All sections of the US political
establishment, Democratic and
Republican, liberal and conservative
are seeking to retaliate against those
who are exposing atrocities by the US
military in Afghanistan and Iraq, and
intimidate all critics of these wars of
aggression by American imperialism.
The most strident rhetoric has come from the ultra-right.
Republican Congressman Mike Rogers of Michigan,
a former FBI agent who sits on the House Intelligence
Committee, told a local radio station Monday that he
thought the death penalty would be appropriate
punishment for Manning if he is convicted on charges
of leaking classified military documents to WikiLeaks.
Pfc. Manning, who worked at an Army intelligence facility
in Iraq, is now imprisoned at the Quantico, Virginia Marine
Corps base, awaiting trial on charges that he supplied
WikiLeaks with classified video of a US helicopter gunship
mowing down Iraqi civilians in a Baghdad neighborhood in
2007. Pentagon officials have also named Manning a “person
of interest” in the leak of 92,000 classified after-action reports
dating from 2004 to 2010 on operations in Afghanistan,
which document the killing of hundreds of Afghan civilians. …
Right-wing media pundits have called for a direct assault by
the US government on WikiLeaks. On Fox News Sunday,
commentator Liz Cheney, daughter of the former vice
-president, called on the Obama administration to shut
down the Internet-based organization, presumably through
the use of the Pentagon’s cyber warfare capability.
On Tuesday, in a column in the Washington Post, former
Bush White House aide Marc A. Thiessen, now a weekly
contributor to the newspaper, said the government should
kidnap and imprison Julian Assange, co-founder of WikiLeaks.
“WikiLeaks is not a news organization; it is a
criminal enterprise,” Thiessen declared. “Its reason
for existence is to obtain classified national security
information and disseminate it as widely as possible
—including to the United States’ enemies.” He argued
that there is ample precedent for using the powers of
“rendition” exercised by the CIA against those engaged
in “material support for terrorism”
“Assange is a non-US citizen operating outside the
territory of the United States,” he wrote. “This means
the government has a wide range of options for dealing
with him. It can employ not only law enforcement but
also intelligence and military assets to bring Assange
to justice and put his criminal syndicate out of business.”
Thiessen contended that if Iceland or Belgium refused to
extradite him, “the United States can arrest Assange on
their territory without their knowledge or approval.” Under
existing US law, he claimed, “we do not need permission
to apprehend Assange or his co-conspirators anywhere
in the world.”
Liberal Democrats have chimed in with their own
proposals to target Wikileaks. According to a report
Wednesday in the New York Times, two Senate
Democrats, Charles Schumer of New York and
Diane Feinstein of California, are drafting an amendment
to the “media shield” legislation now being considered in
Congress “to make clear that the bill’s protections
extend only to traditional news-gathering activities
and not to web sites that serve as a conduit for the
mass dissemination of secret documents.”
The bill was originally drafted in response to a series of
cases in which reporters were jailed for refusing to
disclose their sources to judges, prosecutors or plaintiffs
in lawsuits. In order to avoid WikiLeaks taking advantage
of such a shield law, Schumer and Feinstein want to
specifically exclude whistleblower sites.
The Times quoted Paul J. Boyle, senior vice president
for public policy at the Newspaper Association of
America, the industry trade group, endorsing such
a policy, which would reserve this type of First Amendment
protection for “traditional news organizations subject to
American law and having editorial controls and
experience in news judgment.” In other words,
such safeguards would be reserved to the corporate-
controlled media, run by people loyal to the
American ruling elite and the capitalist state.
The major concern of those targeting WikiLeaks and
Private Manning is that the leaks of internal government
documents provide evidence to justify war crimes
prosecution of US government officials, past
and present. To save their own skins, they want
to criminalize the exposure of these atrocities,
rather than the atrocities themselves.
The language being employed in media and official
circles is dangerous and chilling. It makes clear that
nine years of uninterrupted military aggression have
provided the basis for major attacks on democratic
rights in the United States and the preparation of
more openly dictatorial forms of rule.
Launched on the basis of systematic lying, both about
the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the supposed danger of
“weapons of mass destruction,” these wars are
criminal in every sense of the word. Millions have
been killed, maimed or driven from their homes, and
more than five thousand Americans have died to
advance the interests of US imperialism in the oil
rich Persian Gulf and Central Asia.
Officials of the Bush and Obama administrations are
manifestly guilty of war crimes, ranging from launching
aggressive war—the core charge against the Nazis in
Nuremberg—to the systematic assassination of
opponents in both Iraq and Afghanistan. This last
practice, documented by WikiLeaks in the activities
of Army Task Force 373 in Afghanistan, is a full-scale
repetition of one of the principal horrors of the Vietnam
War, the CIA’s Phoenix Program, which murdered
20,000 suspected supporters of the Vietnamese
National Liberation Front.
After the Phoenix Program was exposed in the US media,
including the publication of the Pentagon Papers,
government-sponsored assassination became political
discredited and was officially outlawed—until the onset
of the “war on terror.” Now such methods are being
effectively legalized, as politicians of both parties,
backed by their media apologists, boast of their right
to “take out” opponents, using bombs, missiles or
direct hand-to-hand violence.
WikiLeaks and Private Manning are being targeted
because they have done what a cowardly and spineless
media has refused to do—tell the truth about the crimes
of American imperialism. Working people in the United
States and around the world must demand the
dropping of all threats and charges against WikiLeaks
an end to the government harassment and targeting of
whistleblowers, and the immediate release of
Private Bradley Manning.
- Patrick Martin
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/aug2010/pers-a05.shtml
