Will WikiLeaks unravel the American 'secret government'?

[James H. Fetzer]

Stunning and unprecedented! A sure sign we are living in a fascist state!

Library of Congress Blocks Access to Wikileaks 03 Dec 2010 The Library of Congress has blocked access to the Wikileaks site on its staff computers and on the wireless network that visitors use, two sources tell TPM. The library is a governmental institution and serves as the research arm for Congress.


December 4, 2010 by legitgov

[Ed Jewett]

Wiki-Leaks and Plausible Lies - Where Have All The Critical Thinkers Gone?


Joe Quinn
Sott.net
While the revelations in the Wiki-leaks documents about the true nature of the US government and its imperial attitude towards other nations are welcome, I find myself in the strange position of having to agree with Hillary Clinton, David Cameron et al that the leaks won't affect anyone's relations with anyone.

Our leaders are an inherently hypocritical bunch and over the past 10 years, even the most uninformed have come to understand that our leaders have a definite tendency to say one thing and do another. Who doubts that such hardened politicians fully understand that lying to each other is par for the course in the sordid game of modern global governance? As such, why should the public be overly surprised to see confirmation of this in the Wiki-leaks documents? Entertained and even intrigued, but surprised?

I am not saying that there is no value in certain aspects of the documents themselves to the extent that they provide a chance to disseminate government corruption and mendacity to a wide audience, but titillating details such as Gadaffi's buxom 'nurse' is nothing new and, much more importantly, such details are by no means the main focus of the documents themselves.

Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran...

The Wiki-leaks documents need to be considered in a broader context. By all means, alternative news sites should continue to expose American, British and any another government inequity that the documents reveal. But where is the criticism of the rest of the documents that confirm the standard Israeli/American narrative - that Iran poses 'an existentialist threat' to Israel and to 'moderate' Arab states?

Does anyone care that these documents clearly support US and Israeli war-mongering? Does anyone else find that to be astonishing? Where is the critical thought?

The problem is that, when the dust has settled (as it soon will) over all-too-familiar US government attempts to spy on UN officials and the pusillanimity of the British government assuring the Americans that their Iraq invasion inquiry would have a pro-US bias, we will be left with some core details which, far from being refuted or covered up, are being accepted as fact. Details such as:

Iran is the greatest threat to peace in the Middle East. This is a blatant lie as every alternative, anti-war analyst who has studied the facts has declared vociferously for years now. And suddenly, with a widely publicized leak, the mainstream media wants to try and shove it down our throats again? Because it is a "leak" and Assange is being "hunted down" like Osama bin Under-the-bed? What kind of truth has ever gotten this kind of press in all the years since the Fascist take-over by the unelected G.W. Bush?

Iran received missile technology from North Korea that may enable it to attack Europe in a few years. That's pure propaganda, and every one of you alt news analysts and commentators know that. Iran is making its own missiles and, in any case, Iran is entitled to defend itself. You've all been saying that for years, based on hard data and researched facts. All of a sudden, a leak appears and the mainstream media wants to convince us otherwise? And you compare it to Watergate? Did you read Fletcher Prouty's expose on Watergate, how many of the documents were created and planted to be leaked because they served the agenda of the PTB?

Middle Eastern leaders want the US and Israel to attack Iran. How can this not been seen as further US and Israeli propaganda? And what Middle Eastern country in its right mind would want that considering that the entire area will be unfit for human habitation for years afterward?

Tehran used Red Cross ambulances to smuggle arms to Hizb'allah during its war against Israel in 2006 . Even if true, Iran is entitled to help the Lebanese defend themselves against Israeli aggression just like UK helped the U.S. attack Iraq and Afghanistan. Haven't all of you people been saying this for years now?

Iran harbors 'al Qaeda'. Why would this be seen as anything other than more of the tired old US 'al-qaeda' imaginings designed to scare the masses, at home and abroad?

Iran could produce an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of reaching the United States by 2015. And Saddam could 'hit the UK in 45 minutes', remember?

Pakistan continues to support the 'Mumbai terror attack group'. Why no details of David Headley, the CIA agent who planned the Mumbai attacks and who, according to the CIA, 'went rogue'? Again, yeah, right!

And let's not forget previous Wiki-leaks 'dumps' of data, which included nuggets of US and Israeli government nonsense like Iraq really did have WMDs! And there you were thinking that the WMD business was a total lie! Well, guess again, thanks to some of the Wiki-leaks documents, we now know that the US was totally justified in invading Iraq and killing 1.5 million innocent civilians. And if that isn't enough for ya, then just remember...9/11! Bin Laden (who is alive and well according to previous Wiki-leaks documents) killed about 3,000 Americans that day, which leaves the US and Iraq just about even (500 Iraqi lives being equal to one American life). And don't go spouting any spurious conspiracy theories, because Mr Assange is annoyed that such 'false conspiracies" [like 9/11] distract so many people (like you).

As Phyillis Bennis wrote recently on the Huffington Post:

"If you watched only Fox News or some of the outraged-but-gleeful mainstream pundits, you would believe that the documents prove the dangers of Iran's nuclear program and world-wide support for a military attack on Iran. If you read only the Israeli press, you would think the documents provide irrefutable proof that "the entire world is panicked over the Iranian nuclear program."

