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Thursday, December 02, 2010
Flag this message Chomsky, Rants, Ideas, Wikileaks, and Bikinis
Ok, actually, no bikinis here. I just wanted to see what the search engines would do with that.
Now, some rambles: Could someone tell Obama that those millions of people did not vote for him? They vtoed first against John McCain and Sarah Palin (and maybe as VP she would have to keep her mouth shut?). Next, they voted for what you represented yourself to be during the campaigns.
First of all, you just said, in reference to compromising with the Republicans, "Men of good will can work together and iron out their differences." FORGET IT!!! They are not men of good will as you should have found out by the letter you got the next day demanding tax cuts for the rich or no legislation at all, signed by 42 Republicans. Wake up.
You have a nice hammer if only you will use it. Tell them you will simply let ALL THE TAX CUTS OF BUSH expire. Then, tell the public that the Republicans raised their taxes! If you think that is a lie, then lie you asshole! Surely that is how you got elected!
Tell them you will consider the tax cut extension, but first we need the unemployment insurance extended, Medicare and Medicaid supported, and Alan Simpson waterboarded! Use the hammer and compromise on the water-boarding. That's a compromise in the Republican tradition.
No more war funding until the Republicans figure out a way to pay for it. Pass don't ask don't tell repeal as even war-mongers deserve an opportunity to serve freely.
A friend said you were the worst President ever. "Prove me wrong," he said. I couldn't. Viscerally, seeing a tape of Bush and Cheney walking together, maybe with Rummy, I have a feeling you aren't, but no proof whatsoever. In addition, it would contradict my past experience that every President was worse that the previous one. Something happened in the 50s or early 60s that ensured that.
Wikileaks: No matter what you have been told, THERE IS NO INTERPOL ARREST WARRANT out for Assange. He is in hiding, probably because of the next "dump" that will cover banks. He fears for his personal safety. Those people have probably already hired someone from Blackwater to "Hit" him, make him "disappear". His attorney was on Democracy now and there is one hot attorney! She has to be the 1% Steven Wright was talking about when he said "99% of attorney's give the others a bad name." If I'm in a position like that, she's the one I want.
The U.S. did try to send a warrant to the U.K., but it was returned because it was not filled out properly. Not only are we ruled by assholes, but they are incompetent as well?
Anyway, here is Noam, confirming what I thought about the documents: they simply give examples of what we knew about our government all along:
Noam Chomsky: WikiLeaks Cables Reveal "Profound Hatred for Democracy on the Part of Our Political Leadership"
Chomsky
In a national broadcast exclusive interview, we speak with world-renowned political dissident and linguist Noam Chomsky about the release of more than 250,000 secret U.S. State Department cables by WikiLeaks. In 1971, Chomsky helped government whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg release the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret internal U.S. account of the Vietnam War. Commenting on the revelations that several Arab leaders are urging the United States to attack Iran, Chomsky says, "latest polls show] Arab opinion holds that the major threat in the region is Israel, that’s 80 percent; the second threat is the United States, that’s 77 percent. Iran is listed as a threat by 10 percent," Chomsky says. "This may not be reported in the newspapers, but it’s certainly familiar to the Israeli and U.S. governments and the ambassadors. What this reveals is the profound hatred for democracy on the part of our political leadership." [includes rush transcript]
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Noam Chomsky, author and Institute Professor Emeritus at MIT, where he taught for over half a century. He is author of dozens of books. His most recent is Hopes and Prospects
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Rush Transcript
This transcript is available free of charge. However, donations help us provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution.
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AMY GOODMAN: We have lost David Leigh, investigations editor from The Guardian. He was speaking to us from the busy newsroom there. The Guardian is doing an ongoing series of pieces and exposes on these documents. They are being released slowly by the various news organizations, from The Guardian in London, to Der Spiegel in Germany, to El Pais in Spain, to the New York Times here in the United States.. For reaction to the WikiLeaks documents, we’re joined by world renowned political dissident and linguist Noam Chomsky, Professor Emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, author of over a hundred books including his latest Hopes and Prospects. Forty years ago, Noam and Howard Zinn helped government whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg edit and release the Pentagon Papers that top-secret internal U.S. history of the Vietnam War.
Noam Chomsky joins us from Boston. It is good to have you back again, Noam. Why don’t we start there. Before we talk about WikiLeaks, what was your involvement in the Pentagon Papers? I don’t think most people know about this.
NOAM CHOMSKY: Dan and I were friends. Tony Russo, who also who prepared them and helped leak them. I got advanced copies from Dan and Tony and there were several people who were releasing them to the press. I was one of them. Then I- along with Howard Zinn as you mentioned- edited a volume of essays and indexed the papers.
AMY GOODMAN: So explain how, though, how it worked. I always think this is important- to tell this story- especially for young people. Dan Ellsberg- Pentagon official, top-secret clearance- gets this U.S. involvement in Vietnam history out of his safe, he Xerox’s it and then how did you get your hands on it? He just directly gave it to you?
NOAM CHOMSKY: From Dan Ellsberg and Tony Russo, who had done the Xeroxing and the preparation of the material.
AMY GOODMAN: How much did you edit?
NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, we did not modify anything. The papers were not edited. They were in their original form. What Howard Zinn and I did was- they came out in four volumes- we prepared a fifth volume, which was critical essays by many scholars on the papers, what they mean, the significance and so on. And an index, which is almost indispensable for using them seriously. That’s the fifth volume in the Beacon Press series.
AMY GOODMAN: So you were then one of the first people to see the Pentagon Papers?
NOAM CHOMSKY: Outside of Dan Ellsberg and Tony Russo, yes. I mean, there were some journalists who may have seen them, I am not sure.
AMY GOODMAN: What are your thoughts today? For example, we just played this clip of New York republican congress member Peter King who says WikiLeaks should be declared a foreign terrorist organization.
NOAM CHOMSKY: I think that is outlandish. We should understand- and the Pentagon Papers is another case in point- that one of the major reasons for government secrecy is to protect the government from its own population. In the Pentagon Papers, for example, there was one volume- the negotiations volume- which might have had a bearing on ongoing activities and Daniel Ellsberg withheld that. That came out a little bit later. If you look at the papers themselves, there are things Americans should have known that others did not want them to know. And as far as I can tell, from what I’ve seen here, pretty much the same is true. In fact, the current leaks are- what I’ve seen, at least- primarily interesting because of what they tell us about how the diplomatic service works.
AMY GOODMAN: The documents’ revelations about Iran come just as the Iranian government has agreed to a new round of nuclear talks beginning next month. On Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the cables vindicate the Israeli position that Iran poses a nuclear threat. Netanyahu said, "Our region has been hostage to a narrative that is the result of sixty years of propaganda, which paints Israel as the greatest threat. In reality, leaders understand that that view is bankrupt. For the first time in history, there is agreement that Iran is the threat. If leaders start saying openly what they have long been saying behind closed doors, with can make a real breakthrough on the road to peace," Netanyahu said. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also discussed Iran at her news conference in Washington. This is what she said:
HILARY CLINTON: I think that it should not be a surprise to anyone that Iran is a source of great concern, not only in the United States. What comes through in every meeting that I have- anywhere in the world- is a concern about Iranian actions and intentions. So, if anything, any of the comments that are being reported on allegedly from the cables confirm the fact that Iran poses a very serious threat in the eyes of many of her neighbors and a serious concern far beyond her region. That is why the international community came together to pass the strongest possible sanctions against Iran. It did not happen because the United States said, "Please, do this for us!" It happened because countries- once they evaluated the evidence concerning Iran’s actions and intentions- reached the same conclusion that the United States reached: that we must do whatever we can to muster the international community to take action to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear weapons state. So if anyone reading the stories about these, uh, alleged cables thinks carefully what they will conclude is that the concern about Iran is well founded, widely shared, and will continue to be at the source of the policy that we pursue with like-minded nations to try to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Secretary to Hillary Clinton yesterday at a news conference. I wanted to get your comment on Clinton, Netanyahu’s comment, and the fact that Abdullah of Saudi Arabia- the King who is now getting back surgery in the New York- called for the U.S. to attack Iran. Noam Chomsky?
NOAM CHOMSKY: That essentially reinforces what I said before, that the main significance of the cables that are being released so far is what they tell us about Western leadership. So Hillary Clinton and Benjamin Netanyahu surely know of the careful polls of Arab public opinion. The Brookings Institute just a few months ago released extensive polls of what Arabs think about Iran. The results are rather striking. They show the Arab opinion holds that the major threat in the region is Israel- that’s 80. The second major threat is the United States- that’s 77. Iran is listed as a threat by 10%.
With regard to nuclear weapons, rather remarkably, a majority- in fact, 57–say that the region would have a positive effect in the region if Iran had nuclear weapons. Now, these are not small numbers. 80, 77, say the U.S. and Israel are the major threat. 10 say Iran is the major threat. This may not be reported in the newspapers here- it is in England- but it’s certainly familiar to the Israeli and U.S. governments, and to the ambassadors. But there is not a word about it anywhere. What that reveals is the profound hatred for democracy on the part of our political leadership and the Israeli political leadership. These things aren’t even to be mentioned. This seeps its way all through the diplomatic service. The cables to not have any indication of that.
When they talk about Arabs, they mean the Arab dictators, not the population, which is overwhelmingly opposed to the conclusions that the analysts here- Clinton and the media- have drawn. There’s also a minor problem; that’s the major problem. The minor problem is that we don’t know from the cables what the Arab leaders think and say. We know what was selected from the range of what they say. So there is a filtering process. We don’t know how much it distorts the information. But there is no question that what is a radical distortion is- or, not even a distortion, a reflection–of the concern that the dictators are what matter. The population does not matter, even if it’s overwhelmingly opposed to U.S. policy.
There are similar things elsewhere, such as keeping to this region. One of the most interesting cables was a cable from the U.S. ambassador in Israel to Hillary Clinton, which described the attack on Gaza- which we should call the U.S./Israeli attack on Gaza- December 2008. It states correctly there had been a truce. It does not add that during the truce- which was really not observed by Israel- but during the truce, Hamas scrupulously observed it according to the Israeli government, not a single rocket was fired. That’s an omission. But then comes a straight line: it says that in December 2008, Hamas renewed rocket firing and therefore Israel had to attack in self-defense. Now, the ambassador surely is aware that there must be somebody in the American Embassy who reads the Israeli press- the mainstream Israeli press- in which case the embassy is surely aware that it is exactly the opposite: Hamas was calling for a renewal of the cease-fire. Israel considered the offer and rejected it, preferring to bomb rather than have security. Also omitted is that while Israel never observed the cease-fire- it maintained the siege in violation of the truce agreement- on November 4, the U.S. election 2008, the Israeli army invaded Gaza, killed half a dozen Hamas militants, which did lead to an exchange of fire in which all the casualties, as usual, were Palestinian. Then in December, Hamas- when the truce officially ended- Hamas called for renewing it. Israel refused, and the U.S. and Israel chose to launch the war. What the embassy reported is a gross falsification and a very significant one since- since it has to do the justification for the murderous attack- which means either the embassy hasn’t a clue to what is going on or else they’re lying outright.
