As The Wiki Documents Are Dumped, A Political Debate Ensues
November 29th, 2010 - by: danny
Participating in a Panel Debate/News Analysis about Korea crisis on Press TV
Listen: Podcast of Interview by Chris Cook on Radio Station in Canada Monday Night
The Wikileaks keep leaking.
The Daily Beast points to the most shocking stories so far.:
It seems to me that the reporting in London’s Guardian is far better than what we are getting in the New York Times whose first instinct was to share all the documents they received with the US government, to show how responsible and patriotic they are.
The Times has focused on selecting documents that bash Iran, a preoccupation in Washington. It was also revealed that Wikileaks did not provide documents to the NY Times. Julian Assange had been pissed at the paper for a putdownish profile they ran of him,
Reader Supported News reports:
- The New York Times has this to say: “The Times has taken care to exclude, in its articles and in supplementary material, in print and online, information that would endanger confidential informants or compromise national security. The Times’s redactions were shared with other news organizations and communicated to WikiLeaks, in the hope that they would similarly edit the documents they planned to post online.” The Times report tends to direct public attention to points it deems relevant.
- For the full, unredacted documents go to the source: WikiLeaks.org has set up their own archive. It’s easy to navigate but, there are a quarter of a million documents.
It seems that it was the Guardian who gave the Times the documents in part to make sure they got out if British authorities sought stop them from publishing. Strange.
There are plenty of criticisms of Wikileaks from the US government including Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama with some Republican Members of Congress urging action against the group and its leader. Some want to designate Wikleaks a terrorist organization.
The NY Times reports: Clinton Says U.S. Relations Will Survive Leak ‘Attack’
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said that the leaks undermined the international community but that they wouldn’t damage America’s ties.
A blogger called Arms Control Wonk says the US comes off good in the expose.
DN: Noam Chomsky says purpose of secrecy is to protect the government from its own population.
There is also some on the right and the left who are suspicious of Wikileaks
Israel has cited documents revealing demands by Arab leaders for action against Iran as an evidence that its own policies are vindicated. This lead to this headline on Venezuela’s Telesur Tv: “Wikileaks revelations benefits Israelis.”
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports:
WIKISRAEL LEAKS: “Leaks don’t embarrass Israel one bit
An Israeli Blogger says the disclosures show Obama is Out Of It
Assasinations:
Iranians suspect Israel and the US in two bomb attacks against top nuclear scientists that killed one yesterday. This is one more act of war, no doubt designed to provoke an Iranian response and further escalate the conflict. One of the Wikileaks cables quotes the head of Iraeli intelligence as urging the recruiting of opposition groups: “Wikileaks: Mossad chief wanted to enlist opposition groups against Iranian government.”
WikiLeaks did not succeed in penetrating the most sensitive channels of U.S.-Israel relations.”
Again, they were not as far as I know targeting Israeli documents but publishing purloined US cables. The LA Times reports that Arab Media outlets, including Al Jazeera have played down the latest Wikileaks releases embarrassing Arab governments. Al Jazeera’s Arabic language Channel did interview me during the film Festival I helped judge in Tehran.
Anwaar Hussain, an Arab Blogger, does deal with the leaks and the US stance:
“The US says that Wikileaks disclosures are a crime. Since when has disclosure of a crime become a crime, wasn’t explained. Apart from the fact that the reaction of the United States’ Government borders on the ridiculous, it does remind one of that famous quote from the 1969 movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, “Boy, I got vision and the rest of the world wears bifocals.”
China to US: Resolve the Issue
BEIJING (Reuters) – China called on the United States on Tuesday to
“appropriately resolve related issues” concerning reports on a series of
leaked U.S. State Department cables, a foreign ministry spokesman said.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said at a regular news briefing
that Beijing has noted the Wikileaks’ disclosure of a trove of State
Department cables, but declined further comment.
Another article blames Wikileaks or not exposing the true intentions of the US even though they are disseminating official cables, not offering their own analysis:
The Guardian reports on Iran’s response:
“Iran today lashed out at the WikiLeaks revelations, with the president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, dismissing the controversial leaks as a “worthless” psychological warfare campaign against his country. But Israel said it felt vindicated by the public exposure of Arab and international concern over Iran’s nuclear programme.
“We don’t think this information was leaked,” the Iranian president insisted during a televised press conference in Tehran. “We think it was organised to be released on a regular basis and they are pursuing political goals.”