Phyillis is correct, but here's the problem: a vast number of people do watch only Fox News or one of its affiliates, and what gets said in the Israeli press is very often received with a sympathetic ear across the US media.

So why is no one contesting these very dubious and much more serious claims? These are claims that could be used to justify an attack on Iran and the murder of millions of Iranian civilians?

Yes, the US government is full of two-faced creeps who spy on friend and foe alike, and if the Wiki-leaks documents help to imprint that on the global awareness, then so much the better. But what will it change in the long run? And more importantly, at what price will come the wholesale acceptance of these documents? If, by simply referring to the precise details and the dominant discourse of the documents, I conclude that some aspects serve the goals of peace and public truth but many others serve the goals of the war-mongers in Tel Aviv and Washington, does that mean I hate Whistle-blowers and want to protect the US government? This whole thing is like the well-known ploy of the psychopath to engage the sympathy of their victim by admitting to flaws and failings - even a few seemingly painful admissions - putting the target to sleep thinking they now have the whole confession, all the while they are being set up for a really big con.

Our world is run by people who lie for a living, so let's examine the situation microcosmically and then all you have to do is extract the principle and apply it on a larger scale.

"Our culture agrees on the signs of lying. Ask anyone how to tell if someone is lying and they will tell you that they can tell by "lack of eye contact, nervous shifting, or picking at one's clothes." Psychologist Anna Salter writes with dry humor: "This perception is so widespread I have had the fantasy that, immediately upon birth, nurses must take newborns and whisper in their ears, "Eye contact. It's a sign of truthfulness." [Anna C. Salter, Ph.D.]

The problem is, if there is a psychopath - or those with related characteropathies - who doesn't know how to keep good eye contact when lying, they haven't been born. Eye contact is "universally known" to be a sign of truth-telling. The problem is liars will fake anything that it is possible to fake, so in reality, eye contact is absolutely NOT a sign of truth telling.

Anna Salter writes:

The man in front of me is a Southern good-ole-boy, the kind of man I grew up with and like. If anything, I have a weakness for the kind of Southern male who can "Sam Ervin" you, the Southern lawyer who wears red suspenders in court along with twenty-five-year-old cowboy boots and who turns his accent up a notch when he sees the northern expert witness coming. A "northern city slicker" on the witness stand will elicit the same kind of focused interest that a deer will in hunting season. You can have some very long days in court with men who wear red suspenders and start by telling you how smart you are and how simple and dumb they are.

I survey the man in front of me. I am not in court; I am in prison, and he is not an attorney but a sex offender, and he has bright eyes along with that slow, sweet drawl. He is a big man, slightly balding, and he has - I have to admit there is such a thing - an innocent face. ...

My Southern good-ole-boy certainly knows eye contact is considered a sign of truthfulness. He describes his manner in getting away with close to 100 rapes of adults and children. He tells me:

The manner that I use when I was trying to convince somebody - even though I knew I was lying - I'd look them in the eye, but I wouldn't stare at them. Staring makes people uncomfortable and that tends to turn them away, so I wouldn't stare at them. But look at them in a manner that, you know, "look at this innocent face. How can you believe that I would do something like that?" It helps if you have a good command of the vocabulary where you can explain yourself in a way that is easily understood. Dress nice. Use fluent hand gestures that are not attacking in any way.

It's a whole combination of things. It's not any one thing that you can do. It's a whole combination of things that your body gestures and things that say "Look, I'm telling you the truth, and I don't know what these people are trying to pull. I don't know what they're trying to prove, but I haven't done any of this. I don't know why they're doing this. You can check my records. I've got a good record. I've never been in any trouble like this. And I don't know what's going on. I'm confused."...

As if reading my thoughts, he breaks off: "You don't get this, Anna, do you?" he says. "You think that when I'm asked, "Did I do it? that's when I lie. But I've been lying every day for the last twenty-five years."

The practiced liar: a category of liar that even experts find it difficult to detect.

Problem is, even when dealing with people who are not practiced liars, such as college students who have volunteered for a research study of lying, most observers are not as good as they think in detecting deception. The research shows consistently that most people - even most professional groups such as police and psychologists - have no better than a chance ability to detect deception. Flipping a coin would serve as well.

"If you want to deny something, make sure you've got an element of truth in it. It sounds like it's true, and there are elements of it that are very true that can be checked out, and try to balance it so that it has more truth than lie, so that when it is checked out, even if the lie part does come out, there's more truth there than lie."

This man was good enough that once he got away with stomping out of court in a huff. He was accused by his sister of raping her and molesting her daughter on the same day. He played it as a preposterous charge. His sister, he told the court, had once accused his uncle of abuse. She was well known in the family for making up crazy charges like this. He said he wasn't going to put up with such nonsense and walked out. No one stopped him, and no one ever called him back. The charge just disappeared somehow. He now admits that both charges were true.

It is 'likeability' and charm that he wields as weapons.

The double life is a powerful tactic. There is the pattern of socially responsible behavior in public that causes people to drop their guard, and to turn a deaf ear to disclosures. The ability to charm, to be likable, to radiate sincerity and truthfulness, is crucial to the successful liar - and they practice assiduously.

"Niceness is a decision," writes Gavin De Becker in The Gift of Fear. It is a "strategy of social interaction; it is not a character trait."