AMY GOODMAN: And the latest report that just came out- from Oxfam, from Amnesty International, and other groups- about the effects of the siege on Gaza? What’s happening right now?
NOAM CHOMSKY: A siege is an act of war. If anyone insists on that, it is Israel. Israel launched two wars- '56 and ’67- in part on grounds its access to the outside world was very partially restricted. That very partial siege they considered an act of war and justification for- well, one of several justifications- for what they called "preventive"- or if you like, preemptive- war. So they understand that perfectly well and the point is correct. The siege is a criminal act, in the first place. The Security Council has called on Israel to lift it, and others have. It's designed to- as Israeli officials have have stated- to keep the people of Gaza to minimal level of existence. They do not want to kill them all off because that would not look good in international opinion. As they put it, "to keep them on a diet." This justification, this began very shortly after the official Israeli withdrawal. There was an election in January 2006 after the only free election in the Arab world- carefully monitored, recognized to be free- but it had a flaw. The wrong people won. Namely Hamas, which the U.S. did not want it and Israel did not want. Instantly, within days, the U.S. and Israel instituted harsh measures to punish the people of Gaza for voting the wrong way in a free election.
The next step was that they- the U.S. and Israel- sought to, along with the Palestinian Authority, try to carry out a military coup in Gaza to overthrow the elected government. This failed- Hamas beat back the coup attempt. That was July 2007. At that point, the siege got much harsher. In between come in many acts of violence, shellings, invasions and so on and so forth. But basically, Israel claims that when the truce was established in the summer 2008, Israel’s reason for not observing it and withdrawing the siege was that there was an Israeli soldier- Gilad Shalit- who was captured at the border. International commentary regards this as a terrible crime. Well, whatever you think about it, capturing a soldier of an attacking army- and the army was attacking Gaza- capturing a soldier of an attacking army isn’t anywhere near the level of the crime of kidnapping civilians. Just one day before the capture of Gilad Shalit at the border, Israeli troops had entered Gaza, kidnapped two civilians- the Muammar Brothers- and spirited them across the border. They’ve disappeared somewhere in Israel’s prison system, which is where hundreds, maybe a thousand or so people are sometimes there for years without charges. There are also secret prisons. We don’t know what happens there.
This alone is a far worse crime than the kidnapping of Shalit. In fact, you could argue there was a reason why was barely covered: Israel has been doing this for years, in fact, decades. Kidnapping, capturing people, hijacking ships, killing people, bringing them to Israel sometimes as hostages for many years. So this is regular practice; Israel can do what it likes. But the reaction here and the rest of the world of regarding the Shalit kidnapping- well, not kidnapping, you don’t kidnap soldiers- the capture of a soldier as an unspeakable crime, justification for maintaining and murders siege... that’s disgraceful.
AMY GOODMAN: Noam, so you have Amnesty International, Oxfam, Save the Children, and eighteen other aide groups calling on Israel to unconditionally lift the blockade of Gaza. And you have in the WikiLeaks release a U.S. diplomatic cable- provided to The Guardian by WikiLeaks- laying out, "National human intelligence collection directive: Asking U.S. personnel to obtain details of travel plans such as routes and vehicles used by Palestinian Authority leaders and Hamas members." The cable demands, "Biographical, financial, by metric information on key PA and Hamas leaders and representatives to include the Young Guard inside Gaza, the West Bank, and outside," it says.
NOAM CHOMSKY: That should not come as much of a surprise. Contrary to the image that is portrayed here, the United States is not an honest broker. It is a participant, a direct and crucial participant, in Israeli crimes, both in the West Bank and in Gaza. The attack in Gaza was a clear case in point: they used American weapons, the U.S. blocked cease-fire efforts, they gave diplomatic support. The same is true of the daily ongoing crimes in the West Bank, and we should not forget that. Actually, in Area C- the area of the West Bank that Israel controls- conditions for Palestinians have been reported by Save The Children to be worse than in Gaza. Again, this all takes place on the basis of crucial, decisive, U.S., military, diplomatic, economic support; and also ideological support- meaning, distorting the situation, as is done again dramatically in the cables.
The siege itself is simply criminal. It is not only blocking desperately needed aid from coming in, it also drives Palestinians away from the border. Gaza is a small place, heavily and densely overcrowded. And Israeli fire and attacks drive Palestinians away from the Arab land on the border, and also drive fisherman in from Gaza into territorial waters. They compelled by Israeli gunboats- all illegal, of course- to fish right near the shore where fishing is almost impossible because Israel has destroyed the power systems and sewage systems and the contamination is terrible. This is just a stranglehold to punish people for being there and for insisting on voting the wrong way. Israel decided, "We don’t want this anymore. Let’s just get rid of them."
We should also remember, the U.S./Israeli policy- since Oslo, since the early 1990’s- has been to separate Gaza from the West Bank. That is in straight violation of the Oslo agreements, but it has been carried out systematically, and it has a big effect. It means almost half the Palestinian population would be cut off from any possible political arrangement that would be made. It also means Palestine loses its access to the outside world- Gaza should have and can have airports and seaports. Right now, Israel has taken over about 40% of the West Bank. Obama’s latest offers have granted even more, and they’re certainly planning to take more. What is left is just canonized. It’s what the planner, Ariel Sharon called Bantustans. And they’re in prison, too, as Israel takes over the Jordan Valley and drives Palestinians out. So these are all crimes of a piece.
The Gaza siege is particularly grotesque because of the conditions under which people are forced to live. I mean, if a young person in Gaza- student in Gaza, let’s say- wants to study in a West Bank university, they can’t do it. If it a person in Gaza needs advanced medical training or treatment from an East Jerusalem hospital where the training is available, they can’t go! Medicines are held back. It is a scandalous crime, all around.
AMY GOODMAN: What do you think the United States should do in this case?
NOAM CHOMSKY: What the United States should do is very simple: it should join the world. I mean, there are negotiations going on, supposedly. As they are presented here, the standard picture is that the U.S. is an honest broker trying to bring together two recalcitrant opponents- Israel and Palestinian Authority. That’s just a charade.
If there were serious negotiations, they would be organized by some neutral party and the U.S. and Israel would be on one side and the world would be on the other side. And that is not an exaggeration. It should not be a secret that there has long been an overwhelming international consensus on a diplomatic, political solution. Everyone knows the basic outlines; some of the details you can argue about. It includes everyone except the United States and Israel. The U.S. has been blocking it for 35 years with occasional departures- brief ones. It includes the Arab League. It includes the Organization of Islamic States. which happens to include Iran. It includes every relevant actor except the United States and Israel, the two rejectionist states. So if there were to be negotiations that were serious, that’s the way they would be organized. The actual negotiations barely reach the level of comedy. The issue that’s being debated is a footnote, a minor footnote: expansion of settlements. Of course it’s illegal. In fact, everything Israel is doing in the West Bank and Gaza is illegal. That hasn’t even been controversial since 1967.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to come back to this in a minute. Noam Chomsky, author and institute professor emeritus at MIT, as we talk about WikiLeaks and the state of the world today.
[music break]
AMY GOODMAN: Our guest is Noam Chomsky, world-renowned dissident, author of more than 100 books, speaking to us from Boston. Noam, you wrote a piece after the midterm elections called Outrage Misguided. I want to read for you now what Sarah Palin tweeted – the former Alaskan governor, of course, and Republication vice presidential nominee. This is what she tweeted about WikiLeaks. Rather, she put it on Facebook. She said, “First and foremost, what steps were taken to stop WikiLeaks’ director Julian Assange from distributing this highly-sensitive classified material, especially after he had already published material not once but twice in the previous months? Assange is not a journalist any more than the editor of the Al Qaeda’s new English-language magazine “Inspire,” is a journalist. He is an anti-American operative with blood on his hands. His past posting of classified documents revealed the identity of more than 100 Afghan sources to the Taliban. Why was he not pursued with the same urgency we pursue Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders?” Noam Chomsky, your response?
NOAM CHOMSKY: That’s pretty much what I would expect Sarah Palin to say. I don’t know how much she understands, but I think we should pay attention to what we learn from the leaks. What we learned, for example, is kinds of things I’ve said. Perhaps the most dramatic revelation, or mention, is the bitter hatred of democracy that is revealed both by the U.S. Government – Hillary Clinton, others – and also by the diplomatic service.
To tell the world– well, they’re talking to each other- to pretend to each other that the Arab world regards Iran as the major threat and wants the U.S. to bomb Iran, is extremely revealing, when they know that approximately 80% of Arab opinion regards the U.S. and Israel as the major threat, 10% regard Iran as the major threat, and a majority, 57%, think the region would be better off with Iranian nuclear weapons as a kind of deterrent. That is does not even enter. All that enters is what they claim has been said by Arab dictators – brutal Arab dictators. That is what counts.
How representative this is of what they say, we don’t know, because we do not know what the filtering is. But that’s a minor point. But the major point is that the population is irrelevant. All that matters is the opinions of the dictators that we support. If they were to back us, that is the Arab world. That is a very revealing picture of the mentality of U.S. political leadership and, presumably, the lead opinion, judging by the commentary that’s appeared here, that’s the way it has been presented in the press as well. It does not matter with the Arabs believe.
AMY GOODMAN: Your piece, Outrage Misguided. Back to the midterm elections and what we’re going to see now. Can you talk about the tea party movement?
NOAM CHOMSKY: The Tea Party movement itself is, maybe 15% or 20% of the electorate. It’s relatively affluent, white, nativist, you know, it has rather traditional nativist streaks to it. But what is much more important, I think, is the outrage. Over half the population says they more or less supported it, or support its message. What people are thinking is extremely interesting. I mean, overwhelmingly polls reveal that people are extremely bitter, angry, hostile, opposed to everything.
The primary cause undoubtedly is the economic disaster. It’s not just the financial catastrophe, it’s an economic disaster. I mean, in the manufacturing industry, for example, unemployment levels are at the level of the Great Depression. And unlike the Great Depression, those jobs are not coming back. U.S. owners and managers have long ago made the decision that they can make more profit with complicated financial deals than by production. So finance – this goes back to the 1970s, mainly Reagan escalated it, and onward- Clinton, too. The economy has been financialized.
Financial institutions have grown enormously in their share of corporate profits. It may be something like a third, or something like that today. At the same time, correspondingly, production has been exported. So you buy some electronic device from China. China is an assembly plant for a Northeast Asian production center. The parts and components come from the more advanced countries – and from the United States, and the technology . So yes, that’s a cheap place to assemble things and sell them back here. Rather similar in Mexico, now Vietnam, and so on. That is the way to make profits.
It destroys the society here, but that’s not the concern of the ownership class and the managerial class. Their concern is profit. That is what drives the economy. The rest of it is a fallout. People are extremely bitter about it, but don’t seem to understand it. So the same people who are a majority, who say that Wall Street is to blame for the current crisis, are voting Republican. Both parties are deep in the pockets of Wall Street, but the Republicans much more so than the Democrats.