Ahmadinejad told reporters that documents highlighting Arab hostility to Iran and its alleged nuclear ambitions would have no impact. “We are friends with the regional countries and mischievous acts will not affect relations,” he said
BBC reports an Iranian Nuclear scientist has been asssinated by parties unknown:, some claim it was Israel’s Mossad
What’s Missing
Professor Michael Brenner of the Univ of Pittsburgh draws an other lesson of the limits of the leaks and the way they are interpreted:
“The most striking feature of the dense cable traffic on Iran is the one item that isn’t there. My scanning of what’s available reveals no mention of possible comprehensive negotiations with Tehran on security arrangements for the Gulf region. Washington doesn’t raise it; neither do our friends, followers or allies. Only the Turks hint at it – and they are told to stop their ‘meddling’ by Assistant Secretary Phil Gordon. Yet the Iranians have made it clear since April 2003 that they are unwilling to decouple the nuclear question from their (and our) broader security concerns.
Th Obama administration (like its predecessor) has made a studied decision not to let the promised diplomatic avenue extend into those domains. Apparently, Obama personally laid down the rule that there was to be no mention of them. The consequence is that the only two options are to ratchet up economic and political pressure, i. e. non-military coercion, or military action. The Sunni Arab governments seem to favor the latter. The Europeans (like Washington) favor the former and avoid thinking about the implications of its failing – as it almost certainly will. Washington’s choice is a conscious one. Other governments seemingly do not have the self-confidence to even consider a strategy that the United States has rejected.
It very well may be that they all eschew the idea of comprehensive negotiations on substantive grounds. However, I suspect that there also is a powerful psychological factor at work. Both the Europeans and Arabs have for generations lived in a dependent relationship with the United States. Understandably, the enervating effects on their ability to think autonomously about criticial choices. much less to take initiative or to muster the courage to push for an unconventional course of action, have politically denatured them. A comparison with Israel is instructive. So, too, is a comparison with Turkey.
So it all rests on the probity and sound judgment of Washington. Our track record over the past decade offers no grounds for encouragement. Nor does the timidity and conventional mindset of Barack Obama.
Forbes Magazine is reporting that Wikileaks next targets are financial institions;
“Early next year, Julian Assange says, a major American bank will suddenly find itself turned inside out. Tens of thousands of its internal documents will be exposed on Wikileaks.org with no polite requests for executives’ response or other forewarnings. The data dump will lay bare the finance firm’s secrets on the Web for every customer, every competitor, every regulator to examine and pass judgment on.
Here is the Forbes interview with Assange;
Norman Solomon writes:
Compared to the kind of secret cables that WikiLeaks has just shared with the world, everyday public statements from government officials are exercises in make-believe. In a democracy, people have a right to know what their government is actually doing. In a pseudo-democracy, a bunch of fairy tales from high places will do the trick. Diplomatic facades routinely masquerade as realities. But sometimes the mask slips — for all the world to see — and that’s what just happened with the humongous leak of State Department cables.
Real News: Cables Show Business a Usual in US Policy
The Free Market Daily Bell is skeptical:
“…But every time his WikiLeaks does another one of these data dumps, Assange takes another step backward in our view. Back in July after a massive WikiLeaks “dump” seemed to set a narrative that Pakistan was at fault for the Afghan war, we’d had enough and wrote a fictional narrative in which we imagined two CIA agents coming up with the idea for an Assange-like character. You can read our analysis here: Comes a Blond Stranger.
This latest effort by Assange raises even more doubts so far as we are concerned. First, there is the constant (annoying) advance dissemination of information to the likes of mainstream leftist publications such as the UK Guardian and Le Monde … and previously to the New York Times. Anyone who believes that the New York Times (or the Guardian for that matter) is not in cahoots with the powers-that-be, has got to be terminally naïve in our opinion. That goes for Assange, too.
Does Assange, for all his apparent cynicism, not get it? He believes that the mainstream media is worth cultivating for his purposes? Apparently, he is fairly sure of their cooperation. Not that Assange puts it that way. There’s plenty of information on the Internet about the way the world works. But rather than focus on the mercantilist intrigues of the Anglosphere, which uses the levers of government to advance its own private interests, Assange focuses attention on the government itself with his endless leaks of hundreds of thousands of low-level documents that are somehow “classified.”
Financial Times A history of the present in 250,000 cables
By Philip Stephens
To trawl the vast cache of hitherto secret US state department cables dumped on to the web by WikiLeaks is to dip into the history of the present. Tales of diplomatic duplicity and unvarnished portraits of foreign leaders have grabbed the headlines. The big picture is one of the most powerful nations on the planet battling to hold on to its primacy…
Given his sabotage of US efforts to restart the Middle East peace process, Benjamin Netanyahu gets off lightly. Israel’s prime minister is said to be elegant and charming, but loath to keep his promises. Slights on David Cameron relayed from London have ruffled feathers in Downing Street, but Britain’s prime minister can hardly claim to have emerged since as a towering figure on the world stage. As for unbecoming behaviour by a member of Britain’s royal family, what’s new?
