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Scott Peterson’s fine piece at CSM on Iranian reactions to the Wikileaks cables is given further credence by yet another document that surfaced Tuesday. Peterson says that the Iranians took the documents to suggest that President Obama was all along plotting against them even while pursuing a diplomatic track in public, and that a breakthrough through negotiations is now very unlikely.

It is an account of conversations between the US undersecretary for arms control and British officials in early September, 2009. It shows that the then British Labor Government supported President Obama’s diplomatic outreach to Iran but was very much prepared for it to fail, and fail quickly, and so was already focused on ratcheting up further economic sanctions on Tehran. Simon McDonald said that the prime minister did not think Obama’s diplomatic efforts should be “open-ended,” and seemed to have a 30-day deadline in mind for Iran to respond. That sort of impatience does not comport with genuine diplomacy, and it seems clear that the British were eager to impose further sanctions as soon as possible.

Another passage suggests strong British and American pressure on Yukiya Amano, the then incoming head of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Under his predecessor, Mohammad Elbaradei, the IAEA had steadfastly refused to rubber stamp US and Western European charges that Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapon. The inspectors could find no evidence of it, and were able to certify that no nuclear material had been diverted from the civilian program. They were extremely frustrated by Iran’s lack of complete cooperation, and some entertained dark suspicions, but Elbaradei’s reports only included what could be proven from the inspections. Foreign Minister David Miliband spoke of putting some “steel” in Amano’s spine. Ellen Tauscher, the US undersecretary for arms control and international security affairs, said that the US and the UK must work to make Amano a “success.”

Reading between the lines, it seems clear that London and Washington intended to get hold of Amano as soon as Elbaradei had departed, and twist his arm to be more alarmist in his reports on Iran. Surely from Washington’s hawkish point of view, any “success” of the IAEA would be in demonstrating an Iranian weapons program and giving evidence that could be used to ratchet up sanctions at the UN Security Council. Ironically, the 2007 US National Intelligence Estimate on Iran had supported Elbaradei’s careful approach. Amano may have been predisposed to be suspicious of Iran because of his own country’s experience of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and his consequent personal commitment to non-proliferation.

It was improper for Miliband to have spoken of putting steel in Amano’s spine, with the obvious meaning that the UK wanted the IAEA to put out reports on Iran’s nuclear activities that mirrored Whitehall’s suspicions– suspicions for which there is no known proof. (Iran has a civilian nuclear enrichment program; no one has found any dispositive evidence that it has a nuclear weapons program, and there is much evidence to the contrary).

There is also a passage about tying Iran’s nuclear program to that of North Korea, said to be urged by then National Security Adviser Gen. Jim Jones. That strategy is shot through with propaganda, since North Korea went for broke to get a nuclear warhead and has a handful of them now. North Korea conducted underground nuclear detonations in 2006 and 2009, as confirmed by seismic activity. In contrast, Iran has no bomb. All Iran can be shown to have done is to whirl radioactive material around to produce about two tons of uranium enriched to 3.5% and a very small amount enriched to 19.75%, intended for use in Iran’s small medical reactor, given it by the US in 1969. Both these levels of enrichment are considered Low-Enriched Uranium (LEU) and are irrelevant to bomb-making unless they are further processed to 95%– something there is no evidence of the Iranians trying to do or even being able to do. Remember, their facility at Natanz is being inspected. So, Iran is just not like North Korea. The latter is a known violator (like Israel, Pakistan and India) of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Nothing Iran has done since 2003 violates the NPT, which it signed– unlike Israel.

