Despite WikiLeaks Revelations, Congress Votes for War Funding

Tom Hayden | The Nation magazine July 28, 2010

Never was the case so weak for throwing another $33 billion into
the Afghanistan sinkhole, but that's what a defensive US Congress
did anyway on Tuesday evening. The vote was 308-114, with Republicans
supplying most of the prowar votes.

Washington-based peace groups, after weeks of e-mailing messages
to Congress, put the best face possible on the vote, claiming a
"significant" gain of fourteen additional antiwar votes over the
100 cast for a similar amendment by Representative Barbara Lee two
weeks ago. (The new Democratic votes were cast by Corrine Brown,
Kathy Castor, John Conyers, Rosa Delauro, Lloyd Doggett, Anna Eshoo,
Chaka Fattah, Eddie Bernice Johnson, Hank Johnson, Marcy Kaptur,
Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick, Gregory Meeks, James Moran, Christopher
Murphy, Carol Shea-Porter, Mike Thompson, Lynn Woolsey and David
Wu; while five Republicans joined the opposition: Paul Broun, Vernon
Ehlers, Jeff Flake, Phil Gingrey and John Linder.)

Those casting prowar votes from safe liberal districts included
Lois Capps, James Clyburn, Susan Davis, John Hall, Patrick Kennedy,
Nita Lowey, Lucille Roybal-Allard, John Sarbanes and Joe Sestak.

Significantly, Speaker Nancy Pelosi abstained from voting, which
meant retreating from the chance to draw an antiwar line more firmly.

The highest measure of House opposition remains the 162 votes,
including Pelosi's, cast in the House recently for Representative
Jim McGovern's amendment requiring an exit strategy including a
withdrawal timeline.

Only eighteen senators voted for an identical amendment by Senator
Russ Feingold earlier this spring. The dissenting numbers have
almost doubled since last year.

In the moments after Tuesday's vote, a representative of Barbara
Lee's office said new antiwar measures may be put forward around
the defense appropriations bill later in this session. No concrete
plan yet exists.

Those Congressional antiwar votes are in part due to years of
grassroots work and mobilization, according to Rusti Eisenberg of
the legislative committee of United for Peace and Justice. Is the
glass half-full or half-empty?, she asks. What is clear is that
there was never a better time to stop or delay this war. The political
climate around Afghanistan turned extremely sour in the days leading
up to Tuesday's vote. The Washington establishment was shaken by
the spilling of 91,000 classified documents by the independent
muckrakers at WikiLeaks.org. The raw documents revealed a much
grimmer situation in Afghanistan than portrayed by the White House
and the Pentagon with its information-war strategy. As millions
read the WikiLeaks revelations in the New York Times, the Guardian
and Der Spiegel, a nervous White House pressed for an immediate
House vote. "We don't know how to react. This obviously puts Congress
and the public in a bad mood," lamented one White House official.

The president could have declared that the newly released materials
only add to a growing consensus that the war is unwinnable. Instead
he sent his spokesperson Robert Gibbs out to discredit the founder
of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, who is fast becoming a hero in the
global info-wars.

Gibbs was offended by a German interview with the elusive Assange,
in which he said "I enjoy crushing bastards," a sentiment that will
do him no harm with Assange's readers and collaborators.

The Pentagon also is seeking to muzzle and imprison the American
Private First Class Bradley Manning, 22, charged with downloading
the documents and sending them to Assange. Manning, who is known
by his hacker name Bradass87, copied the secret information on a
CD labeled "Lady Gaga"

while pretending to hum along to her music.

"I want people to see the truth, the non-PR version," said Manning.

While downloading the materials, he had discovered "awful things
that belong in the public domain and not on some server stored in
a darkroom in Washington, DC. I just couldn't let these things stay
inside of the system and inside of my head."

Manning calls his action "open diplomacy. It's beautiful and
horrifying. It belongs in the public domain."

WikiLeaks founder Assange announced Monday that he has another
15,000 documents ready to release.

For now, funding for the escalation has been salvaged by the House
vote.

But the full impact of the documents remains to be seen. If the
Pentagon finds a way to shut down WikiLeaks, it is likely that a
huge media and public protest will follow. Going forward with upbeat
messages about the war becomes hazardous for Obama too, especially
with the release of more documents threatened. Pressures thus will
increase here and across the NATO alliance to begin reducing the
military presence.