Much as the publication of this high-grade gossip will have bruised plenty of egos, in truth it is the stuff of routine diplomatic reporting. Nor should anyone be surprised that US diplomats at the United Nations might gather personal information about UN staff. Everyone who is anyone does something similar.
Amy Goodman’s Report/Roundtable on Democracy Now
Columbia Journalism Review: Coverage Round Up
ACLU SITE ON FACEBOOK
This is some of the reaction and speculation. More on Wikileaks to come.
Comments to Dissector@mediachannel.org
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WikiLeaks Bombshell; Special Report: My Visit To The Former US Embassy In Iran, Recession Over? War Worries In Korea
November 28th, 2010 - by: danny
NY TIMES: Leaked Cables Uncloak U.S. Diplomacy
A cache of a quarter-million confidential American diplomatic cables, most of them from the past three years, provides an unprecedented look at backroom bargaining by embassies around the world, brutally candid views of foreign leaders and frank assessments of nuclear and terrorist threats.
Some of the cables, made available to The New York Times and several other news organizations, were written as recently as late February, revealing the Obama administration’s exchanges over crises and conflicts. The material was originally obtained by WikiLeaks, an organization devoted to revealing secret documents. Read more.
Where the secret cables can be read: Wikileaks.org (currently under mass distributed denial of service attack; for current status & events, check Twitter
Also: The Guardian | The New York Times | Le Monde | El Pais | Der Spiegel: English or German. Greg Mitchell, at the Nation, has been live blogging the release. Many of these cables reveal that Arab States, especially Saudia Arabia as well as Israel have been pushing for military action and covert action against Iran.
Profile In Courage: Notice That the NY Times Turned Over All The Documents from WiliLeaks To The White House
Simon Jenkins, Guardian, The job of the media is not to protect power from embarrassment
RELATED: WikiLeaks Vs. the Pentagon Papers — July 26, 2010 [watch video and check out the many other links]
“The Pentagon Papers took the blinders off. The Wikileaks documents are more like a microscopic view of the day in day out grind of the war in Afghanistan.I would add to that one other difference: the Pentagon Papers produced one of the great Supreme Court cases when the Nixon Administration tried unsuccessfully to stop publication. The Obama administration has given no indication it intends to attempt something similar with Wikileaks, which is based overseas and probably beyond the jurisdiction of U.S. courts.”
What Wikileaks Says About Their Document Dump
The cables, which date from 1966 up until the end of February this year, contain confidential communications between 274 embassies in countries throughout the world and the State Department in Washington DC. 15,652 of the cables are classified Secret. The embassy cables will be released in stages over the next few months. The subject matter of these cables is of such importance, and the geographical spread so broad, that to do otherwise would not do this material justice.
The cables show the extent of US spying on its allies and the UN; turning a blind eye to corruption and human rights abuse in “client states”; backroom deals with supposedly neutral countries; lobbying for US corporations; and the measures US diplomats take to advance those who have access to them. This document release reveals the contradictions between the US’s public persona and what it says behind closed doors – and shows that if citizens in a democracy want their governments to reflect their wishes, they should ask to see what’s going on behind the scenes.
Mail & Guardian: Mandela Connection: Winnie Reported To Have Given US Info on Nelson and ANC
Reuters: Spin anyone? Israel Says Wikileaks Vindicates Its Concerns
DS comment: The latest massive Wikileaks revelations released Sunday show how the US and its allies have been covertly discussing military attacks and covert actions against Iran. If history is any judge, this doesn’t always work out the way Washington wants as I learned in Tehran. It may be worthwhile considering what previous calls for outside intervention has led to in Iran in the past:
Report from Tehran: Memories That Still Hold US Hostage: Reflections On A Visit To The Former Embattled US Embassy in Tehran
Tehran, Iran: The building was smaller than I remembered. The fading images in my mind were grainy: angry crowds, students marching, flags burning, chants of “Death to America,” and Americans diplomats in blindfolds, It became a soap opera: Ted Koppel started his rise in TV News with ABC’s nightly “America Held Hostage” series, the forerunner to “Nightline.”
Back then, I was in radio news, just transitioning into TV. I remember publicly debating about what we should do with a DJ friend who had turned from a Vietnam War peacenik into a bomb Iran hawk.
In Iran, the takeover of the US Embassy – what students called its “conquering”– was justified as a blow against imperialism, the seizure of a “spy nest.” It was, at the time, the most globally covered aspect of the Iranian Revolution, an audacious confrontation between people power and a foreign power.