The USG Open Source center today translated an Iranian Fars News Agency, Wednesday, December 1, 2010, report of a television discussion in which an Iranian security expert complained about this very strategy:

‘ Fars News Agency: An expert on Iran and the region emphasized with the new atmosphere of controversy the Zionists are creating they are trying to show that Iran’s peaceful nuclear program is connected to North Korea’s nuclear program. Fars reports Amir Musavi in an interview with this week’s program The Israeli Eye on the Al-Alam News Network mentioned the creation of controversy by the Zionists against Iran’s nuclear program and said the Zionists are trying to divert world public opinion away from their own nuclear armory towards other directions, and to portray Iran’s peaceful nuclear program as a threat they are connecting North Korea’s nuclear program to Iran’s peaceful nuclear program. This expert on Iran and regional affairs added: However unlike North Korea the Islamic Republic of Iran consistently cooperates with the IAEA.’ Musavi added: If the Islamic Republic of Iran were seeking to conceal its peaceful nuclear program it could have done this but Iran has always sought mutual cooperation with the IAEA.

Iran-related passages of the wikileaks cable:

Background: Ellen Tauscher, the US under secretary for arms control and international security affairs held meetings in London on September 2-4 on the margins of the P5 Conference on Confidence Building Measures Towards Nuclear Disarmament with Foreign Secretary David Miliband, Simon McDonald, Head of the Foreign and Defence Policy Secretariat at the Cabinet Office … [and others]

“Tuesday, 22 September 2009, 14:13

S E C R E T SECTION 01 OF 05 LONDON 002198

NOFORN… 09/21/2019

SUBJECT: U/S TAUSCHER’S MEETINGS WITH FS MILIBAND AND OTHER

HMG OFFICIALS

¶11. (S/NF) Tauscher made clear that Iran needed to respond to the P5 1 offer prior to the UNGA, at which point there would be a stock-taking; absent progress, attention would turn to substantially stronger sanctions. FS Milband opined that U.S. Administration is “rightly trying to overcome a deficit of prejudice and mistrust in a relatively short time” by diplomatic outreach to Iran. He continued that the Iranian elections were a “bad outcome” — an outcome that had given extremists the upper hand and resulted in a “culling of reformists.” Miliband said that, in his opinion, Iran’s extremist government would not make concessions in a short time. Nonetheless, the U.S. “Administration’s support for a diplomatic solution is very wise.” He praised the impact of financial sanctions spearheaded by Treasury U/S Levey. Leslie asserted that the Iranian administration is “in a state of flux” and “not focused,” so probably unable to respond to overtures.

LONDON 00002198 003 OF 005

¶12. (S/NF) McDonald stressed that the PM supports the President’s outreach efforts to Iran, but this outreach should not be “open ended.” The UK view is that “if Iran is not responsive, we have to get serious.” UK experts have concluded that stronger sanctions should be in place by the end of the year if Iran is not significantly responsive by the end of September. McDonald observed that it would take some time to negotiate a UNSCR [United Nations Security Council Resolution]; in the meantime, the UK is considering national steps it could take as well as possible steps the EU could take. HMG shares NSA Jones’ view that proliferation problems posed by Iran and North Korea should be addressed together, not as separate, unrelated issues, McDonald said…

¶14. (S/NF) “We need to put some steel in Director General-elect Amano,” [of the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency] Miliband opined. Amano has a key role and he “must be a leader and a consensus-builder who reports faithfully what experts tell him.” McDonald observed that the IAEA seems more prepared than it has in the past to address Iranian conduct. Tauscher agreed we need to make Amano a success.”

By Juan Cole

December 03, 2010 “Information Clearing House” —

www.juancole.com

It’s odd that what has almost never been overlooked by a single Marxist commentator in human history, seems to be “outside of the box” for many progressive “pundits” and many in the progressive sphere. Of course, after Bush pushed — the MSM willing — for his debacle/bloodbath in Mesopotamia, there seemed to be a great deal of thought put into, apparently, what many had interpreted as a purported failure of the “mainstream” press. Commentators who took this line of approach, one would almost have to wonder, if they had ever read any of the MSM’s scrawlings? And if such persons making such an argument have read the mainstream “news” media; on U.S. foreign policy and a panoply of other things, and believed what it is that they are reading, then such commentators are surely living in a surreality of their own.