The same is true on issue after issue. The antagonism to everyone is extremely high – actually antagonism – the population doesn’t like Democrats, but they hate Republicans even more. They’re against big business. They’re against government. They’re against Congress. They’re against science –
AMY GOODMAN: Noam, we only have thirty seconds. I wanted ask if you were President Obama’s top adviser, what would you tell him to do right now?
NOAM CHOMSKY: I would tell him to do what FDR did when big business was opposed to him. Help organize, stimulate public opposition and put through a serious populist program, which can be done. Stimulate the economy. Don’t give away everything to financiers. Push through real health reform. The health reform that was pushed through may be a slight improvement but it leaves some major problems untouched. If you’re worried about the deficit, pay attention to the fact that it is almost all attributable to military spending and this totally dysfunctional health program.
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
Wikileaks Documents Analysis Early
The title already tells us a couple of things. First of all, Wikileaks will release these things in batches over a nine-day period, thus keeping it in the news. Essentially, it confirms what we know about how our government acts and its attitude towards its citizens. Second, I wrote it that way out of deference to search engines. This reminds me very much of an early criticism or comment on Journalistic prose as started by Hearst: "Backward ran the sentences until reeled the mind."
At any rate, here is a discussion of the first real and substantial analysis of the documents that I promised.
"Tabloid Journalism" and Why WikiLeaks Is "Under Siege"
Rush Transcript
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AMY GOODMAN: The whistleblowing website WikiLeaks has begun releasing a giant trove of confidential American diplomatic cables that’s sending shockwaves through the global diplomatic establishment. The more than a quarter million classified cables were sent by U.S. embassies around the world, most of them in the past three years. WikiLeaks provided the documents to five newspapers in advance: the New York Times, the London Guardian, Germany’s Der Spiegel, France’s La Monde and Spain’s El Paiz. The revelations in the cables are extensive and varied.
Among the findings, Arab leaders are privately urging the United States to conduct air strikes on Iran; in particular, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia has repeatedly called on U.S. to attack Iran to destroy its nuclear program, reportedly calling on American officials to “cut off the head of the snake”. Jordan, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, also said they support a U.S. attack. The cables also highlight Israel’s anxiety to preserve its regional nuclear monopoly; it’s readiness to 'go it alone' against Iran, and its attempts to influence American policy. The cables also name Saudi donors as the biggest financiers of Sunni militant groups like Al-Qaeda. The cables also provide a detailed account of an agreement between Washington and Yemen to cover up the use of U.S. warplanes to bomb targets in Yemen. One cable records that during a meeting in January with General David Petraeus, the Yemeni president Abdallah Saleh said, “We will continue saying these are our bombs, not yours.”
Among the biggest revelations is how the U.S. uses its embassies around the world as part of a global spy network. U.S. diplomats are asked to obtain information from the foreign dignitaries they meet including frequent flier numbers, credit card details, and even DNA material. The United Nations is also a target of the espionage with one cable listing the information-gathering priorities to American staff at the UN headquarters in New York. The roughly half a dozen cables from 2008 and 2009 detailing the more aggressive intelligence collection were signed by Secretaries of State Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton. The New York Times says the directives, quote: "Appear to blur the traditional boundaries between statesmen and spies." The cables also reveal that U.S. officials sharply warned Germany in 2007 not to enforce arrest warrants for CIA officers involved in an operation in which an innocent German citizen with the same name as a suspected militant was abducted and held for months in Afghanistan. The cables also document suspicion of corruption in the Afghan government. One cable alleges that Afghan vice president Zia Massoud was carrying fifty two million dollars in cash when stopped during a visit to the United Arab Emirates. Only 220 cables were published by WikiLeaks on it’s website on Sunday with hundreds of thousands more to come. The Obama administration has been warning allies about the expected leaks since last week. A statement from the White House on Sunday said, “We condemn in the strongest terms the unauthorized disclosure of classified documents and sensitive national security information.” It also said the disclosure of the cables could, "deeply impact not only U.S. foreign policy interests, but those of our allies and friends around the world."
For more, I’m joined for this hour by four guests Carne Ross is with us, he is a British diplomat for fifteen years who resigned before the Iraq war. He’s the founder and head of a non-profit diplomatic advisory group, Independent Diplomat. He is joining me here in New York in our studios along with Greg Mitchell who writes the Media Fix blog for the Nation. And before that was the longtime editor of Editor and Publisher Magazine. Joining me via Democracy Now! Video Stream is Daniel Ellsberg, perhaps the countries most famous whistleblower, he leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971. We are also joined by As’ad AbuKhalil, a professor of political science at California State University Stanislaus, and visiting professor at UC Berkeley. He is author of The Battle for Saudi Arabia and runs the Angry Arab News Server blog. Daniel Ellsberg, we’re going to begin with you. We were talking to you on October 20 at Democracy Now! when you were headed to London to participate in the WikiLeaks news conference on the release of close to 400,000 documents. What are your thoughts today?
DANIEL ELLSBERG: Well, this is totally a process and this stage of the process has just begun. It’s going to go on day after day. We have seen one out of one thousand so far of the cables that WikiLeaks is prepared to release. So it’s very early to judge, really, the value or the dangers, if any, of releasing that. Back in October when we were releasing or when he was releasing I think it was the Afghan documents at that point, they were still new to the process, and I think they made some mistakes in terms of releasing some names that they shouldn’t have released at that time and were properly criticized for that. As a result, it appears that the last batch before this one was redacted fairly heavily by Assange- by WikiLeaks- with the result that when the Pentagon said that there were 300 names that were endangered by that release, they said right away, based on their own files and their own knowledge of the cables, it turned out within a couple of days that WikiLeaks had released none of those names, that none of those had been redacted. They were not endangered. The upshot right now appears to be that as of now, with the hundreds of thousands of documents that WikiLeaks has put out, the Pentagon has had to acknowledge that not one single informant or soldier has been endangered. In fact, they have not even felt the need to protect one or inform one that he or she was in danger. So that risk, which we’re hearing again, now, right now has obviously been very largely overblown and is a lot of blather.
AMY GOODMAN: Greg Mitchell, you’ve been tweeting this since it came out yesterday- 1:30 in the afternoon on Sunday Eastern Standard Time- the beginning of the release of the documents. First of all, talk about their significance, what they are; what are the different places they are from?
GREG MITCHELL: Well there from 79 different embassies from around the world, so it really is quite unprecedented. And as Dan said, the way this is different from the previous WikiLeaks, when they came out on the Iraq war and on Afghanistan those were basically one-day stories. There were gigantic document dumps, got massive media coverage for a day or so and then it was pretty much over. This is gonna be emerging over the next nine days, for example in the New York Times, and WikiLeaks on their own site has said it’s gonna on for months. So it is a little early to say exactly what the effects are gonna be what the down side might be and the revelations are already quite significant. We already see in some of the outlets are summarizing some of the revelations yet to come. So when you read, even some of the things you read at the top of the hour, they’re actually not cables that have been released yet, but some of the media outlets are kind of previewing what’s coming.
AMY GOODMAN: Interestingly, there is a file on BitTorrent- in case the full release doesn’t go forward for some reason. The files are encrypted, but all that is needed to decrypt it is a pass phrase, which will be released in the worst-case scenario.
GREG MITCHELL: What is also different about this release is that even the previous leaks, WikiLeaks worked closely with news organizations. But here they gave the news organizations these files very early on and news organizations, at least the _New York Times, have gone to the administration, it’s run names pass the State Department and has redacted many of the documents, which then WikiLeaks has then taken redacted documents and these are among the over 200 they’ve already posted. So, in a sense, WikiLeaks is letting the news media help them in making sure these documents are safe. So, I would imagine that as they emerge, there is going to be even fewer worries about what might be in them and that might have been in the past.
DANIEL ELLSBERG: First of all, we have Admiral Mullen there who is the interesting position of sending American troops- men and women- into harm’s way. So when it comes to blood on hands, he’s really has got a lot to answer for. From another point of view, he’s quite an expert on that. At the same time, you have to realize that he has almost unlimited resources on his side to minimize that damage by assigning people to find out who is in danger in these documents. He has had months and months to look at them and how to protect them. His command in Kabul has reported they have not felt it necessary to protect or inform any individual, nor has any individual been harmed. And you can believe that if their plumber’s operation- to the tune of more than 100 men working on this- had been able to find one mutilated body, that one would be on the cover of Newsweek by now. So we’ve had a pretty good test of how well the process of sanitizing these documents by the newspapers- and by WikiLeaks- has operated and the answer is, the proof is in the pudding: No harm has been done; Admiral Mullen’s fears are groundless.
AMY GOODMAN: Carne Ross, you were a British diplomat for fifteen years, you resigned before the Iraq War, you now have founded and are head of a non-profit diplomatic advisory group called Independent Diplomat. These are diplomatic cables. Talk about the significance of what they are and the fact they have been exposed and what you found the most interesting.
CARNE ROSS: I think this is an extraordinary and colossal event that will have a profound affect on the discourse- the practice- of diplomacy. I don’t think it’s at all clear that one can say they’ve not caused harm or have caused harm. This will have effects. There will probably be good affects and there will probably be bad affects when this amount of information is dumped into the public sphere- information that was hitherto confidential. This will have political and perhaps security effects as well.
What this means is I think it will be very difficult for American diplomats henceforward to practice diplomacy. I think the fact these cables have come out will mean other diplomats will find it harder to share confidences with American diplomats. It also, I suspect, will mean that American diplomats will forebear from putting the most sensitive and juicy material into telegrams, or at least those telegrams will be given a much narrower distribution than they have hitherto. That will have, of course, negative effects for the operational effectiveness of the U.S. government, and perhaps also for the WikiLeaks and historians of the future who want to find out what the U.S. government and its diplomats were actually doing or thinking. So I think this will be very, very significant in the long term. It will ramify in all sorts of different ways.
AMY GOODMAN: In the United States, the mainstream media is basically just talking about the ways this will damage the United States, yet you- a British diplomat- are saying this could be beneficial. Why?
CARNE ROSS: Well, I resigned from the Foreign Office over the Iraq War. People were not told the truth about the reasons for going to war in Iraq. I was our Iraq expert at the UN Security Council for many years. I personally think that far too much in diplomacy is kept secret. There is this kind of-
AMY GOODMAN: And you testified.
CARNE ROSS: I did. I’ve testified twice at two official inquiries. Uh-
AMY GOODMAN: And presented information about weapons of mass destruction.
CARNE ROSS: Yes. And when I first presented it, I was attacked by my government. Now what I said is more or less accepted as, you know, the understood truth of what happened- you know, the government did not tell the truth about WMD, they ignored all available alternatives to war. The trouble with all of this is we tend to place government in this sort of superior, elite position; that they know things we do not know; that governments are entitled to know things that the public do not know. I think the balance is way too far in the government’s favor. Far more information should be released and made transparent. I’m not sure, however, that the way WikiLeaks has done this is the right way. This is a very random, blunt instrument to attack the problem of a lack of transparency of government. This should ideally be done through the mechanisms of democratic accountability. Of course, it’s not been done that way so far. Hence, WikiLeaks.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about Yemen. The revelations around Yemen.