The events that followed may have been considered revolutionary in Iran, but for progressive Americans they became the nail in President Jimmy Carter’s political coffin. He angered Iranians first when he toasted the Shah calling him a beloved figure. He then tried and failed to negotiate through third parties and later sent in a military ‘rescue” operation that crashed and burned leading to his own downfall.
The Iranians held him responsible for sheltering the ailing Shah; he in turn was being pressured by the likes of David Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger to shelter the monarch.
These events also helped bring on the turn to the right with the elevation of the actor we called “Ronnie Raygun.” The hostages were released in a tacit agreement after 444 days in the very hour of his inauguration.
We are still living with the consequences, when wages declined, unions were broken, and military spending escalated. Reagan invaded Grenada and Beirut where the killings of hundreds of US soldiers sparked what we now label a War on Terror and which Iranians see as a Clash of Civilizations.
The despotic Shah, our faithful servant for so many years, was driven from power by a popular revolt with the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini soon becoming the man we loved to hate.
Now, thirty plus years later, I am standing in front of what was once our Embassy surrounded today by well-kept lawns as it was then.
It is as if the past is never past, with so many ghosts still around.
The tragedy is that polarization between our two countries remains symbolized by what is now a very politicized museum with photos of the activists who crawled through a basement window and tunnel to take it over. They were demanding the return of the Shah to stand trial. They were protesting US interference in their internal affairs.
I didn’t remember that eight hostages-women and black employees — were released by Khomeni as a gesture. He urged the black men to return home and carry on the work of our most famous Muslim martyr, Malcolm X.
Malcolm was one of the Americans they admired.
There are rooms of creative if didactic art works, graffiti, and murals denouncing US policy, including our news media which they see as a weapons system that has been deployed against them. (One slogan on the wall: “Information R.I.P.”) Perhaps this is why my film WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception was shown here and is popular.)
The angry art is not the building’s most popular attraction. On the second floor, is the ex-Embassy’s own West Wing, behind a metal safe like door is where the spying was done.
The offices are pretty much as they found it – a soundproof glass encased safe room within a room, cryptographic equipment, communications gear that allowed them to tap Tehran’s telephones and a forgery bench where they invented passports and spread disinformation. (I once saw a similar room in a former Stasi secret police station in East Germany that kept tabs on everyone.)
The students found a secret document with a floor plan of the Ayatollah’s residence and other artifacts of CIA espionage including guns and coding machines.
Today, all of this is done digitally and with much more sophistication. Just last week, the US launched a massive new spy satellite to upgrade our global surveillance capabilities.
You don’t need Embassies anymore to do this dirty work. We have since set up a well-funded Office of Global Reconnaissance but it doesn’t seem be to making us any more secure.
These days, a small group like Wikileaks has found ways to release hundreds of thousands of documents that officialdom wants to hide. (After the Embassy seizure, The US government downplayed spying by diplomats. The latest Wikileaks expose—See Above– reveals that diplomats are spying more than ever.)
As the students muscled their way into the Embassy back then, US officials were busy destroying documents, burning them in the basement, throwing them into chemical vats that turned paper into powder, and feeding them into huge industrial-strength shredders. I saw the machines.
They managed to keep the activists at bay for three hours while destroying sensitive and potentially embarrassing data before surrendering.
What they didn’t count on was that scores of students would spend weeks patiently and systematically piecing the shreds together, literally ironing and weaving the fragments into readable prose. They reconstructed the destroyed documents and published them in scores of books that topped the best-seller list in Iran, if there was one.
The late Bill Worthy, a legendary African American journalist, brought some of the books back to Boston in 1980 only to have them confiscated at the airport where he was threatened with prosecution.
Most Americans know little of Iran’s 2500 year history, its proud culture or the role played by the CIA in toppling the democratically elected the Mosaddegh government in l953 that wanted to nationalize the country’s oil instead of being forced to allow the West to exploit it. (The Ayatollah Khomeini referenced this event when he told the US: “You have no right to complain, because you took our whole country hostage in 1953.”) There is no evidence that the Ayatollah organized the Embassy takeover.
They don’t know that the US orchestrated Iraq’s invasion of Iran causing a half million deaths, many from chemical weapons. I met some of the still sick victims of those chemicals including a disfigured Member of Parliament who was a war correspondent. Saddam’s gassing of Iran got almost no press attention compared to his killing of Kurds.
