Category Archives: State Department

WikiLeaks’ gift to Robert Mugabe

The political and media establishment’s assault on WikiLeaks has had the unfortunate effect of creating two camps — one for which WikiLeaks is a band of cyber-terrorists and the other in which WikiLeaks’ embattled status fosters a sense that all challenges are unwarranted.

At this point, I still believe that WikiLeaks’ actions pose a legitimate challenge to the cancerous growth of secrecy in the West’s nominal democracies. If however I was living under the oppressive rule of the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe, I don’t think I’d have a favorable view of Julian Assange and his cohorts. Indeed, in this instance, I’d say WikiLeaks fucked up — perhaps catastrophically.

Christopher R. Albon writes:

Last year, early on Christmas Eve morning, representatives from the U.S., United Kingdom, Netherlands, and the European Union arrived for a meeting with Zimbabwean opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai. Appointed prime minister earlier that year as part of a power-sharing agreement after the fraud- and violence-ridden 2008 presidential election, Tsvangirai and his political party, Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), are considered Zimbabwe’s greatest hopes for unseating the country’s long-time de facto dictator Robert Mugabe and bringing democratic reforms to the country.

The topic of the meeting was the sanctions imposed on Zimbabwe by a collection of western countries, including the U.S. and E.U. Tsvangirai told the western officials that, while there had been some progress in the last year, Mugabe and his supporters were dragging their feet on delivering political reforms. To overcome this, he said that the sanctions on Zimbabwe “must be kept in place” to induce Mugabe into giving up some political power. The prime minister openly admitted the incongruity between his private support for the sanctions and his public statements in opposition. If his political adversaries knew Tsvangirai secretly supported the sanctions, deeply unpopular with Zimbabweans, they would have a powerful weapon to attack and discredit the democratic reformer.

Later that day, the U.S. embassy in Zimbabwe dutifully reported the details of the meeting to Washington in a confidential U.S. State Department diplomatic cable. And slightly less than one year later, WikiLeaks released it to the world.

In Zimbabwe’s The Standard, Nqaba Matshazi writes:

The recent WikiLeaks cable releases could have afforded President Robert Mugabe ammunition to call for elections next year, with his main argument that his coalition partner, Morgan Tsvangirai was in bed with the West.

For years now, Mugabe has claimed that Tsvangirai was a pliant tool for Britain and America and revelations that the Prime Minister called for the West to maintain sanctions against Zimbabwe will only strengthen the veteran leader’s resolve to hold elections.

The removal of sanctions is listed as one of the priority issues in the Global Political Agreement (GPA) and hawks in Mugabe’s Zanu PF party are already screaming treason and are using the cables as an excuse to call for the end of the inclusive government.

Political analysts last week told The Standard that the leaked cables were fitting well into Zanu PF’s agenda and they would use them to confront the government.

Trevor Maisiri said Zanu PF would now use the cables as an excuse to call for the end of the inclusive government charging that they were getting rid of imperialist influences in the government.

“Zanu PF will obviously see these leaks as a bonus to their already rubber-stamped position of early elections,” he said.

“What Zanu PF may then do is craft their message upon the urgency of having election so as to retire the MDC-T out of government and thereby ensure that there is a blockade of the USA influence in Zimbabwean affairs.”

South Africa’s Business Day reports:

Zimbabwean government’s threat to investigate treason charges against Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai over his confidential talks with US diplomats disclosed by WikiLeaks was Zanu (PF)’s opening salvo ahead of proposed elections next year, analysts said yesterday.

The South African government yesterday refused to speculate on how new treason charges, if instituted against Mr Tsvangirai, would affect President Jacob Zuma ’s mediation efforts.

Siphamandla Zondi, executive director at the Institute for Global Dialogue, said the WikiLeaks revelations would hurt Mr Tsvangirai’s political stature, and were likely to be exploited by President Robert Mugabe to discredit him and reinforce negative perceptions spread by Zanu (PF) that the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) was “the political surrogates and puppets” of western powers.

The attorney-general, Johannes Tomana, reportedly said he intended appointing a commission of five lawyers to examine whether recent disclosures amounted to a breach of the constitution.

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State Dept spokesman P J Crowley is a liar

Richard Silverstein writes:

On February 25, 2010, State Department spokesperson Philip Crowley lied when he told a press conference that he wasn’t aware of any request from Dubai for assistance in tracking the Mossad killers of Mahmoud al-Mabouh. To those who say that Wikileaks hasn’t told us anything we didn’t already know–think again.

Wikileaks has just released a February 24, 2010 cable in which the embassy relays the specific credit card numbers used by 14 of the 27 known Mossad suspects to State with a request for assistance from authorities investigating the killing, and confirms that the UAE foreign minister made the exact same request directly to Secretary Clinton on February 23rd:

On the margins of a meeting with visiting Secretary [of Energy] Chu, on Feb 24 MFA Minister of State Gargash made a formal request to the Ambassador for assistance in providing cardholder details and related information or credit cards reportedly issued by a U.S. bank to several suspects in last month’s killing of Hamas leader Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh in Dubai. According to a letter Gargash gave the Ambassador (which transmitted details of the request from Dubai Security authorities to the UAE Central Bank), the credit cards were issued by MetaBank, in Iowa.

Comment: Ambassador requests expeditious handling of and reply to the UAEG request, which was also raised by UAE Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed in a February 23 meeting with Secretary Clinton in Washington.

Given that the State of Israel’s role in the assassination of Mahmoud al Mabhouh and in the theft and fraudulent use of British and other passports, it comes as no surprise that as these facts become matters of public record, the new chief of Mossad is about to issue an apology to the British government and promise not to commit such crimes in the future. This is not to suggest that either the Israelis or the British are opposed to similar assassinations being conducted in the future — merely that Mossad is expected operate its death squads in such a way that Israel’s allies can be saved from embarrassment.

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How a secret gets revealed and then becomes secret again

On November 30, The Express Tribune, Pakistan’s first internationally affiliated newspaper (partnered with The International Herald Tribune – the global edition of The New York Times) reported:

A North Waziristan tribesman, whose brother and teenage son were killed in a drone strike last year, said on Monday that he would sue all those US officials supposedly in control of the predator’s operations in Pakistan.