On the very day the disclosures were splashed across front pages,
American officials were quarreling with Afghanistan's President
Hamid Karzai over whether fifty-two civilians were killed by Western
rockets in Helmand Province, a scene of the current offensive. And,
according to official sources interviewed by Dexter Filkins of the
New York Times, Karzai is "pressing to strike his own deal with the
Taliban and the country's archrival, Pakistan, the Taliban's longtime
supporter."

Instead of bending to these apparent realities, Obama instead seems
intent on doubling-down with the military offensive in Kandahar and
his secret attacks in Pakistan.

No one in the government has found a way to stop him, despite 73
percent of Democrats and a majority of independents opposing his
Afghanistan policy. By voting for war funding without conditions,
Congress has yielded its checks and balances function, and now is
being usurped and outperformed in its oversight responsibilities
by the twenty something geeks of WikiLeaks.

Source URL:

http://www.thenation.com/article/37983/despite-wikileaks-revelations-...
____________________________________________________________________

'Negligence on a massive scale': Assange

Australian Broadcasting Corporation Lateline Broadcast: 29/07/2010

Reporter: Tony Jones

Australian-born WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange talks about the
material they released, and what they held back

Transcript

TONY JONES, PRESENTER: And now to tonight's guest, Julian Assange,
the founder of the Wikileaks website that this week released to the
world more than 90,000 secret US military intelligence documents
on the Afghanistan war.

We caught up with him earlier this evening in London.

Julian Assange, thanks for joing us.

JULIAN ASSANGE, WIKILEAKS FOUNDER: You're welcome Tony.

TONY JONES: Having immersed yourself in the detail of these documents,
what is the key significance of them? What do you believe will be
the major impact of releasing them?

JULIAN ASSANGE: I think it will be the vast scale of activities and
abuses that are represented here. We're talking about 92,000 reports
occurring over a six year period from the regular US army comprising
of nearly every death that has occurred in Afghanistan as a result
of US activity or to US forces.

So what I see is, it's not the big headline things like another
Kunduz or Gurrani with a big bombing, well those are represented,
but rather it is where the most kills are.

It's the small events, taking off a child here or a deaf man there
or running away or a family or a village that has been shelled in
revenge or by accident. That's my big take away from this that it's,
if you like, not just the bus accidents of war, but all the car
accidents, all the pedestrian accidents that actually make up the
big kill figures in the end.

We're talking about 20,000 people, stories behind 20,000 kills
represented in this material.

TONY JONES: You've actually made comparisons between the release
of these documents and the opening up of the East German Stasi
archives. Of course the Stasi files revealed repression and criminal
activity on a massive scale, you're not alleging anything like that
are you?

JULIAN ASSANGE: There's negligence that's on a massive scale, I
wouldn't say there's criminal activity or deliberate targeting of
civilians by US forces on a massive scale, maybe just a few individual
events. But we do see the sort of squalor of war coming out on a
massive scale and the destruction of Afghan society.

Also we can see the increase in the war tempo in a number of kill
events occurring over time. It's getting worse over at least the
last three years and now the general public and academics and
journalists have the raw ingredients that the Pentagon was using
to monitor and assess the war and come up with its own aggregate
figures as to the number of civilian casualties and how the war is
heading, and people can see, in some cases, that the raw ingredients
are a bit faulty.

So there's some misreporting by ground units, but it also permits
people to sort of come up with a different conclusion about how the
war is going and how it should go.

TONY JONES: You said in your press conference that you and the
conventional journalists you'd worked with had only managed to read
between one and 2,000 of the reports properly. Is that correct?

JULIAN ASSANGE: Yeah, that is true. To read and to read them in
detail and that, there is just so much material we maybe had 20
people across the four organisations working on this full time and
only for about a month for the other organisations and about six
weeks for us.

TONY JONES: So, how many of the reports that you put on Wikileaks
went onto the site without you actually knowing the detail of what
was in them?

JULIAN ASSANGE: It's fair to say that only two per cent have been
read in precise detail and the rest have been hived off using these
classification systems.

Now, I presume what your question is getting to is what, how did
we split off the 15,000 that we have not yet released because we
think they need further review to understand whether there might
be innocent informers' names in there.

So after reviewing several different types of material we saw that
it was really these threat reports and then some other classifications
that contained information about informers, so those were all hived
off.

TONY JONES: Well, not according to the Pentagon. They're accusing
you of revealing the identities of Afghan informants and putting
their lives at risk. Afghan's president, Karzai, agrees with that
he says 'the breach is extremely irresponsible and shocking.' Your
response to those comments.

