Global Research, July 29, 2010

Since the release of classified US military papers by WikiLeaks, the material has been aggressively spun by various political factions. Meanwhile, virtually no attention has been devoted to investigating the source of this “leak”, or questioning the agenda behind it.

According to the Associated Press, a US official who spoke on condition of anonymity stated that the US government is not certain who “leaked” the 91,000 documents to the online whistle blowing web site.

Unlike a previous WikiLeak exposing the murder of Iraqi civilians in a US airstrike, , nobody has been apprehended, arrested or  pressured by the Pentagon, the CIA or any US agency.

The White House has expressed no intense concern. It did not block the release or deny the material. Government officials, led by President Obama, have almost casually dismissed the expose as nothing new.

The major mainstream newspapers that had full early access to the material—The New York Times, Der Spiegel and the Guardian—also had ample time to frame and steer the discourse surrounding it, and (particularly in the case of the White House-friendly New York Times) conduct damage control.

Leak as anti-war fodder

The new material obviously adds to what is already known for years: US forces are mired in a dirty and horrific war, and committing atrocities and war crimes. Corruption is rampant, allies are despicable and untrustworthy, and there appears no end in sight.

For critics of US policy, the expose reinforces their tired call for the war to end. However, the value of these particular papers (in terms of turning public opinion against the war) is questionable. This is not a potent high-level Pentagon Papers-type leak, and today’s society is a far cry from the 1970s.

Today’s acquiescent, ignorant and grossly manipulated mass populace—one that fully embraces and supports the manufactured “war on terrorism”—wholeheartedly supports any and all means to “prevent another 9/11”. A decade of Bush-Cheney criminality and mass murder failed to trigger any interest from a general US population that has been shocked into servitude, and further brain-addled by ubiquitous corporate right-wing media. Another day, another massacre.

Leak as imperial war propaganda

Where the WikiLeaks papers gain significance is in the detail revealed about the operations of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence directorate (ISI) and, more specifically, the manner in which leading government figures and the media have interpreted these items.

The ISI is being accused of “undercutting” US operations, “conspiring with’ and aiding the “powerfully resurgent” Taliban and Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, aiding the killing of US forces, and organizing “networks of militants” across the region. An all-out propaganda attack against Pakistan led by the White House is underway.

Essentially, Pakistan is being branded as a terrorist state and a worthy target of military attack, along with Iran, which is also fingered by the WikiLeak for backing Taliban militants within Afghanistan.

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Hamid Gul, former ISI chief and major regional player, accuses the US of orchestrating the expose to shift attention away from the US government’s “own failings”, in order to “force Pakistan’s hand on policy in Afghanistan”.

According to Gul “they [the Americans] want to bash Pakistan, at this time to come up with this leak. I refuse to believe it is not on purpose.”

The Obama administration, eager for a pretext to escalate the Central Asia/Middle East (resource) war into Pakistan and Iran, has certainly found ammunition with the WikiLeak expose.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the “leak” occurred just prior to a new $33 billion/30,000 troop surge for Afghanistan was signed in the US Congress, and ahead of a possible military attack on Iran, which former CIA Director Michael Hayden says is “inexorable”.

The glaring omission

As accusations and attacks on Pakistan and its “terrorist ISI” rise in intensity, not one mainstream media report mentions the fact that the ISI is a virtual branch of the CIA, and one that operates on behalf of Anglo-American policy.

It is fact that the ISI, with full Anglo-American direction, has long been a driving force behind “Islamic militants” and “terrorists” throughout the world, including “Al-Qaeda”. The CIA and ISI have cooperatively fomented instability and tension throughout Central Asia and the Middle East, playing all sides for geostrategic gain. This “strategy of tension” is one of the hallmarks of the “war on terrorism”. The ISI was also directly involved with the false flag operation of 9/11.

According to Michel Chossudovsky:

“The ISI actively collaborates with the CIA. It continues to perform the role of a ‘go-between’ in numerous intelligence operations on behalf of the CIA. The ISI directly supports and finances a number of terrorist organizations, including Al Qaeda.”

If the ISI is responsible for terrorism, the funding and aiding of “Islamic militants”, and the killing of US forces, logic dictates that its big brethren—the CIA and officials in Washington—are also guilty and involved.