The mainstream media’s primary vocation, when it comes to the U.S. reach throughout the planet, is to slander, ridicule and report all sorts of dubious information on, those who are resisting the global neoliberal imperial economic order. Anyone who understands the facts of U.S. efforts to topple the democratically elected socialist government of Venezuela understands this as an elementary and incontrovertible precept. But a segment — if not the majority of the “progressive commentariat” — were left scratching their heads, after the goals of a particular imperial campaign were met and served by the mainstream media “bastions of journalism”? The obtuseness here, borders on the absurd, but these sorts of views that the mainstream should have deviated from a standard, long-standing and virtually uninterrupted practice; on Iraq, were not rare.

All of this has come to my attention, probably because I am not one, who has joined in the upswell for the “crusading” of Julian Assange and the support of his Wikileaks operation. Insofar as what he has released has been very much in line with the blueprint of ensconcing a wholly neoliberal planetary order. And so long as Assange’s revelations, push nothing other than a proliferation of the U.S. neoliberal imperial project; it will be unclear as to what masters it is that Wikileaks ultimately serves. Assange, despite purported education in a multiplicity of areas, would seem to be a neophyte in matters of intelligence and geopolitic schemes. The Western media and intelligence services, love nothing more than to engage in the manipulation of an unwilling person — as a kind of “propagandistic fodder” — that they can use, and can shape and can mold. I’m not saying that is what Assange/Wikileaks is; however, but I do look forward to forthcoming reports that will be damaging to U.S. imperial power, and client states such as Israel, Colombia, Saudi Arabia, Georgia, Egypt, etc.

As Noam Chomsky adeptly pointed out — after the release of recent cables — the United States and Israel are viewed by a plurality of average, everyday Arabs as far greater threats to them than the Islamic Republic of Iran. Yet, the cables that have come out have shown Arab leaders; far out of step with their own citizenry, calling for the US to stop Iran’s alleged nuclear proliferation program. In which, claims of a program for weapons of mass destruction are dubious, and should remind any rational observer of the “cherry picking” and “sexing up” that went on before Bush’s “blunder” in Iraq. Not to mention, of course, that India and Pakistan developed nuclear weapons and neither state was subject to monitoring by the International Atomic Energy Agency, because neither of these countries had even ratified the NPT (Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty). Israel, is a whole different story altogether, but unequivocally it has continued to operate as a rogue government, and not even make any official acknowledgment of any of its nuclear bombs.

The games that can be played to serve imperial power are certainly varied and duplicitous, indeed. Hollywood scenarios of Manchurian candidates and Mk-ultra zombies, performing psychological, and other intelligence operations, can be titillating and serve as great fantasy — and even a bit of fun. Just as likely; however, is that Assange/Wikileaks have moved out of the shallow end, and into the deeper end of the water. Knowing what we know about the Western media consistently and reliably servicing war, neoliberalism, and imperialism, we should be certain that Wikileaks is not involved in supporting them too. We don’t want to hop on the Wikileaks bandwagon of cheering for a man who is “surely” a force for peace, justice, transparency, and good.

By Sean Fenley

15 September, 2010

Countercurrents.org

Sean Fenley is an independent progressive, who would like to see some sanity brought to the creation and implementation, of current and future, U.S. military, economic, foreign and domestic policies. He has been published by a number of websites, and publications throughout the alternative media.

seanm_f@fastmail.net

In the face of an unprecedented campaign of US harassment and intimidation, the Internet-based WikiLeaks group is continuing its efforts to expose the predatory role of American foreign policy around the world, releasing secret diplomatic documents every day.

WikiLeaks has acquired over 250,000 leaked US diplomatic cables, most of them generated over the past five years, and it has posted about 700 of them so far on its web site, as well as turning over the entire cache to four news organizations in Europe. One of the four, the British daily Guardian, in turn gave access to the New York Times.

Material made public Sunday sheds light on the increasingly incendiary state of world relations, under conditions of deepening world economic crisis. In particular, the declining world power, the United States, is seeking to maintain its domination against the rise of rivals like China. This conflict is the focus of a State Department cable on March 24, 2009, describing a meeting between Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, then visiting Washington, and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

According to the summary, Clinton complained during a luncheon discussion about the difficulty of the US taking action to curb China’s growing overseas influence, given the huge US balance of trade deficit with China and China’s massive stockpile of nearly $2 trillion in dollar-denominated assets, including Treasury bills. “How do you deal toughly with your banker?” she asked.