JULIAN ASSANGE: Well we have yet to see clear evidence of that. I
mean the London Times is also making this allegation today and in
a quite disingenuous way, for example they mention some informers'
names they say they had found and with a headline Afghan informer
already dead, but when you actually read the story what you see is
in fact that individual that they're mentioning died two years ago.

So there's a little bit of media manipulation occurring here. In
terms of the Afghan government, it's in their interests to sort of
play up the irresponsible, irresponsibility of the United States
that they say has been involved in sort of collecting and permitting
this data to release, be released.

Now we contacted the White House as a group before we released this
material and asked them to help assist in going through it to make
sure that no innocent names came out, and the White House did not
accept that request.

TONY JONES: So you're saying that you offered the White House a
chance to go through the documents, or officials from the White
House a chance to go through the documents and single out names of
people at risk. Is that correct?

JULIAN ASSANGE: Yeah that's right. Not, of course we did not offer
them a chance to veto any material, but rather we told them that
we were going through a harm minimisation process and offered them
the chance to point out names of informers or other innocents who
might be harmed and they did not respond to that request which was
mediated through the New York Times who was our, acting as the
contact for the four media groups involved in this.

TONY JONES: Now I imagine as an Australian you've paid special
attention to material that's related to Australian troops, we've
seen relatively few so far and relatively insignificant reference,
but are there more documents that you know of in the files that
have direct implications for Australia's involvement in the war in
Afghanistan?

JULIAN ASSANGE: We haven't spent special attention yet on Australia.

But, you will find that as you go through this material there's
some ways to pick it up, so the Australian troops are located in a
particular region in Afghanistan, that is one way of looking for
incidences, there's other abbreviations such as Aus and obviously
key words such as Australia.

It's worth remembering that these are reports by US forces. Now
they do sometimes overlap with the activities of Australian forces
because there can be combined operations or transports, but purely
Australian operations will not be included in this material.

One of the interesting things that I did see included was a report
to the US Embassy in Kabul speaking about the change of Australian-Afghan
policy under John Howard, I think it was in 2006, and the embassy
in Kabul was made aware of this and what it would be and the upcoming
details some weeks before the Australian public was made aware.

TONY JONES: I heard your general statement earlier, but is there
specific evidence in the documents that you've seen, or know the
contents of, showing that NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation)
have covered up civilian deaths or suppressed information about the
numbers of civilian deaths.

JULIAN ASSANGE: Yes, there's a number of incidences related, including
the deaths of children. We've seen, these are a different type so
there's events that have not been reported before, there's also
events in here that have been reported before and scrutinized and
we can go back and look what was the original filing, how does that
line up with what we've come to know about these events, such as
the Kunduz or Gurrani, these big bombing events.

And there's also cases where it has been reported before, although
maybe not in the western press, and prosecuted. So an example of
that is there's a Polish Milli in this material, so Polish troops
were hit by an IED and the next day they come to a village that
they've somehow blamed the whole village for this event and shelled
the village in a revenge attack.

Now to their credit the Poles did see this themselves, investigated
it, and are in the course of a prosecution in Australia, sorry in
Poland.

For the other sorts of events we can look at something like Taskforce
373, which is a US secretive, special forces, assassination squad,
is working its way down a hit list called the 'kill or capture list'
the priority effects list is the acronym used by the US military
and there's an example in there of it attacking a house, killing
seven children, seven others and taking some captives, not achieving
their objective, which was going after Al Qaeda or Taliban commander
and then covering it up.

So we can see, in that report, a special classification called 'no
forn' which is 'no foreign' which means don't even release this
report to Australian allied forces, to British allied forces.

TONY JONES: So, I imagine from that, that you would argue, well
particularly in the Polish case, althought that wasn't covered up,
that there is evidence of actual war crimes, or what you would
describe as war crimes, or potential war crimes?

JULIAN ASSANGE: Well potential war crimes is the safest description,
I mean in the end it's up for a court to decide if these are in the
end crimes, but there's a lot that on the face of it are deeply
troubling.

There's cases of a man riding along on a bike, two men riding along
on a bike and being shot by a sniper, and then the justification
is, well, he had a bike pump on his back.

There's quite a lot of cases of reports about civilians being shot
at with warning fire and then being killed with ricochet, the unusual
number of ricochets for, are represented in this material. There
are over 22 hundred escalation of force events, labelled as such
by the US military.