Despite the decades of research that have demonstrated that people cannot reliably tell whose lying and who isn't, most people believe they can. There is something so fundamentally threatening about the notion that we cannot really know whether or not to trust someone that it is very difficult to get anyone - clinicians, citizens, even police - to take such results seriously.

Assange on Netanyahu

In a recent Time Magazine interview, Julian Assange stated that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu "is not a naive man" but rather a "sophisticated politician". That's Assange's assessment of a man who is clearly a psychopath. In the same interview Assange said:

"We can see the Israeli Prime Minister 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."

Apart from the fact that he appears to be praising a pathological war criminal, Assange displays an amazing level of naivete. Netanyahu's comment about Middle Eastern leaders making their private opinions public was in reference to the leaked allegation that the Saudi, Jordanian and Emirati governments were privately in favor of "cutting the head of the Iranian snake", something that Netanyahu has been cheer-leading for several years. Despite this, Assange believes that this will lead to "some kind of increase in the peace process in relation to Iran".

Say what?!

But not everyone is fooled. On Wednesday, a senior Turkish official blamed Israel for the Wiki-leaks release. Addressing reporters, Huseyin Celik, deputy leader of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's AKP party, hinted that Israel engineered the leak of hundreds of thousands of United States diplomatic cables as a plot to pressure the Turkish government.

"One has to look at which countries are pleased with these," Celik was quoted as saying. "Israel is very pleased. Israel has been making statements for days, even before the release of these documents."

"Documents were released and they immediately said, 'Israel will not suffer from this.' How did they know that?" Celik asked.

He doesn't even realize that probably many of these documents were created FOR leaking! Again, the reader is referred to Fletcher Prouty's book The Secret Team.

Critical Vs 'Black and White' Thinking

The Wiki-leaks documents that provide evidence for what is already understood should be accepted, the documents that echo what we already know to be US and Israeli propaganda should be understood as just that - US and Israeli propaganda. Is that so hard?

Why are many alternative news writers who railed against similar lies and disinformation when it came from US and Israeli 'Intel reports' now accepting, or ignoring, the same propaganda simply because it comes via Wiki-leaks? Do the Wiki-leaks documents have to be all good or are all bad? Is such black and white thinking ever a good way to discern truth from lies in a world where almost everything has some element of spin? Are we so desperate for a truth-telling hero - like the practiced liar described by Anna Salter above - that we have lost our ability to critically think? What happened to our ability to understand and identify the nuances and subtitles of big government propaganda?

The broad view of Wiki-leaks and its documents, so far, paints a picture of a concerted effort to supplant the alternative, anti-war media with an illusion of truth. As the Western mainstream media continues to reach new heights of mendacity and obfuscation of the truth, an increasing number of ordinary people have been turning to alternative news sites for a more accurate perspective of what is happening on our planet. This has posed a clear threat to those whose positions of influence and power depend on a misinformed population.

The solution to this problem would be the appearance on the scene of an organization that goes one better than the anti-war, alternative media and produces 'smoking gun', officially documented evidence of government lies and deception. Such evidence would, after all, come from the horse's mouth, a veritable admission of guilt from the wrong-doers themselves rather than accusations from third-party alternative news web sites. Re-read Anna Salter's description of the pedophile she was interviewing above to get a real picture of the pathology at work here. The deception, of course, lies not in the release of official documents, but in the use of those documents, which in themselves do not constitute high crimes, as a cover to promote the same big government lies. I submit that, based on the clear evidence, Wiki-leaks is just such an organization and is designed to fulfill just such a role: the dissemination of Plausible Lies.

[Peter Lemkin]

Stunning and unprecedented! A sure sign we are living in a fascist state!

Library of Congress Blocks Access to Wikileaks 03 Dec 2010 The Library of Congress has blocked access to the Wikileaks site on its staff computers and on the wireless network that visitors use, two sources tell TPM. The library is a governmental institution and serves as the research arm for Congress.


December 4, 2010 by legitgov

And for sure these documents won't be in NARA.....Gee, I wonder if at the LOC they cut out the 'verboten parts' in their newspaper and magazine collections?! Must quickly be training or hiring new censors! I wonder if the offending issues of the NYT, for example, will have large black portions or the articles cut out.

This is NOT the country I was born in. Same place on the map, different country....very VERY sad. It will get worse, as they use any excuse to ratchet things up one more notch and wring out all of the freedoms, liberties, rights - even those from that 'piece of old paper' called the Constitution [at least 9 years ago superseded secretly by COG].

Hey, Magda, the window dressing there is great!....better than any other country's Library. We are #1 [at something....:marchmellow:]

If one notes the central reading area of the LOC is perfect for sharpshooters to perch - to eliminate anyone reading verboten materials! toned: They thought ahead!

[Peter Lemkin]

WikiLeaks site's Swiss host dismisses pressure to take it offline

Swiss host Switch says there is 'no reason' why WikiLeaks should be forced off internet, despite French and US demands

Comments (136)
Josh Halliday
guardian.co.uk, Saturday 4 December 2010 20.23 GMT
Article history

WikiLeaks has been fighting to stay online since releasing a cache of sensitive diplomatic cables to five international media organisations. Photograph: WikiLeaks

WikiLeaks received a boost tonight when Switzerland rejected growing international calls to force the site off the internet.