Our ignorance still feeds dangerous calls for war like those made recently by the pin-headed Lindsey Graham, a Republican Senator from the former Confederate State of South Carolina. He’s called for the sinking of Iranian Navy. He seems to have forgotten his own States role in launching the American civil war after a Naval battle between the Monitor and the Merrimack in Charleston harbor.
The Confederates started it, but the Union finished it, finishing them at a great cost. Today, the South and its attitudes have risen again.
Graham also seems unaware that if we attack them, Iran will likely block the Strait of Hormuz freezing oil shipments worldwide. Not a good thing.
Today, some US personalities want a theocratic state here like the one in Iran. Our own fundamentalists, many end of timers, politicized into Christian right movements, the antecedents of today’s Tea Party, fired up by vicious Islamaphobia.
Theocratic evangelists posing as TV commentators like Glenn Beck urge us to let God Rule,the message of some of Iran’s Mullahs. George Bush denounced Iran as part of the “Axis of Evil” while they do the same towards us. There is a poster in the former Embassy building denouncing our evils.
I know my Iranian hosts expected me to be excited by visiting the Embassy as a symbol of an embarrassing set back to US plans.
I wasn’t.
I reminded them that when the Taliban took Iranian diplomats hostage, and threatened to kill them, Iran moved troops to the border, and was about to invade Afghanistan before we did.
The US government learned from the Embassy takeover not in terms of changing imperial policies but by investing in more security. It now builds vast and far more fortified “diplomatic” enclaves like Iraq’s Green Zone. Secrecy has become our national security state’s religion.
These symbols of our past conflicts have a way of blocking new initiatives and possible reconciliation. I am sure that the former Embassy building is on some target list for potential missile attacks on Tehran. Americans relish “payback” as much as Iranians.
Avoiding an escalation of tension will not be easy as Jaswant Singh, a former Indian finance minister, foreign minister, and defense minister explains: “In both countries, deep and mutually paralyzing suspicion has poisoned relations for three decades. Negotiations in such an atmosphere are almost fated to failure.”
Can anything be done?
On the plane back, I watched the movie SALT where Angelina Jolie stops a fictionalized nuclear attack on Tehran at the last second in a gun battle staged in the bunker below the White House.
Hollywood pictures the story as a plot by Russian renegades who want to use nukes to outrage the whole Muslim world and trigger a more apocalyptic jihad against the US.
At the same time, we are doing all we can to block Iranian nuclear ambitions, even as I told an audience in Iran about my own objections to nuclear power plans in favor of green energies – not a popular position.ß
There are legitimate non-fiction fears of a new war against Iran, another no-win conflict that will cause more death and sap more treasure.
The neo-cons are busy at work lobbying for just such a war, eager to replicate their “heroic victory” over Iraq. They are playing the fear card with lots of covert lobbying from Israel that claims Iran represents an “existential” threat.
To me, the arrogant right-wing politicians and propagandists in Israel are a far more dangerous threat to any prospects for peace. Successive American Administrations, like the current one, shovels sheckels at them, appeasing their contempt and occupation of Palestinians.
The world mocks dogmatic believers in the Koran while fanatical Torah worshippers have a free pass to practice hatred.
Talk about hypocrisy.
War is a profitable business, and as our economy continues its decline, we can anticipate more calls to “bomb, bomb Iran” so we can fight and spend our way to “recovery.”
Talk about insanity.
Already our sanctions are hurting the Iranian people and their businesses without seriously impacting their government, whatever the fiery pubic claims of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
We need to engage, but even the talks President Obama promised have yet to happen. Washington seems as frozen as Tehran in making a real overture.
What if Iran turned the former U.S. Embassy into an international peace and religious center for diplomatic discourse and mediation? That might be a gesture Washington could respond to. Why not recycle a relic of the past to enable a serious initiative for resolving conflict? The growing confrontation gives both countries an enemy to mobilize against while diverting attention from real problems.
Someone has to break the ice before we end up causing each other more pain!
My walk down a lane of bad memories convinced me that we need to work for a better future, not stay mired in the images and rhetorical combats of the past.
IS THE RECESSION OVER OR ARE WE PLAYING PRETEND? Read this from NakedCapititalism.com
Yves Smith writes: A hedge fund manager and I had a flurry of e-mails over the weekend, prompted by various “The recession is over” declarations, particularly one lauding Timothy Geithner’s skills as a forecaster. I think our shared view is that to call this recession over is tantamount to calling an operation successful when the patient is tethered to an oxygen tank and needs 24 hour nursing care. In other words, the designation may be technically correct, but also shows how low the threshold of “success” is considered to be.