Rudd’s reply was eye opening. Describing himself as “a brutal realist on China,” he said that Australian intelligence agencies were paying close attention to China’s growing military strength, and that Australia was building up its naval forces as “a response to China’s growing ability to project force” in the south Pacific. He said the US and its allies should make efforts to integrate China into the US-dominated structure of state relations in the Asia-Pacific region, “while also preparing to deploy force if everything goes wrong.”

There is no record of Clinton’s response to this suggestion that a military conflict between the two strongest world powers, both armed with nuclear weapons, was to be considered as a policy option. Nor was her reaction reported to another declaration by Rudd, that he had invited another nuclear-armed power, Russia, to join his proposed Asia-Pacific Community, in order to forestall any thoughts of a “Chinese Monroe Doctrine.” Rudd used that term as shorthand for an effort by China to exclude outside powers—like the United States—from the Asia-Pacific region.

The exchange is reminiscent of the secret discussions held among the Great Powers in the decades leading up to World War I and World War II, as they jockeyed for power and influence while building up their military forces for the ultimate test of force. In both periods, localized and regional tensions—in the Balkans, the Far East, and North Africa—became the spark of a global conflict.

The Middle East is one of the regions most likely to play the role of detonator today, with US forces already deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan and the US and Israel openly threatening military action against Iran if economic sanctions fail to bring the regime in Tehran to heel.

Secret documents made public in summary form Sunday by the New York Times and the Guardian underscore the rising tensions in that region. A classified memo from Secretary of State Clinton in December 2009 complains that Saudi Arabia and the Arab sheikdoms of the Persian Gulf were the principal financiers of anti-American terrorist activity. “Donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide,” the memo declares.

This assessment is in sharp contrast to the public US focus on Afghanistan and the tribal territories of Pakistan as the base of Al Qaeda terrorism. The real purpose of the war in Afghanistan is to establish a dominant US role in Central Asia, the second largest source of world oil and gas exports.

As the Guardian notes in its coverage (but not the Times), the US complaints about the Saudi role in financing terrorism play second fiddle to US oil interests. The Guardian observed: “The cables show that when it comes to powerful oil-rich allies, US diplomats save their concerns for closed-door talks, in stark contrast to the often pointed criticism meted out to allies in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Instead, officials at the Riyadh embassy worry about protecting Saudi oilfields from al-Qaida attacks.”

A second set of cables from the Mideast, summarized in the Guardian, cite the view of Iraqi government officials that Saudi Arabia, not Iran, posed the biggest threat of destabilization. A cable from the US ambassador in Baghdad, sent in September 2009, explains that Iraqi leaders viewed the Saudi objective as “to enhance Sunni influence, dilute Shia dominance and promote the formation of a weak and fractured Iraqi government.” The newspaper concluded that this dispatch, “feeds claims, prevalent after the 9/11 attacks, that religiously conservative, politically repressive Saudi Arabia, where most of the 9/11 terrorists came from, is the true enemy of the west.”

The accounts published by the “authorized” newspapers have undoubtedly been cleared in advance with the US State Department and the British Foreign Office to minimize the damage done to ongoing imperialist activities. These reports therefore fail to provide an adequate picture of the sheer skullduggery of American imperialism all over the world.

A few examples—all from a single weekend’s posting on the WikiLeaks site—give a glimpse of the systematic double-dealing that are the essence of the predatory foreign policy of Washington. In each instance, the cable tells the truth, in direct contradiction to the public position of the US government, which is a lie.

September 9, 2009—A cable from the US embassy in Baku, Azerbaijan, reports on a visit by two unnamed leaders of the Kashgai tribe in the adjacent region just across the Iranian border. Three months after the disputed Iranian presidential election, the two men note that while members of their tribe regarded opposition candidate Mehdi Karroubi favorably, as a member of another minority ethnic group, the Lurs, “most Kashgai probably voted for Ahmadinejad, as a result of gratitude for improved health, education, and infrastructure services and/or monetary inducements.