The whistleblowers site, which has been publishing leaked US embassy cables, was forced to switch domain names to WikiLeaks.ch yesterday after the US host of its main website, WikiLeaks.org, pulled the plug following mounting political pressure.


The site's new Swiss host, Switch, today said there was "no reason" why it should be forced offline, despite demands from France and the US. Switch is a non-profit registrar set up by the Swiss government for all 1.5 million Swiss .ch domain names.


The reassurances come just hours after eBay-owned PayPal, the primary donation channel to WikiLeaks, terminated its links with the site, citing "illegal activity". France yesterday added to US calls for all companies and organisations to terminate their relationship with WikiLeaks following the release of 250,000 secret US diplomatic cables.


The Swiss Pirate Party, which registered the WikiLeaks.ch domain name earlier this year on behalf of the site, said Switch had reassured the party that it would not block the site.


An email sent by Denis Simonet, president of the Swiss Pirate Party, to international members of the liberal political group said: "Some minutes ago I got good news: Switch, the registrar for .ch domains, told us that there is no reason to block wikileaks.ch."


Laurence Kaye, leader of the UK-based Pirate Party, tonight told the Guardian: "International Pirate Parties now have an integral role in allowing access to WikiLeaks. I wish some of our other politicians had the same guts.


"We support the WikiLeaks project as access to information is the prerequisite for an informed and engaged democracy."


WikiLeaks has been fighting to stay online since releasing a cache of sensitive diplomatic cables to the Guardian and four other international media organisations. Amazon, the world's largest online retailer, dropped the site from its servers on Thursday after being contacted by staff of Joe Lieberman, chairman of the US Senate's homeland security committee.


Everydns.net, the site's US hosting provider, yesterday forced the site offline for the third time in under a week. A series of "distributed denial of attacks" by unknown online activists still bring the site intermittently to its knees.


WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, described the decision as "privatisation of state censorship" in the US. Everydns.net said the attacks – which have been going on all week – threatened "the stability of the EveryDNS.net infrastructure, which enables access to almost 500,000 other websites".

[Peter Lemkin]

Julian Assange: Wanted by the Empire, Dead or Alive

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN; December 3-5, 2010 - Counterpunch Weekend Edition
http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn12032010.html [1]

The American airwaves quiver with the screams of parlor assassins howling for Julian Assange's head. Jonah Goldberg, contributor to the National Review, asks in his syndicated column, "Why wasn't Assange garroted in his hotel room years ago?" Sarah Palin wants him hunted down and brought to justice, saying: "He is an anti-American operative with blood on his hands."

Assange can survive these theatrical blusters. A tougher question is how he will fare at the hands of the US government, which is hopping mad. The US attorney general, Eric Holder, has announced that the Justice Department and Pentagon are conducting "an active, ongoing criminal investigation" into the latest Assange-facilitated leak under Washington's Espionage Act. Asked how the US could prosecute Assange, a non-US citizen, Holder said, "Let me be clear. This is not saber-rattling," and vowed "to swiftly close the gaps in current US legislation…"

In other words the espionage statute is being rewritten to target Assange, and in short order, if not already, President Obama – who as a candidate pledged "transparency" in government - will sign an order okaying the seizing of Assange and his transport into the US jurisdiction. Render first, fight the habeas corpus lawsuits later.

Interpol, the investigative arm of the International Criminal Court at The Hague, has issued a fugitive notice for Assange. He's wanted in Sweden for questioning in two alleged sexual assaults, one of which seems to boil down to a charge of unsafe sex and failure to phone his date the following day.

This prime accuser, Anna Ardin has, according to Israel Shamir [2], writing on this CounterPunch site, "ties to the US-financed anti-Castro and anti-communist groups. She published her anti-Castro diatribes in the Swedish-language publication Revista de Asignaturas Cubanas put out by Misceláneas de Cuba…Note that Ardin was deported from Cuba for subversive activities."

It's certainly not conspiracism to suspect that the CIA has been at work in fomenting these Swedish accusations. As Shamir reports, "The moment Julian sought the protection of Swedish media law, the CIA immediately threatened to discontinue intelligence sharing with SEPO, the Swedish Secret Service."

The CIA has no doubt also pondered the possibility of pushing Assange off a bridge or through a high window (a mode of assassination favored by the Agency from the earliest days) and has sadly concluded that it's too late for this sort of executive solution.

The irony is that the thousands of diplomatic communications released by WikiLeaks contain no earth-shaking disclosures that undermine the security of the American empire. The bulk of them merely illustrate the well-known fact that in every capital city round the world there is a building known as the U.S. Embassy inhabited by people whose prime function is to vanquish informed assessment of local conditions with swaddling cloths of ignorance and prejudice instilled in them by what passes for higher education in the United States, whose governing elites are now more ignorant of what is really happening in the outside world that at any time in the nation’s history.

