The New Dark Age

22 July, 2010 — News Dissector Blog

‘Truth Crushed To Earth Will Rise Again,’ William Cullen Bryant (and later a song title on the third album by House of Pain.’) I first heard this quote when spoken by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr back in the day. He also quoted poet James Russell Lowell who wrote, ‘Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne, Yet that scaffold sways the future..’

THE WAR STANDS EXPOSED IN ALL OF ITS DEADLY VICIOUSNESS

Sunday Night: Wileaks released 90+ 000 secret documents to the New York Times, England’s Guardian and Der Spiegel, an unprecedented act of an unauthorized release of official information about the war in Afganistan. Please read these War Logs as they represent a new stage in the the fight for public’s right to know and media freedom. The New York Times story here. Here’s the link to the NY TIMES interactive feature. Here’s one of the documents as reported in the Guardian.

In England the Stop The War-coalition plans a new march, commenting:

‘The 90,000 US secret documents leaked today confirm everything the anti-war movement has said for years. The biggest ever wartime leaks show conclusively that the war in Afghanistan is pointless and unwinnable and the warmongers have lied to us continually. The war must end now. All foreign troops must be withdrawn without delay.

‘The Guardian, giving 14 pages of coverage to the revelations, reports, ‘The huge cache of secret US military files provides 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 fuelling the insurgency.’ SEE http://bit.ly/bVQzvA

This release comes at the end of a week in which the Washington Post published a major investigative report over three days on the growth and organization of our vast, uncoordinated, secret and often privately owned intelligence organizations employing hundreds of thousands of people. Juan Cole comments on what the WikiLeaks disclosure means for American security.

Their governmenet sees its job as keeping secrets; Wikileaks mision is to make them public. CNN reports that Wikileaks says it is getting tons of high caliber disclosures and whistle blower documents.

‘WikiLeaks.org, the website that released secret video of a U.S. airstrike in Iraq that killed a dozen civilians, is ‘getting an enormous quantity of whistle-blower disclosures of high caliber,’ the site’s founder, Julian Assange, said Friday in a rare public appearance here.

Speaking at the TED Global conference, Assange said that ‘we are overwhelmed by our growth’ and the site can’t keep up with the volume of the new material because it doesn’t have enough people to verify it.

He later told reporters that ‘there are many things which are very explosive.’

This unprecedented challenge to the Pentagon and the war us much bigger, more inportant and deeper than the Pentagon Papers which was a secret history of the Vietnam war. Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg was one of their influences and supporters. (I see this release also a tribute to the life and work of journalist Daniel Schorr who also exposed documenmts about secret CIA activities in the l970’s, and died this week at age 93. He must have a smile on his face!)

The Pentagon Papers was a print document found and zeroxed by Daniel Ellsberg and Tony Russo. It was copied and given to American journalists at the NY Times and later the Washington Post/Boston Globe. The War Logs were digital, allegedly given to WikiLeaks by an American soldier, Bradley E. Manning. He has been arrested and is being called a ‘political prisoner’ by WikiLeaks.

This six-year archive of Afghan war documents was disseminated by a shadowy but credible web-based organization based in in Sweden, Iceland, and who knows where else to three newspapers globally–The Times, Der Spiegel and the Guardian. The Pentagon Papers were challenged in the courts by President Nixon’s Administration—so far, President Obama has been silent. Its not clear what the Pentagon will or can do.

General James Jones has denounced the document release in the NY Times: ‘saying that the United States ‘strongly condemns the disclosure of classified information by individuals and organizations which could put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk, and threaten our national security.’’

‘WikiLeaks made no effort to contact us about these documents – the United States government learned from news organizations that these documents would be posted,’ General Jones said.

The Guardian reports: ‘The White House today condemned whistleblower Wikileaks, accusing the website of putting the lives of US, UK and coalition troops in danger and threatening America’s national security of the US after it posted more than 90,000 leaked US military documents about the war in Afghanistan.

The documents have revealed unreported incidents of Afghan civilian killings and information about secret operations against Taliban leaders, as well as highlighting US fears that Pakistan’s intelligence service was aiding the Afghan uprising.

The White House ‘strongly’ criticised the leaks in a statement, which it said, ‘could put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk, and threaten our national security’. It said that Wikileaks had made no effort to contact US security services, but insisted that what it called the ‘irresponsible leaks’ would not ‘impact our ongoing commitment to deepen our partnerships with Afghanistan and Pakistan; to defeat our common enemies; and to support the aspirations of the Afghan and Pakistani people’.

EXTENSIVE LINKS ON WIKILEAKS STORY FROM GREG MITCHELL

FASCINATING: THE GUARDIAN ACCOUNT OF THE STORY’S ORIGINS

US authorities have known for weeks that they have suffered a haemorrhage of secret information on a scale which makes even the leaking of the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam war look limited by comparison.

The Afghan war logs, from which the Guardian reports today, consist of 92,201 internal records of actions by the US military in Afghanistan between January 2004 and December 2009 – threat reports from intelligence agencies, plans and accounts of coalition operations, descriptions of enemy attacks and roadside bombs, records of meetings with local politicians, most of them classified secret.

The Guardian’s source for these is Wikileaks, the website which specialises in publishing untraceable material from whistleblowers, which is simultaneously publishing raw material from the logs.

Washington fears it may have lost even more highly sensitive material including an archive of tens of thousands of cable messages sent by US embassies around the world, reflecting arms deals, trade talks, secret meetings and uncensored opinion of other governments.

Wikileaks’ founder, Julian Assange, says that in the last two months they have received yet another huge batch of ‘high-quality material’ from military sources and that officers from the Pentagon’s criminal investigations department have asked him to meet them on neutral territory to help them plug the sequence of leaks. He has not agreed to do so.

Behind today’s revelations lie two distinct stories: first, of the Pentagon’s attempts to trace the leaks with painful results for one young soldier; and second, a unique collaboration between the Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel magazine in Germany to sift the huge trove of data for material of public interest and to distribute globally this secret record of the world’s most powerful nation at war.

THE SONG THEY LOVE

On their website, the brave journalists of Wikileaks reveal they also have a song that has inspired them.

Here it is: their tribute to a tradition of dissent, and now, a tribute to their work.

The proverbial sh-t may be about to hit the fan.

Danny Schechter

If I had a hammer – WikiLeaks song. Words and music by Lee Hays and Pete Seeger. (c) TRO-Ludlow Music, Inc.

If I had a hammer
I’d hammer in the morning
I’d hammer in the evening
All over this land
I’d hammer out danger
I’d hammer out a warning
I’d hammer out love between my brothers and my sisters
All over this land

If I had a bell
I’d ring it in the morning
I’d ring it in the evening
All over this land
I’d ring out danger
I’d ring out a warning
I’d ring out love between my brothers and my sisters
All over this land

If I had a song
I’d sing it in the morning
I’d sing it in the evening
All over this land
I’d sing out danger
I’d sing out a warning
I’d sing out love between my brothers and my sisters
All over this land

Well I’ve got a hammer
And I’ve got a bell
And I’ve got a song to sing
All over this land
It’s the hammer of justice
It’s the bell of freedom
It’s the song about love between my brothers and my sisters
All over this land

Perhaps Wikileaks can do us another service and reveal the child porn sites that were apparently heavily patronized by people working in the Pentagon, a story revealed by the Boston Globe Friday and reported on by the AP Sunday. The NY Times ran the story.