This cable undermines the official US lie that Ahmadinejad “stole” the presidential election, one of the principal components of the ongoing propaganda campaign against Iran. The failure of opposition candidates Karroubi and Mirhossein Mousavi to win the vote in non-Persian northwest Iran was invariably cited as “proof” of official ballot rigging. But the embassy cable demonstrates that the US government knew that their support in that region was weak.

December 26, 2009—A cable from the US embassy in Sana, Yemen relayed the Yemeni foreign minister’s request that the Obama administration should deny responsibility for US air strikes against alleged Al Qaeda targets in that country, which left dozens of civilians dead. Instead, the official urged the US to “highlight … indigenous counterterrorism capabilities.”

In other words, the Yemeni government asked the US government to help it lie to its own people, as well as the world, and Washington obliged.

January 15, 2010—A cable from the embassy in Morocco reported a successful US operation against Dadis Camara, leader of a military coup in the West African country of Guinea, who was receiving medical treatment at a Moroccan hospital. The State Department regarded Camara as less reliable than the officer who replaced him during his illness.

Moroccan officials put Camara on board a small plane, telling him he was going back to Guinea, but he was instead flown to Burkina Faso, a neighboring country, and placed under house arrest. In effect, Camara was kidnapped at the behest of the US government, which publicly denied any role in the affair.

Another series of cables from the US embassy in Paris in March 2010, track the visit of French President Sarkozy to former French colonies in Africa, noting shifts in French military and economic policy in that area. The cable noted that while in Niger, Sarkozy acted as a shill for the giant uranium monopoly AREVA.

This dispatch underscores one of the driving forces of foreign policy for all the imperialist powers: the financial interests of the giant corporations. The United States is no exception, as demonstrated by two more excerpts from the weekend postings on WikiLeaks:

The US embassy in Madrid noted the intercession of the American ambassador in January 2009 on behalf of General Electric, which had complained that the Spanish government “was not welcoming US bidders on procurement contracts.” When the Spanish Ministry of Defense awarded a contract to provide helicopter motors to the British-based Rolls Royce, Prime Minister Zapatero “overturned the decision and it was announced that GE had won the bid. The Ambassador is convinced that Zapatero personally intervened in the case in favor of GE.”

Another cable, sent in August 2007 by the US embassy in Bolivia, details attacks on the property of American corporations by the nationalist government of President Evo Morales: “A number of Evo’s recent actions and statements have been seen as anti-investment by the industries affected: to give only a few examples, the forced renegotiation of petroleum contracts, the nationalization of Glencore’s Vinto smelter, Evo’s stated intention to create a state energy and electricity company.”

The embassy adds, “One U.S. investment which is vulnerable is San Cristobal mine, which is 65 percent owned by Apex Silver. San Cristobal would be particularly hard-hit by a bill currently in Congress, which would increase mining taxes.”

Imperialism is the global policy of finance capital, rapacious and predatory. This remains as true today as it was when Lenin wrote his classic work Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism in 1915. It is to the great credit of WikiLeaks that the organization has provided irrefutable documentation of this historical reality.

By Patrick Martin

06 December, 2010

WSWS.org

 

In a national broadcast exclusive interview, we speak with world-renowned political dissident and linguist Noam Chomsky about the release of more than 250,000 secret U.S. State Department cables by WikiLeaks. In 1971, Chomsky helped government whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg release the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret internal U.S. account of the Vietnam War. Commenting on the revelations that several Arab leaders are urging the United States to attack Iran, Chomsky says, “latest polls show] Arab opinion holds that the major threat in the region is Israel, that’s 80 percent; the second threat is the United States, that’s 77 percent. Iran is listed as a threat by 10 percent,” Chomsky says. “This may not be reported in the newspapers, but it’s certainly familiar to the Israeli and U.S. governments and the ambassadors. What this reveals is the profound hatred for democracy on the part of our political leadership.” [includes rush transcript]