The reports in the official press invite us to be stunned at the news that the King of Saudi Arabia wishes Iran was wiped off the map, that the US uses diplomats as spies, that Afghanistan is corrupt, also that corruption is not unknown in Russia! These press reports foster the illusion that U.S. embassies are inhabited by intelligent observers zealously remitting useful information to their superiors in Washington DC . To the contrary, diplomats – assuming they have the slightest capacity for intelligent observation and analysis -- soon learn to advance their careers by sending reports to Foggy Bottom carefully tuned to the prejudices of the top State Department and White House brass, powerful members of Congress and major players throughout the bureaucracies. Remember that as the Soviet Union slid towards extinction, the US Embassy in Moscow was doggedly supplying quavering reports of a puissant Empire of Evil still meditating whether to invade Western Europe!

This is not to downplay the great importance of this latest batch of WikiLeaks. Millions in America and around the world have been given a quick introductory course in international relations and the true arts of diplomacy – not least the third-rate, gossipy prose with which the diplomats rehearse the arch romans à clef they will write when they head into retirement.

Years ago Rebecca West wrote in her novel The Thinking Reed of a British diplomat who, "even when he was peering down a woman's dress at her breasts managed to look as though he was thinking about India." In the updated version, given Hillary Clinton's orders to the State Department, the US envoy, pretending to admire the figure of the charming French cultural attaché, would actually be thinking how to steal her credit card information, obtain a retinal scan, her email passwords and frequent flier number.

There are also genuine disclosures of great interest, some of them far from creditable to the establishment US press. On our CounterPunch site last week Gareth Porter [2] identified a diplomatic cable from last February released by WikiLeaks which provides a detailed account of how Russian specialists on the Iranian ballistic missile program refuted the US suggestion that Iran has missiles that could target European capitals or that Iran intends to develop such a capability. Porter points out that:

"Readers of the two leading US newspapers never learned those key facts about the document. The New York Times and Washington Post reported only that the United States believed Iran had acquired such missiles - supposedly called the BM-25 - from North Korea. Neither newspaper reported the detailed Russian refutation of the US view on the issue or the lack of hard evidence for the BM-25 from the US side.

"The Times, which had obtained the diplomatic cables not from WikiLeaks but from the Guardian, according to a Washington Post story Monday, did not publish the text of the cable. The Times story said the newspaper had made the decision not to publish 'at the request of the Obama administration'. That meant that its readers could not compare the highly distorted account of the document in the Times story against the original document without searching the Wikileaks website."

Distaste among the "official" US press for WikiLeaks has been abundantly apparent from the first of the two big releases of documents pertaining to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The New York Times managed the ungainly feat of publishing some of the leaks while simultaneously affecting to hold its nose, and while publishing a mean-spirited hatchet job on Assange by its reporter John F Burns, a man with a well burnished record in touting the various agendas of the US government.

There have been cheers for Assange and WikiLeaks from such famed leakers as Daniel Ellsberg, but to turn on one's television is to eavesdrop on the sort of fury that Lord Haw-Haw – aka the Irishman William Joyce, doing propaganda broadcasts from Berlin -- used to provoke in Britain in World War II. As Glenn Greenwald wrote in his column on the Salon site:

"On CNN, Wolf Blitzer was beside himself with rage over the fact that the US government had failed to keep all these things secret from him... Then - like the Good Journalist he is - Blitzer demanded assurances that the Government has taken the necessary steps to prevent him, the media generally and the citizenry from finding out any more secrets: 'Do we know yet if they've [done] that fix? In other words, somebody right now who has top secret or secret security clearance can no longer download information onto a CD or a thumb drive? Has that been fixed already?' The central concern of Blitzer - one of our nation's most honored 'journalists' - is making sure that nobody learns what the US Government is up to."

These latest WikiLeaks files contains some 261,000,000 words - about 3,000 books. They display the entrails of the American Empire. As Israel Shamir wrote here last week [2], "The files show US political infiltration of nearly every country, even supposedly neutral states such as Sweden and Switzerland. US embassies keep a close watch on their hosts. They have penetrated the media, the arms business, oil, intelligence, and they lobby to put US companies at the head of the line."

Will this vivid record of imperial outreach in the early 21st century soon be forgotten? Not if some competent writer offers a readable and politically vivacious redaction. But a warning: in November 1979 Iranian students seized an entire archive of the State Department, the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) at the American embassy in Tehran. Many papers that were shredded were laboriously reassembled.

These secrets concerned far more than Iran. The Tehran embassy, which served as a regional base for the CIA, held records involving secret operations in many countries, notably Israel, the Soviet Union, Turkey, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Beginning in 1982, the Iranians published some 60 volumes of these CIA reports and other US government documents from the Tehran archive, collectively entitled Documents From the US Espionage Den. As Edward Jay Epstein, a historian of US intelligence agencies, wrote years ago, "Without a doubt, these captured records represent the most extensive loss of secret data that any superpower has suffered since the end of the Second World War."

In fact the Tehran archive truly was a devastating blow to US national security. It contained vivid portraits of intelligence operations and techniques, the complicity of US journalists with US government agencies, the intricacies of oil diplomacy. The volumes are in some university libraries here. Are they read? By a handful of specialists. The inconvenient truths were swiftly buried – and perhaps the WikiLeaks files will soon fade from memory too, joining the inspiring historical archive of intelligence coups of the left.