There's a report where 181 people are killed in the course of a
single action, zero are detained, and one wounded. Those reports
need to be looked at in detail to understand, you know, is there
some sort of excuse for this behaviour? But they are deeply suspicious
on the surface.

TONY JONES: It's interesting that some conventional journalists,
like for example the editor of the New York Times, have been prepared
to work with you on these leaked documents, but they still want to
distance themselves from you and from Wikileaks and from your
methods. What do you think is going on there?

JULIAN ASSANGE: That's quite interesting the well the Spiegel and
the Guardian were not really like that. They really did come properly
to the table, but you know, the sort of the environment in the
United States, the publishing environment I presume is just a really
quite difficult when saying anything strongly against the war.

In previous cases, what we've seen is you can actually get important
stories into the New York Times and into other mainstream press
outlets like CNN. We did that with the collateral murder tape which
exposed the murders of two Reuters' journalists in Baghdad and the
slaying of 16 to 24 other people.

But then what happens is editorial space is opened up for apologists
who simply have opinion. So to get story in about the war, it has
to be hard fact, and you have to have the hard facts, but to get a
pro war story in all you need is opinion, and I think that really
represents just a sheer scope of the war industry in the United
States.

TONY JONES: Even some other online journalists appear to be dubious
of some of your methods. Slate magazine says the profound difference
between how WikiLeaks uses anonymous sources and how the rest of
the media uses them is that the reporters who get leaked documents
in conventional media actually know the identity of their sources
and they can judge their veracity, but you can't do that. What do
you say to that criticism?

JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, this is just a nonsense. I mean we have the
best record in the industry. We have never released a mis-described
document in our four year publishing history and we have also
published more classified documents than the rest of the world press
combined. So combine those two and you see that there's, you know,
nonsense sprouted by organisations who are... I suppose they feel
jealous, or they just don't understand the issue.

It's quite important that we do not verify sources, we verify
documents and as a result we're not fooled by sources. In the case
of say Judith Miller from the New York Times who was given documents
by a source that she trusted but the documents themselves were
fabricated and that is one of the things that led up to the political
climate that supported the invasion of Iraq.

So, and because we have taken that methodology, we're in a position
where we don't have to keep the identities of sources. In fact, we
never even collect the identities of a source at any stage.

It is very hard when operating under scrutiny by international
intelligence organisations to keep secrets. We don't specialise in
keeping secrets, but we specialise in never keeping a secret in the
first place, and that's a lot easier task.

TONY JONES: Julian you've trod on so many toes and rattled so many
cages, how do you think this is going to end for you? Bear in mind
here that the head of the Australian Defence Association is actually
accusing you of treachery at the moment and saying that you may
well have broken some criminal laws.

JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, the head of the Defence Association, this is
just some association of, I don't know, retired soldiers or something,
so this is not really that consequential. But have we broken some
laws?

Well certainly not in the United States we haven't broken laws. In
Australia, well this is really quite hard to see. We're talking
about material from the United States. But in the end, you know,
this organisation has had over 100 legal attacks and we have defeated
every single one of them.

TONY JONES: Just a quick follow up, because I was asking you how
you thought it would end up for you and bear in mind that there are
reports now, you've quoted them yourself, suggesting that the
Australian Government was approached to surveil you and possibly
even detain you?

JULIAN ASSANGE: Those reports also say that the Australian Government
understood that politically that was not something that would be
acceptable to the Australian public and we have a lot of support
from the Australian public and Australian press.

So I think they will have to think very carefully before going down
that sort of line just to sort of fulfil a favour by the Australian
Government. But, you know, nonetheless, if the Australian Government
is not supportive of this organisation, there are plenty of other
countries that are, and it would be, you know, a real slight on the
Australian Government if it was perceived that they did not support
their own.

TONY JONES: Julian Assange, we know you're running out of time,
we'll have to leave you there. We thank you very much for taking a
little time to talk to us on Lateline tonight.

JULIAN ASSANGE: Thanks, Tony.

http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2010/s2968342.htm

------------------------------------

The archives of South News can be found at

http://southmovement.alphalink.com.au/southnews/
*************************************************************************** ********

Yahoo! Groups Links

<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/southnews/

<*> Your email settings:

Individual Email | Traditional

<*> To change settings online go to:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/southnews/join (Yahoo! ID required)

<*> To change settings via email:

southnews-dig...@yahoogroups.com southnews-fullfeatu...@yahoogroups.com

<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:

southnews-unsubscr...@yahoogroups.com

<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: