Watson Video: Meet the New Boss
The military-industrial complex is back.
Paul Joseph Watson is back with a new short video, this time to warn us that, with the possible ascension of Joe Biden to the White House, "the neo-liberal war machine is back!" Don't miss this video below, delivered in Watson's inimitable style:
In bipartisan vote: US House approves record $741 billion military spending bill
The
overwhelming bipartisan vote by the House of Representatives Tuesday evening to
approve the largest military budget in American history demonstrates the
reality of capitalist politics. Democrats and Republicans are supposedly at
each other’s throats over an array of social and political issues, but they are
entirely in agreement on funding the world’s largest and most lethal military
machine.
The
House vote for the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) was by a massive
margin, 335–78. Democrats supported passage by 195–37. Republicans supported
passage by 140–40. Every leader of the House Democrats backed passage: Speaker
Nancy Pelosi, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, Majority Whip James Clyburn. They
were joined by the top Republicans: Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Minority
Whip Steve Scalise and the ranking Republican on the House Armed Services
Committee, the co-sponsor of the massive bill, Mac Thornberry of Texas.
The
margin was far more than the two-thirds required to override a threatened Trump
veto, although it is not clear that Trump will actually follow up on his tweets
demanding two changes in the bill, neither relevant to its basic purposes.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has already said the Senate will pass
the NDAA in the next few days. The margin is likely to be even more decisive
than in the House.
While rubber-stamping the largest-ever Pentagon budget, the
House and Senate remain locked in a protracted stalemate which has blocked the
payment of a single dollar of federal supplemental unemployment insurance since
the benefit expired last July 31.
The $741 billion for the Pentagon is approximately six times as
much as the $121 billion in unemployment benefits paid out to 60 million
workers since the coronavirus pandemic struck.
The
goal of the NDAA, according to its preamble, is to achieve “irreversible
momentum in the implementation of the National Defense Strategy” spelled out by
the Pentagon in 2018, which identified “strategic competition” with Russia and
China, not terrorism, as the “preeminent challenge” of US military policy. This
includes, according to the various subdivisions of the massive bill, achieving
“Superiority in the Air”, “Superiority on the Seas,” “Superiority on the Land,”
and, in keeping with the demands of Trump, “Superiority in Space.”
It
is not hard to imagine what the rest of the world is to think of this all-out
US drive for military power “uber alles”: China, Russia and imperialist powers
like Germany, Britain, France and Japan are all engaged in military build-ups
to match that in America, bringing ever closer the danger of an uncontrolled
military clash between great powers, most of them nuclear armed.
Well
short of such an apocalypse, the arms race involves an unforgivable squandering
of economic resources needed to meet social concerns such as education, health
care, alleviating poverty and retirement security.
One
of the largest single components of the Pentagon budget is Overseas Contingency
Operations (OCO), funded to the tune of $69 billion. This is the spending for
ongoing military operations where US forces are deployed: primarily
Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, as well as the Persian Gulf, where vast naval and air
assets are arrayed against Iran. The OCO also covers active drone missile
warfare operations across Central Asia, the Middle East and North Africa.
Democratic
and Republican leaders on the committees overseeing Pentagon policies and
military budgets gave unanimous support to the NDAA, boasting that the military
budget has passed Congress by huge majorities for 59 straight years, and the
Fiscal 2021 budget will be number 60.
When
it comes to the most critical institution of the capitalist state, there is not
even a two-party system in America, there is only one party: the party of the
military-intelligence apparatus, which is required both to assert US
imperialist interests around the world and to defend the financial aristocracy
against the looming threat of social disorder and class conflict at home.
This is because despite all its declarations,
the Democratic Party is not a party of workers. It, as Biden’s transition team
attests, is a party of Wall Street, big banks, Amazon, and
the military-industrial complex.
Amazon
is entangled not only with Wall Street, but also with the US military and
intelligence apparatus. Amazon was awarded a $600 million contract with the CIA
in 2013, followed by a $10 billion contract with the Department of Defense last
year to move government data onto the cloud. Meanwhile, Amazon’s
facial-identification software “Rekognition” is being marketed to federal and
local police.
Biden names
national security team of right-wing militarists
President-elect
Joe Biden sent a clear message to the world and to the American people with the
first announcement of the top appointees to his cabinet and White House staff:
the number one priority of the incoming Democratic administration is to build a
US-led front of imperialist powers in preparation for stepped up military
pressure and outright war on Russia and China.
All
six of the appointments announced Monday in press releases—the nominees
themselves will be introduced to the public later today—are in the sphere of
foreign policy and national security. All are veterans of the
Obama-Biden administration, and many were confirmed in those earlier positions
by a Republican-controlled Senate led by Mitch McConnell, demonstrating that
Biden intends to form a government entirely acceptable to the Republican right.
Former U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Tony Blinken speaks
during a news conference in Kiev, Ukraine, Friday, March 6, 2015. (AP
Photo/Sergei Chuzavkov)
The
six officials named Monday include:
Antony
Blinken, secretary
of state: Blinken is a long-time Biden national security aide in both the US
Senate and during Biden’s vice presidency, and he was deputy secretary of state
in 2015-2016.
Jake
Sullivan, national
security adviser: Sullivan succeeded Blinken as national security adviser to
Vice President Biden, as well as serving as chief of staff to Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton.
Avril
Haines, director of
national intelligence: Haines was on Biden’s staff at the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee, then on the Obama-Biden National Security Council before
serving two years as deputy director of the CIA in 2015-2016.
Alexander
Mayorkas, secretary
of homeland security: a Cuban-born son of immigrants, Mayorkas is a career
domestic security official who was deputy secretary of the Department of
Homeland Security (DHS) in the Obama administration, which deported more
immigrants than any previous government.
Linda
Thomas-Greenfield,
ambassador to the United Nations: the highest ranking African American in the
career foreign service, Thomas-Greenfield was named ambassador to Liberia by
George W. Bush, then State Department personnel chief under Obama and later
assistant secretary for African Affairs. She was forced out by Trump in 2017
and became a counselor with the Albright-Stonebridge Group, a foreign policy
think tank for Democrats headed by former Secretary of State Madeline Albright.
John
Kerry, special
presidential envoy for climate: the former senator, presidential candidate and
secretary of state, now 76, co-chaired Biden’s climate change task force along
with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He will head a US effort to
rejoin the Paris climate accord.
The first and most obvious fact about all six nominees is that
they are dedicated defenders of American imperialism and the interests of Wall
Street. Several are multi-millionaires, while all are comfortably within the
top tier financially. Blinken, for example, is the son of a founder of Warburg
Pincus investment bank, Donald Blinken, who was for 12 years chairman of the
board of the State University of New York.
For
all the hosannas in the media over the “diversity” of these initial
appointees—one African American, one Hispanic, two women—these facets of their
identities are entirely irrelevant. It doesn’t matter to the victim of torture
in a CIA secret prison that the torturer (or her boss in Washington) is female.
It doesn’t matter to refugee children separated from their parents by
immigration agents that the DHS secretary is Hispanic. It doesn’t matter to the
victims of US military aggression that the diplomat who defends this violence
before the world is black.
The
emphasis on diversity is used to distract from the reactionary character of the
foreign policy orientation of the incoming Biden administration, which his
apologists seek to disguise using the skin color, gender and national origin of
the personnel who will carry it out.
There
has been little discussion in the media of the significance of Biden choosing,
in the midst of a nationwide and worldwide public health catastrophe that has
already taken the lives of a quarter million Americans, to announce his foreign
policy team first. If victory over coronavirus was the number one priority, as
Biden claimed during the fall campaign, why not announce those who will head up
the Department of Health and Human Services and other agencies with the main
responsibility for the fight against the pandemic?
This
is a signal that the real point of difference between the Democrats and Trump
is not his catastrophic performance in relation to COVID-19. While Trump now
openly embraces “herd immunity” and dismisses the death toll as
inconsequential, the Democrats will pursue essentially the same policy, and
Biden has flatly rejected any new lockdown of the US economy.
Ever
since Trump took office, the focus of Democratic Party opposition has been on
foreign policy, particularly Trump’s allegedly “soft” line on Russia and his
pullout, albeit largely rhetorical, from US commitments to Syria, Iraq and
Afghanistan. Now that Biden expects to be in control of US foreign policy in
less than 60 days, he is demonstrating that this will be the initial focus of
policy changes.
BLOG EDITOR: THE WASHINGTON POST IS OWNED BY BIDEN
CRONY JEFF BEZOS.
Both
major pro-Democratic Party newspapers emphasized this in their coverage of the
Biden team’s rollout. The Washington
Post wrote, “Biden is planning to prioritize foreign
policy as a major pillar in his administration, with vows to reassemble global
alliances and insert the United States into a more prominent position on the
world stage.”
The New
York Times was even blunter, identifying China as the main target of
the new administration. In a front-page profile, the Times described
Blinken as “a defender of global alliances” and said that he “will try to
coalesce skeptical international partners into a new competition with China…”
It identified trade in the Indo-Pacific region, technology investments, and
Africa as areas in which the US would be “competing with China.”
Other
profiles have noted that Blinken and Biden were generally aligned on foreign
policy issues during the Obama administration, except on two occasions—the US
attack on Libya, and US policy towards Syria—where Blinken favored more
aggressive US intervention and Biden was more cautious.
The
two were completely in step in relation to Ukraine, where Blinken played a key
public role in turning the Crimean secession and reunification with Russia into
a major international crisis. Blinken was the main US spokesman advocating
heavy sanctions on Russia, to punish not only the Putin government, but also
the population of the country as a whole. In a speech at the time, he said
sanctions were needed to “demonstrate to the Russian people that there is a
very hefty fine for supporting international criminals like” Putin.
Of
the other appointees, Avril Haines is also a close personal associate of Biden,
serving on the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when he was
chairman, then moving to the National Security Council in the Obama-Biden White
House before her two years at the CIA. After
leaving the government when Trump came in, Haines joined Blinken at the newly
formed WestExec Partners, a national security think tank peddling advice to US
corporations. Another partner was Michele Fluornoy, the former
Pentagon official under Obama who is widely expected to be Biden’s choice as
secretary of defense.
Late
Monday, after the rollout of the group that Biden called the “crux” of his
national security team, the Biden transition revealed that his next major
cabinet pick would be former Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen to serve as
Treasury secretary. This underscores the
absolute subservience of the incoming administration to Wall Street, since
Yellen was identified with the Fed policy of unrestrained opening of the
financial spigots to support the financial markets during the 2008-2009 Wall
Street crash.
Yellen
was a top Fed official from 2004 on, working with then-chairman Ben Bernanke,
moving up to vice chair in 2009 and appointed by Obama to succeed Bernanke in
2013. Trump declined to reappoint her to a second term in 2017.
Wall Street,
Republicans and militarists back Biden campaign
Anyone who wants to know what type of policies will be
pursued by a Biden administration in the event the Democrats win the November 3
presidential election has only to look at the social and political forces that
are rallying to his campaign.
BLOG EDITOR: BIDEN WAS ENDORSED VERY EARLY BY WAR PROFITEER
AND PARTNER FOR RED CHINA SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN.
They include Wall Street, prominent Republicans and
veterans of the Obama national security team.
Thanks to strong support from big business, the
presidential campaign of the former vice president outraised President Trump’s
reelection campaign in June, according to figures announced by the two
campaigns last week. Joe Biden raked in $141 million, while Trump’s campaign
took in $131 million.
It was the second consecutive month that Biden collected
more in campaign contributions than Trump, following a $6 million edge in May,
$80.8 million to $74 million, according to reports filed with the Federal
Election Commission.
The Trump campaign still leads in cash in the bank, with
$295 million on hand as of July 1, as it had few expenses during the Republican
primaries, where Trump had only token opposition. Biden’s campaign was
effectively broke at the time of his breakthrough victories in the Super
Tuesday primaries on March 3, but he now has amassed a war chest of at least
$125 million, according to published estimates.
ActBlue, the online fundraising vehicle for the Democratic
Party as a whole, took in $392 million in June, shattering all previous
records, the bulk of it in smaller donations and contributions from first-time
donors. This is an indication of the widespread popular hostility to Trump,
exacerbated by his vitriolic attacks on the mass protests against police
violence that took place throughout the month, as well as his refusal to take
any serious action to stem the coronavirus pandemic.