I should honor here “Spies for Peace” – the group of direct-action British anarchists and kindred radicals associated with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and Bertrand Russell’s Committee of 100 who, in 1963, broke into a secret government bunker, Regional Seat of Government Number 6 (RSG-6) at Warren Row, near Reading, where they photographed and copied documents, showing secret government preparations for rule after a nuclear war. They distributed a pamphlet along with copies of relevant documents to the press, stigmatizing the “small group of people who have accepted thermonuclear war as a probability, and are consciously and carefully planning for it. ... They are quietly waiting for the day the bomb drops, for that will be the day they take over.” There was a big uproar, and then the Conservative government of the day issued a D-notice forbidding any further coverage in the press. The cops and intelligence services hunted long and hard for the spies for peace, and caught nary a one.

And Assange? Hopefully he will have a long reprieve from premature burial. Ecuador offered him sanctuary until the US Embassy in Quito gave the president a swift command and the invitation was rescinded. Switzerland? Istanbul? Hmmm. As noted above, he should, at the least, view with caution women eagerly inviting his embraces and certainly stay away from overpasses, bridges, and open windows.

In 1953 the CIA distributed to its agents and operatives a killer's training manual (made public in 1997) full of hands-on advice:

"The most efficient accident, in simple assassination, is a fall of 75 feet or more onto a hard surface. Elevator shafts, stair wells, unscreened windows and bridges will serve... The act may be executed by sudden, vigorous [excised] of the ankles, tipping the subject over the edge. If the assassin immediately sets up an outcry, playing the 'horrified witness', no alibi or surreptitious withdrawal is necessary."

[Peter Lemkin]

WikiLeaks cables are dispatches from a beleaguered America in imperial retreat

Envoys provide devastating truths, but world can admire Washington's patient mission to avert nuclear apocalypse

Comments (79)

Neal Ascherson
guardian.co.uk, Saturday 4 December 2010 21.30 GMT
Article history

There's more to the WikiLeaks dispatches than leaks. Look behind them, at the writers, and you see the loyal rearguard of America: an imperial power in retreat.

There was a tradition in our Foreign Office that a retiring ambassador could blow off steam. In a final, exuberant telegram to Whitehall, he could say exactly what he thought of the country he was leaving, and of the folly of the Foreign Office in ignoring his advice.The best telegrams were treasured by young diplomats. But they began to leak into the press. And a few years ago this privilege was suppressed.

Now the WikiLeaks eruption has smothered the world with the secret thoughts of the state department's ambassadors. Tmorrow's Observer, focusing on China, reveals fascinating data about Chinese "muscle-flexing, triumphalism and assertiveness" (as the US ambassador put it). But with the cables comes a snapshot of the state department itself. It's a unique window on America's search – with diminishing confidence – for a coherent, inspiring account of what the US is trying to achieve in the world.

These diplomats who didn't want us to know their thoughts are not mere cogs in an imperial machine. Many emerge as wise, courageous, patient, likeable men and women– especially the women, who lead so many US embassies. Their view of their host countries is not rosy. You begin to absorb their vision, in which America is the only adult in a world of grasping, corrupt, unreliable teenagers who cannot be abandoned to their own weakness.

The test of an ambassador is telling truth to those who wield the power – having the guts to tell the department that its plan is a delusion. Here is Anne Patterson in Islamabad, discussing Pakistan's support for "terrorist and extremist groups" and telling Washington "there is no chance that Pakistan will view enhanced assistance levels in any field as sufficient compensation for abandoning support to these groups". She states bleakly: "The relationship is one of co-dependency, we grudgingly admit – Pakistan knows the US cannot afford to walk away; the US knows Pakistan cannot survive without our support."

Not all the dispatch-writers are that sound. In Georgia, ambassador John F Tefft was assuring his employers only hours before the bombardment of Tskhinvali that nothing of the sort could happen: that was what they wanted to hear. But then we find Margaret Scobey in Cairo, warning Clinton ("Madame Secretary") ahead of her meeting with Egypt's foreign minister that "he may not raise human rights… political reform or democratisation, but you should". Or Tatiana Gfoeller, ambassador in Kyrgyzstan, who reported with amused disgust the ravings of Prince Andrew as he attacked "these (expletive) journalists, especially from the Guardian, who poke their noses everywhere". There's irony there. Those same journalists would print her own secret words and touch off a palace uproar in London.

Britain doesn't cut a pretty figure in the cables. On the rare occasions when US policies – on cluster bomb storage, on rendition flights through UK territory – meet challenges from the UK, British politicians are assumed to be thinking about voters rather than principles. Monotonously, Ambassador Louis Susman in London writes off Gordon Brown's criticisms of Washington policies as posturing "driven by domestic politics".

And the devastating pages about the "special relationship", published in yesterday's Guardian, reveal a trembling British obsequiousness which the Americans find absurd, even embarrassing. Only last year Richard LeBaron, deputy chief of mission in London, said that the British attitude "would often be humorous, if it were not so corrosive". The Tory cringe, as party leaders prepared to take power, is shown to be as low as the Labour cringe when Tony Blair rushed to offer Britain as a so-called "equal partner" in invading Iraq. William Hague, as shadow foreign secretary, assured the embassy in confidence he considered the US his "other country" and promised "a pro-American regime".

This degree of toadying clearly poses problems for the Americans. The dispatches repeat genuine appreciation of Britain's unique loyalty as an ally. But LeBaron was typically shrewd to call this behaviour "corrosive".