CARNE ROSS: [unintelligible] there will be very, very many unhappy people in the government right now. The telegram recording General Petraeus’s conversation with President Saleh is hugely damaging to the government of Yemen and it makes clear that U.S. aircraft and UAV’s are carrying out strikes inside Yemen against Al-Qaeda- or militants perhaps, we don’t know who they are. But the Yemeni government is claiming these strikes as its own. The fact the U.S. is doing this, and that this has now been confirmed- many people speculated that this was the case, because Yemen itself didn’t have this capability- but the fact that this is now confirmed in writing is enormously damaging to the Yemen government.
AMY GOODMAN: And have the Yemeni vice-president saying that he then lied to his parliament about this as well.
CARNE ROSS: Yes. Yemen is not exactly a perfect democracy, to say the least, so whether the fact that he lied to his parliament is a major revelation or not, I leave to others to judge. But the fact that U.S. air strikes are confirmed inside the country will enormously increase the pressure on the Yemeni government. That is one of the many, many ways that these telegrams- the release of these telegrams- will ramify, frankly in unpredictable ways.
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s talk about- since he worked at the UN Security Council- let’s talk about the cables. From Condoleezza Rice, previous Secretary of State, to Hillary Clinton- basically ordering diplomats around the world-
CARNE ROSS: From Clinton to Rice, actually. From Secretary of State Clinton to Ambassador Rice at the UN.
AMY GOODMAN: Ah, continue.
CARNE ROSS: This is a standard instruction telegrams from Washington to the USG- all of these telegrams are signed off "Clinton". This shouldn’t be seen as a sort of personal message by Hillary Clinton- all instruction telegrams from Washington will be signed off with the name of the secretary of state, so that’s not a very big deal. What this telegram sets out is a long list of intelligence requirements for the U.S. at the UN which is, frankly, an extremely exhaustive list- right down to the activities of NGO’s in preventing AIDS or affecting the policies of the UN. So it’s a very, very comprehensive list.
The fact the U.S. is trying to gather intelligence information at the UN, frankly, is not a very big revelation. I mean, everybody is spying on everybody else at the UN, including on Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon. The British Development Secretary Claire Short, who also resigned over the Iraq War, has said publicly that the UK authorities were bugging the phones of Kofi Annan when he was Secretary General. So I don’t think that this will come as a great revelation to people at the UN. It will, however, be rather embarrassing for the U.S. diplomats currently practicing at the UN.
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s really talk specifically- for people who are waking up this morning and have not heard anything about this- the kind of spying they’re talking about. I’m looking at The Guardian, one of the participants in the WikiLeaks release, "Washington running a secret intelligence campaign targeted at the leadership of the United Nations, including Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon and the permanent Security Council representatives from China, Russia, France, and the U.K. The classified directive which appears to blur the lines between diplomacy and spying was issued to U.S. diplomats under Hillary Clinton’s name in July 2009, demanding forensic technical details about the communication systems used by top UN officials including passwords and personal encryption keys used in private and commercial networks for official communications. It called for detailed biometric information on key UN officials to include undersecretaries, heads of specialized agencies and their chief advisers, top SIG- that’s Secretary General Aides- heads of peace operations and political field missions, including force commanders, as well as intelligence on Ban’s management and decision making style and his influence on the secretariat. A parallel intelligence directive sent to diplomats sent to the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, and biometric data including DNA, fingerprints and iris scans."
CARNE ROSS: Yes, such is the nature of modern intelligence gathering. But the fact that the U.S. has this list of intelligence requirements of the UN I don’t think would be any great surprise. The fact that The Guardian claims this is an enormous revelation seems to me rather a pretense- we are not babes in the woods. States spy on each other. They’re going to spy on the UN. What the Secretary General and his senior officials say is of interest to states, so they’re going to do that.
AMY GOODMAN: This does include cables from former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, from Hillary Clinton, Republicans and Democrats alike. So a diplomat in another country who invites an ambassador, a president to the U.S. Embassy for tea, then that president is wondering if when they drink the tea their DNA is going to be taken.
CARNE ROSS: Well that’s a new twist on the intelligence. I agree, it is rather extraordinary. I can’t quite myself see how your saliva on a coffee cup is going help you learn the intentions of the UN or the government of country xyz. It’s a rather extraordinary thing and I would be interested to find out how, in fact, that process works. But the fact that the U.S. is collecting this data, I do not think we should all be surprised about this.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, you are a diplomat, I think people in the public would be rather surprised. Greg Mitchell, what is your take on this?
GREG MITCHELL: It’s interesting how the different news outlets have handled it. As you mentioned, in The Guardian it’s one of their featured articles, and it went into great detail about the UN angle. Whereas The New York Times had a much, much less detailed, softer, gentler version of that. Maybe The New York Times is trying say that they are not babes in the woods, and that they know this is going on. It’s hard for me to believe-
AMY GOODMAN: The just stuck with the iris scans, didn’t mention the fingerprints and the biometrics.
GREG MITCHELL: Right, it’s hard for me to believe that the long list of this is not something that is new- the full extent of it. And as someone pointed out, even if it’s not that shocking, it must be exhausting asking these diplomats around the world to do this work instead of the important work they’re supposed to be doing. They have a long checklist to go through of what they’re supposed to do to contribute to this intelligence gathering.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to bring in As’ad AbuKhalil into this conversation. Professor of political science at California State Stanislaus, visiting professor at UC Berkeley, he is the author of the book The Battle for Saudi Arabia which is what I want to go to that right now. The diplomatic cables around Saudi Arabia calling for the attacking of Iran. Can you summarize what the cables said, and then your response?
AS’AD ABUKHALIL: Much of the cables about Saudi Arabia shows a very high degree of control by the U.S. government over the policy decisions made in Saudi Arabia. At one point, there is an American specific request, issuing what reads like a command, asking the Saudi government to go to China and to undertake a certain mission on behalf of the United States vis-à-vis the situation in Iran. I think the extent to which the Saudi government- and all Arab governments in the Gulf- are embarrassed by these leaks, is evidenced by the clampdown that is being exhibited throughout the Saudi-controlled Arab media. And even the so-called "independent" Al Jazeera- which is, contrary to it’s reputation here in the West, is the most serious news organization in Yemeni- is also trying to cover up the embarrassing revelations about the way Arab governments operate vis-à-vis the United States. You have to take into consideration much of the discussions and the utterances and the statements that are made by Arab leaders at the highest levels of these documents are in direct contradiction with their publicly declared policies, which are made in Arabic to their people`.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to ask, As’ad AbuKhalil, if you could go a little closer to your computer so we can hear you more clearly. As’ad AbuKhalil, again is a professor of visiting at UC Berkeley, he is the author of The Battle for Saudi Arabia, and he runs the Angry Arab News Service blog. If you could now continue with exactly what was said by Saudi Arabia in conversation with who in the U.S.?
AS’AD ABUKHALIL: There is more than one conversation revealed in those documents. I’ve read all those pertaining to the Middle East, and for example, there’s one discussion conducted between the king of Saudi Arabia- who rarely has these kinds of discussions even with his counterparts in the region. But he is willing to meet with the relatively lower ranking official, say, of the Department of Homeland Security. And the discussion goes on about a variety of issues related to what is of interest to American government.
What is very striking to me, for example: take the issue of human rights. I read what was released yesterday, and I am not struck, really. The U.S. government does not bring up human rights except in one meeting between American congressional delegation and the Syrian president. At one point, the Syrian president told them what amounts to, "What about Saudi Arabia?" Because in a meeting between an American official from Homeland Security and the Saudi King, not only does that American official not bring up the human rights violations in the most oppressive governments, bar none, in the entire region- and that is Saudi Arabia- but he even goes on, on behalf of the U.S. government, to praise the King for the human rights improvement and reform- ostensibly reforms- that has been going on in the kingdom. You also see, for example, in the same meeting, the Saudi King brings up the issue and the various restrictions on travelers from Saudi Arabia into the United States. And the King tells him that it is very embarrassing for him- before friends and foes alike- because it gives the impression the United States and Saudi Arabia are not that close as allies. And of course the American official goes on to underline the extent to which the two countries are very close to each other.
What is very striking about all these documents on the Middle East is that the Arab people are not going to be surprised that much. They all along have known that they are ruled by a bunch of liars and deceivers who go to extra lengths to appease and please the United States. What is going to be particularly revealing are the details that show the lengths to which these rulers go in order to please the United States. And we find that they are not capable of making independent decisions. Whatever the instincts of the United States are, those rulers go along with them and, in fact, they seem to compete with one another. For example, in showing how much they are hostile towards Iran. You see, for example, the second person in the United Arab Emirates- a guy who is very influential there- goes on to encourage the United States not only to attack Iran in a variety of sites, but to prepare for a land invasion.
I should also say, what is revealing in the documents also is the utter stupidity of those rulers who, in many of these conversations, seem to think that the United States government really listens to their advice, that they really consult with them on a regular basis, as if they are waiting for the opinion of the Egyptian President or the Saudi King before they reach their decision. And I think they seem to want to flatter themselves, because the kind of relation between these protectorates- and I call them protectorates because that’s what they were, say, in the era of the British Empire- it seems they have not advanced that much in approaching a level of sovereignty that has characterized membership in the United Nations.
On the question of Israel, what people are going to notice is the extent to which there is a close correlation between the Israeli government and the American government on all issues pertaining to the Middle East- including Pakistan- and the extent to which that kind of coordination is absent in these discussions between the American officials and the Israelis. I should also say that we have seen documents in which the opinions of the Head of the Mossad Dagan were detailed in an American cable. It is also striking, the extent to which the head of the Mossad- a highly touted organization- does not seem to have that many insights or information or analysis that is insightful about what is happening in the Middle East. Certainly, the location of Israel is extremely high in the esteem of the United States, but the low esteem to which the Arab governments are held by U.S. officials is quite apparent in these documents.
AMY GOODMAN: In particular, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia repeatedly calling on the U.S. to attack Iran, to destroy its nuclear program, and reportedly calling on American officials to, "Cut off the head of the snake." Now the King is actually in New York, is that right, for back surgery?
AS’AD ABUKHALIL: Right. He is going to be there for a few weeks and I think he will be able to see what his media is not showing- the extent to which these revelations are dominating international media. I should also add, the extent to which they’re dominating the underground media, or the new media of the Middle East- Twitter and Facebook- all of them are discussing from the Arab world what is happening, and many are commenting about the irony. Yesterday, the main Saudi news organization, Arabia, kept promising viewers the leak of the document was imminent: "Ten minutes from now, we’re going to see all these documents!" And then once the documents were out, there was complete silence in that news organization. They figured that all these documentations are, in fact, an utter embarrassment to the image of their ruler the they try so hard to prop up in the eyes of the public. I think the Arab public today woke up wiser than before, more cynical than before, and certainly more critical of the government. You see all these governments competing, trying to bring up the issue of Iranian nuclear weapons. Not a single Arab leader in those discussions brought up the issue of the massive Israeli WMD program that has been going on for decades. They don’t dare bring it up.