Karim Khan, a local journalist from Mirali town of the lawless tribal district, had sent a $500 million claim for damages to the US Defence Secretary Robert Gates, CIA chief Leon Panetta and its station head in Islamabad Jonathan Banks.

On December 10, a report appearing in the Miami Herald repeated the same claims:

The lawsuit, which stands little chance of being won, is lodged against the CIA station chief in Islamabad, identified as Jonathan Banks; CIA Director Leon Panetta; and Defense Secretary Robert Gates. There’s speculation that the publicity has compromised the position of the CIA chief in Pakistan. The U.S. Embassy in Islamabad refused to confirm that Banks was the right person.

“What CIA station chief? I can’t talk about employees,” embassy spokesman Alberto Rodriguez said.

But yesterday, the New York Times started reporting like a newspaper that takes directions from the government censors.

Just as in Israel, where secrecy can be imposed through censorship even when the “secret” has been made known everywhere else in the world, the New York Times is now following government directions by refusing to reprint the CIA station chief’s name even though it has been widely reported outside and inside the United States.

The Central Intelligence Agency’s top clandestine officer in Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad, was removed from the country on Thursday amid an escalating war of recriminations between American and Pakistani spies, with some American officials convinced that the officer’s cover was deliberately blown by Pakistan’s military intelligence agency.

The American spy’s hurried departure is the latest evidence of mounting tensions between two uneasy allies, with the Obama administration’s strategy for ending the war in Afghanistan hinging on the cooperation of Pakistan in the hunt for militants in the mountains that border those two countries. The tensions could intensify in the coming months with the prospect of more American pressure on Pakistan.

As the cloak-and-dagger drama was playing out in Islamabad, 100 miles to the west the C.I.A. was expanding its covert war using armed drones against militants. Since Thursday, C.I.A. missile strikes have killed dozens of suspects in Khyber Agency, a part of the tribal areas in Pakistan that the spy agency had largely spared until now because of its proximity to the sprawling market city of Peshawar.

American officials said the C.I.A. station chief had received a number of death threats since being publicly identified in a legal complaint sent to the Pakistani police this week by the family of victims of earlier drone campaigns.

So, before his cover was blown and this cloak-and-dagger drama started playing out, are we to suppose that the CIA station chief was happily cruising round Islamabad in an open-top Cadillac proudly flying the Stars and Stripes on the hood?

Even if the station chief who must now not be named was less exposed before a name which might be his name appeared in print, let’s not pretend he operated in Pakistan with anything less than maximum security.

The Washington Post confirms: “Ordinarily, station chiefs in Islamabad rarely stray beyond the sprawling American diplomatic compound, living and working in a warren of apartments and offices set deep inside the embassy complex’s walls.”

Maybe the issue is not threats to the station chief’s life as much as threats to his liberty. Pakistan’s judicial system, unlike its government, has at times displayed what American officials might regard as an irksome level of independence.

A report in Pakistan’s Daily Mail, published on December 1 (part of which appears below without corrections — the English and editing are rough, but the story is strong), provides interesting background on the legal action being brought by Kareem Khan.

Kareem Khan challenged the precision of drone attacks and specifically questioned the precision of 31st December 2009 attack where in three innocent lives were taken by CIA in a secretive mode. He further challenged that if CIA can establish involvement of any of victims of 31st December attack in terrorism he will pay damages to United States instead.

While talking about the catastrophe he told The Daily Mail how his18 years old son Zaenullah, his young brother Asif Iqbal and a mason who was working on construction of village masque and had came from another village of Khyber Pakhtunkhawa were killed.

Kareem Khan told The Daily Mail that “his family is one of few educated families from the North Waziristan .He himself is M .Phil while his son was employee of Government school in town and his brother was graduate of National University of Modern languages from Islamabad .After compilation of his studies he went back to his town to add his positive contribution in educational uplifting of tribal area. They were innocent Pakistani citizen of Islamic Republic Of Pakistan whose fundamental rights have been guaranteed under the Constitution of Islamic Republic of Pakistan

In the response of one question about the families of victims he told Asif Iqbal left two years old son Muhammad Kafeel and a widow. Mohammad Kafeel has no one to look after as his mother is suffering great emotional and mental trauma. . “I lost my son and brother and now family’s full responsibility is now on me now we are living in uncle’s house waiting for justice or compensation”. He told The Daily Mail

Kareem Khan told the Daily Mail after this tragedy “I went here and there for Justice but all in vain because of undefined and so called system in tribal areas than one of my good friend suggested me to ask for Justice through legal way”. On November 29 2010 I through my lawyer Mirza Shahzad Akbar issued a legal notice to United States Secretary Defence Mr. Robert Gates, Director CIA Leon Panetta CIA Islamabad Station Chief Jonathan Banks for damages of $ 500 Million .he added

He also told that Drone attacks in tribal areas are carried out by CIA in langly, Virginia USA with co-ordination of local intelligence gathered by spies on ground in tribal area. CIA, s Islamabad station Chief, Jonathan Banks coordinates such intelligence through the network of on ground spies, who are paid a hefty amount for pointing out any militant. On these uncorroborated reports, CIA is executing people of tribal areas.

He stated that “CIA Director Leon Panetta has been reported in media saying that ‘Drone attacks are precise and limited in terms of collateral damage’.

“CIA officials are not part of United States armed forces, therefore under international law they are civilians directly participating in hostilities. Furthermore being non-diplomat and non-armed forces members CIA officials, who are operating drone attacks have no immunity and therefore are liable for murder and damages under laws of Pakistan and principles of natural justice throughout the world’ Kareem Khan explained

Kareem Khan also grumbled that media is not playing vibrant role and journalists even don’t bother to find ground realities. Every time we watched in media that numbers of militants are killed in the result of drone attacks. All the time they go for figures they don’t even bother to differentiate the innocent people and militants. Unfortunately they just rely on people who are present there and love to create hype for their own purpose.Kareem Khan gave the example of Hakeem Ullah Mehsood, Jalal Din ,Aimen Alzwari and Sheikh Usamma and told that according to so called reliable sources media published news regarding their, several times deaths . Which is very funny situation because in my limited knowledge a person died once in his or her life .