The manner in which the ISI is under fire, while omitting any mention of the ISI’s guiding superiors in Washington speaks to a deliberate anti-Pakistan/pro-US bias.

Whose political weapon?

Until the source of this WikiLeak is revealed, along with the motive for the “leak”, all that remains is a political Rohrschach Test, open to interpretation.

The ultimate beneficiary is whatever faction controls the interpretation.

In the end, only Pakistan and Iran have been politically damaged, while the Obama administration has a new pretext to escalate and intensify its continuing resource war.

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Left and Right Against War

by Murray Polner

“Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living.”

~ General Omar Bradley

“Canada must be ours [say the war hawks]. We have nothing to do but to march into Canada and display the standard of the U.S., and the Canadians will immediately flock to it.”

~ Rep. Samuel Taggart, 1812

The United States of America has historically been addicted to war, an addiction that persists today more than ever with a vast “national security” apparatus, over 700 military bases, and a nation torn between those who believe in military intervention for humanitarian causes and those who extol war as a way of maintaining the country’s worldwide hegemony. Now we are faced with endless wars in the Middle East as the drums are beating for war against Iran in Washington, Jerusalem and western European capitals.

Several years ago Thomas Woods, Jr. asked me to collaborate with him in a book we titled We Who Dared to Say No to War: American Antiwar Writing from 1812 to Now (Basic Books, 2008). We intended to portray a broad American antiwar tradition often absent from classrooms, films, television and the new media. Tom is a libertarian and conservative and I a left-liberal and believer in nonviolent activism. We differ on some things but not on our opposition to our nation’s reliance on war and conquest (as well as our mutual support for civil liberties).

We have no illusions that our book can deter contemporary warmakers or outwit the fabrications and manipulations of governments and propagandists past and present. We were (and are) instead motivated by the hope that arguments for war might be critically examined, as the men and women of different political persuasions we include in the book did in their time. To quote from our introduction, we intend the book to be “a surprising and welcome change from the misleading liberal-peace/conservative-war dichotomy that the media and our educational establishment and popular culture have done so much to foster.”

During our efforts to find appropriate and effective essays, speeches and documents, I turned to Americans who had shaped my own thoughts about war: Randolph Bourne, the physically handicapped prophet who died far too young (at 32) but memorably wrote that “war is the health of the state”; Robert A. Taft, bitterly assailed as an isolationist – in truth, he was very suspicious about military interventions – who rightly condemned the undeclared entry into the Korean War, where some 38,000 GIs died, many more were wounded in body and mind and several million Korean civilians killed, saying “the President has no right to involve the United States in a foreign war”; Russell Kirk, the founder of postwar American conservatism, urging “a policy of patience and prudence” against “preventive war” and decrying how “a handful of individuals…made it their business to extirpate the populations of Nagasaki and Hiroshima”; and a man I proudly voted for in 1972, George McGovern, who publicly excoriated his pro-war senatorial colleagues by describing each of them as “partly responsible for sending 50,000 young Americans to an early grave.” “This chamber,” said this onetime World War II bomber pilot unforgettably, “reeks of blood,” adding Edmund Burke’s cautionary words: “A conscientious man would be cautious how he dealt in blood.”

Unsurprisingly, we found that the arguments used for war today are the same ones that have been employed in all our wars. We begin with Daniel Webster’s speech in December 1814 after the War Hawks (a term coined during America’s aggressive war to capture Canada) urged a draft: “Where is it written in the Constitution,” he asked, “in what article or section is it contained, that you may take children from their parents, and parents from their children, and compel them to fight the battles of any war in which the folly of the wickedness of Government may engage it?”

For the U.S. government’s war of aggression against Mexico in 1846–48 we include (among numerous others) the abolitionist William Goodell, who called President Polk’s invasion a “war for slavery.” In another selection then-Representative Abraham Lincoln denounced the Mexican War, calling Polk’s war message “the half-mumbling of a fever dream” and Polk a “bewildered, confounded, and miserably perplexed man.”

