[Peace-discuss] Liberals Smear Wikileaks
C. G. Estabrook
galliher at illinois.edu
Thu Apr 15 09:31:19 CDT 2010
Liberals Smear Wikileaks
Mother Jones and Colbert go after Wikileaks
by Justin Raimondo, April 14, 2010
Activists intent on releasing evidence of crimes committed by a powerful
government are harassed and followed by police and intelligence agents:
a restaurant in which they are meeting comes under surveillance, and,
subsequently, one of their number is detained by the police for 21
hours. Their leader is followed on an international flight by two
agents: and, in a parking lot of foreign soil, one of their number is
accosted by a "James Bond character" and threatened. Computers are
seized, and on the group’s Twitter account the following message appears:
"If anything happens to us, you know why … and you know who is responsible."
Well, then, who is responsible? Surely it must be some totalitarian
regime – say, the Chinese, or one of the Arab autocracies – but no. The
culprits are the Americans, and their target is Wikileaks – the web site
of record for leaked government and other official documents, which has
so far done more real investigative reporting in the last few years to
unnerve and expose the Powers That Be than the New York Times and the
Washington Post, combined.
From the dicey activities of major banks, to the "Climate-gate" e-mails
that revealed attempts by government scientists to falsify or "sex up"
data to make the case for global warming, to the war crimes committed by
US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, Wikileaks is fearlessly exposing the
evil that stalks the world – and they, in turn, are being relentlessly
stalked by the US government and its minions.
A US government document [.pdf] posted on Wikileaks, and authored by
Michael D. Horvath, of something called the "Cyber Counterintelligence
Assessments Branch," apparently a division of the Army
Counterintelligence Center, declared Wikileaks to be a danger to
national security. The report explored several ways to track the
provenance of documents posted on the Wikileaks site, and take down the
site itself. Horvath cites a supposed lack of "editorial review" which
means "the Wikileaks.org Web site could be used to post fabricated
information; to post misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda; or
to conduct perception management and influence operations designed to
convey a negative message to those who view or retrieve information from
the Web site."
Oh no!
Furthermore, "it must be presumed that Wikileaks.org has or will receive
sensitive or classified DoD documents in the future. This information
will be published and analyzed over time by a variety of personnel and
organizations with the goal of influencing US policy."
Shocking! Why, how dare these perfidious personnel and obviously
subversive organizations presume to imagine they could possibly
influence US policy! Horvath lists a number of "foreign" intelligence
agencies – the Russians, the British, the Israelis – who have the
technical capacity to shut Wikileaks down, and alludes to a more subtle
effort by averring:
"Efforts by some domestic and foreign personnel and organizations to
discredit the Wikileaks.org Web site include allegations that it
wittingly allows the posting of uncorroborated information, serves as an
instrument of propaganda, and is a front organization of the US Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA)."
Horvath goes on to detail all the criticism of Wikileaks that have
appeared in the general media, including the blogosphere, and now that
the "Collateral Murder" video has been released – with another one,
showing similar atrocities in Afghanistan, on the way – the techniques
described by Horvath are being implemented by the Obama administration’s
media shills to discredit and marginalize Wikileaks, particularly
targeting its founder, Julian Assange.
First up is Mother Jones magazine, a citadel of Bay Area high liberalism
and the left-wing of the Obama cult, with a long article by one David
Kushner. The piece is essentially a critical profile of Assange, who is
described as an egotist in the first few paragraphs, and it goes
downhill from there. Most of the article is a collection of dishy quotes
from various "experts" – including from the apparently quite jealous
(and obviously demented) editor of Cryptome.org, a similar site, who
says Wikileaks is CIA front. Steven Aftergood, author of the Federation
of American Scientists’ Secrecy News blog, "says he wasn’t impressed
with WikiLeaks’ ‘conveyor-belt approach’ to publishing anything it came
across. ‘To me, transparency is a means to an end, and that end is an
invigorated political life, accountable institutions, opportunities for
public engagement. For them, transparency and exposure seem to be ends
in themselves,’ says Aftergood. He declined to get involved."