Shahzad Mirza Akbar ,the legal representative of Kareem khan who was present during the interview told The Daily Mail Drone attacks on house of his client is in clear violation of United Nations declaration of Human Rights ,International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights(ICCRP) and the citizens of Pakistan through the constitution of Islamic Republic of Pakistan .Those who have committed this atrocity are liable to be charged under the Penal Code of Pakistan and no law custom or authority gives CIA the permission to carry out killing in the sovereign territory of another country .So this is illegal act of United States and CIA and cannot be recognized as legal at any judicial or legal forum .The UN special report on extra –judicial ,summery and executions declared in 2004

“Empowering Government to identify and kill “known terrorists” places no verifiable obligation upon them to demonstrate in any way that those against whome lethal force is used are indeed terrorists, or to demonstrate that every other alternative had been exhausted”.

He told Court issued the notice on November 29, 2010 and count down has been started from today .He also talked about next step is to go in American court for justice.

So what’s the story here? Is it about the life of a CIA station chief being placed at risk? Or is it about the struggle among the victims of drone warfare who believe that tribal people should be afforded the same political, legal and human rights and protections as anyone else?

Strangely, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, while acceding to a CIA request not to reprint the station chief’s name, nevertheless provide additional identifying information about him which I have not included here, nor has it appeared in the Pakistani press. That information was, no doubt, provided to them by the CIA!

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If President Obama is sincere …

The Popular Struggle Coordination Committee comments on the Obama administration’s silence on the continued imprisonment of a Palestinian champion of non-violence.

Amid a flurry of European diplomatic attention over the imprisonment of Bil’in’s Abdallah Abu Rahmah, the United States has stayed strangely silent on the issue. Abu Rahmah, a non-violent leader from the West Bank village of Bil’in, has been in an Israeli military jail for over one year stemming from a charge of incitement and illegal protest levied against him after he was arrested in a night raid on his house on December 10th, 2009. After serving his sentence in full, the Israeli military prosecution demanded that he stay in jail while they file an appeal asking for a harsher sentence in order to ‘make an example’ of him.

On Friday, 10 December, AP reporter Matt Lee directly addressed Abdallah Abu Rahmah’s case during a US State Department briefing. US State department spokesman PJ Crowley responded that he was unable to provide a comment on the trial. When Matt Lee pushed, arguing that the EU and other foreign dignitaries had labeled Abu Rahmah a human rights defender, Crowley responded that he will “[find] out what we know.”
At his appeal hearing at the Ofer military court of appeals on 6 December 2010, a dozen European diplomats from France, Spain, the United Kingdom, Germany, Denmark, and Malta were on hand to observe the trial. Sir Vincent Fean gave a short statement to the press, noting his support of EU Foreign Policy Chief Catherine Ashton’s statement labeling Abu Rahmah as a human rights defender. He also pointed out that last month Abu Rahmah had already finished serving his sentence. Last month, British Foreign Minister, William Hague, met with leading Palestinian grassroots organizers in an unprecedented show of support in the face of ongoing Israeli repression.

The current US administration has made repeated statements on the need to support civil society activists, such as the one made by Secretary of State Clinton in July, 2010 the Krakow Community of Democracies meeting, in which she saluted “civil society activists around the world who have recently been harassed, censored, cut off from funding, arrested, prosecuted, even killed.” Clinton explained that when we defend civil society activists “we are defending an idea that has been and will remain essential to the success of every democracy.” She called for action to “protect civil society,” “to do more to defend the freedom of association,” and to “coordinate our diplomatic pressure” “to address situations where freedom of association comes under attack.”

Despite such statements, absent from the diplomatic core were representatives of the United States. In fact, the United States has not yet made any public statements on Abdallah’s imprisonment.

Yesterday, 15 December 2010, the issue of Abu Rahmah was followed up by the AP. Crowley answered that the case is ‘watched closely’ by US representatives in Israel. Far from releasing a statement on Abdallah Abu Rahmah, Crownly confirmed the silent position on Palestinian non-violence that the United States has maintained in recent months.

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Richard Holbrooke’s final words: “You’ve got to stop this war in Afghanistan.”

Richard Holbrooke died this evening. The Washington Post looked back at his career.

Mr. Holbrooke was sent to Vietnam in 1963, assigned to the lower Mekong Delta as a field officer for the U.S. Agency for International Development, a post that would later give him unique perspective on reconstruction efforts and provincial stabilization in Afghanistan.

His insights drew the attention of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, and he was soon moved there to serve as a staff assistant to two ambassadors, Maxwell D. Taylor and Henry Cabot Lodge Jr.

In 1966, he joined the Vietnam staff in the Johnson White House, where had a front-row seat for what came to be considered an unwise escalation of U.S. military forces based on deceptive assessments.

“Our beloved nation sent into battle soldiers without a clear determination of what they could accomplish and they misjudged the stakes. And then we couldn’t get out,” he said that year at a State Department conference on the American experience in Southeast Asia. “. . . We fought bravely under very difficult conditions. But success was not achievable. Those who advocated more escalation or something called ‘staying the course’ were advocating something that would have led only to a greater and more costly disaster afterwards.”

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America: the panoptic shiver

At Open Democracy, Paul Rogers writes:

Among the most compelling nuggets of information contained in the batch of United States diplomatic documents released by WikiLeaks and published in leading international newspapers is the list of installations in more than fifty countries which the state department in Washington deems to be a US security concern.

Some of the locations seem obvious (major oil-and-gas processing-plants and pipeline terminuses, for example); but others are far harder to fit any evident national-security frame (such as an Australian pharmaceutical plant specialising in anti-snake-venom treatments, and cobalt-mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo).

But even the more unlikely sites are relevant to a country that sees itself as the world’s sole superpower with interests across the globe. The anti-snake-venom plant in Australia almost certainly has the expertise and equipment to make antidotes to other toxins, and this could be highly significant in the event of a biological-warfare threat.

The cobalt-mines around Kolwezi and Mutshatsha in the southern DRC extract the world’s most important deposits of cobalt ores, and ferro-alloys containing cobalt have the specific property of retaining their shape at very high temperatures. They are therefore much in demand for the guidance-vanes of missile-engines and other elements of modern weapons-systems.