BLOG EDITOR: THE RICH KNOW WHO WILL SERVE THEM BEST! ALL
BILLIONAIRES ARE DEMOCRATS. THE GREATEST TRANSFER OF WEALTH TO THE
RICH IN AMERICAN HISTORY OCCURRED DURING THE BANKSTER REGIME OF
OBAMA-BIDEN-HOLDER.
But a major factor in Biden’s fundraising surge has been a
series of virtual events featuring former President Obama, Senator Elizabeth
Warren and Senator Kamala Harris, at which wealthy contributors were invited to
give the maximum donation of $5,600 directly to Biden as well as much larger
sums to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the political action
committee favored by the Biden campaign, Priorities USA, which expects to spend
$200 million by itself to support his election.
Under the terms of an agreement between the Biden campaign
and the DNC, the Biden Victory Fund can receive checks as large as $620,600
from wealthy donors. The money is then distributed in smaller amounts to the
campaign, the DNC and various state parties in order to comply with campaign
finance regulations.
According to figures released this week by the Center for
Responsive Politics, Wall Street in particular is favoring Biden’s campaign
over Trump’s. The group found that Biden has raised $52.4 million from the
finance, insurance and real estate industries, of which $32.2 million came from
“securities and investment.”
Trump raised $33.5 million from the broader category of
finance, insurance and real estate. He was competitive with Biden among the
real estate moguls, who view Trump as one of their own, but trailed badly, with
only $7.8 million, from the “securities and investment” subcategory.
In other words, Wall
Street favored Biden by better than four to one, and Biden’s $23
million lead among the financial elite accounted for more than his entire $16
million edge over Trump in fundraising in May and June.
Along with the support of the stock exchange and financial
institutions, Biden is winning support from sections of the Republican Party.
This includes the well publicized Lincoln Project, established by former
Republican campaign operatives Reed Galen, John Weaver, Rick Wilson and Steve
Schmidt, with the support of other former party officials like Jennifer Horn,
former chair of the New Hampshire Republican Party, and George Conway, a
prominent Republican lawyer and husband of Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway.
The Lincoln Project began running
television and internet commercials denouncing Trump from a right-wing foreign
policy standpoint, criticizing him as soft on China and Russia. One ad,
released after the New York Times launched its fabricated
and unsubstantiated charge that Russia paid bounties to Taliban fighters to
kill American soldiers in Afghanistan, features a former Navy SEAL who attacks
Trump for not ordering military action to kill Russians. The ad is titled
“Betrayal.”
BLOG EDITOR: BOTH BIDEN AND GEORGE W BUSH ARE GLOBALIST FOR
OPEN BORDERS AND ENDLESS WAR. THE BUSH FAMILY, LONG PARTNERED WITH THE 9-11
INVADING SAUDIS, STARTED TWO WARS AGAINST IRAQ WHICH ARE STILL FILLING THEIR
POCKETS.
Another political action committee, “43 Alumni for Biden,”
consists of hundreds of former officials in the Republican administration of
George W. Bush (the 43rd US president). They declare they are “choosing country
over party” in the November election, stating: “We believe that a Biden
administration will adhere to the rule of law ... and restore dignity and
integrity to the White House.” As a Super PAC, the group can raise unlimited
sums of money to run ads attacking Trump or boosting Biden.
The final component in the rapidly coalescing coalition of
reactionaries supporting the Biden campaign consists of former
military-intelligence officials of the Obama administration, who have made a
killing in the lucrative business of “strategic consulting” and now hope to
return to power in a Biden administration. Several of them, including former
deputy defense secretary Michele Flournoy and former deputy national security
adviser and deputy secretary of state Anthony Blinken, have signed on as
Biden’s top national security advisers.
A remarkable article
in The American Prospect—a liberal publication that supports
Biden against Trump—makes a devastating exposure of these militarists for
Biden, under the headline, “How Biden’s Foreign Policy Team Got Rich.”
It documents the creation of a strategic consulting firm
called WestExec Advisors (named after West Executive Avenue, the street outside
the West Wing of the White House in Washington D.C.). WestExec was founded by
two lesser operatives, Sergio Aguirre, former chief of staff to Samantha Power,
UN ambassador under Obama, and Nitin Chadda, a former aide to Obama Secretary
of Defense Ashton Carter.