AMY GOODMAN: We have lost David Leigh, investigations editor from The Guardian. He was speaking to us from the busy newsroom there. The Guardian is doing an ongoing series of pieces and exposes on these documents. They are being released slowly by the various news organizations, from The Guardian in London, to Der Spiegel in Germany, to El Pais in Spain, to the New York Times here in the United States.. For reaction to the WikiLeaks documents, we’re joined by world renowned political dissident and linguist Noam Chomsky, Professor Emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, author of over a hundred books including his latest Hopes and Prospects. Forty years ago, Noam and Howard Zinn helped government whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg edit and release the Pentagon Papers that top-secret internal U.S. history of the Vietnam War.

Noam Chomsky joins us from Boston. It is good to have you back again, Noam. Why don’t we start there. Before we talk about WikiLeaks, what was your involvement in the Pentagon Papers? I don’t think most people know about this.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Dan and I were friends. Tony Russo, who also who prepared them and helped leak them. I got advanced copies from Dan and Tony and there were several people who were releasing them to the press. I was one of them. Then I- along with Howard Zinn as you mentioned- edited a volume of essays and indexed the papers.

AMY GOODMAN: So explain how, though, how it worked. I always think this is important- to tell this story- especially for young people. Dan Ellsberg- Pentagon official, top-secret clearance- gets this U.S. involvement in Vietnam history out of his safe, he Xerox’s it and then how did you get your hands on it? He just directly gave it to you?

NOAM CHOMSKY: From Dan Ellsberg and Tony Russo, who had done the Xeroxing and the preparation of the material.

AMY GOODMAN: How much did you edit?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, we did not modify anything. The papers were not edited. They were in their original form. What Howard Zinn and I did was- they came out in four volumes- we prepared a fifth volume, which was critical essays by many scholars on the papers, what they mean, the significance and so on. And an index, which is almost indispensable for using them seriously. That’s the fifth volume in the Beacon Press series.

AMY GOODMAN: So you were then one of the first people to see the Pentagon Papers?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Outside of Dan Ellsberg and Tony Russo, yes. I mean, there were some journalists who may have seen them, I am not sure.

AMY GOODMAN: What are your thoughts today? For example, we just played this clip of New York republican congress member Peter King who says WikiLeaks should be declared a foreign terrorist organization.

NOAM CHOMSKY: I think that is outlandish. We should understand- and the Pentagon Papers is another case in point- that one of the major reasons for government secrecy is to protect the government from its own population. In the Pentagon Papers, for example, there was one volume- the negotiations volume- which might have had a bearing on ongoing activities and Daniel Ellsberg withheld that. That came out a little bit later. If you look at the papers themselves, there are things Americans should have known that others did not want them to know. And as far as I can tell, from what I’ve seen here, pretty much the same is true. In fact, the current leaks are- what I’ve seen, at least- primarily interesting because of what they tell us about how the diplomatic service works.

AMY GOODMAN: The documents’ revelations about Iran come just as the Iranian government has agreed to a new round of nuclear talks beginning next month. On Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the cables vindicate the Israeli position that Iran poses a nuclear threat. Netanyahu said, “Our region has been hostage to a narrative that is the result of sixty years of propaganda, which paints Israel as the greatest threat. In reality, leaders understand that that view is bankrupt. For the first time in history, there is agreement that Iran is the threat. If leaders start saying openly what they have long been saying behind closed doors, with can make a real breakthrough on the road to peace,” Netanyahu said. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also discussed Iran at her news conference in Washington. This is what she said:

HILARY CLINTON: I think that it should not be a surprise to anyone that Iran is a source of great concern, not only in the United States. What comes through in every meeting that I have- anywhere in the world- is a concern about Iranian actions and intentions. So, if anything, any of the comments that are being reported on allegedly from the cables confirm the fact that Iran poses a very serious threat in the eyes of many of her neighbors and a serious concern far beyond her region. That is why the international community came together to pass the strongest possible sanctions against Iran. It did not happen because the United States said, “Please, do this for us!” It happened because countries- once they evaluated the evidence concerning Iran’s actions and intentions- reached the same conclusion that the United States reached: that we must do whatever we can to muster the international community to take action to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear weapons state. So if anyone reading the stories about these, uh, alleged cables thinks carefully what they will conclude is that the concern about Iran is well founded, widely shared, and will continue to be at the source of the policy that we pursue with like-minded nations to try to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Secretary to Hillary Clinton yesterday at a news conference. I wanted to get your comment on Clinton, Netanyahu’s comment, and the fact that Abdullah of Saudi Arabia- the King who is now getting back surgery in the New York- called for the U.S. to attack Iran. Noam Chomsky?