The American diplomats are smart enough to know that buttering up the Americans is a routine which incoming British leaders think they have to perform, and that most of them privately resent it. They do it largely for reasons the state department understands only too well. Britain's "independent" nuclear deterrent flies the threadbare rags which are all that remain of the United Kingdom's lost "Great Power" status. But its manufacture and use are in reality dependent on the supply of American technology and American strategic decisions.

But, between the lines, the leaks are telling a bigger, more ominous story. These are exclusively state department documents – not the thoughts of other American power centres with an interest in foreign policy. And these diplomats' reports reveal how far their department has lost prestige and influence. It's a far cry from the days when foreign service giants like Averell Harriman or George Kennan, in the Moscow embassy or in Washington, could issue judgments which would sway a president. Now, though, other agencies – hairier and more shadowy – take it as read that they can require state department officers to carry out their leg work. It's enough to look at the instructions, pretty clearly from the CIA, for US diplomats to spy on their colleagues at the United Nations and even on the secretary-general's office.

Weren't these foreign service men and women humiliated, when they were asked to record the credit card numbers and frequent flyer details of those they worked with? Who asked the embassy in Buenos Aires last year to find out how President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner was "managing her nerves and anxiety", what pills she was taking, and "how does she calm down when distressed"? And "what is the status" of her husband's gastro-intestinal ailment and "what are the most common triggers to [his] anger?" There are spies based in most British embassies, usually with "attaché" cover, but at least MI6 does not order diplomats to collect the intimate personal details of its targets. The professions are kept reasonably separate. So they should be.

It's true that the US system of selecting ambassadors has sometimes been baffling to foreigners. Rich businessmen who donate millions to parties have traditionally been rewarded with embassies (the British, less riskily, reward them with peerages). But these dispatches show that the intellectual quality of the "career diplomat" ambassadors remains pretty high. It would be a disaster for the US if the state department became a "penetrated system" allowing other agencies which, since the Reagan presidency, have progressively pushed state aside to gain the ear of the White House.

Enormous damage was done in the run-up to the Iraq war. As Niall Ferguson puts it in the latest edition of his book Colossus, "responsibility for the postwar occupation of Iraq was seized by the defence department, intoxicated as its principals became in the heat of their blitzkrieg". The state department had laboured hard on long-term plans for the occupation. as the fighting ended. But state had to stand by and see its work junked by Donald Rumsfeld and his neocon team around the Pentagon, who convinced President George W Bush that the Iraqis would simply welcome the Americans as liberators.and romp forward to liberal democracy. The tone of the leaked dispatches suggests thatthis shattering blow to the standing and self-confidence of state has still not been repaired.

Behind all these diligent reports glows an evening landscape, in which a declining empire has lost its way. When communism collapsed, the US expected to become the unchallenged global superpower. But instead the US instantly lost control of countless nations and movements stampeding away from cold war discipline. Paradoxically, it was in those cold war years that America had been in charge of most of the world, mostly by consent, and knew why it was in charge. Now that world has burst into a thousand pieces: all sharp, many of them unstable, some of them fearfully dangerous. And the certainty of mission has gone.

So what is America for in the 21st century? The report-writers are confident about its superior wealth, though it is "banked" by China. They are sure about America's superior military strength, though only a fraction of that strength can be brought to bear in "insurgency" wars. But they are strikingly less sure about America's aims.

In the 1990s the "New American Century" neocons proposed: let's use that wealth and power to act as the world empire we really are! Few traces of that remain. Several ambassadors deny they are playing any great game against Russia or China, because great games are played by empires and the US isn't one. Yet several others indignantly reject the idea of "zones of influence" – no firewall must keep out the benevolent "soft power" influence of America. US policy is stuck aground in muddy places: Israel and Pakistan, Iraq and Afghanistan, Cuba and the Caucasus. If it could extract itself from these, would it simply drift "rudderless" (as the ambassador said about Gordon Brown)?

Perhaps not. Two aims do recur obsessively through these reports. One, rooted in American history, is that the independence of new nations must be honoured and protected. The other is the struggle against nuclear proliferation. Preventing apocalypse has become more important than striving for world leadership. This is a diplomacy clearer about what it doesn't want than what it does.

That's a "mission" we can salute. A British ambassador said: "Our duty at the Foreign Office has been to cover Britain's retreat from greatness and to prevent that retreat turning into a rout." One day the state department may say the same about its service to America.

[Peter Lemkin]

Read and Weep USG! Guardian poll on who'd contribute or not to Wikileaks!

Also, Within the last hour, Mark Stevens, Assange's British lawyer told the BBC that Wikileaks was withholding and 'infternet thermonuclear weapon' should anything happen to Assange or Wikileaks....quite a strong statement, I'd say! Them's fighting words!!!! :fight:

[Magda Hassan]

Good for them. I'm pleased they have some insurance up their sleeve. They may well need it the way the dirty tricks are being played against him and Wikileaks. I hope Julian is surrounded by good friends right now. It must be very stressful for him. Poor guy has probably gone right off a quick refreshing nookie too. hakehands:

[Peter Lemkin]

Analysis: Impact of Wikileaks' US cable publications

The US cables released in stages by Wikileaks and several newspapers have caused a stir around the world. Anatol Lieven, professor in the War Studies Department of King's College, London, examines the impact.

