Time for an exploration of some of the continuing myths, falsehoods, unsupported claims, and just plain nonsense surrounding the November 28 release by Wikileaks of, as of today, 1,269 U.S. State Department cables.
“President Obama supports responsible, accountable, and open government at home and around the world, but this reckless and dangerous action runs counter to that goal. By releasing stolen and classified documents, WikiLeaks has put at risk not only the cause of human rights but also the lives and work of these individuals.” — Robert Gibbs, Nov. 28, 2010
Actually, many of the cables published so far reveal U.S. officials either directly involved in, or trying to cover up, seriously anti-democratic and inhumane policies, actions, or behavior. The cables reveal, furthermore, that U.S. officials have lied and misled the American public about policies and actions that not only endangered innocent lives, but destroyed them.
- On December 2, The Guardian revealed that foreign contractors working with DynCorp, a U.S. company, bought drugs and hired young Afghan “dancing” boys to perform at wild parties for the Afghan police they were training, and that Afghanistan’s Minister of the Interior had insisted that the U.S. put pressure on a journalist who was writing about the events not to publish her article or an accompanying video of the parties. A local Houston paper (DynCorp has a big corporate facility in Fort Worth) writes, “According to most reports, over 95 percent of [Dyncorp’s] $2 billion annual revenue comes from US taxpayers.”
- A Wikileaks-released cable from January of this year confirmed that an air strike in Yemen that killed dozens of civilians was carried out by the United States, not by Yemen, as had been claimed by the Yemeni government. In the cable, the president of Yemen (Ali Abdullah Saleh) told Gen. David Petraeus that Yemen would “continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours.” The deputy prime minister of Yemen responded to Saleh’s promise by laughingly saying he had just “lied” by telling his country’s Parliament that “the bombs in Arhab, Abyan, and Shebwa were American-made but deployed by the ROYG [Republic of Yemen Government].”
- The cables also confirm that reports of a secret U.S.-conducted war in Pakistan — something the U.S. government has long denied — are true. Jeremy Scahill, who has been investigating and reporting this story for at least a year, writes, “… 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. … 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.”
- While Americans were being publicly assured by their government that the war against drug cartels in Mexico was making great progress due to Mexico’s “unprecedented cooperation,” the U.S. ambassador and deputy ambassador to Mexico were expressing their deep concerns in private cables that “poorly trained Mexican soldiers and a federal police force hobbled by corruption were failing to slow the surging violence.”
- Nowhere is the hypocrisy and irony of Robert Gibbs’ pious concern for Cablegate’s effect on “the cause of human rights” more glaring, however, than in the group of cables exchanged between U.S. and Spanish officials in which the former pressured the latter to call off legal investigations into the Bush administration’s torture and abuse of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, at C.I.A. black site interrogation centers in Europe and Asia, and at the hands of other governments as the result of the U.S. policy of “rendering” detainees to countries notorious for using torture.
More myth-busting to come.
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