The more surprising elements of the list as much as the expected ones thus illustrate the continued reach of the United States’s strategic and security ambitions. But they also reveal something more: its new vulnerabilities. The increased inter-state competition across much of the global south from China and other rising states is one, familiar, source of these; another and perhaps less visible source is the challenge posed by insurgent groups to these prime targets. Indeed, central Africa may be a good place to begin to track this superpower dilemma.

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WikiLeaks and the Espionage Act

WL Central reports:

Today, Jennifer Robinson, one of the lawyers for Julian Assange, told The Guardian that the US government may be about to press charges against Julian Assange under the Espionage Act. She said that the legal team had heard from “several different US lawyers rumours that an indictment was on its way or had happened already, but we don’t know”. Ms Robinson told ABC News that “Our position of course is that we don’t believe it (the Espionage Act) applies to Mr. Assange and that in any event he’s entitled to First Amendment protection as publisher of Wikileaks and any prosecution under the Espionage Act would in my view be unconstitutional and puts at risk all media organizations in the U.S.”

Rumours about the possibility of Julian Assange having been indicted by a grand jury, whose proceedings are secret, have been circulating for a while. The Christian Science Monitor had a few days ago quoted Stephen Vladeck, an expert in national security law at American University, who said that an empaneled grand jury could have already been considering the case. “We wouldn’t know what they’re doing until the whole thing is concluded,” he said. The Monitor also quoted CNN legal expert Jeffrey Toobin, who said “I would not be at all surprised if there was a sealed arrest warrant currently in existence.”

Prominent civil rights attorney Harvey A. Silverglate, who worked on the Pentagon Papers case, also raised the possibility in an interview with NECN, while also pointing out that prosecution would be extremely difficult, and for many reasons not in the interest of the United States government.

As we previously covered, the legal consensus appears to be that a prosecution under the Espionage Act would be both difficult and dangerous for the United States, notably with regards to First Amendment protections (also see: EFF, ACLU.)

The US Congressional Research Service published on December 6 a report titled “Criminal Prohibitions on the Publication of Classified Defense Information” [PDF]:

This report identifies some criminal statutes that may apply, but notes that these have been used almost exclusively to prosecute individuals with access to classified information (and a corresponding obligation to protect it) who make it available to foreign agents, or to foreign agents who obtain classified information unlawfully while present in the United States. Leaks of classified information to the press have only rarely been punished as crimes, and we are aware of no case in which a publisher of information obtained through unauthorized disclosure by a government employee has been prosecuted for publishing it. There may be First Amendment implications that would make such a prosecution difficult, not to mention political ramifications based on concerns about government censorship. To the extent that the investigation implicates any foreign nationals whose conduct occurred entirely overseas, any resulting prosecution may carry foreign policy implications related to the exercise of extraterritorial jurisdiction and whether suspected persons may be extradited to the United States under applicable treaty provisions. (emphasis ours)

The report’s conclusion states: “Thus, although unlawful acquisition of information might be subject to criminal prosecution with few First Amendment implications, the publication of that information remains protected.”

A new poll finds that only 31% of Americans believe that the publication of secrets is protected by the First Amendment.

This implies that most Americans have unquestioningly swallowed the line that the boundaries that circumscribe freedom for the press are those defined by the US government. The government defines the terms of national security and the press must not challenge those definitions.

In other words, the press should have as much freedom as the government sees fit.

In other words, the press can enjoy the same amount of freedom that a well-trained dog enjoys once it has learned to never strain at its leash.

In other words, most of the Americans who say that America is at war in order to protect our freedom, see that freedom as being akin to the freedom of a domesticated animal.

We know how to bark, how to wag our tails and how to catch treats.

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Lying for the State Department

Is skill in the art of lying a prerequisite for the job of State Department spokesman, or is it just an ability acquired through on-the-job training?

James Rubin, State spokesman for the Clinton administration, demonstrated that he retains his fluency in an interview he did this afternoon alongside Salon‘s Glenn Greenwald and John Burns from the New York Times who were all guests on KCRW’s On The Point.

Glenn Greenwald:

I’ve written about this before, but what’s most remarkable is how — as always — leading media figures and government officials are completely indistinguishable in what they think, say and do with regard to these controversies; that’s why Burns and Rubin clung together so closely throughout the segment, because there is no real distinction between most of these establishment reporters and the government; the former serve the latter. Below is the clip itself; I’m posting the specific evidence showing that Rubin’s general claim (that these cables contain no deceit or wrongdoing) as well as his specific claims about Yemen were absolutely false:

Regarding Rubin’s claims about Yemen: here is the cable reflecting a meeting between Gen. David Petraeus and the Yemeni President in January, 2010, proving that it was the U.S., not Yemen, which perpetrated the December, 2009 air strike. Moreover, it records this:

President Obama has approved providing U.S. intelligence in support of ROYG [Republic of Yemen government] ground operations against AQAP targets, General Petraeus informed Saleh. . . . Saleh lamented the use of cruise missiles that are “not very accurate” and welcomed the use of aircraft-deployed precision-guided bombs instead. “We’ll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours,” Saleh said, prompting Deputy Prime Minister Alimi to joke that he had just “lied” by telling Parliament that the bombs in Arhab, Abyan, and Shebwa were American-made but deployed by the ROYG.

As Salon‘s Justin Elliott noted, this cable “confirms that the Obama Administration has secretly launched missile attacks on suspected terrorists in Yemen, strikes that have reportedly killed dozens of civilians.” Despite that, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley had the following exchange on December, 15, 2009, with reporters:

QUESTION: On the conflict in Yemen, Houthis say that U.S. warplanes have launched airstrikes in northern Yemen. Is the U.S. involved in any military operations in Yemen?

MR. CROWLEY: No.

QUESTION: No?

MR. CROWLEY: But we — those kinds of reports keep cropping up. We do not have a military role in this conflict.

In response to having been caught spouting these falsehoods in the wake of the WikiLeaks release, Crowley claimed that he confined his denial to only one attack in which the U.S. was not involved (the one on the Yemeni Houthis), but the clear words from the Press Conference prove that his denial applied to “any military operations in Yemen” (Q: “Is the U.S. involved in any military operations in Yemen? MR. CROWLEY: No”). The WikiLeaks cable reveal that is false; the airstrike launched by the U.S. occurred a mere two days later, on December 17.

