12-12-2010, 06:54 PM
First, They Came for WikiLeaks. Then...
The Editors
December 9, 2010 | This article appeared in the December 27, 2010 edition of The Nation.
The equanimity with which the government was able to breeze past the Post series is telling in light of the great ruckus caused by WikiLeaks and its slow drip of more than 250,000 State Department cables. The Post didn't tell secrets so much as outline the contours of the shadow world from which they originate; WikiLeaks rips off the veil. It's the exposure of these secrets that has the world's power elite so rattled. Pols and pundits are calling for the prosecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange under the Espionage Act of 1917. Some have even gone so far as to suggest that Assange be assassinated. As a magazine that champions free speech, The Nation defends the rights of leakers and media organizations to disclose secrets that advance a public interest without fear of retribution—or murder. If the Justice Department goes after Assange as an enemy of the state, what's next? The arrest of the editors of the New York Times, the Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel and El País, the news outlets that collaborated with WikiLeaks?
By and large WikiLeaks has come to embrace the ethics that guide traditional news organizations' disclosure of secrets, and it should be afforded the same protections. WikiLeaks' critics assert—without evidence—that its leaks have endangered lives, but a senior NATO official told CNN in October that "there has not been a single case of Afghans needing protection or to be moved because of the [Afghanistan] leak." Critics characterize WikiLeaks' actions as indiscriminate document dumps, but at press time WikiLeaks had released only 1,095 cables, almost all vetted and redacted by its partner news organizations. WikiLeaks even asked the State Department to help redact the cables before they were released. It refused.
What's really at stake here is not individual privacy, the safety of sources or America's diplomatic leverage—it's the secret state. Over the past decade, our leaders have come to see secrecy as a casual right instead of a rare privilege. The cables released so far illustrate this corruption: routine, even banal, matters of diplomatic correspondence are labeled "NOFORN" (not for release to foreign nationals), "Confidential" or "Secret."
Beyond revealing the unprecedented scale of secrecy, WikiLeaks has also brought to light the antidemocratic actions secrecy protects. In Yemen, for example, the United States conducted secret airstrikes on suspected Al Qaeda targets, then conspired with Yemeni leaders to pretend that Yemen's military had done it (see Jeremy Scahill, "WikiLeaking Covert Wars," in this issue). Here is an instance where America's standing in the world was put at risk. But it's not WikiLeaks that did it. It's the policy of covert action and the lies told to cover it up.
=============================================
On September 6, 2009, President Obama's deputy national security adviser, John Brennan, met with Yemen's president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, to discuss the rising influence of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). "President Saleh pledged unfettered access to Yemen's national territory for U.S. counterterrorism operations," according to a secret diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks. While the Obama administration was insisting publicly that its role in Yemen was limited to training the country's military forces—the same claim it made about Pakistan—US Special Operations forces were conducting offensive operations in Yemen, including airstrikes, and conspiring with Yemen's president and other leaders to cover up the US role.
On December 17, 2009, an alleged Al Qaeda training camp in Yemen at al-Majalah, Abyan, was hit by a cruise missile, killing forty-one people. According to an investigation by the Yemeni Parliament, fourteen women and twenty-one children were among the dead, along with fourteen alleged Al Qaeda fighters. A week later another airstrike hit another village in Yemen.
Amnesty International released photographs from one of the strikes, revealing remnants of US cluster munitions and the Tomahawk cruise missiles used to deliver them. At the time, the Pentagon refused to comment, directing all inquiries to Yemen's government, which released a statement on December 24 taking credit for both airstrikes, saying in a press release, "Yemeni fighter jets launched an aerial assault" and "carried out simultaneous raids killing and detaining militants."
US diplomatic cables now reveal that both strikes were conducted by the US military under orders from Gen. David Petraeus, then head of US Central Command (Centcom). "We'll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours," President Saleh told Petraeus during a meeting in early January 2010, according to one cable. Yemen's Deputy Prime Minister Rashad al-Alimi then boasted that he had just "lied" by telling Parliament "that the bombs...were American-made but deployed by" Yemen. According to US Special Operations sources, US teams also conduct targeted killing operations and raids inside Yemen.
The WikiLeaks information partially corroborates what sources told The Nation in June about how the Obama administration was expanding the footprint of covert actions conducted by the military, not the CIA, to more than seventy-five countries. The frontline battles, the sources alleged, were in Yemen and Somalia. "In both those places, there are ongoing unilateral actions," said a special operations source, adding that they do "a lot in Pakistan too."
The WikiLeaks cables also reveal that despite denials by US officials spanning more than a year, US Special Operations forces have been conducting offensive operations in Pakistan, helping direct US drone strikes and conducting joint operations with Pakistani troops against Al Qaeda and Taliban forces in North and South Waziristan and elsewhere in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. According to an October 9, 2009, cable classified by Anne Patterson, then the US ambassador to Pakistan, the operations were conducted by US Special Operations forces and coordinated with the US Office of the Defense Representative in Pakistan. A Special Operations source told The Nation that the US forces described in the cable as "SOC(FWD)-PAK" were "forward operating troops" from the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), the most elite force in the US military, made up of Navy SEALs, Delta Force and Army Rangers.
The cables also confirm aspects of a Nation story from November 2009, "The Secret US War in Pakistan," which detailed offensive combat operations by JSOC in Pakistan. At the time, Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell called the Nation story "conspiratorial" and denied that US Special Operations forces were doing anything other than "training" in Pakistan. More than a month after the October 2009 cable from the US Embassy in Pakistan confirming JSOC combat missions, Morrell told reporters that the United States had "a few dozen forces on the ground in Pakistan...training Pakistani forces so that they can in turn train other Pakistani military," adding, "That's the extent of our military boots on the ground in Pakistan." It now appears that Morrell's statement was false.
To the embassy staff, Pakistan's allowing US forces to engage in combat was viewed as a "sea change" in its military leaders' thinking. The staff said they had previously been "adamantly opposed [to] letting us embed" US Special Operations forces with Pakistani forces. On the issue of airstrikes, the US government appears to have an arrangement with Pakistani authorities that mirrors the one with Yemen's government. While the US government will not confirm drone strikes inside the country and Pakistani officials regularly criticize the strikes, the issue of the drones was discussed in another cable, from August 2008. That cable described a meeting between Ambassador Patterson and Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani. Gillani said, "I don't care if they do it as long as they get the right people. We'll protest in the National Assembly and then ignore it."
In fall 2008, the US Special Operations Command asked top US diplomats in Pakistan and Afghanistan for detailed information on refugee camps along the Af-Pak border and a list of humanitarian aid organizations working in those camps. On October 6, Patterson sent a cable marked "Confidential" to Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the CIA, Centcom and several US embassies, saying that some of the requests, which came as e-mails, "suggested that agencies intend to use the data for targeting purposes." Other requests, according to the cable, "indicate it would be used for 'NO STRIKE' purposes." The cable, issued jointly by the US embassies in Kabul and Islamabad, declared: "We are concerned about providing information gained from humanitarian organizations to military personnel, especially for reasons that remain unclear. Particularly worrisome, this does not seem to us a very efficient way to gather accurate information."
It is also clear from the cables that the ability of US Special Operations forces to operate in Pakistan is viewed as a major development. The US Embassy there notes the potential consequences of the activities leaking: "These deployments are highly politically sensitive because of widely-held concerns among the public about Pakistani sovereignty and opposition to allowing foreign military forces to operate in any fashion on Pakistani soil. Should these developments and/or related matters receive any coverage in the Pakistani or US media, the Pakistani military will likely stop making requests for such assistance."
Such statements might help explain why Ambassador Richard Holbrooke lied when he said bluntly in July: "People think that the US has troops in Pakistan. Well, we don't."
What the WikiLeaks documents make clear is that the handful of cables on US Special Operations activities in Pakistan and Yemen offer a tiny glimpse into one of the darkest corners of current US counterterrorism policy.