AMY GOODMAN: As’ad AbuKhalil, teaches at University of California Berkeley. We are talking about this massive WikiLeaks leak, up to 250,000 documents being released over the next few weeks. We’re going to break and then come back to this discussion.
Daniel Ellsberg, I wanted to go back to you to get you to comment on Democratic Senator John Kerry’s comments on WikiLeaks- the chair of the Foreign Relations Committee. He called the release reckless and said "This is not an academic exercise about freedom of information and it is not akin to the release of the Pentagon Papers, which involved an analysis aimed at saving American lives and exposing government deception. Instead, these sensitive cables contain candid assessments and analysis of ongoing matters and they should remain confidential to protect the ability of the government to conduct lawful business with a private candor that is vital to effective diplomacy." Dan Ellsberg, your response?
DANIEL ELLSBERG: Oh, blah. Senator Kerry is still reeling, I’m afraid, from the battering he got from the Swiftboat liars who were said to have said at the time, “When we get through with John Kerry, people won’t know which side he fought on in Vietnam.” They took a war hero and made him into a hoax basically and he has been trying to establish his macho credentials ever since. It is not his finest hour to say silly things such as the quote you just described.
Let me put, though, these papers in some perspective. Most of your people, except for Carne Ross and to some extent John Kerry, are really not familiar with the levels of classification here and a lot of silly things have been said about them ignorantly. The fact is that these are quite low level documents. They are equivalent to the fields level documents on the civilian side that we saw in the Afghan and Iraq documents that Wikileaks earlier released. So they’re not the Pentagon Papers in terms of top secret, high level decision making papers. When the Times hypes its documents, or the other papers, as being prepared for high level policy makers, that is just false. Probably no high level policy maker even saw one of these "secret" documents.
I will give you one piece of background on that. When I worked for an assistant secretary of defense in 1964-65, on Vietnam alone I wanted to inform him as to what he ought to look at in the course of his day in the way of these very same cables just from Vietnam alone and I asked for the whole set of cables of all kinds from that area. So I came into my office in the morning and I find as high as my head, five and one-half feet high, I was just a couple of inches higher than that, two piles of paper for me to look at. I couldn’t even whip through it into the burn bag without reading most of that stuff. So I had to give the directive, "Cut out the secret documents, leave me only those that are no dis, ex dis, or slime dis–that’s limited distribution or eyes only, and top secret or higher. And that cut me down to two piles each two and a half feet high or five feet of paper instead of eleven feet of paper. In short, what I am reading in this, and it’s very familiar to me from my days in Vietnam when I wrote this sort of cable and sent it out from Vietnam back to Washington, what we are reading is the sort of thing that I in Washington didn’t have time to read. It just wasn’t important. So I think you can say that probably no assistant secretary or Hilary Clinton ever laid eyes on any of these cables. They are not, for example, the Eikenberry cable which was genuinely very revealing which was given to the New YorkTimes from our general in Kabul that revealed his opinion that General McChrystal’s program which Obama actually followed was hopeless and counterproductive and would have no way improved the situation. Now that cable was only secret, but it was no dis and it had a code word. That meant it was very carefully closed and is the sort of thing I would have seen if I had been in the Pentagon, a no dis cable. In short, we are not seeing high level decision making paper.
For what it’s worth, we are finding that the big problem with our awful, miserable, incompetent foreign policy in Iraq and Afghanistan is not the fault of foolish, stupid or lying mid-level staffers down below. They are speaking fairly honestly, not with a lot of local knowledge often, but fairly shrewdly in many cases, doing their best job to their superiors. The lying- as in Vietnam- is being enforced by the upper levels. What we need to see, really, is someone following Bradley Manning, or whoever the source is, following his example. He gave what he could- at his twenty-two year old level, corporal’s level, or whatever was available to him- to inform the public. We need somebody with higher access, the kind that I had at that time, and unfortunately didn’t use then, I’m sorry to say, I apologize. But somebody should put out the higher level papers that reveal the high level dealing and stupid formulations, theories, 'mad man' theories and others that are informing our policy so that the American people can begin to get some grip on our incoherent policy and enforce a more humane and productive thrust to it.
AMY GOODMAN: Former British diplomat in studio here. Carne Ross is shaking his head.
CARNE ROSS: I have to disagree with Daniel Ellsberg. I mean, the telegrams that I’ve seen, including the secret classified stuff, is the meat and drink of diplomacy. My foreign secretary read this stuff every day, a thick folder of it, as I did in the foreign office. I don’t know how things work in the U.S. government, but my experience working on Iraq is that the top secret stuff, the intelligence based stuff, is the least accurate form of reporting that you get. What foreign leaders are saying to American diplomats or British diplomats in confidential discussions is enormously important. Records of what King Abdullah said or President Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen said would be of great interest to senior officials in the State Department or indeed the NSC or the White House, so I will have disagree with Daniel Ellsberg’s analysis. This stuff is very, very revealing of the every day meat and drink of American diplomacy.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to talk about what the mainstream press in America is mainly focusing, the documents describing French President Nicolas Sarkozy as touchy, authoritarian, as "an emperor without clothes". They say German Chancellor Angela Merkel is someone who avoids risk. They call her "The Teflon Leader". Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is incapable. They also describe Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin as an "alpha dog" while Russian President Dmitry Medvedev is "pale and hesitant" and "plays Robin to Putin’s Batman" and much has been written about the cable that reports Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddafi never travels without his trusted Ukrainian nurse, a “voluptuous blonde.”
Greg Mitchell, the significance of other leaks that have come out in this trove of documents. How the hacker attacks which forced Google to quit China in January were orchestrated by a senior member of the Politburo who typed his own name into the global version of the search engine and found articles criticizing him personally, but what China did with Google’s information.
GREG MITCHELL: Well, there is a whole list of those that are going to be coming out in further detail. We don’t know a lot about that yet because all the cables have not been released. But, as you say, the American media has often focused on what others call gossip and that really is the one day material that is going to be reported. What is more important is what is going to come out. It is interesting that looking at if from a media aspect is the calls that we are starting to hear now, the one bipartisan thing we are seeing out of Washington, is Democrat and Republican senators calling for prosecution of WikiLeaks for stopping the documents, somehow preventing the documents from being released.
AMY GOODMAN: Lindsey Graham and others calling for…..
GREG MITCHELL: Joe Lieberman just is the most recent one, quite a detailed call saying this is a national security threat. Peter King said it was the same thing as a military attack, liking it to an attack on the U.S. But so far that hasn’t gotten anywhere and there hasn’t been a serious move to prevent the further dissemination or to stop, as we saw with the Pentagon papers, the actual newspapers printing documents. So we haven’t seen that yet, but we have seen some elegant defenses of publishing the documents, particularly in The Guardian – Simon Jenkins there and in the New York Times note on why the published the documents and they emphasize that it is not the press’ role to keep the government from suffering embarrassment and they also, as he mentioned earlier, the importance of using the example of the false information that was spread about Iraqi WMD’s, that if material like this had come out at that time it would have had a tremendous impact on perhaps halting what became the invasion of Iraq.
AMY GOODMAN: Of course, there is the Swedish warrant out for Julian Assange’s arrest which has been very long and complicated. First they issued one and then they didn’t and then they did, and…
GREG MITCHELL: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to talk about Bradley Manning for a minute. The US military believes the leak can be traced to Private First Class Bradley Manning who has been held in solitary confinement for the last seven months and is facing a court martial next year. In an on-line conversation with computer hacker, Adrian Lamo, who would later turn him in. Manning said, “Hilary Clinton and several thousand diplomats around the world are going to have a heart attack when they wake up one morning and find an entire repository of classified foreign policy is available in a searchable format to the public. Everywhere there is a U.S. post there is a diplomatic scandal that will be revealed. It is open diplomacy, worldwide anarchy in CSV format. It’s Climategate with a global scope and breathtaking depth. It is beautiful and horrifying." Those are the words of Bradley Manning, 22 years old, low level, in Iraq, coming in with this Lady Gaga CD, saying it was Lady Gaga, and downloading all this information. Is this possible? Daniel Ellsberg, I want to put that question to you. You have been raising money for his defense.
DANIEL ELLSBERG: Clearly what’s possible to 22 year old Manning who was, by the way, seven years younger I think, probably 20 or so when he actually started this process. What is available to him is probably available to five or six hundred thousand people- available to SIPRNet- and notice that the thing that first struck him was his realization that he was involved in the arrest process of people who he later discovered were doing nothing other than writing what he calls, "scholarly critiques of the current administration" for which they were being tortured by the Iraqis to whom we were turning them over with the knowledge of Americans. All of this being blatantly illegal, both for the Iraqis and for the Americans who turned them over to torture. When he reported this to his superior, his superior told him to forget it and get back to work arresting people. The effect that had on Bradley Manning was that he was being asked to participate in a blatantly illegal process and he chose to say no to it, to expose it, to resist it, to do what he actually should have done. One person out of hundreds of thousands who did that. The material that he revealed in the Iraq Logs, which were just revealed recently- some 400,000 logs- revealed hundreds if not thousands of cases of Americans who reported that they understood they were turning people over to be tortured, clearly against U.S. and international law, and they were then being ordered not to pursue the investigation further or take any measure to stop this illegal process. Now that order was blatantly illegal so it will be interesting to take a look at those thousands of cases and just see which one led to a refusal to carry out that blatantly illegal order as the USMJ requires them to do. Bradley Manning seems to have been the one who did that, the one who lived up to his oath of office and the one who acted patriotically here to stop this illegal process. For that he will pay very heavily. And yet, he may yet inspire some other people to do the same – to save lives, stop processes of torture and to reveal, by the way, the absolute lack of progress that is revealed throughout all of these documents. The 260,000 documents, none so far-
AMY GOODMAN: Dan, we only have five seconds. Do you think it’s possible he is alone in releasing this information?
DANIEL ELLSBERG: In terms of access to the information, he is certainly not alone. In terms of ability to download it, not alone. Although they have tightened up the procedures as a result of what they found out about him and how he has revealed how he did it so they will have to give him a medal for improving their security.
AMY GOODMAN: We are going to have to leave it there. I want to thank you all for being with us. Daniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon papers whistleblower; Carne Ross, former British diplomat, Greg Mitchell of the The Nation and As’ad AbuKhalil, California professor. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks so much for joining us.
Among the findings, Arab leaders are privately urging the United States to conduct air strikes on Iran; in particular, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia has repeatedly called on U.S. to attack Iran to destroy its nuclear program, reportedly calling on American officials to “cut off the head of the snake”. Jordan, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, also said they support a U.S. attack. The cables also highlight Israel’s anxiety to preserve its regional nuclear monopoly; it’s readiness to 'go it alone' against Iran, and its attempts to influence American policy. The cables also name Saudi donors as the biggest financiers of Sunni militant groups like Al-Qaeda. The cables also provide a detailed account of an agreement between Washington and Yemen to cover up the use of U.S. warplanes to bomb targets in Yemen. One cable records that during a meeting in January with General David Petraeus, the Yemeni president Abdallah Saleh said, “We will continue saying these are our bombs, not yours.”