Among Rubin’s many dubious claims, none is more disingenuous than his assertion that the Yemeni government’s choice to lie to its own people is one over which the US has no control, and thus he implies, no interest. On the contrary, the Obama administration has just as deep an investment as does the Yemeni government in concealing from the Yemeni people the depth of America’s military involvement in their country.

Having opted for a policy which runs the risk of turning Yemen into another Somalia, the administration is holding on to the dubious idea that so long as this emerging war can avoid being officially stamped “made in America,” Yemen’s feeble government might be able to retain its grip on power.

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Leiberman suggests New York Times could be investigated

The Guardian reports:

Joe Lieberman, the chair of the Senate homeland security committee, told Fox News: “To me the New York Times has committed at least an act of, at best, bad citizenship, but whether they have committed a crime is a matter of discussion for the justice department.”

Lieberman also said that the department of justice should indict Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, under the 1917 Espionage Act and try to extradite him from the UK. Asked why this had not happened, Lieberman admitted there was probably an argument going on over how to charge Assange.

“I think this is the most serious violation of the Espionage Act in our history,” Lieberman said, adding: “It sure looks to me that Assange and WikiLeaks have violated the Espionage Act.”

At the daily state department briefing in Washington, DC, Philip Crowley, the department’s press spokesman, said: “What WikiLeaks has done is a crime under US law.”

The Guardian appears to have misquoted Crowley. According to the transcript of yesterday’s briefing, he said:

What we’re investigating is a crime under U.S. law. The provision of 250,000 classified documents from someone inside the government to someone outside the government is a crime. We are investigating it. And as we’ve said, we will hold those responsible fully accountable. That investigation is still ongoing.

From all the information currently available, the only individual who is believed to have committed a crime is Private First Class Bradley Manning. He has been has been arrested and charged with the unauthorized use and disclosure of classified information.

The New York Times reporter David Sanger told NPR:

The Times knew that this material was going to be out there anyway. We didn’t get the initial leak,” he says. “If we had done nothing — if we had ignored it — I think it would have looked strange. I think that also would have been irresponsible. It is the responsibility of American journalism, back to the founding of this country, to get out and try to grapple with the hardest issues of the day and to do it independently of the government.

Which is why the Times‘ sycophantic executive editor, Bill Keller, consulted with the administration for advice on each of the cables it has published. So much for “independence.”

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Paypal and the State Department’s legal charade

“On November 27, the State Department — the US government basically — wrote a letter saying that the WikiLeaks activities were deemed illegal in the United States and as a result our [acceptable use] policy group had to make the decision of suspending the account,” PayPal’s VP of Platform Osama Bedier said on stage at Le Web 2010 conference in Paris today, TechCrunch reported. He later clarified that this letter was not sent to Paypal but was addressed to Julian Assange and his lawyer Jennifer Robinson.

This is what the State Department letter from legal adviser Harold Hongju Koh says on the legality of WikiLeaks activities:

As you know, if any of the materials you intend to publish were provided by any government officials, or any intermediary without proper authorization, they were provided in violation of U.S. law and without regard for the grave consequences of this action. As long as WikiLeaks holds such material, the violation of the law is ongoing.

The letter then goes on to provide an assessment of the damage that publication of “documents of this nature at a minimum would” cause. It also claims that WikiLeaks is not acting in accordance with the organization’s stated principles.

The only illegal action that the State Department identified was one that could be committed by a US government official. If WikiLeaks itself was violating or about to violate any law, it’s hard to imagine that the State Department would be mealy mouthed about stating the fact. Indeed, not only would the legal infraction be spelled out but likewise the legal consequences.

For that reason — the lack of legal recourse — State was forced to fall back on moral persuasion, in the hope that it might pressure WikiLeaks to do what the US government regards as “the right thing.”

The fact that the administration is now clutching at straws in its pursuit of a legal case against WikiLeaks is evident in the suggestion that Assange might be charged with receiving stolen property. If that happens, Bill Keller at the New York Times better get ready to turn himself in — for that matter, virtually every journalist in America should volunteer to be arrested.

One can only assume that Paypal, Visa, Mastercard and other corporations that are now acting as lackeys for the Obama administration in its witch-hunt against WikiLeaks, hope that come the day they themselves run afoul of the law, they can expect leniency in return for today’s favors. Even worse, they seem happy to display a corporate-government solidarity that reflects the all too transparent fact that representative democracy now means government of corporations, for corporations, by corporations.

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Truth in chains

Chris Floyd writes:

Well, they got him at last. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, the target of several of the world’s most powerful governments, turned himself into British authorities today and is now at the mercy of state authorities who have already shown their wolfish – and lawless – desire to destroy him and his organization.

It has been, by any standard, an extraordinary campaign of vilification and persecution, wholly comparable to the kind of treatment doled out to dissidents in China or Burma. Lest we forget, WikiLeaks is a journalistic outlet – just like The New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel, all of whom are even now publishing the very same material – leaked classified documents — available on WikiLeaks. The website is also a journalistic outlet just like CNN, ABC, CBS, Fox and other mainstream media venues, where we have seen an endless parade of officials – and journalists! – calling for Assange to be prosecuted or killed outright. Every argument being made for shutting down WikiLeaks can – and doubtless will – be used against any journalistic enterprise that publishes material that powerful people do not like.

And the leading role in this persecution of truth-telling is being played by the administration of the great progressive agent of hope and change, the self-proclaimed heir of Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi, the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Barack Obama. His attorney general, Eric Holder, is now making fierce noises about the “steps” he has already taken to bring down WikiLeaks and criminalize the leaking of embarrassing information. And listen to the ferocious reaction of that liberal lioness, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who took to the pages of Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal to call for Assange to be put in prison – for 2,500,000 years:

When WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange released his latest document trove—more than 250,000 secret State Department cables—he intentionally harmed the U.S. government. The release of these documents damages our national interests and puts innocent lives at risk. He should be vigorously prosecuted for espionage.