NOAM CHOMSKY: That essentially reinforces what I said before, that the main significance of the cables that are being released so far is what they tell us about Western leadership. So Hillary Clinton and Benjamin Netanyahu surely know of the careful polls of Arab public opinion. The Brookings Institute just a few months ago released extensive polls of what Arabs think about Iran. The results are rather striking. They show the Arab opinion holds that the major threat in the region is Israel- that’s 80. The second major threat is the United States- that’s 77. Iran is listed as a threat by 10%.

With regard to nuclear weapons, rather remarkably, a majority- in fact, 57–say that the region would have a positive effect in the region if Iran had nuclear weapons. Now, these are not small numbers. 80, 77, say the U.S. and Israel are the major threat. 10 say Iran is the major threat. This may not be reported in the newspapers here- it is in England- but it’s certainly familiar to the Israeli and U.S. governments, and to the ambassadors. But there is not a word about it anywhere. What that reveals is the profound hatred for democracy on the part of our political leadership and the Israeli political leadership. These things aren’t even to be mentioned. This seeps its way all through the diplomatic service. The cables to not have any indication of that.

When they talk about Arabs, they mean the Arab dictators, not the population, which is overwhelmingly opposed to the conclusions that the analysts here- Clinton and the media- have drawn. There’s also a minor problem; that’s the major problem. The minor problem is that we don’t know from the cables what the Arab leaders think and say. We know what was selected from the range of what they say. So there is a filtering process. We don’t know how much it distorts the information. But there is no question that what is a radical distortion is- or, not even a distortion, a reflection–of the concern that the dictators are what matter. The population does not matter, even if it’s overwhelmingly opposed to U.S. policy.

There are similar things elsewhere, such as keeping to this region. One of the most interesting cables was a cable from the U.S. ambassador in Israel to Hillary Clinton, which described the attack on Gaza- which we should call the U.S./Israeli attack on Gaza- December 2008. It states correctly there had been a truce. It does not add that during the truce- which was really not observed by Israel- but during the truce, Hamas scrupulously observed it according to the Israeli government, not a single rocket was fired. That’s an omission. But then comes a straight line: it says that in December 2008, Hamas renewed rocket firing and therefore Israel had to attack in self-defense. Now, the ambassador surely is aware that there must be somebody in the American Embassy who reads the Israeli press- the mainstream Israeli press- in which case the embassy is surely aware that it is exactly the opposite: Hamas was calling for a renewal of the cease-fire. Israel considered the offer and rejected it, preferring to bomb rather than have security. Also omitted is that while Israel never observed the cease-fire- it maintained the siege in violation of the truce agreement- on November 4, the U.S. election 2008, the Israeli army invaded Gaza, killed half a dozen Hamas militants, which did lead to an exchange of fire in which all the casualties, as usual, were Palestinian. Then in December, Hamas- when the truce officially ended- Hamas called for renewing it. Israel refused, and the U.S. and Israel chose to launch the war. What the embassy reported is a gross falsification and a very significant one since- since it has to do the justification for the murderous attack- which means either the embassy hasn’t a clue to what is going on or else they’re lying outright.

AMY GOODMAN: And the latest report that just came out- from Oxfam, from Amnesty International, and other groups- about the effects of the siege on Gaza? What’s happening right now?