Among the biggest revelations is how the U.S. uses its embassies around the world as part of a global spy network. U.S. diplomats are asked to obtain information from the foreign dignitaries they meet including frequent flier numbers, credit card details, and even DNA material. The United Nations is also a target of the espionage with one cable listing the information-gathering priorities to American staff at the UN headquarters in New York. The roughly half a dozen cables from 2008 and 2009 detailing the more aggressive intelligence collection were signed by Secretaries of State Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton. The New York Times says the directives, quote: "Appear to blur the traditional boundaries between statesmen and spies." The cables also reveal that U.S. officials sharply warned Germany in 2007 not to enforce arrest warrants for CIA officers involved in an operation in which an innocent German citizen with the same name as a suspected militant was abducted and held for months in Afghanistan. The cables also document suspicion of corruption in the Afghan government. One cable alleges that Afghan vice president Zia Massoud was carrying fifty two million dollars in cash when stopped during a visit to the United Arab Emirates. Only 220 cables were published by WikiLeaks on it’s website on Sunday with hundreds of thousands more to come. The Obama administration has been warning allies about the expected leaks since last week. A statement from the White House on Sunday said, “We condemn in the strongest terms the unauthorized disclosure of classified documents and sensitive national security information.” It also said the disclosure of the cables could, "deeply impact not only U.S. foreign policy interests, but those of our allies and friends around the world."
For more, I’m joined for this hour by four guests Carne Ross is with us, he is a British diplomat for fifteen years who resigned before the Iraq war. He’s the founder and head of a non-profit diplomatic advisory group, Independent Diplomat. He is joining me here in New York in our studios along with Greg Mitchell who writes the Media Fix blog for the Nation. And before that was the longtime editor of Editor and Publisher Magazine. Joining me via Democracy Now! Video Stream is Daniel Ellsberg, perhaps the countries most famous whistleblower, he leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971. We are also joined by As’ad AbuKhalil, a professor of political science at California State University Stanislaus, and visiting professor at UC Berkeley. He is author of The Battle for Saudi Arabia and runs the Angry Arab News Server blog. Daniel Ellsberg, we’re going to begin with you. We were talking to you on October 20 at Democracy Now! when you were headed to London to participate in the WikiLeaks news conference on the release of close to 400,000 documents. What are your thoughts today?
DANIEL ELLSBERG: Well, this is totally a process and this stage of the process has just begun. It’s going to go on day after day. We have seen one out of one thousand so far of the cables that WikiLeaks is prepared to release. So it’s very early to judge, really, the value or the dangers, if any, of releasing that. Back in October when we were releasing or when he was releasing I think it was the Afghan documents at that point, they were still new to the process, and I think they made some mistakes in terms of releasing some names that they shouldn’t have released at that time and were properly criticized for that. As a result, it appears that the last batch before this one was redacted fairly heavily by Assange- by WikiLeaks- with the result that when the Pentagon said that there were 300 names that were endangered by that release, they said right away, based on their own files and their own knowledge of the cables, it turned out within a couple of days that WikiLeaks had released none of those names, that none of those had been redacted. They were not endangered. The upshot right now appears to be that as of now, with the hundreds of thousands of documents that WikiLeaks has put out, the Pentagon has had to acknowledge that not one single informant or soldier has been endangered. In fact, they have not even felt the need to protect one or inform one that he or she was in danger. So that risk, which we’re hearing again, now, right now has obviously been very largely overblown and is a lot of blather.
AMY GOODMAN: Greg Mitchell, you’ve been tweeting this since it came out yesterday- 1:30 in the afternoon on Sunday Eastern Standard Time- the beginning of the release of the documents. First of all, talk about their significance, what they are; what are the different places they are from?
GREG MITCHELL: Well there from 79 different embassies from around the world, so it really is quite unprecedented. And as Dan said, the way this is different from the previous WikiLeaks, when they came out on the Iraq war and on Afghanistan those were basically one-day stories. There were gigantic document dumps, got massive media coverage for a day or so and then it was pretty much over. This is gonna be emerging over the next nine days, for example in the New York Times, and WikiLeaks on their own site has said it’s gonna on for months. So it is a little early to say exactly what the effects are gonna be what the down side might be and the revelations are already quite significant. We already see in some of the outlets are summarizing some of the revelations yet to come. So when you read, even some of the things you read at the top of the hour, they’re actually not cables that have been released yet, but some of the media outlets are kind of previewing what’s coming.
AMY GOODMAN: Interestingly, there is a file on BitTorrent- in case the full release doesn’t go forward for some reason. The files are encrypted, but all that is needed to decrypt it is a pass phrase, which will be released in the worst-case scenario.
GREG MITCHELL: What is also different about this release is that even the previous leaks, WikiLeaks worked closely with news organizations. But here they gave the news organizations these files very early on and news organizations, at least the _New York Times, have gone to the administration, it’s run names pass the State Department and has redacted many of the documents, which then WikiLeaks has then taken redacted documents and these are among the over 200 they’ve already posted. So, in a sense, WikiLeaks is letting the news media help them in making sure these documents are safe. So, I would imagine that as they emerge, there is going to be even fewer worries about what might be in them and that might have been in the past.
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AMY GOODMAN: Admiral Mike Mullen, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who has previously accused WikiLeaks of having blood on its hands was on CNN’s GPS on Sunday. This was his response when host Fareed Zakaria asked him if WikiLeaks latest document release endangers American troops.MIKE MULLEN: So it’s not just American troops, but it also endangers the lives of other individuals that we have engaged in our, uh, in our overall efforts, whether they be in Afghanistan or other countries. So I think is a very, very dangerous precedent. What I don’t think those who are in charge of WikiLeaks understand is we live in a world where just a little bitty piece of information can be added to a network of information and really open up, uh, an understanding that just wasn’t there before. So it continues to be extremely dangerous and I would hope that those who are responsible for this would at some point in time think about the responsibility they have four lives, that they’re exposing, uh, and the potential there, and stop leaking this information.AMY GOODMAN: That is Admiral Mike Mullen. Dan Ellsberg, your response?
DANIEL ELLSBERG: First of all, we have Admiral Mullen there who is the interesting position of sending American troops- men and women- into harm’s way. So when it comes to blood on hands, he’s really has got a lot to answer for. From another point of view, he’s quite an expert on that. At the same time, you have to realize that he has almost unlimited resources on his side to minimize that damage by assigning people to find out who is in danger in these documents. He has had months and months to look at them and how to protect them. His command in Kabul has reported they have not felt it necessary to protect or inform any individual, nor has any individual been harmed. And you can believe that if their plumber’s operation- to the tune of more than 100 men working on this- had been able to find one mutilated body, that one would be on the cover of Newsweek by now. So we’ve had a pretty good test of how well the process of sanitizing these documents by the newspapers- and by WikiLeaks- has operated and the answer is, the proof is in the pudding: No harm has been done; Admiral Mullen’s fears are groundless.
AMY GOODMAN: Carne Ross, you were a British diplomat for fifteen years, you resigned before the Iraq War, you now have founded and are head of a non-profit diplomatic advisory group called Independent Diplomat. These are diplomatic cables. Talk about the significance of what they are and the fact they have been exposed and what you found the most interesting.
CARNE ROSS: I think this is an extraordinary and colossal event that will have a profound affect on the discourse- the practice- of diplomacy. I don’t think it’s at all clear that one can say they’ve not caused harm or have caused harm. This will have effects. There will probably be good affects and there will probably be bad affects when this amount of information is dumped into the public sphere- information that was hitherto confidential. This will have political and perhaps security effects as well.
What this means is I think it will be very difficult for American diplomats henceforward to practice diplomacy. I think the fact these cables have come out will mean other diplomats will find it harder to share confidences with American diplomats. It also, I suspect, will mean that American diplomats will forebear from putting the most sensitive and juicy material into telegrams, or at least those telegrams will be given a much narrower distribution than they have hitherto. That will have, of course, negative effects for the operational effectiveness of the U.S. government, and perhaps also for the WikiLeaks and historians of the future who want to find out what the U.S. government and its diplomats were actually doing or thinking. So I think this will be very, very significant in the long term. It will ramify in all sorts of different ways.
AMY GOODMAN: In the United States, the mainstream media is basically just talking about the ways this will damage the United States, yet you- a British diplomat- are saying this could be beneficial. Why?
CARNE ROSS: Well, I resigned from the Foreign Office over the Iraq War. People were not told the truth about the reasons for going to war in Iraq. I was our Iraq expert at the UN Security Council for many years. I personally think that far too much in diplomacy is kept secret. There is this kind of-
AMY GOODMAN: And you testified.
CARNE ROSS: I did. I’ve testified twice at two official inquiries. Uh-
AMY GOODMAN: And presented information about weapons of mass destruction.
CARNE ROSS: Yes. And when I first presented it, I was attacked by my government. Now what I said is more or less accepted as, you know, the understood truth of what happened- you know, the government did not tell the truth about WMD, they ignored all available alternatives to war. The trouble with all of this is we tend to place government in this sort of superior, elite position; that they know things we do not know; that governments are entitled to know things that the public do not know. I think the balance is way too far in the government’s favor. Far more information should be released and made transparent. I’m not sure, however, that the way WikiLeaks has done this is the right way. This is a very random, blunt instrument to attack the problem of a lack of transparency of government. This should ideally be done through the mechanisms of democratic accountability. Of course, it’s not been done that way so far. Hence, WikiLeaks.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about Yemen. The revelations around Yemen.
CARNE ROSS: [unintelligible] there will be very, very many unhappy people in the government right now. The telegram recording General Petraeus’s conversation with President Saleh is hugely damaging to the government of Yemen and it makes clear that U.S. aircraft and UAV’s are carrying out strikes inside Yemen against Al-Qaeda- or militants perhaps, we don’t know who they are. But the Yemeni government is claiming these strikes as its own. The fact the U.S. is doing this, and that this has now been confirmed- many people speculated that this was the case, because Yemen itself didn’t have this capability- but the fact that this is now confirmed in writing is enormously damaging to the Yemen government.
AMY GOODMAN: And have the Yemeni vice-president saying that he then lied to his parliament about this as well.
CARNE ROSS: Yes. Yemen is not exactly a perfect democracy, to say the least, so whether the fact that he lied to his parliament is a major revelation or not, I leave to others to judge. But the fact that U.S. air strikes are confirmed inside the country will enormously increase the pressure on the Yemeni government. That is one of the many, many ways that these telegrams- the release of these telegrams- will ramify, frankly in unpredictable ways.
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s talk about- since he worked at the UN Security Council- let’s talk about the cables. From Condoleezza Rice, previous Secretary of State, to Hillary Clinton- basically ordering diplomats around the world-
CARNE ROSS: From Clinton to Rice, actually. From Secretary of State Clinton to Ambassador Rice at the UN.
AMY GOODMAN: Ah, continue.