These two recruited Flournoy and Blinken to serve as the
group’s biggest “names.” Flournoy was widely expected to become secretary of
defense if Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election and she is once again at the
top of the list for Pentagon boss under Biden.
Under Trump, Flournoy served on the
Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board
and the CIA director’s External Advisory Board, before leaving once the 2020
presidential campaign heated up. She is a notorious warmonger, and The
American Prospect article details her role in
advocating continued US military support to Saudi Arabia in its war in Yemen,
which has resulted in $3 billion in weapons contracts for Raytheon. WestExec
principal Robert Work, a former deputy defense secretary, is a member of
Raytheon’s board of directors.
WestExec quickly made a splash in Washington with its
launch party attended by top former Obama national security aides such as Susan
Rice, Tom Donilon and Denis McDonough. It lined up a list of clients so potent
that neither WestExec nor the Biden campaign would release the names, for fear
of exposing the fact that Biden’s foreign policy advisory group is a wholly
owned subsidiary of the big military contractors.
One particularly noxious principal at
WestExec is former Deputy CIA Director Avril Haines, who, as The
American Prospect put it, “helped design Obama’s program of using
drones for extrajudicial killings.” In June, the Biden campaign announced that
Haines would oversee foreign policy for the Biden transition team.
While the former drone missile chief
prepares plans for the future Biden administration, the current advisers, with
their lucrative “consulting” affiliations, are listed by The American
Prospect as follows: “Nicholas Burns (The Cohen Group), Kurt Campbell
(The Asia Group), Tom Donilon (BlackRock Investment Institute), Wendy Sherman
(Albright Stonebridge Group), Julianne Smith (WestExec Advisors) and Jake
Sullivan (Macro Advisory Partners). They rarely discuss their connections to
corporate power, defense contractors, private equity, and hedge funds, let
alone disclose them.”
This is what Senator Bernie Sanders, Senator Elizabeth
Warren and their various liberal and pseudo-left apologists have embraced as
the alternative to the fascistic Trump administration—a government of
warmongers and corporate shills, no less committed to the defense of the
interests of the American ruling elite.
Biden
is bringing the warmongers back to the White House
For almost all of the Bush administration, Democrats
were the anti-war party. They took to the streets, to the airwaves, to the print
media, wherever they could, to tout their anti-message.
During Obama’s presidency, the anti-war cohort vanished, even as he dropped bombs, created terrorist groups, started wars, and triggered mass refugee movements.
Then came Trump, a truly anti-war president who was the first president in decades not to start a war. With Biden now the AP's declared president, leftists are openly thrilled about the military-industrial complex moving into the White House.
BLOG EDITOR: READ THE BOOK HOUSE OF BUSH, HOUSE OF SAUD. BUSH
AND HIS CORRUPT FAMILY HAS BEEN ON THE TAKE FROM THE 9-11 INVADERS FOR 50
YEARS!
President George W. Bush was the last of the Wilson
Doctrine presidents: He believed that America could “make the world safe for
democracy” by sending her blood and gold overseas to kill totalitarian
dictators. Of course, he didn’t spell it out in such simple terms, but that was
the gist of his belief that you could end Islamic terrorism by bringing
Western-style democracy to the Middle East.
In retrospect, it was a dumb idea or, at least, it
was a failed idea. The reason we were able to use war to bring democracy to
Japan, Italy, and Germany was because, by WWII’s end, we had blasted those
countries into dust and were able to rebuild them from the ground up. In
addition, we left our troops in place to keep an eye on things for the next 75
years.
In both Afghanistan and Iraq, America didn’t fight
to win. Instead, she repeated the mistake from Vietnam, which was to fight bad
guys within the country while simultaneously trying to be nice to the ordinary
people caught in the crossfire. As my father, a veteran of two wars, always
said, you can no more "sort of" fight a war than you can be
"sort of" pregnant. If you don’t fight to win, you’re losing.