“The law Mr. Assange continues to violate is the Espionage Act of 1917. That law makes it a felony for an unauthorized person to possess or transmit “information relating to the national defense which information the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation.” … Importantly, the courts have held that “information relating to the national defense” applies to both classified and unclassified material. Each violation is punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

So there you have it. Ten years for each offense; 250,000 separate offenses; thus a prison term of 2.5 million years. Naturally, tomorrow the same newspaper will denounce Feinstein for being such a namby-pamby terrorist-coddling pinko: “Why didn’t she call for Assange to be torn from limb to limb by wild dogs, as any right-thinking red-blooded American would do!?”

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The expanding Saudi file

Saudi Arabia’s Prince Turki al-Faisal demanded on Sunday that WikiLeaks be “vigorously punished” and said that it was incumbent on the US “to not just be extra vigilant but to try to restore the credibility and the legitimacy of their engagement with the rest of us, and ensure that there are no more leaks to be faced in the future,” Reuters reported.

Leaked cables claim that Saudi Arabia is the world’s largest source of financial support for terrorism; that the Iraqi government sees a greater threat to the country’s stability coming from Saudi Arabia than Iran; and that the Saudis appeared to want ‘another Musharraf‘ to take over Pakistan — no wonder the Saudis want to see WikiLeaks punished.

The Los Angeles Times now reports:

At Saudi Arabia’s urging, Morocco broke ties with Iran and began a domestic campaign against Moroccan Shiites in exchange for economic trade-offs, an Egyptian diplomat told sources at the U.S. Embassy in Rabat, according to a leaked U.S. diplomatic cable published by the Lebanese newspaper Al Akhbar.

“[The diplomat] said goading Iran, a country with which it had limited economic interests, and demonizing the Shi’a, a powerless minority group, was a small price for Morocco to pay for a strategy that could have major payoffs,” the April 2009 cable read.

In exchange for active Moroccan support, Saudi Arabia allegedly promised to ensure the flow of subsidized oil and compensate for the loss in direct foreign investment in Morocco resulting from the global financial crisis.

The diplomat, whose name had been redacted from the cable, also said that the domestic campaign against Shiites was intended to neutralize opposition groups in the municipal elections and reassert King Mohammed VI’s authority as a religious leader.

Morocco broke ties with Iran in March 2009, accusing Tehran of using its embassy in Rabat as a base for spreading Shiite Islam. The formal break in relations was followed by a crackdown on Morocco’s tiny Shiite minority, which resulted in the closure of religious schools and the arrest of hundreds of people.

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New York Times plays down Saudi role in promoting terrorism

“WikiLeaks cables portray Saudi Arabia as a cash machine for terrorists,” declares The Guardian, reporting on the US State Department’s concerns about the Kingdom’s role in funding al Qaeda and other militant organizations.

The New York Times opts for the bland, “Cash Flow to Terrorists Evades U.S. Efforts,” with a subhead, “Arab Allies Resist U.S. Moves to Close Aid Pipelines, Cables Say.”

Reporters Eric Lichtblau and Eric Schmitt wait until paragraph nineteen of their report to declare: “Saudi Arabia, a critical military and diplomatic ally, emerges in the cables as the most vexing of problems.” Paragraph nineteen! Why wasn’t that in the first paragraph? Just because President Obama has demonstrated his willingness to bow to King Abdullah, does the Times feel obliged to assume the same posture?

The Guardian reports:

Saudi Arabia is the world’s largest source of funds for Islamist militant groups such as the Afghan Taliban and Lashkar-e-Taiba – but the Saudi government is reluctant to stem the flow of money, according to Hillary Clinton.

“More needs to be done since Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support base for al-Qaida, the Taliban, LeT and other terrorist groups,” says a secret December 2009 paper signed by the US secretary of state. Her memo urged US diplomats to redouble their efforts to stop Gulf money reaching extremists in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

“Donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide,” she said.

Three other Arab countries are listed as sources of militant money: Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates.

The cables highlight an often ignored factor in the Pakistani and Afghan conflicts: that the violence is partly bankrolled by rich, conservative donors across the Arabian Sea whose governments do little to stop them.

The problem is particularly acute in Saudi Arabia, where militants soliciting funds slip into the country disguised as holy pilgrims, set up front companies to launder funds and receive money from government-sanctioned charities.

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Julian Assange and the power of asymmetric fear

The counterpart of asymmetric warfare is asymmetric fear — a form of mass hysteria in which smaller and smaller threats provoke more and more extreme reactions.

The arc that connects Osama bin Laden to Julian Assange describes the pathology of these times: fear has become our only compass.

When the United States Secretary of State describes the release of reams of somewhat embarrassing but generally informative cables as “an attack on the international community,” and while opinion makers call for Assange’s arrest, assassination or execution, we shouldn’t be asking how much harm WikiLeaks can do, but whether the political establishment in America is becoming unhinged.

David Samuels writes:

Julian Assange and Pfc Bradley Manning have done a huge public service by making hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. government documents available on Wikileaks — and, predictably, no one is grateful. Manning, a former army intelligence analyst in Iraq, faces up to 52 years in prison. He is currently being held in solitary confinement at a military base in Quantico, Virginia, where he is not allowed to see his parents or other outside visitors.

Assange, the organizing brain of Wikileaks, enjoys a higher degree of freedom living as a hunted man in England under the close surveillance of domestic and foreign intelligence agencies — but probably not for long. Not since President Richard Nixon directed his minions to go after Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg and New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan – “a vicious antiwar type,” an enraged Nixon called him on the Watergate tapes — has a working journalist and his source been subjected to the kind of official intimidation and threats that have been directed at Assange and Manning by high-ranking members of the Obama Administration.

Published reports suggest that a joint Justice Department-Pentagon team of investigators is exploring the possibility of charging Assange under the Espionage Act, which could lead to decades in jail. “This is not saber-rattling,” said Attorney General Eric Holder, commenting on the possibility that Assange will be prosecuted by the government. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called the Wikileaks disclosures “an attack on the international community” that endangered innocent people. White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs suggested in somewhat Orwellian fashion that “such disclosures put at risk our diplomats, intelligence professionals, and people around the world who come to the United States for assistance in promoting democracy and open government.”

Politics Daily reports:

For the past several months, Assange has widely believed to have been in hiding somewhere in the United Kingdom. The public perception has been one of a man hunt.