Wikileaks are like peanuts - absolutely addictive, but in the end curiously unsatisfying.

In truth, not much has emerged that had not already been leaked to the media in one form or another by US diplomats, to serve either US agendas or battles over policy in Washington.

It is hardly news that US officials privately despise Hamid Karzai and believe that his family are deeply involved in the heroin trade, nor that they see the Russian administration as profoundly corrupt and criminal - nor that the Pakistani government, while denouncing US drone attacks on its territory in public, acquiesces in them in private and even welcomes them when they target rebels against Pakistan.

Some of the detail is, however, fascinating, even if it only extends what we knew already.

For example, the fact that Pakistan's President Zardari wants his sister to succeed him if he is assassinated emphasises still further the profoundly dynastic character of most of South Asian "democracy".

The biggest single revelation is that the Arab Gulf monarchies would prefer a US or Israeli attack on Iran to the possibility of that country developing nuclear weapons (though they would never of course publicly support an attack).

Their deep fear of Iran and Iran's nuclear programme was of course well known, but many analysts (including myself) had believed that their fear of Iran's reaction to a US attack, and of unrest among their own peoples, would outweigh this.

This news endorses the arguments of neo-conservatives in the US, who always argued that the Arab monarchies themselves privately favoured attacking Iran.

Not much emerged that had not already been leaked

On the other hand, it also emphasises the deep gulf between these monarchies and their own peoples, who - according to opinion polls - strongly oppose an attack on Iran, and the extremely two-faced approach of these states to their relationship with the US and Israel, and indeed to the world in general.

Here, Wikileaks may be of real importance: partly by increasing Iranian hostility to the Gulf States - though the Iranians were already aware of the Gulf princes' fear of them - but even more importantly by increasing Arab popular contempt for the Gulf monarchies.
Striking dislike

On other issues, US disappointment with the British performance in Helmand is deeply depressing for the British, but was already known and indeed echoes condemnation of the planning and resourcing of the campaign from within Britain's own military.

Much worse - though also well-known - is the fresh evidence of obsessive British grovelling in Washington, which even US officials find ludicrous.

Britons can moreover comfort themselves with the fact that US disdain for us is as nothing to their contempt for another close US ally, namely Italy.

US dislike of Berlusconi (a close US ally over Iraq) is striking, as is the belief that Berlusconi and his cronies may be profiting personally from close relations with the Putin administration in Russia.

Here however a note of caution is in order. Despite the impression given by much of the media, just because US diplomats believe something and report their views in private does not necessarily make it true.

This is above all true of course where the officials concerned have strong personal views, which in turn reflect those of the establishment in general.

This is true, for example, concerning the comments about Russia. The general picture of a highly corrupt and brutal state is unfortunately true.

However, the portrayal of a complete merger between the state and organised crime is exaggerated.

The attribution of the murder of Alexander Litvinenko in London to the Russian secret service is highly plausible. The idea that it was personally ordered by Putin is not. That is not how these things work, even in Russia.

I happen to have listened on a number of occasions in public and private to one of the US officials who is extensively quoted in Wikileaks.

In the cables, US diplomats expressed strong personal views

I'd believe what he says about Russia if he had a supporting statement signed by St Peter and at least seven other apostles - not otherwise.
Sensibilities

Finally, there is the wider question as to whether such leaks are a good or bad thing. After careful thought and with certain reservations, I'd have to say that on balance they are good.

On the security threat which has so often been cited as an objection, it seems that Wikileaks have taken care to exclude anything that can endanger specific US agents or actions.

Another objection is that for the need for confidentiality in diplomacy - so that diplomats can express candid views to their home governments without fearing that they will be spread all over the media.

This is a much stronger argument, but in the end it is outweighed - in the West, not obviously in Russia - by the fact that we are after all supposed to be democracies, and our electorates have the democratic right to know more than they have done in recent years about the conduct of their government's foreign policy.

Far too much misinformation and outright lying has surrounded the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Overall, we in the West now live in an atmosphere of security hysteria and obsessive secrecy that would have filled our ancestors with horror.

If the threat of more Wikileaks releases makes this less likely in future, so much the better.

As to the effects on the tender sensibilities of Silvio Berlusconi, Vladimir Putin and Hamid Karzai of private US official opinions of them - well, how very tragic.

The more these people know of how the outside world regards them the better for their countries. From this point of view, Wikileaks might almost be seen as rather a good way for a US administration to pass on candid messages that it could not possibly deliver officially.

[David Guyatt]

He also made it clear that the Uk police aren't rushing with the Swedish request for Assenge -- which is, he said, a demand for interview not an arrest warrant. he added that this is strange because Assange has offered to be interviewed by the Swedish prosecutor at Sweden's UK Embassy.

In other words everyone knows it's politically motivated, and the lawyer has little doubt that he'll be able to successfully fight any extradition order.

More interesting was this from your above post:

Asked how the US could prosecute Assange, a non-US citizen, Holder said, "Let me be clear. This is not saber-rattling," and vowed "to swiftly close the gaps in current US legislation…"

Very curious. How can US domestic law impact internationally if foreign nations follow international law (even though we know the US doesn't) and will not extradite? Assange is too high profile to secretly render -- the fallout would be unprecedented and massive. All in all, it sounds very much to me as "sabre rattling".