Jeremy Scahill
The Editors
December 9, 2010 | This article appeared in the December 27, 2010 edition of The Nation.
The equanimity with which the government was able to breeze past the Post series is telling in light of the great ruckus caused by WikiLeaks and its slow drip of more than 250,000 State Department cables. The Post didn't tell secrets so much as outline the contours of the shadow world from which they originate; WikiLeaks rips off the veil. It's the exposure of these secrets that has the world's power elite so rattled. Pols and pundits are calling for the prosecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange under the Espionage Act of 1917. Some have even gone so far as to suggest that Assange be assassinated. As a magazine that champions free speech, The Nation defends the rights of leakers and media organizations to disclose secrets that advance a public interest without fear of retribution—or murder. If the Justice Department goes after Assange as an enemy of the state, what's next? The arrest of the editors of the New York Times, the Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel and El País, the news outlets that collaborated with WikiLeaks?
By and large WikiLeaks has come to embrace the ethics that guide traditional news organizations' disclosure of secrets, and it should be afforded the same protections. WikiLeaks' critics assert—without evidence—that its leaks have endangered lives, but a senior NATO official told CNN in October that "there has not been a single case of Afghans needing protection or to be moved because of the [Afghanistan] leak." Critics characterize WikiLeaks' actions as indiscriminate document dumps, but at press time WikiLeaks had released only 1,095 cables, almost all vetted and redacted by its partner news organizations. WikiLeaks even asked the State Department to help redact the cables before they were released. It refused.
What's really at stake here is not individual privacy, the safety of sources or America's diplomatic leverage—it's the secret state. Over the past decade, our leaders have come to see secrecy as a casual right instead of a rare privilege. The cables released so far illustrate this corruption: routine, even banal, matters of diplomatic correspondence are labeled "NOFORN" (not for release to foreign nationals), "Confidential" or "Secret."
Beyond revealing the unprecedented scale of secrecy, WikiLeaks has also brought to light the antidemocratic actions secrecy protects. In Yemen, for example, the United States conducted secret airstrikes on suspected Al Qaeda targets, then conspired with Yemeni leaders to pretend that Yemen's military had done it (see Jeremy Scahill, "WikiLeaking Covert Wars," in this issue). Here is an instance where America's standing in the world was put at risk. But it's not WikiLeaks that did it. It's the policy of covert action and the lies told to cover it up.
=============================================
On September 6, 2009, President Obama's deputy national security adviser, John Brennan, met with Yemen's president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, to discuss the rising influence of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). "President Saleh pledged unfettered access to Yemen's national territory for U.S. counterterrorism operations," according to a secret diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks. While the Obama administration was insisting publicly that its role in Yemen was limited to training the country's military forces—the same claim it made about Pakistan—US Special Operations forces were conducting offensive operations in Yemen, including airstrikes, and conspiring with Yemen's president and other leaders to cover up the US role.
On December 17, 2009, an alleged Al Qaeda training camp in Yemen at al-Majalah, Abyan, was hit by a cruise missile, killing forty-one people. According to an investigation by the Yemeni Parliament, fourteen women and twenty-one children were among the dead, along with fourteen alleged Al Qaeda fighters. A week later another airstrike hit another village in Yemen.
Amnesty International released photographs from one of the strikes, revealing remnants of US cluster munitions and the Tomahawk cruise missiles used to deliver them. At the time, the Pentagon refused to comment, directing all inquiries to Yemen's government, which released a statement on December 24 taking credit for both airstrikes, saying in a press release, "Yemeni fighter jets launched an aerial assault" and "carried out simultaneous raids killing and detaining militants."
US diplomatic cables now reveal that both strikes were conducted by the US military under orders from Gen. David Petraeus, then head of US Central Command (Centcom). "We'll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours," President Saleh told Petraeus during a meeting in early January 2010, according to one cable. Yemen's Deputy Prime Minister Rashad al-Alimi then boasted that he had just "lied" by telling Parliament "that the bombs...were American-made but deployed by" Yemen. According to US Special Operations sources, US teams also conduct targeted killing operations and raids inside Yemen.