One of his comments:
“It’s weird, but even here in the heart of our wealthy suburb, and people APPEAR to be as affluent as ever, but scratch beneath the surface, and many are experiencing money strains. It’s like we just continue extend and pretend and then people use the recurrence of bad habits as a sign that Geithner was right. It’s nauseating. And somehow 10% unemployment doesn’t matter any more!!???
Michel Chossudovsky: The Global Economic Crisis. The Great Depression of the XXI Century
NUCLEAR WAR ANYONE
The UK’s Daily Mail imagines:
Countdown to Oblivion: North Korea artillery strike – the Start of the First Nuclear War?
Top thriller writer Tom Cain imagines what would happen if the North and South Korea stand-off detonated the world’s First Nuclear War in this fictional account.
Is there an alternative?
Our media treats the conflict in Korea as if it is just between a right-wing South Korean government backed by the US and North Korea. But there are other voices in South Korea calling for a REDUCTION of tensions. The US and our media is ignoring.
h/t to L F: The Need for Talks to Avoid Escalation of the Crisis on the Korean Peninsula
From: Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict (GPPAC) Statement
In response to the artillery exchange which took place on Yeonpyeong Island near the border of the Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Korea (DPRK) and the Republic of Korea (ROK) on November 23, 2010, the International Steering Group of the Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict (GPPAC)* extends its deepest condolences to the families of all those, including civilians, who lost their lives and to the communities affected by this tragic event.
This exchange of artillery comes as part of an ongoing conflict deeply entrenched in remnant Cold War structures. This situation has repercussions not only on the Korean Peninsula but also throughout the wider Northeast Asian region.
GPPAC strongly calls for an immediate cessation of hostilities to prevent escalation into another tragedy as has been experienced on the Korean Peninsula in the past.
Furthermore, as an international civil society peace-building network, we advocate non-violent, non-military approaches to find a peaceful solution to this crisis, and emphasize the need for civil society involvement in this process. GPPAC is offering the expertise of its network to contribute to the facilitation of dialogue between the relevant stakeholders.
GPPAC calls for:
1. An immediate cessation of hostilities to be declared.
2. A further investigation to be held into all aspects of the artillery exchange before any judgment or action is made.
3. All sides to refrain from military provocation that could lead to further escalation of tension or violence, including military drills in the area.
4. An emphasis on dialogue, both bilaterally between the DPRK and ROK, and regionally, including the resumption of the Six Party Talks as the only existing framework for dialogue on peace and security in the Northeast Asian region.
5. Civil society participation in dialogue processes related to this conflict.
6. World leaders to build bridges to calm the situation rather than reenact the language and barriers of the past.
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The Latest On My Film Plunder, South Africa’s Media Debate, WikiLeaks Latest
November 26th, 2010 - by: danny
William S Burroughs, Thanksgiving Prayer
I am just back from Iran. Watch for my final report recounting a visit to the former US embassy, the scene of the 1979 hostage drama.
WATCH: Talking about my film, PLUNDER, for LinkTV. org. It is also on Facebook. For more information: PlunderTheCrimeOfOurTime.com.
NYT: Russian TV Personality Skewers Russian TV
MEDIA DEBATE IN SOUTH AFRICA
Part of the fight against apartheid in South Africa involved combating censorship there and self-censorship in the US. My own work with Globalvision’s series, SOUTH AFRICA NOW! was part of that fight.
Today in South Africa, the African National Congress is considering restrictions on a free media promoting a major debate, as well disgust among some veterans of the struggle.
ANC veteran, Pallo Jordan, a senor member of the ANC and former Broadcasting Minister is among those speaking out against gagging the media in a courageous speech challenging his own comrades. Here’s a newspaper report from South Africa.
Media gag ‘a fool’s errand’ – Jordan
ANC veteran Pallo Jordan has sharply criticised the party’s plans for a media tribunal and the Protection of Information Bill, saying attempts to muzzle the modern media were a “fool’s errand”.
By CHANTELLE BENJAMIN
AFRICAN National Congress (ANC) veteran Pallo Jordan has sharply criticised the party’s plans for a media tribunal and the Protection of Information Bill, saying attempts to muzzle the modern media were a “fool’s errand”.
He warned that the party was backing itself into a “lose-lose situation”, with the ANC at risk of losing its credibility as a campaigner for media freedom, and the bill possibly failing a mooted constitutional challenge.
Mr Jordan’s remarks are likely to give the ruling party cause for thought, given his seniority in its ranks and his status as one of its leading intellectuals.
He was speaking at a panel discussion at the weekend hosted by the National Association of Democratic Lawyers (Nadel).
In a forthright statement, Mr Jordan, who was originally down to speak on the panel in favour of the bill and tribunal, said those who had come to hear him taking that position might be confused by his remarks. Mr Jordan, who has criticised the print media for its alleged lack of accountability, asked how “the ANC had managed to paint itself into a corner”.