Before the U.S. entered World War I, Eugene Debs, the Socialist labor leader, spoke truth to power: It is “the working class who freely shed their bloods and furnish the corpses.” Debs received a ten-year prison sentence for that speech. Senator George Norris, the progressive Republican from Nebraska (the Midwestern states once had many such Republican politicians) who condemned U.S. entry into WWI and their advocates, likewise condemned war profiteering: “Their object in having war and in preparing for war is to make money.”

That, incidentally, isn’t a problem that has gone away. Think of contemporary war profiteers who have made so much money in Iraq and Afghanistan, while a threatened war with Iran promises untold riches as well. Add to this the hysteria generated during the Cold War, a frenzy which consistently and deliberately exaggerated Soviet military capabilities while frightening many Americans. (See, for example, the declassified documents released in September 2009 by George Washington University’s private National Security Archive.)

These are tough words, echoed by so many men and women (Helen Keller, Jane Addams, Jeannette Rankin, Rep. Barbara Lee, Gold Star mothers, etc.) whose words we sought to rescue from obscurity. Had we more room we would also have written about the military decimation of our Native American tribes and the habitual interference in the affairs of Caribbean and Central American states.

What we learned in writing this book was that lies, deliberate manipulation of patriotic feelings, scare tactics, a compliant, often indifferent media, and bribery of legislators kept and keeps the war machine oiled and too many decision makers in clover. Virtually everything heard in the past is still heard today. We quoted William Jay’s observation after the invasion of Mexico: “We have been taught to ring our bells, and illuminate our windows and let off fireworks as manifestations of our joy, when we have heard of great ruin and devastation, and misery, and death, inflicted by our troops upon a people who never injured us, who never fired a shot on our soil and who were utterly incapable of acting on the offensive against us.”

And we concluded, “Everything we’ve seen recently, we’ve seen before. Time and again.”

In the end, I have personal favorites: William Graham Sumner, an irascible Yale academic who opposed the Spanish-American and Philippine-American wars and the nation’s growing appetite for imperial conquest and world power; Marine Commandant David Shoup, who said of our Vietnam adventure, “Let’s Mind Our Business”; and W.D. Ehrhart, a combat Marine veteran of Vietnam, who enlisted at age 18 and years later told students at a Pennsylvania school, “I am no longer convinced that what I owe to my country is military service whenever and wherever my government demands it…if I owe something to my country, my country also owes something to me…it owes us the obligation not to ask for our lives unless it is absolutely necessary.” Then there is Howard Zinn, WWII bombardier turned pacifist, who argues, “We need to refute the idea that our nation is different from, morally superior to, other imperial powers of world history” and instead “assert our allegiance to the human race, and not to any one nation.” Libertarian Lew Rockwell writes, “Do we reject war and all its works? We do reject them.” Especially moving is the contribution of Andrew Bacevich, a Vietnam War veteran, Boston University professor, and father of a son killed in Iraq, whose distressing “I Lost My Son to a War I Oppose; We Were Both Doing Our Duty” is unforgettable.

Our book will not change the course of history. Still, it reflects our mission, our passion: to encourage debate and discussion, in our nation’s classrooms as well as among our compatriots, now drowning in a mass culture that celebrates trivia – “amusing themselves to death” in the late Neil Postman’s incisive words. Tom Woods and I would like to encourage an alternative patriotism that goes not abroad every few years to seek and destroy real and imagined “enemies” while sacrificing a new generation of our young.

October 1, 2009

Murray Polner [send him mail] was editor of Present Tense, published by the American Jewish Committee from 1973–90. He wrote Rabbi: The American Experience; co-edited (with Stefan Merken) Peace Justice Jews: Reclaiming Our Tradition, as well as No Victory Parades: The Return of the Vietnam Veteran and, with Jim O’Grady, Disarmed & Dangerous, a biography of Daniel and Philip Berrigan. His most recent book is We Who Dared to Say No to War: American Antiwar Writing From 1812 to Now, co-authored with Thomas Woods.

Copyright © 2009 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given

Possibly Related Posts:

• GORDON DUFF: AMERICA’S WAR RACKETEERS, THE REAL TERRORISTS
• IS ISRAEL RUNNING THE TALIBAN?
• Flying the Flag, Faking the News
• AFGHANISTAN, PATHS TO PEACE
• More War Lies