To begin with, quite obviously Assange and the Wikileaks group have a
political goal in, say, publishing the Iraq massacre video – which is to
stop the war, end the atrocities, and expose the war crimes of this
government to the light of day. Surely the video, and the ones to come,
will continue to "invigorate" our political life – perhaps a bit more
than the Aftergoods of this world would like.
Kushner contacted a few members of the Wikileaks advisory board who
claim they never agreed to serve – and gets one of them, computer expert
Ben Laurie, to call Assange "weird." Kushner adds his own description:
"paranoid: – and yet Laurie’s own paranoia comes through loud and clear
when he avers:
"WikiLeaks allegedly has an advisory board, and allegedly I’m a member
of it. I don’t know who runs it. One of the things I’ve tried to avoid
is knowing what’s going on there, because that’s probably safest for all
concerned.”
This is really the goal of harassing and pursuing government critics:
pure intimidation. With US government agents stalking Assange as he
flies to a conference in Norway, and one attempted physical attack in
Nairobi, Assange is hated by governments and their shills worldwide. And
Mother Jones certainly is a shill for the Obama administration, a
virtual house organ of the Obama cult designed specifically for Bay Area
limousine liberals who’ll gladly turn a blind eye to their idol’s war
crimes – and cheer on the Feds as they track Assange’s every move and
plot to take him down.
Kushner asks "Can WikiLeaks be trusted with sensitive, and possibly
life-threatening, documents when it is less than transparent itself?"
Oh, what a good question: why shouldn’t Wikileaks make itself
"transparent" to the US government, and all the other governments whose
oxen have been viciously gored by documents posted on the site? Stop
drinking the bong water, Kushner, and get a clue.
Kushner quotes one Kelly McBride, "the ethics group leader" at the
Poynter Institute for Media Studies, as saying Wikileaks suffers from "a
distorted sense of transparency.” This Orwellian turn of phrase is an
indicator of how the mind of a government shill works. Says McBride:
“They’re giving you everything they’ve got, but when journalists go
through process of granting someone confidentiality, when they do it
well, they determine that source has good information and that the
source is somehow deserving of confidentiality.”
I want to ask this "ethics group leader" if someone who works for the US
government and has evidence of war crimes committed by that government,
"is somehow deserving of confidentiality?" Yes or no? If no, then you
had better reexamine the "ethics" upheld by you and the Poynter
Institute. By the way, nothing about McBride’s views are at all
surprising, given that the Poynter Institute is promoting the idea of
government subsidies to the American media. If McBride & Co. aren’t
already on the government payroll, then they should be. Same goes for
the ubiquitous Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters
Committee for the Freedom of the Press, who "thinks WikiLeaks’ approach
gives fresh ammunition to those who seek to pressure journalists to
cough up the names of their unnamed sources. She forbids her staff from
using the site as a source."
Ms. Dalglish has her head screwed on backwards: that’s the only possible
explanation for an organization ostensibly devoted to press freedom
joining the government’s pushback against Wikileaks. She should resign –
or be impeached – forthwith. Far from pressuring journalists, Wikileaks
is an essential asset to the profession: it provides them not only with
more sources, but also with a convenient fallback: "I got it from
Wikileaks." This decreases pressure on journalists pressed to identify
their sources: they can always blame it on Assange and his fellow
Scarlet Pimpernels of the Internet.
A child could understand this, but it’s way beyond the executive
director of the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press, and
also far beyond the comprehension of the "liberal" Mother Jones
magazine, which ought to change its name to Encounter. Kushner "reports"
this nonsense uncritically, and even cites the loony John Young, of
Cryptome.org, who rants:
"’WikiLeaks is a fraud,’ [Young] wrote to Assange’s list, hinting that
the new site was a CIA data mining operation. ‘Fuck your cute hustle and
disinformation campaign against legitimate dissent. Same old shit,
working for the enemy.’"
Kushner has all bases covered: the white-wine-and-brie liberals who
would rather look the other way while their hero Obama slaughters
children on the streets of Baghdad, and the tinfoil hat crowd who can be
convinced Wikileaks is a "false flag" operation.