But according to his U.K.-based lawyer, Mark Stephens, Scotland Yard has actually had precise knowledge of Assange’s whereabouts since he arrived in this country in October. Indeed, Stephens maintains, they even have a phone number should they wish to reach him.

“I feel like I am sitting in the middle of a surreal Swedish fairytale,” Stephens said. “The trolls keep threatening to come on and keep making noises off stage. But at the moment, no appearance from them.”

Apparently, the delay in Assange’s apprehension stems from the fact that the original warrant listed the maximum penalty only for the most serious charge (in this case, rape), rather than for all of the charges (which include sexual molestation and unlawful coercion). Assuming the new warrant fulfills the letter of the law, Soca will then be legally obliged to authorize the police to arrest Julian Assange.

Baruch Weiss, a former federal prosecutor who served in the Treasury and Homeland Security departments, asks:

What law did Assange violate? It will surprise many that there is no statute making it illegal to reveal classified information. There are statutes that criminalize the disclosure of very specific types of classified information, such as the identity of a covert operative (think Valerie Plame) or “codes, ciphers or cryptographic systems.” But there is no catch-all law that simply says, “Thou shalt not disclose classified information.”

Indeed, when Congress tried to enact such a statute, President Bill Clinton sensibly vetoed it. His reason: The government suffers from such an overclassification problem – some intelligence agencies classify even newspaper articles – that a law of this sort would end up criminalizing the disclosure of innocuous information. And even that vetoed statute would have applied only to government officials, not to private individuals or journalists.

Instead, prosecutors in the Assange case, like the prosecutors in the AIPAC case I handled, would resort to the Espionage Act of 1917, an archaic, World War I-era statute that prohibits “willfully” disclosing “information relating to the national defense.” According to Judge T.S. Ellis in the AIPAC case, this means that the prosecution must prove, among other things, that a defendant knew that the information he was disclosing was potentially damaging to national security and that he was violating the law.

Here, Assange can make the department’s case especially difficult. Well before publishing the cables, he wrote a letter to the U.S. government, delivered to our ambassador in London, inviting suggestions for redactions. The State Department refused. Assange then wrote another letter to State, reiterating that “WikiLeaks has absolutely no desire to put individual persons at significant risk of harm, nor do we wish to harm the national security of the United States.”

In that second letter, Assange stated that the department’s refusal to discuss redactions “leads me to conclude that the supposed risks are entirely fanciful.” He then indicated that WikiLeaks was undertaking redactions on its own.

In an interview with the BBC, Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times, said that his paper presented to the Obama administration all the cables they planned on publishing and sought and received advice on making redactions and on national security issues. The fact that the administration was willing to enter into discussions with the Times but not Wikileaks, suggests that the administration has less concern about security risks than it does with sustaining the incestuous relationship it enjoys with its favorite newspaper.

A press release just issued by Wikileaks says the Julian Assange Defense Fund has been frozen.

The Swiss Bank Post Finance today issues a press release stating that it had frozen Julian Assange’s defense fund and personal assets (31K EUR) after reviewing him as a “high profile” individual.

The technicality used to seize the defense fund was that Mr. Assange, as a homeless refugee attempting to gain residency in Switzerland, had used his lawyers address in Geneva for the bank’s correspondence.

Late last week, the internet payment giant PayPal, froze 60Keur of donations to the German charity the Wau Holland Foundation, which were targeted to promote the sharing of knowledge via WikiLeaks.

WikiLeaks and Julian have lost 100Keur in assets this week.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the Cablegate exposure is how it is throwing into relief the power dynamics between supposedly independent states like Switzerland, Sweden and Australia.

WikiLeaks also has public bank accounts in Iceland (preferred) and Germany.

Please help cover our expenditures while we fight to get our assets back.

http://wikileaks.ch/support.html

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Israel on Iran: So wrong for so long

Justin Elliot looks back at Israel’s repeated predictions that Iran would soon acquire nuclear weapons.

Officials at the U.S. Department of State, we learned from the secret cables released by WikiLeaks last week, have serious questions about the accuracy — and sincerity — of Israeli predictions about when Iran will obtain a nuclear weapon. As one State official wrote in response to an Israeli general’s November 2009 claim that Iran would have a bomb in one year: “It is unclear if the Israelis firmly believe this or are using worst-case estimates to raise greater urgency from the United States.”

So we thought this was as good a time as any to look at the remarkable history of incorrect Israeli predictions about Iran — especially given that the WikiLeaks trove is being used to argue that an attack on Iran is becoming more likely.

According to various Israeli government predictions over the years, Iran was going to have a bomb by the mid-90s — or 1998, 1999, 2000, 2004, 2005, and finally 2010. More recent Israeli predictions have put that date at 2011 or 2014.

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US State Department now afraid of its own shadow

Craig Murray, former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, notes:

[D]iplomats as a class very seldom tell unpalatable truths to politicians, but rather report and reinforce what their masters want to hear, in the hope of receiving preferment.

There is therefore [in the cables released by WikiLeaks] a huge amount about Iran’s putative nuclear arsenal and an exaggeration of Iran’s warhead delivery capability. But there is nothing about Israel’s massive nuclear arsenal. That is not because wikileaks have censored criticism of Israel. It is because any US diplomat who made an honest and open assessment of Israeli crimes would very quickly be an unemployed ex-diplomat.

WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange when asked by Time magazine what effect he is seeing from the publication of the diplomatic cables said, among other things:

[W]e can see the Israeli Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu coming out with a very interesting statement that leaders should speak in public like they do in private whenever they can. He believes that the result of this publication, which makes the sentiments of many privately held beliefs public, are promising a pretty good [indecipherable] will lead to some kind of increase in the peace process in the Middle East and particularly in relation to Iran.

But if Assange actually believes Netanyahu is rallying to the cause of transparency, he’ll be disappointed to read this from Sami Moubayed:

Last summer, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu signed off on a law extending classification of state archives related to the early years of the Jewish State’s foundation. That means all documents related to the war of 1948 and its monumental aftermath will remain under lock and key until 2018, exactly 70 years after what the Arabs refer to as the Palestinian Nakba, or “Catastrophe.”

