afghan documents without removing the names of Afghan intelligence sources for NATO troops. “We were very, very upset with that, and with the way he spoke about it afterwards,” said Birgitta Jonsdottir, a core WikiLeaks volunteer and a member of Iceland’s Parliament. “If he could just focus on the important things he does, it would be better.”

He is also being investigated in connection with accusations of rape and molestation involving two Swedish women. Mr. Assange has denied the allegations, saying the relations were consensual. But prosecutors in Sweden have yet to formally approve charges or dismiss the case eight weeks after the complaints against Mr. Assange were filed, damaging his quest for a secure base for himself and WikiLeaks. Though he characterizes the claims as “a smear campaign,” the scandal has compounded the pressures of his cloaked life.

“When it comes to the point where you occasionally look forward to being in prison on the basis that you might be able to spend a day reading a book, the realization dawns that perhaps the situation has become a little more stressful than you would like,” he said over the London lunch.

Exposing Secrets

Mr. Assange has come a long way from an unsettled childhood in Australia as a self-acknowledged social misfit who narrowly avoided prison after being convicted on 25 charges of computer hacking in 1995. History is punctuated by spies, defectors and others who revealed the most inflammatory secrets of their age. Mr. Assange has become that figure for the Internet era, with as yet unreckoned consequences for himself and for the keepers of the world’s secrets.

“I’ve been waiting 40 years for someone to disclose information on a scale that might really make a difference,” said Daniel Ellsberg, who exposed a 1,000-page secret study of the Vietnam War in 1971 that became known as the Pentagon Papers.

Mr. Ellsberg said he saw kindred spirits in Mr. Assange and Pfc. Bradley Manning, the 22-year-old former Army intelligence operative under detention in Quantico, Va., suspected of leaking the Iraq and Afghan documents.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/24/world/24assange.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=print

criminals in arms...

From Chris Floyd Moscow Times 2003

Here's a headline you don't see every day: "War Criminals Hire War Criminals to Hunt Down War Criminals."

Perhaps that's not the precise wording used by the Washington Post this week, but it is the absolute essence of its story about the Bush Regime's new campaign to put Saddam's murderous security forces on America's payroll.

Yes, the sahibs in Bush's Iraqi Raj are now doling out American tax dollars to hire the murderers of the infamous Mukhabarat and other agents of the Baathist Gestapo – perhaps hundreds of them. The logic, if that's the word, seems to be that these bloodstained "insiders" will lead their new imperial masters to other bloodstained "insiders" responsible for bombing the UN headquarters in Baghdad – and killing another dozen American soldiers while Little George was playing with his putts during his month-long Texas siesta.

Naturally, the Iraqi people – even the Bush-appointed leaders of the Potemkin "Governing Council" – aren't exactly overjoyed at seeing Saddam's goons return, flush with American money and firepower. And they're certainly not reassured by the fact that the Bushists have also re-opened Saddam's most notorious prison, the dread Abu Ghraib, and are now, Mukhabarat-like, filling it with Iraqis – men, women and children as young as 11 – seized from their homes or plucked off the street to be held incommunicado, indefinitely, without due process, just like the old days. As The Times reports, weeping relatives who dare approach the gleaming American razor-wire in search of their "disappeared" loved ones are referred to a crude, hand-written sign pinned to a spike: "No visits are allowed, no information will be given and you must leave." Perhaps an Iraqi Akhmatova will do justice to these scenes one day.

 

Back to 2010

One of the first stories out of the gate from the gigantic new release of classified documents on the Iraq War by Wikileaks details the willing connivance and cooperation between the American invaders and their Iraqi collaborators in perpetrating heinous tortures against Iraqis.


an international arrest warrant...

Sweden is to issue an international arrest warrant for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in a rape case.

Prosecutors said they would seek the warrant after a court ruled he should be held for questioning. An initial inquiry had been dropped in August.

Mr Assange, an Australian who does not live in Sweden, says the allegations are part of a smear campaign.

Wikileaks has published confidential material relating to US military activities in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Mr Assange, 39, denies allegations of rape, sexual molestation and unlawful coercion, which stem from a visit to Sweden in August.

A Stockholm prosecutor started an investigation shortly afterwards, but the case was dropped by the chief prosecutor a day later.

In September, Sweden's Director of Prosecution, Marianne Ny, reopened the investigation, but did not request Mr Assange's detention at the time.

'Complete innocence'

Ms Ny says Mr Assange needs to be questioned. "So far, we have not been able to meet with him to accomplish the interrogations," she says.

On Thursday the Stockholm District Court issued an order to detain him.

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Gus: if it had been someone of lesser notoriety, the "case" would have stayed within the Swedish "borders"... One smells CIA sulphur in the process of spreading this "hunt" internationally, in which the chief of prosecution may nor be part of, but the instigator of the case may be... Remember how Mossad caught Vanunu in Italy... The goons of Mossad could not really capture him in the UK so they got a female Mossad agent (from America) to infuse "love at first sight" and to convince Vanunu to elope from London to Rome, where he was swiftly captured and shipped back to Israel — AFTER his story of Israeli nuclear bombs had been published...

abusing her powers...

Julian Assange, the editor-in-chief of whistleblower site WikiLeaks, has hit back at Swedish authorities following the issuing of an arrest warrant on charges of rape and sexual molestation.

Assange's lawyer, Mark Stephens, has released a statement via Twitter, in which he criticises the actions of the Sweden's director of prosecutions, Marianne Ny, which have led to a situation in which one in ten instances of the word 'rape' on the internet also include his name.

This, he says, is the result of blanket media coverage of allegations which he is yet to be informed of in writing - despite numerous demands over the past three months. Stephens points out that this is a breach of EU law.

In applying successfully for an arrest warrant yesterday, Ny claimed she had been unable to persuade him to submit to an interview voluntarily: "The reason for my request is that we need to interrogate him. So far, we have not been able to meet with him to accomplish the interrogations."

Stephens says that, on the contrary, Assange offered to make himself available for interview in Sweden before he left in August, and again in the UK either by videophone, phone or email.

"All of these offers have been flatly refused by a prosecutor who is abusing her powers by insisting that he return to Sweden at his own expense to be subjected to another media circus that she will orchestrate," the statement reads. "This behavior is not a prosecution, but a persecution."



Read more: http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/71698,people,news,julian-assange-hits-back-at-sweden-over-rape-case-arrest-warrant#ixzz15ohFbj7j
see toon at top...