The positive impact of Wikileaks is "debatable," avers Kushner –
especially if you’re an Obamaite intent on covering up the fact of US
war crimes, because of the political damage it might inflict on your
"progressive" coalition. As evidence of this "debatability," Kushner
tries to blame the assassination of two Kenyan dissidents on the
publication of documents on Wikileaks exposing Kenyan corruption – which
seems a blatant case of diverting the real blame from where it really
belongs, and that is on the Kenyan government and its death squads. No,
it just won’t wash – and this is certainly a curious argument for an
ostensibly liberal magazine, supposedly devoted to human rights, to
make. But then again, anything is possible if you’ve decided to become a
government apologist and errand boy.
Speaking of government apologists and errand boys, Steven Colbert of The
Colbert Report on Comedy Central had Assange on Monday night, and it was
the Mother Jones piece with a snarky grin and a laugh track. Colbert
dropped the comic mask, and let his true face as a loyal Obamaite shine
through, reciting Pentagon lies and attacking Assange for having edited
"Collateral Murder," and even for giving it that title. He then opined
Assange was "emotionally manipulating" people – an echo of Horvath’s
analysis, which denounced Wikileaks as "disinformation" and
"propaganda." "Collateral Murder" was "an editorial," not real
reporting, said Colbert, but looked a bit surprised when Assange calmly
pointed out that the assertion of a nearby firefight is "a lie." "We
have classified information" to the contrary, Assange said, with calm
assurance. You could hear a pin drop when he said that the report of
"some gunfire" preceded the killings by twenty minutes and miles away
from the reported location.
What was supposed to have been a "gotcha" interview turned into a
triumph for Wikileaks. Colbert, the court jester in King Obama’s court,
missed his target by a country mile. This failed ambush, coupled with
the Mother Jones hit piece, tell us all we need to know about what
political discourse in Obama’s America is going to be like. Obama’s
political police are after Wikileaks, and specifically Assange, and the
liberal smear brigade is going to go after him hammer and tongs. The
Obamaites know that a great chunk of their liberal base opposes the wars
in Iraq and Afghanistan, and their Dear Leader could easily find himself
in the same position as Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1968. No wonder there
were two US State Department officials following Assange on that
international flight: will Hillary Clinton, their boss, tell us what
they were doing, and on what authority?
The spying on Wikileaks, and attempts by the US government to take down
and/or discredit this valuable Internet resource, is taking place on
Obama’s watch, and under the direction of his appointed officials. The
entire apparatus of surveillance and repression developed under the Bush
administration has been adopted by and expanded on by the Obamaites This
is a regime that has now decided it’s okay to assassinate American
citizens, but foreign-born terrorists plotting to kill Americans must be
tried in a US court and given free lawyers.
And if that doesn’t prove we’ve entered Bizarro World, via the Twilight
Zone, then I don’t know how else to explain it.
While Assange is being tailed by Hillary’s gendarmes, and a brazen
campaign of intimidation is being carried out by government agencies
against a legal organization and web site, the "liberals" over at Mother
Jones are doing their bit by trying to discredit Assange, and Wikileaks,
in progressive circles. Judging from the comments attached to Kushner’s
piece, it isn’t working all that well.
When are conservatives going to wake up and smell the coffee? Probably
when Obama’s thugs come after them and their dinky little web sites, if
ever they become a threat to the regime. This is blowback, guys: the
very spying and surveillance you wanted as weapons in the "war on
terrorism" are now being turned on critics of a liberal Democratic
administration. They’re going after the web site that published the
"Climate-gate" emails — and you’re next!
And when are liberals going to wake up and smell the fact that their
Dear Leader has betrayed the Revolution, and is in many ways worse than
his predecessor? At least you knew Bush was an authoritarian. Obama puts
a "reasonable" and even "liberal" face on what is, essentially, the same
doctrine of executive and governmental supremacism. What’s interesting
is to listen to liberals now sounding like the once-hated neocons,
smearing anyone who stands in their way and justifying an increasingly
unpopular and costly war. The real Mother Jones must be spinning in her
grave.
http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2010/04/13/liberals-smear-wikileaks/
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