Documents about the 1967 Arab-Israeli war will, therefore, remain classified until 2037, while anything related to the 1982 siege of Beirut will remain off-limits until 2052. Records of Yasser Arafat’s 2004 death will not be opened until 2074 while Israeli archives of what happened in Beirut on that fateful day in February 2005, when a massive bomb killed Lebanon’s Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri, will hauntingly remain labeled “top secret”” until 2075.

Meanwhile, US government employees are being instructed to shield their eyes from the corrupting influence of US government documents. Christian Science Monitor reports that both State and Defense department employees have been instructed not to visit the WikiLeaks website.

At The Nation, Tom Hayden writes:

Informed sources say that the current deluge of Wikileaks documents will continue for another week and grow in significance.

Leading US human rights lawyers Leonard Weinglass and Michael Ratner have joined the defense team for Julian Assange and Wikileaks. US officials are employing cyber-warfare and prosecutorial steps to deny any safe haven for the Wikileaks operation with a fervor comparable to their drone attacks on Al Qaeda havens in Pakistan and Yemen. WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange was placed on Interpol’s “most wanted” list as US authorities intensified efforts to suppress the whistleblower organization’s deluge of classified US diplomatic cables. Assange’s location was not immediately known. His choices are to turn himself in or be tracked down by local police. If outside of Sweden, he could face extradition on charges to stand trial there. Or the US could seek his extradiction on charges of espionage or theft of classified documents.

Two cyber-attacks have been reported against WikiLeaks servers this week. The Justice Department is seeking indictments on espionage charges from a grand jury quietly impaneled this week in arch-conservative Alexandria, Virginia. Assange is in London, facing rape and sexual harrassment charges in Sweden, which he denies. Extradition could be sought by the United States at any time from either venue.

Why is this drama important? Not because of “life-threatening” leaks, as claimed by the establishment, but because the closed doors of power need to be open to public review. We live increasingly in an Age of Secrecy, as described by Garry Wills in Bomb Power, among recent books. It has become the American Way of War, and increasingly draws the curtains over American democracy itself.

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WikiLeaks: good for Israel

I didn’t come up with the headline — it’s from Israel’s pro-settler Arutz Sheva news network. And as their report makes clear, this favorable review of what has been described as a diplomatic 9/11, reflects the views of the Israeli government.

Just as Benjamin Netanyahu on September 11, 2001, said the attacks were a “good thing” for US-Israeli relations and then again in 2008 told an Israeli audience, “We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon,” it’s likewise reasonable to assume that he is similarly pleased with the repercussions of “Cablegate.” If for the past few days the diplomatic world has been thrown into disarray, the one country that so far remains unscathed is Israel.

WikiLeaks, on the other hand, having placed itself at the vanguard of a movement demanding transparency in global affairs, has so far failed to live up to the standard it is setting for others. They don’t need to jeopardize the security of their own operations, but they do need to explain the inner workings of the editorial process through which by releasing some cables and withholding others they are now feeding a narrative to the global media.

I’ll leave it others to construct elaborate theories on how WikiLeaks could be seen as a Mossad or CIA operation, but whether or not either or both intelligence organizations have played a role in shaping this story, one of its central features echoes the history of Israel and its use of a strategy of “divide-and-survive” across the Middle East.

In The American Interest earlier this year, Benjamin E Schwartz described this policy:

When American diplomats talk about the road to peace, few Israelis dare articulate one awkward truth. The truth is that Israelis have managed their conflict with the Arabs and the Palestinians for half a century not by working to unite them all, but either by deliberately and effectively dividing them, or by playing off existing divisions. By approaching matters in this way, Israelis have achieved de facto peace during various periods of their country’s history—and even two examples of de jure peace. It is because of divisions among Palestinians that Israelis survived and thrived strategically in 1947–48, and because of divisions among the Arab states that Israel won its 1948–49 war for independence. Divisions among the Arabs and divided competition for influence over the Palestinians allowed Israelis to build a strong state between 1949 and 1967 without having to contend with a serious threat of pan-Arab attack. It was because of divisions and the strength of Egypt amid those divisions that Anwar Sadat decided to make a separate peace in 1979. It was because of another set of divisions that King Hussein was able to do the same in 1994.

The results of Israeli statecraft did not produce an American-style comprehensive peace, and it did not produce peace with the Palestinians. It may not even have produced a lasting peace with Egypt and Jordan—time will tell. But it did produce peace in its most basic and tangible form: an absence of violence and the establishment of relative security. This is what peace means for the vast majority of Israelis, most of whom do not believe that their Arab neighbors will ever accept, let alone respect as legitimate, a Jewish state in geographical Palestine. And the way Israelis have achieved this peace is, in essence, through a policy of divide and survive.

Now, thanks to WikiLeaks, we see the Saudi king insulting the president of Pakistan, Egypt insulting Iran, America’s fear of Turkey — suspicions, fear and hostility pushed from the background into the foreground with no consequence more predictable than that these expressions of candor will be divisive and further erode the political authority of every player, except for one: Israel.

Meanwhile, if Israeli officials are discreet enough not to openly celebrate the divisions exposed by WikiLeaks, they have no hesitation in trumpeting their sense of vindication arising from the public display of hostility towards Iran expressed by so many of the region’s autocratic leaders.

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WikiLeaks v the imperial presidency’s poodle

Pratap Chatterjee writes:

Anticipating Sunday’s release of classified US embassy cables, Harold Koh, the top lawyer to the US state department, fired off a letter to Julian Assange, the editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, on Saturday morning accusing him of having “endangered the lives of countless individuals”. Thus Koh pre-emptively made himself the figurehead for the US government’s reaction to the WikiLeaks release; the White House’s subsequent statement has echoed his attack.

Koh, a former dean of Yale law school, is also the man who authored a legal opinion for the Obama administration this past March stating that the president had the right to authorise “lethal operations” to target and kill alleged terrorists anywhere in the world without judicial review. This is in spite of the fact that other respected law professors and human rights organisations from Amnesty to Human Rights Watch have expressed grave worries that such actions also endanger the lives of countless individuals.

Koh – and another famous White House legal adviser named John Yoo – were both once fierce critics of what they believed were executive abuses by the president of US interests and standards of conduct overseas. Yet, once they themselves ascended to become acolytes of the highest office in the land, they both came to believe that the president alone had the right to determine what was right and what was wrong.

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