The Iraq War turned around only with the Surge when
Bush decided to fight to win, rather than wallow in a Vietnam-esque quagmire in
the face of guerilla (and Iranian) warfare. The gains from those bloody battles
might have lasted if America had kept her troops there for a decade or two, not
to fight but to maintain the peace. Instead, Obama, the “anti-war president,”
pulled American troops out of Iraq rather than acknowledge victory, creating a
giant gaping hole that ISIS and Iran quickly filled.
Of course, Obama was a pretty deadly guy for an
anti-war president. He personally targeted the victims of drone strikes in the
hinterlands between Pakistan and Afghanistan. He decided to engage in
regime-change in Libya, even though the execrable Qaddafi had already laid down
his arms against America. Having toppled Qaddafi, Obama left, turning the
country into a terrorist haven. And of course, Obama meddled in Syria,
creating a refugee crisis that permanently changed Europe for the worse.
And what about the Democrats as a whole? From 2002
to January 2009, they were the anti-War party, taking to the streets on a
regular basis to call President Bush "Hitler incarnate." (Where have
we heard that before?) They turned the pathetic Cindy Sheehan, who had broken
down mentally after her son died fighting in Iraq, into a saint, only to dump
her when she ceased to be useful.
In January 2009, when Obama entered the White House,
the anti-war movement stopped. Suddenly, American aggression was fine,
contingent upon one thing: Samantha Power’s “Responsibility to Protect” theory
meant that America could engage in war provided that the war did not confer any
direct benefit on her. America’s troops would henceforth die as martyrs to the
causes of other nations.
Eventually, America’s working and middle classes,
the people whose sons and daughters were filling up the ranks of martyrdom,
were done. They rejected self-styled elites using their children as vehicles
for the elites’ own sense that, by sacrificing the little people, they were
doing a form of penance for America’s sordid history of capitalism and liberty.
That’s one of the reasons we got Trump, who didn’t
like seeing Americans die pointlessly. He made it clear to our enemies that,
like Teddy Roosevelt, he would speak softly and carrying a "yuuge"
stick. It worked. Despite the leftists’ certainty that Trump was Hitler, he was
the first president in decades not to embroil America in new
wars. Naturally, the Pentagon crowd hates Trump. A peacetime military
doesn’t provide scope for promotion, nor is the money following the military
businesses that give well-paying jobs to retired Pentagon types.
Leftists have now become the party of war. They
are incredibly pleased that Biden will bring the military-industrial complex
and pointless wars back to the forefront of American politics. Paul Joseph
Watson, with his usual acumen, points out what Obama did to the world and what
Biden promises to do. It’s ugly. (As usual, these Watson videos come with
a language warning.)
Image: Refugees heading
to Europe. YouTube screengrab.
Ten years since
WikiLeaks published the
US diplomatic cables
Today
is the tenth anniversary of “Cablegate” when WikiLeaks, leading a group of
partner media organisations, began reporting on the contents of hundreds of
thousands of leaked United States government diplomatic cables.
The
documents revealed the vast scope and global reach of US imperialism’s criminal
conspiracies against the international working class, and the brutality and
corruption of capitalist governments the world over.
Julian Assange (Credit: Newsonline, Flickr)
Of
historic significance in their own right, the publications followed WikiLeaks’s
extraordinary releases earlier that year of the “Collateral Murder”
video—showing the killing of Iraqi civilians, including journalists and first
responders, by US soldiers—the Afghan War Logs and the Iraq War Logs.
These publications earned WikiLeaks, and in particular its
founder, the journalist and publisher Julian Assange, the undying enmity of the
ruling class. A
vicious campaign of slander and pseudo-legal persecution was launched against
Assange that continues to this day. He is currently locked up in London’s
Belmarsh maximum security prison awaiting a verdict on his extradition to the
US, where he faces a likely sentence of 175 years in the darkest corner of the
American prison system, on charges under the Espionage Act.
Just
a small sample of the diplomatic cables exposures gives a sense of their
significance.
They
revealed that the US had knowledge of and approved the military coup that
toppled Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra in 2006. American officials
discussed the possibility of a similar overthrow of the Pakistani government in
2009 with the country’s top general. In 2009, Washington privately supported
the military coup against Honduran President Manuel Zelaya and worked to cover
up the repression which followed.
