14 December 2010

WikiLeaks and the secret world of government

Excerpts from an editorial by David Samuels at The Atlantic online:
The true importance of Wikileaks -- and the key to understanding the motivations and behavior of its founder -- lies not in the contents of the latest document dump but in the technology that made it possible, which has already shown itself to be a potent weapon to undermine official lies and defend human rights. Since 1997, Assange has devoted a great deal of his time to inventing encryption systems that make it possible for human rights workers and others to protect and upload sensitive data. The importance of Assange's efforts to human rights workers in the field were recognized last year by Amnesty International, which gave him its Media Award for the Wikileaks investigation The Cry of Blood - Extra Judicial Killings and Disappearances, which documented the killing and disappearance of 500 young men in Kenya by the police, with the apparent connivance of the country's political leadership.

Yet the difficulties of documenting official murder in Kenya pale next to the task of penetrating the secret world that threatens to swallow up informed public discourse in this country about America's wars. The 250,000 cables that Wikileaks published this month represent only a drop in the bucket that holds the estimated 16 million documents that are classified top secret by the federal government every year. According to a three-part investigative series by Dana Priest and William Arkin published earlier this year in The Washington Post, an estimated 854,000 people now hold top secret clearance - more than 1.5 times the population of Washington, D.C. "The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive," the Post concluded, "that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work."

The result of this classification mania is the division of the public into two distinct groups: those who are privy to the actual conduct of American policy, but are forbidden to write or talk about it, and the uninformed public, which becomes easy prey for the official lies exposed in the Wikileaks documents: The failure of American counterinsurgency programs in Afghanistan, the involvement of China and North Korea in the Iranian nuclear program, the likely failure of attempts to separate Syria from Iran, the involvement of Iran in destabilizing Iraq, the anti-Western orientation of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and other tenets of American foreign policy under both Bush and Obama.

It is a fact of the current media landscape that the chilling effect of threatened legal action routinely stops reporters and editors from pursuing stories that might serve the public interest - and anyone who says otherwise is either ignorant or lying. Every honest reporter and editor in America knows that the fact that most news organizations are broke, combined with the increasing threat of aggressive legal action by deep-pocketed entities, private and public, has made it much harder for good reporters to do their jobs, and ripped a hole in the delicate fabric that holds our democracy together...

2 comments:

  1. Excellent. Re the media/journalism - add in the extra pressure of conforming to the owners' views based on their commercial interests and the relentlessness of producing good work under time pressure...well it's not easy. I also liked your reference to other things Assange has done - this is the first time I've read/heard about the Amnesty International Award. No-one is black or white, and situations are complex - it's a shame there isn't more grown up discussion about these complexities.

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  2. Me again. Anonymous.

    "The failure of American counterinsurgency programs in Afghanistan, the involvement of China and North Korea in the Iranian nuclear program, the likely failure of attempts to separate Syria from Iran, the involvement of Iran in destabilizing Iraq"

    There you ago again.
    Whats with keep kicking Iran when it is America and Israel that are the most destructive forces in the area?



    Re: American counterinsurgency programs in Afghanistan

    Well now. There would not be an "American counterinsurgency program" if there not an insurgency.
    And what is there an insurgency for/about one may ask.
    One mans insurgent is another mans freedom fighter.



    Anyone remember the part how it was Saudis that did 911?

    Anyone remember the part about how Saddam had WMD?

    You do not seem to post things about Israel and their illegal weapons of mass destruction.
    The American proliferation of nuclear weapons in the middle east against how many united nations conventions?


    It is still surprising how that America still manages to put disinformation into an article that is "by definition" anti American.

    Repeat a lie often enough people will start to believe it.

    This article you quote is at heart, anti China, anti Arab and anti North Korea propaganda.
    The only thing they missed was the Saddam Hussein.

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