“How did it (the ANC) paint itself into a corner where it can be portrayed as being opposed to media freedom? All the legislation we now have, including the Protection of Access to Information Act, was developed by the ANC.
“Given all these measures, how does one square that with an attempt to control, or pressure, media into a corner? I say it’s a fool’s errand, it cannot be done, given the commercial, technical environment that presently exists in media.
“Think about WikiLeaks and documents on the Nato coalition’s activities in Afghanistan or Iraq.
“Given the policies we (the ANC) have in place and the laws we have in place, if the movement pursues this path it can only result in a lose-lose situation.
“Those who want to rubbish us will have every right to do so,” he told the gathering.
At the ANC’s national general council (NGC) in Durban in September, it was agreed that a team of academics and lawyers would make submissions to Parliament on its behalf about creating a statutory media appeals tribunal.
The NGC’s commission on media diversity and communications chaired by Mr Jordan oversaw the removal of some of the more repressive measures put forward by the provinces, such as annual registration of journalists. But it agreed that the existing self-regulatory system of the press ombudsman and Press Council was ineffective and needed to be strengthened to balance the rights of the media and those of citizens.
Mr Jordan, who was broadcasting minister after the 1994 elections, challenged Nadel members to engage the government to help it “to achieve its objectives but without contravening the constitution”.
He criticised constitutional lawyers, saying they should have stepped into the breach when the media tribunal and information bill were first put on the table, not to be critical but to ensure the legislation was a co-operative work.
State law adviser Enver Daniels, also on the panel, defended the Protection of Information Bill, saying the intention was to make information more accessible by classifying less information – this bill has only three levels of classification instead of the four that the previous act has.
He said it was also intended to replace the Protection of Information Act, which retained features of the apartheid era. Mr Daniels said the public had recourse to the Protection of Access to Information Act to gain access to information.
Mohamed Junaid Husain, of the Commonwealth Lawyers Association, said the proposed bill was more restrictive than legislation in the US, UK or France.
He said the bill makes provision for documents to be classified for 20 years and then possibly classified again for another 20 years.
“That is the longest jurisdiction I have ever heard of.
“Three generations of South Africans may not know what is in those documents.”
He did not dispute the government’s right to classify documents, but said the bill should contain a public interest clause to balance the power given to officials.
There ought to be an adjudication body to decide on whether a document should be declassified.
“At the end of the day, the decision may lie with the official who classified the document in the first place, which is unacceptable. The bill makes an (official) a judge in his own cause,” Mr Husain said.
Latest WIkileaks: Documents Show Washington Supported Terrorist Grouos-Sydney Morning Herald
JERUSALEM: Several of the documents set to be published by WikiLeaks this weekend are believed to show the US has been helping Turkey’s Kurdish separatist movement the PKK, or Kurdistan Workers Party.
The PKK is listed as a terrorist group in Turkey, the US, the European Union and Australia.
The claim is reported in the London Arabic-language newspaper Al-Hayat.
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Another document is believed to charge Turkey with providing indirect assistance to al-Qaeda. It is believed the document will say Turkey rendered this assistance by failing to control the movement of people across its border with Iraq.
WikiLeaks is planning to publish up to 400,000 sensitive cables from the past five years that include media reports, talks with politicians, government officials and journalists, and evaluations and various analyses by American diplomats regarding their host countries.
A report in The Jerusalem Post said the US military documents referred to the PKK as ”warriors for freedom and Turkish citizens” and said the US had set free arrested PKK members in Iraq.
The documents also say US forces in Iraq have given weapons to the PKK.
Another Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, reported that Israeli officials were apprehensive about the WikiLeaks material.
Haaretz reported that the US embassy in Tel Aviv had told Israel’s Foreign Ministry of the imminent disclosure of sensitive information by WikiLeaks.
The Americans said they wanted Israel to know so it would not be surprised and would be prepared for publicity that might cause embarrassment.
Haaretz said if cables from the US embassy were published, it could be embarrassing because they involve internal correspondence between US diplomats that might not reflect the position of the White House.
A senior Israeli official familiar with the material, who asked to remain anonymous, said it included diplomatic cables sent to Washington from US embassies throughout the world.
The official said the US embassy said the documents were not highly classified.
”The Americans said they view the leak very seriously,” the official said. ”They don’t know when they will be released on the internet and what exactly they say, but they didn’t want us to read about it in the newspapers.”
Kurt Hoyer, spokesman for the US embassy in Tel Aviv, neither confirmed nor denied that the embassy had conveyed a message relating to the matter to the Prime Minister’s Bureau and the Foreign Ministry.
In two previous releases of leaked US government documents, in July and October, WikiLeaks provided the documents in advance to The New York Times, The Guardian in London and and Der Spiegel in Germany on condition that they publish their stories simultaneously.
The first leak contained thousands of military field reports on the war in Afghanistan; the second was a similar but larger file on the Iraq war.
Petition to Support Julian Assange
Related: Losing the Real Bradley Manning Story
By Ralph Lopez, WarIsACrime.org
The Bradley Manning case is approaching. When we think of Bradley Manning, many of us tend to think of either a Wikileaks document dump or the attack in the video in which two Reuters reporters are killed after a group of Iraqi men are fired upon by an Apache attack helipcopter. Already dismissed as justifiable by many due to the presence of a rocket launcher found on the scene, these associations may be losing the essence of Manning’s actions and his strongest defense. Manning was not shocked by the initial attack on the Iraqi men, and wrote to Adrian Lamo:
“At first glance it was just a bunch of guys getting shot up by a helicopter…No big deal … about two dozen more where that came from, right? But something struck me as odd with the van thing, and also the fact it was being stored in a JAG officer’s directory. So I looked into it.”"
Unlike the intial attack, the follow-up attack captured in the Wikileaks video, “the van thing,” was a strictly illegal and prohibited attack upon the wounded during wartime, which is why it was being buried in the military Judge Advocate General’s office (JAG,) which is a military prosecutor. There is no other explanation for the video being stored there. It seals the case, in one clear, specific, and identifiable instance, that Bradley Manning was not committing a crime. He was reporting one.
Manning virtually predicts that given he will probably be held incommunicado and without a chance to speak for himself as he is tried in the media, his biggest problem to be to tell his side of the story. Adrian Lamo asked him in an email: “What would you do if your role [with] Wikileaks seemed in danger of being blown?”
Manning answered:
“Try and figure out how I could get my side of the story out, before everything was twisted around to make me look like Nidal Hassan (the Fort Hood shooter.)
Humane treatment of the wounded is one of the oldest laws of war. It came into being after a lifelong personal campaign by Henri Dunant, after the Battle of Solferino in 1859, during the Napoleonic Wars, after Dunant witnessed the horror of 40,000 wounded men dying upon the field. Dunant was founder of the Red Cross, and though he finished out his old age in ascetic poverty, he never lacked for people eager to care for him or take him into their villages across Europe. A poor but educated man, Dunant convinced the royal houses of Europe that a law of the wounded was in their own best interests. Observers remarked in later wars that wounded Frenchmen were often treated like royalty by all sides.
Article 12 of the Geneva Convention of 1864 states that,
“…Members of the armed forces and other persons (…) who are wounded or sick, shall be respected and protected in all circumstances. They shall be treated humanely and cared for by the Party to the conflict…Any attempts upon their lives, or violence to their persons, shall be strictly prohibited; in particular, they shall not be murdered or exterminated…”.
The law extends to those attempting to evacuate them, to whom it is required that assistance be given if possible. The definition of wounded and sick for the purpose of the Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts (Protocol 1) is:
“…persons, whether military or civilians, who, because of trauma, disease or other physical or mental disorder or disability, are in need of medical assistance or care and who refrain from any act of hostility.”
Also from a Marine Corp study guide,Military Studies:
“Marines do not attack medical personnel, facilities, or equipment. Both friendly and enemy medical personnel are to be encouraged to come to the battlefield in safety to care for the wounded combatants.”
I have perused Internet miltary sites, and the results are instructive. Although some shock at the first attack is expressed, most commenters identifiying themselves as Iraq and other war combat vets express little outrage at the first attack. But with respect to “the van thing,” the words come up over and over, often with little elaboration: “war crime.”
In the second attack a man is seen crawling upon the ground after the first attack, partially disemboweled, when a van pulls up with men who attempt to evacuate him. The Apache gunner in his bloodlust requests and receives permission to open fire, muttering the words “just pick up a weapon,” even though no weapons are anywhere visible near the crawling man. It is in this attack that two children who are in the van are wounded, whereupon the gunner remarks “that’s what they get for bringing their kids to the battle.” These are the children saved by Spc. Ethan McCord, who runs with them to a Bradley vehicle after another soldier, upon discovering them, runs away vomiting.
It is critical that Bradley’s side of the story get out.
Please urge his defense team to point out the clear war crime, and post this widely.
And This:
Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp Funds North Korean Regime
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About Danny Schechter
Danny Schechter is an Emmy award winning journalist, television producer and independent filmmaker who also writes, blogs and speaks about media issues.
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