US
intelligence assets helped to engineer Kevin Rudd’s replacement as Australian
prime minister by Julia Gillard in 2010, to ensure a continued Australian
presence in the criminal US-led occupation of Afghanistan. Rudd was also
targeted for suggesting America make minor accommodations to China’s growing
influence in the Asia-Pacific region.
The
cables demonstrated that the US government was fully aware of the torture,
random arrests, and extra-judicial killings carried out by its ally Hosni
Mubarak in Egypt. They proved Washington’s detailed knowledge of state
corruption in Tunisia and exposed the government’s collaboration in abrogating
the rights of Tunisian citizens detained in Guantanamo Bay. Governments in
Pakistan and Yemen were shown to have collaborated with US drone operations in
their own countries, responsible for the repeated massacres of civilians.
American
officials were aware of an explosion at a BP gas rig in the Caspian Sea in 2008
but took no action to investigate the safety of the company’s other sites. Two
years later, an explosion at a rig in the Gulf of Mexico killed eleven people
and created the largest marine oil spill in history. During the 2009 Copenhagen
climate conference, the US successfully bribed and blackmailed poor countries
over development aid to gain support for a watering down of climate
commitments.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ordered US embassies and
UN representatives to gather personal information, including credit card and
frequent flyer account numbers, internet passwords, work schedules and even DNA
samples, from UN and foreign government officials. The only realistic purpose
being to facilitate similar blackmail operations.
Yet
more cables detailed the domination of the Nigerian state by Shell Oil.
Contrary
to the claims of the US government that WikiLeaks recklessly endangered
vulnerable sources named in the cables, a painstaking and collaborative process
was established to review and redact the documents before publication. At
Assange’s extradition hearing this September, journalists from all over the
world testified to WikiLeaks’ “pioneering” use of encryption to protect sources
and documents. The cables were scheduled to be released over the course of a
year, on a country-by-country basis, making use of the expertise of local
partner media organisations to ensure the appropriate redactions took place. In
some cases, the US government itself provided suggestions for redactions.
Evidence
heard at the hearing also established that it was Guardian journalist
David Leigh who was responsible for allowing the release of tens of thousands
of unredacted cables, which had been securely stored by WikiLeaks, in September
2011. In a hatchet-job on WikiLeaks, WikiLeaks: Inside Julian
Assange's War on Secrecy, Leigh published the password to a secure online archive
containing the cables, making them freely accessible.
Assange
called the US State Department to warn them of an impending release but was
ignored. He and the other WikiLeaks editors then took the decision to publish
the unredacted cables themselves, since the documents were already in the
public domain. WikiLeaks’s main media partners, the Guardian,
the New York Times, Der Spiegel, El Pais, and Le
Monde, used this event as a pretext to break off relations with the
organisation and denounce its work.
The
American government responded to the initial “Cablegate” publications with an
embargo on WikiLeaks. Amazon removed the site from its web servers, PayPal cut
off the WikiLeaks account and Mastercard and Visa prevented payments being made
to the organisation. Bank of America stopped handling WikiLeaks payments and
Swiss bank PostFinance froze Assange’s assets.
WikiLeaks
also came under a massive “distributed denial-of-service” (DDoS) attack,
effectively preventing users from accessing its site.
Obama’s Democratic Party administration launched a furious salvo
of denunciations, with then Vice President Joe Biden calling Assange a
“high-tech terrorist” and Hilary Clinton reportedly asking, “Can’t we just
drone this guy?” This opened the floodgates to a torrent of demands from
Republicans and the right-wing media for his assassination.
Assange
was subjected to a sprawling conspiracy, as Sweden launched a manufactured
sexual assault investigation to secure his arrest. Swedish prosecutors were
encouraged by the UK authorities who used a Swedish extradition request to
arbitrarily detain Assange in the Ecuadorian Assembly in London, where he had
claimed political asylum. Pseudo-left political organisations abandoned Assange
entirely over this smear campaign, or openly attacked him as a “rapist”,
despite no charges ever being laid.
In
April 2019, the US, UK and a new Ecuadorian government led by Lenin Moreno
reached a deal to see Assange illegally seized from the embassy by British
police.
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