CARNE ROSS: This is a standard instruction telegrams from Washington to the USG- all of these telegrams are signed off "Clinton". This shouldn’t be seen as a sort of personal message by Hillary Clinton- all instruction telegrams from Washington will be signed off with the name of the secretary of state, so that’s not a very big deal. What this telegram sets out is a long list of intelligence requirements for the U.S. at the UN which is, frankly, an extremely exhaustive list- right down to the activities of NGO’s in preventing AIDS or affecting the policies of the UN. So it’s a very, very comprehensive list.
The fact the U.S. is trying to gather intelligence information at the UN, frankly, is not a very big revelation. I mean, everybody is spying on everybody else at the UN, including on Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon. The British Development Secretary Claire Short, who also resigned over the Iraq War, has said publicly that the UK authorities were bugging the phones of Kofi Annan when he was Secretary General. So I don’t think that this will come as a great revelation to people at the UN. It will, however, be rather embarrassing for the U.S. diplomats currently practicing at the UN.
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s really talk specifically- for people who are waking up this morning and have not heard anything about this- the kind of spying they’re talking about. I’m looking at The Guardian, one of the participants in the WikiLeaks release, "Washington running a secret intelligence campaign targeted at the leadership of the United Nations, including Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon and the permanent Security Council representatives from China, Russia, France, and the U.K. The classified directive which appears to blur the lines between diplomacy and spying was issued to U.S. diplomats under Hillary Clinton’s name in July 2009, demanding forensic technical details about the communication systems used by top UN officials including passwords and personal encryption keys used in private and commercial networks for official communications. It called for detailed biometric information on key UN officials to include undersecretaries, heads of specialized agencies and their chief advisers, top SIG- that’s Secretary General Aides- heads of peace operations and political field missions, including force commanders, as well as intelligence on Ban’s management and decision making style and his influence on the secretariat. A parallel intelligence directive sent to diplomats sent to the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, and biometric data including DNA, fingerprints and iris scans."
CARNE ROSS: Yes, such is the nature of modern intelligence gathering. But the fact that the U.S. has this list of intelligence requirements of the UN I don’t think would be any great surprise. The fact that The Guardian claims this is an enormous revelation seems to me rather a pretense- we are not babes in the woods. States spy on each other. They’re going to spy on the UN. What the Secretary General and his senior officials say is of interest to states, so they’re going to do that.
AMY GOODMAN: This does include cables from former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, from Hillary Clinton, Republicans and Democrats alike. So a diplomat in another country who invites an ambassador, a president to the U.S. Embassy for tea, then that president is wondering if when they drink the tea their DNA is going to be taken.
CARNE ROSS: Well that’s a new twist on the intelligence. I agree, it is rather extraordinary. I can’t quite myself see how your saliva on a coffee cup is going help you learn the intentions of the UN or the government of country xyz. It’s a rather extraordinary thing and I would be interested to find out how, in fact, that process works. But the fact that the U.S. is collecting this data, I do not think we should all be surprised about this.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, you are a diplomat, I think people in the public would be rather surprised. Greg Mitchell, what is your take on this?
GREG MITCHELL: It’s interesting how the different news outlets have handled it. As you mentioned, in The Guardian it’s one of their featured articles, and it went into great detail about the UN angle. Whereas The New York Times had a much, much less detailed, softer, gentler version of that. Maybe The New York Times is trying say that they are not babes in the woods, and that they know this is going on. It’s hard for me to believe-
AMY GOODMAN: The just stuck with the iris scans, didn’t mention the fingerprints and the biometrics.
GREG MITCHELL: Right, it’s hard for me to believe that the long list of this is not something that is new- the full extent of it. And as someone pointed out, even if it’s not that shocking, it must be exhausting asking these diplomats around the world to do this work instead of the important work they’re supposed to be doing. They have a long checklist to go through of what they’re supposed to do to contribute to this intelligence gathering.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to bring in As’ad AbuKhalil into this conversation. Professor of political science at California State Stanislaus, visiting professor at UC Berkeley, he is the author of the book The Battle for Saudi Arabia which is what I want to go to that right now. The diplomatic cables around Saudi Arabia calling for the attacking of Iran. Can you summarize what the cables said, and then your response?
AS’AD ABUKHALIL: Much of the cables about Saudi Arabia shows a very high degree of control by the U.S. government over the policy decisions made in Saudi Arabia. At one point, there is an American specific request, issuing what reads like a command, asking the Saudi government to go to China and to undertake a certain mission on behalf of the United States vis-à-vis the situation in Iran. I think the extent to which the Saudi government- and all Arab governments in the Gulf- are embarrassed by these leaks, is evidenced by the clampdown that is being exhibited throughout the Saudi-controlled Arab media. And even the so-called "independent" Al Jazeera- which is, contrary to it’s reputation here in the West, is the most serious news organization in Yemeni- is also trying to cover up the embarrassing revelations about the way Arab governments operate vis-à-vis the United States. You have to take into consideration much of the discussions and the utterances and the statements that are made by Arab leaders at the highest levels of these documents are in direct contradiction with their publicly declared policies, which are made in Arabic to their people`.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to ask, As’ad AbuKhalil, if you could go a little closer to your computer so we can hear you more clearly. As’ad AbuKhalil, again is a professor of visiting at UC Berkeley, he is the author of The Battle for Saudi Arabia, and he runs the Angry Arab News Service blog. If you could now continue with exactly what was said by Saudi Arabia in conversation with who in the U.S.?
AS’AD ABUKHALIL: There is more than one conversation revealed in those documents. I’ve read all those pertaining to the Middle East, and for example, there’s one discussion conducted between the king of Saudi Arabia- who rarely has these kinds of discussions even with his counterparts in the region. But he is willing to meet with the relatively lower ranking official, say, of the Department of Homeland Security. And the discussion goes on about a variety of issues related to what is of interest to American government.
What is very striking to me, for example: take the issue of human rights. I read what was released yesterday, and I am not struck, really. The U.S. government does not bring up human rights except in one meeting between American congressional delegation and the Syrian president. At one point, the Syrian president told them what amounts to, "What about Saudi Arabia?" Because in a meeting between an American official from Homeland Security and the Saudi King, not only does that American official not bring up the human rights violations in the most oppressive governments, bar none, in the entire region- and that is Saudi Arabia- but he even goes on, on behalf of the U.S. government, to praise the King for the human rights improvement and reform- ostensibly reforms- that has been going on in the kingdom. You also see, for example, in the same meeting, the Saudi King brings up the issue and the various restrictions on travelers from Saudi Arabia into the United States. And the King tells him that it is very embarrassing for him- before friends and foes alike- because it gives the impression the United States and Saudi Arabia are not that close as allies. And of course the American official goes on to underline the extent to which the two countries are very close to each other.
What is very striking about all these documents on the Middle East is that the Arab people are not going to be surprised that much. They all along have known that they are ruled by a bunch of liars and deceivers who go to extra lengths to appease and please the United States. What is going to be particularly revealing are the details that show the lengths to which these rulers go in order to please the United States. And we find that they are not capable of making independent decisions. Whatever the instincts of the United States are, those rulers go along with them and, in fact, they seem to compete with one another. For example, in showing how much they are hostile towards Iran. You see, for example, the second person in the United Arab Emirates- a guy who is very influential there- goes on to encourage the United States not only to attack Iran in a variety of sites, but to prepare for a land invasion.
I should also say, what is revealing in the documents also is the utter stupidity of those rulers who, in many of these conversations, seem to think that the United States government really listens to their advice, that they really consult with them on a regular basis, as if they are waiting for the opinion of the Egyptian President or the Saudi King before they reach their decision. And I think they seem to want to flatter themselves, because the kind of relation between these protectorates- and I call them protectorates because that’s what they were, say, in the era of the British Empire- it seems they have not advanced that much in approaching a level of sovereignty that has characterized membership in the United Nations.
On the question of Israel, what people are going to notice is the extent to which there is a close correlation between the Israeli government and the American government on all issues pertaining to the Middle East- including Pakistan- and the extent to which that kind of coordination is absent in these discussions between the American officials and the Israelis. I should also say that we have seen documents in which the opinions of the Head of the Mossad Dagan were detailed in an American cable. It is also striking, the extent to which the head of the Mossad- a highly touted organization- does not seem to have that many insights or information or analysis that is insightful about what is happening in the Middle East. Certainly, the location of Israel is extremely high in the esteem of the United States, but the low esteem to which the Arab governments are held by U.S. officials is quite apparent in these documents.
AMY GOODMAN: In particular, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia repeatedly calling on the U.S. to attack Iran, to destroy its nuclear program, and reportedly calling on American officials to, "Cut off the head of the snake." Now the King is actually in New York, is that right, for back surgery?
AS’AD ABUKHALIL: Right. He is going to be there for a few weeks and I think he will be able to see what his media is not showing- the extent to which these revelations are dominating international media. I should also add, the extent to which they’re dominating the underground media, or the new media of the Middle East- Twitter and Facebook- all of them are discussing from the Arab world what is happening, and many are commenting about the irony. Yesterday, the main Saudi news organization, Arabia, kept promising viewers the leak of the document was imminent: "Ten minutes from now, we’re going to see all these documents!" And then once the documents were out, there was complete silence in that news organization. They figured that all these documentations are, in fact, an utter embarrassment to the image of their ruler the they try so hard to prop up in the eyes of the public. I think the Arab public today woke up wiser than before, more cynical than before, and certainly more critical of the government. You see all these governments competing, trying to bring up the issue of Iranian nuclear weapons. Not a single Arab leader in those discussions brought up the issue of the massive Israeli WMD program that has been going on for decades. They don’t dare bring it up.
AMY GOODMAN: As’ad AbuKhalil, teaches at University of California Berkeley. We are talking about this massive WikiLeaks leak, up to 250,000 documents being released over the next few weeks. We’re going to break and then come back to this discussion.
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AMY GOODMAN: We continue on this historic release, unprecedented release, of diplomatic cables that is happening over the next weeks or months, the total believed to be over 250,000. It has been released by WikiLeaks, the whistleblower website. My guests for the hour are Dan Ellsberg who is the premier whistleblower in the United States, released the Pentagon Papers 39 years ago or 40 years ago. He worked as a high-level official in the Pentagon. He had top security clearance which is how he got the documents and also worked for the Rand Corporation. We’re also joined by As’ad AbuKhalil, a professor from University of California system. Greg Mitchell is with us from The Nation magazine and we are also joined by Carne Ross. Carne Ross is a former British diplomat who quit over the Iraq war.Daniel Ellsberg, I wanted to go back to you to get you to comment on Democratic Senator John Kerry’s comments on WikiLeaks- the chair of the Foreign Relations Committee. He called the release reckless and said "This is not an academic exercise about freedom of information and it is not akin to the release of the Pentagon Papers, which involved an analysis aimed at saving American lives and exposing government deception. Instead, these sensitive cables contain candid assessments and analysis of ongoing matters and they should remain confidential to protect the ability of the government to conduct lawful business with a private candor that is vital to effective diplomacy." Dan Ellsberg, your response?
DANIEL ELLSBERG: Oh, blah. Senator Kerry is still reeling, I’m afraid, from the battering he got from the Swiftboat liars who were said to have said at the time, “When we get through with John Kerry, people won’t know which side he fought on in Vietnam.” They took a war hero and made him into a hoax basically and he has been trying to establish his macho credentials ever since. It is not his finest hour to say silly things such as the quote you just described.