The WikiLeaks information partially corroborates what sources told The Nation in June about how the Obama administration was expanding the footprint of covert actions conducted by the military, not the CIA, to more than seventy-five countries. The frontline battles, the sources alleged, were in Yemen and Somalia. "In both those places, there are ongoing unilateral actions," said a special operations source, adding that they do "a lot in Pakistan too."
The WikiLeaks cables also reveal that despite denials by US officials spanning more than a year, US Special Operations forces have been conducting offensive operations in Pakistan, helping direct US drone strikes and conducting joint operations with Pakistani troops against Al Qaeda and Taliban forces in North and South Waziristan and elsewhere in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. According to an October 9, 2009, cable classified by Anne Patterson, then the US ambassador to Pakistan, the operations were conducted by US Special Operations forces and coordinated with the US Office of the Defense Representative in Pakistan. A Special Operations source told The Nation that the US forces described in the cable as "SOC(FWD)-PAK" were "forward operating troops" from the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), the most elite force in the US military, made up of Navy SEALs, Delta Force and Army Rangers.
The cables also confirm aspects of a Nation story from November 2009, "The Secret US War in Pakistan," which detailed offensive combat operations by JSOC in Pakistan. At the time, Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell called the Nation story "conspiratorial" and denied that US Special Operations forces were doing anything other than "training" in Pakistan. More than a month after the October 2009 cable from the US Embassy in Pakistan confirming JSOC combat missions, Morrell told reporters that the United States had "a few dozen forces on the ground in Pakistan...training Pakistani forces so that they can in turn train other Pakistani military," adding, "That's the extent of our military boots on the ground in Pakistan." It now appears that Morrell's statement was false.
To the embassy staff, Pakistan's allowing US forces to engage in combat was viewed as a "sea change" in its military leaders' thinking. The staff said they had previously been "adamantly opposed [to] letting us embed" US Special Operations forces with Pakistani forces. On the issue of airstrikes, the US government appears to have an arrangement with Pakistani authorities that mirrors the one with Yemen's government. While the US government will not confirm drone strikes inside the country and Pakistani officials regularly criticize the strikes, the issue of the drones was discussed in another cable, from August 2008. That cable described a meeting between Ambassador Patterson and Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani. Gillani said, "I don't care if they do it as long as they get the right people. We'll protest in the National Assembly and then ignore it."
In fall 2008, the US Special Operations Command asked top US diplomats in Pakistan and Afghanistan for detailed information on refugee camps along the Af-Pak border and a list of humanitarian aid organizations working in those camps. On October 6, Patterson sent a cable marked "Confidential" to Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the CIA, Centcom and several US embassies, saying that some of the requests, which came as e-mails, "suggested that agencies intend to use the data for targeting purposes." Other requests, according to the cable, "indicate it would be used for 'NO STRIKE' purposes." The cable, issued jointly by the US embassies in Kabul and Islamabad, declared: "We are concerned about providing information gained from humanitarian organizations to military personnel, especially for reasons that remain unclear. Particularly worrisome, this does not seem to us a very efficient way to gather accurate information."
It is also clear from the cables that the ability of US Special Operations forces to operate in Pakistan is viewed as a major development. The US Embassy there notes the potential consequences of the activities leaking: "These deployments are highly politically sensitive because of widely-held concerns among the public about Pakistani sovereignty and opposition to allowing foreign military forces to operate in any fashion on Pakistani soil. Should these developments and/or related matters receive any coverage in the Pakistani or US media, the Pakistani military will likely stop making requests for such assistance."
Such statements might help explain why Ambassador Richard Holbrooke lied when he said bluntly in July: "People think that the US has troops in Pakistan. Well, we don't."
What the WikiLeaks documents make clear is that the handful of cables on US Special Operations activities in Pakistan and Yemen offer a tiny glimpse into one of the darkest corners of current US counterterrorism policy.
Jeremy Scahill
"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws. - Mayer Rothschild
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will" - Frederick Douglass
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will" - Frederick Douglass