Let me put, though, these papers in some perspective. Most of your people, except for Carne Ross and to some extent John Kerry, are really not familiar with the levels of classification here and a lot of silly things have been said about them ignorantly. The fact is that these are quite low level documents. They are equivalent to the fields level documents on the civilian side that we saw in the Afghan and Iraq documents that Wikileaks earlier released. So they’re not the Pentagon Papers in terms of top secret, high level decision making papers. When the Times hypes its documents, or the other papers, as being prepared for high level policy makers, that is just false. Probably no high level policy maker even saw one of these "secret" documents.
I will give you one piece of background on that. When I worked for an assistant secretary of defense in 1964-65, on Vietnam alone I wanted to inform him as to what he ought to look at in the course of his day in the way of these very same cables just from Vietnam alone and I asked for the whole set of cables of all kinds from that area. So I came into my office in the morning and I find as high as my head, five and one-half feet high, I was just a couple of inches higher than that, two piles of paper for me to look at. I couldn’t even whip through it into the burn bag without reading most of that stuff. So I had to give the directive, "Cut out the secret documents, leave me only those that are no dis, ex dis, or slime dis–that’s limited distribution or eyes only, and top secret or higher. And that cut me down to two piles each two and a half feet high or five feet of paper instead of eleven feet of paper. In short, what I am reading in this, and it’s very familiar to me from my days in Vietnam when I wrote this sort of cable and sent it out from Vietnam back to Washington, what we are reading is the sort of thing that I in Washington didn’t have time to read. It just wasn’t important. So I think you can say that probably no assistant secretary or Hilary Clinton ever laid eyes on any of these cables. They are not, for example, the Eikenberry cable which was genuinely very revealing which was given to the New YorkTimes from our general in Kabul that revealed his opinion that General McChrystal’s program which Obama actually followed was hopeless and counterproductive and would have no way improved the situation. Now that cable was only secret, but it was no dis and it had a code word. That meant it was very carefully closed and is the sort of thing I would have seen if I had been in the Pentagon, a no dis cable. In short, we are not seeing high level decision making paper.
For what it’s worth, we are finding that the big problem with our awful, miserable, incompetent foreign policy in Iraq and Afghanistan is not the fault of foolish, stupid or lying mid-level staffers down below. They are speaking fairly honestly, not with a lot of local knowledge often, but fairly shrewdly in many cases, doing their best job to their superiors. The lying- as in Vietnam- is being enforced by the upper levels. What we need to see, really, is someone following Bradley Manning, or whoever the source is, following his example. He gave what he could- at his twenty-two year old level, corporal’s level, or whatever was available to him- to inform the public. We need somebody with higher access, the kind that I had at that time, and unfortunately didn’t use then, I’m sorry to say, I apologize. But somebody should put out the higher level papers that reveal the high level dealing and stupid formulations, theories, 'mad man' theories and others that are informing our policy so that the American people can begin to get some grip on our incoherent policy and enforce a more humane and productive thrust to it.
AMY GOODMAN: Former British diplomat in studio here. Carne Ross is shaking his head.
CARNE ROSS: I have to disagree with Daniel Ellsberg. I mean, the telegrams that I’ve seen, including the secret classified stuff, is the meat and drink of diplomacy. My foreign secretary read this stuff every day, a thick folder of it, as I did in the foreign office. I don’t know how things work in the U.S. government, but my experience working on Iraq is that the top secret stuff, the intelligence based stuff, is the least accurate form of reporting that you get. What foreign leaders are saying to American diplomats or British diplomats in confidential discussions is enormously important. Records of what King Abdullah said or President Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen said would be of great interest to senior officials in the State Department or indeed the NSC or the White House, so I will have disagree with Daniel Ellsberg’s analysis. This stuff is very, very revealing of the every day meat and drink of American diplomacy.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to talk about what the mainstream press in America is mainly focusing, the documents describing French President Nicolas Sarkozy as touchy, authoritarian, as "an emperor without clothes". They say German Chancellor Angela Merkel is someone who avoids risk. They call her "The Teflon Leader". Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is incapable. They also describe Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin as an "alpha dog" while Russian President Dmitry Medvedev is "pale and hesitant" and "plays Robin to Putin’s Batman" and much has been written about the cable that reports Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddafi never travels without his trusted Ukrainian nurse, a “voluptuous blonde.”
Greg Mitchell, the significance of other leaks that have come out in this trove of documents. How the hacker attacks which forced Google to quit China in January were orchestrated by a senior member of the Politburo who typed his own name into the global version of the search engine and found articles criticizing him personally, but what China did with Google’s information.
GREG MITCHELL: Well, there is a whole list of those that are going to be coming out in further detail. We don’t know a lot about that yet because all the cables have not been released. But, as you say, the American media has often focused on what others call gossip and that really is the one day material that is going to be reported. What is more important is what is going to come out. It is interesting that looking at if from a media aspect is the calls that we are starting to hear now, the one bipartisan thing we are seeing out of Washington, is Democrat and Republican senators calling for prosecution of WikiLeaks for stopping the documents, somehow preventing the documents from being released.
AMY GOODMAN: Lindsey Graham and others calling for…..
GREG MITCHELL: Joe Lieberman just is the most recent one, quite a detailed call saying this is a national security threat. Peter King said it was the same thing as a military attack, liking it to an attack on the U.S. But so far that hasn’t gotten anywhere and there hasn’t been a serious move to prevent the further dissemination or to stop, as we saw with the Pentagon papers, the actual newspapers printing documents. So we haven’t seen that yet, but we have seen some elegant defenses of publishing the documents, particularly in The Guardian – Simon Jenkins there and in the New York Times note on why the published the documents and they emphasize that it is not the press’ role to keep the government from suffering embarrassment and they also, as he mentioned earlier, the importance of using the example of the false information that was spread about Iraqi WMD’s, that if material like this had come out at that time it would have had a tremendous impact on perhaps halting what became the invasion of Iraq.
AMY GOODMAN: Of course, there is the Swedish warrant out for Julian Assange’s arrest which has been very long and complicated. First they issued one and then they didn’t and then they did, and…
GREG MITCHELL: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to talk about Bradley Manning for a minute. The US military believes the leak can be traced to Private First Class Bradley Manning who has been held in solitary confinement for the last seven months and is facing a court martial next year. In an on-line conversation with computer hacker, Adrian Lamo, who would later turn him in. Manning said, “Hilary Clinton and several thousand diplomats around the world are going to have a heart attack when they wake up one morning and find an entire repository of classified foreign policy is available in a searchable format to the public. Everywhere there is a U.S. post there is a diplomatic scandal that will be revealed. It is open diplomacy, worldwide anarchy in CSV format. It’s Climategate with a global scope and breathtaking depth. It is beautiful and horrifying." Those are the words of Bradley Manning, 22 years old, low level, in Iraq, coming in with this Lady Gaga CD, saying it was Lady Gaga, and downloading all this information. Is this possible? Daniel Ellsberg, I want to put that question to you. You have been raising money for his defense.
DANIEL ELLSBERG: Clearly what’s possible to 22 year old Manning who was, by the way, seven years younger I think, probably 20 or so when he actually started this process. What is available to him is probably available to five or six hundred thousand people- available to SIPRNet- and notice that the thing that first struck him was his realization that he was involved in the arrest process of people who he later discovered were doing nothing other than writing what he calls, "scholarly critiques of the current administration" for which they were being tortured by the Iraqis to whom we were turning them over with the knowledge of Americans. All of this being blatantly illegal, both for the Iraqis and for the Americans who turned them over to torture. When he reported this to his superior, his superior told him to forget it and get back to work arresting people. The effect that had on Bradley Manning was that he was being asked to participate in a blatantly illegal process and he chose to say no to it, to expose it, to resist it, to do what he actually should have done. One person out of hundreds of thousands who did that. The material that he revealed in the Iraq Logs, which were just revealed recently- some 400,000 logs- revealed hundreds if not thousands of cases of Americans who reported that they understood they were turning people over to be tortured, clearly against U.S. and international law, and they were then being ordered not to pursue the investigation further or take any measure to stop this illegal process. Now that order was blatantly illegal so it will be interesting to take a look at those thousands of cases and just see which one led to a refusal to carry out that blatantly illegal order as the USMJ requires them to do. Bradley Manning seems to have been the one who did that, the one who lived up to his oath of office and the one who acted patriotically here to stop this illegal process. For that he will pay very heavily. And yet, he may yet inspire some other people to do the same – to save lives, stop processes of torture and to reveal, by the way, the absolute lack of progress that is revealed throughout all of these documents. The 260,000 documents, none so far-
AMY GOODMAN: Dan, we only have five seconds. Do you think it’s possible he is alone in releasing this information?
DANIEL ELLSBERG: In terms of access to the information, he is certainly not alone. In terms of ability to download it, not alone. Although they have tightened up the procedures as a result of what they found out about him and how he has revealed how he did it so they will have to give him a medal for improving their security.
AMY GOODMAN: We are going to have to leave it there. I want to thank you all for being with us. Daniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon papers whistleblower; Carne Ross, former British diplomat, Greg Mitchell of the The Nation and As’ad AbuKhalil, California professor. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks so much for joining us.
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Monday, November 29, 2010
Israel Intentionally Destroys a Mosque
Wikileaks will continue for nine days, and I'll have a great analysis later, but here is something you ought to know:
Wave of Israeli demolitions culminates in destroying a mosqueHere is an al Jazeera video of Israel pulling down a mosque in the Jordan Valley village of Khirbat Yarza, Tubas, yesterday morning (deep inside the West Bank).  Over 60% of the Jordan Valley in the West Bank is under “Israeli control”, though in practise, all of the Palestinian territories are. But in this case, it means, Palestinians cannot build or repair houses without Israeli permission. In 95%, however, Palestinians do not get permission to build or repair, and in the few cases they do get permission, they have to wait for years. According to the Israeli NGO Brimkon, the Israeli Civil Administration grants only 12 permits a year. Over a three day period, Israeli authorities demolished a mind-blowing amount of Palestinian structures: Tuesday: a mosque and seven buildings in the Jordan valley and a house that is home to 18 people in Yatta, Southern West Bank. The day before: seven businesses near Hizme, a large family home in the At-Thuri neighborhood of occupied East Jerusalem, a newly built road and a green-house in the Salfit region in the North of the West Bank, six structures in Jiftlik in the Jordan Valley, and the day before that: more buildings in East Jerusalem. Earlier this week, Israeli demolished the Bedouin village of Arakeeb in the Negev (today’s Israel) for the seventh time since July this year. See Amnesty International comdenation over Bedouin Vilage demolition. For more info on this week’s wave of demolitions, see Popular Struggle’s Israeli forces demolish mosque as West Bank Demolitions Wave Continues for Second Day in a Row. Supporters of Israel should worry less about the construction of mosques in the United States, and more about their destruction in the West Bank, which is a much greater affront to our values. |
Sunday, November 28, 2010
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