NOAM CHOMSKY: A siege is an act of war. If anyone insists on that, it is Israel. Israel launched two wars- ’56 and ’67- in part on grounds its access to the outside world was very partially restricted. That very partial siege they considered an act of war and justification for- well, one of several justifications- for what they called “preventive”- or if you like, preemptive- war. So they understand that perfectly well and the point is correct. The siege is a criminal act, in the first place. The Security Council has called on Israel to lift it, and others have. It’s designed to- as Israeli officials have have stated- to keep the people of Gaza to minimal level of existence. They do not want to kill them all off because that would not look good in international opinion. As they put it, “to keep them on a diet.” This justification, this began very shortly after the official Israeli withdrawal. There was an election in January 2006 after the only free election in the Arab world- carefully monitored, recognized to be free- but it had a flaw. The wrong people won. Namely Hamas, which the U.S. did not want it and Israel did not want. Instantly, within days, the U.S. and Israel instituted harsh measures to punish the people of Gaza for voting the wrong way in a free election.

The next step was that they- the U.S. and Israel- sought to, along with the Palestinian Authority, try to carry out a military coup in Gaza to overthrow the elected government. This failed- Hamas beat back the coup attempt. That was July 2007. At that point, the siege got much harsher. In between come in many acts of violence, shellings, invasions and so on and so forth. But basically, Israel claims that when the truce was established in the summer 2008, Israel’s reason for not observing it and withdrawing the siege was that there was an Israeli soldier- Gilad Shalit- who was captured at the border. International commentary regards this as a terrible crime. Well, whatever you think about it, capturing a soldier of an attacking army- and the army was attacking Gaza- capturing a soldier of an attacking army isn’t anywhere near the level of the crime of kidnapping civilians. Just one day before the capture of Gilad Shalit at the border, Israeli troops had entered Gaza, kidnapped two civilians- the Muammar Brothers- and spirited them across the border. They’ve disappeared somewhere in Israel’s prison system, which is where hundreds, maybe a thousand or so people are sometimes there for years without charges. There are also secret prisons. We don’t know what happens there.

This alone is a far worse crime than the kidnapping of Shalit. In fact, you could argue there was a reason why was barely covered: Israel has been doing this for years, in fact, decades. Kidnapping, capturing people, hijacking ships, killing people, bringing them to Israel sometimes as hostages for many years. So this is regular practice; Israel can do what it likes. But the reaction here and the rest of the world of regarding the Shalit kidnapping- well, not kidnapping, you don’t kidnap soldiers- the capture of a soldier as an unspeakable crime, justification for maintaining and murders siege… that’s disgraceful.

AMY GOODMAN: Noam, so you have Amnesty International, Oxfam, Save the Children, and eighteen other aide groups calling on Israel to unconditionally lift the blockade of Gaza. And you have in the WikiLeaks release a U.S. diplomatic cable- provided to The Guardian by WikiLeaks- laying out, “National human intelligence collection directive: Asking U.S. personnel to obtain details of travel plans such as routes and vehicles used by Palestinian Authority leaders and Hamas members.” The cable demands, “Biographical, financial, by metric information on key PA and Hamas leaders and representatives to include the Young Guard inside Gaza, the West Bank, and outside,” it says.

NOAM CHOMSKY: That should not come as much of a surprise. Contrary to the image that is portrayed here, the United States is not an honest broker. It is a participant, a direct and crucial participant, in Israeli crimes, both in the West Bank and in Gaza. The attack in Gaza was a clear case in point: they used American weapons, the U.S. blocked cease-fire efforts, they gave diplomatic support. The same is true of the daily ongoing crimes in the West Bank, and we should not forget that. Actually, in Area C- the area of the West Bank that Israel controls- conditions for Palestinians have been reported by Save The Children to be worse than in Gaza. Again, this all takes place on the basis of crucial, decisive, U.S., military, diplomatic, economic support; and also ideological support- meaning, distorting the situation, as is done again dramatically in the cables.

The siege itself is simply criminal. It is not only blocking desperately needed aid from coming in, it also drives Palestinians away from the border. Gaza is a small place, heavily and densely overcrowded. And Israeli fire and attacks drive Palestinians away from the Arab land on the border, and also drive fisherman in from Gaza into territorial waters. They compelled by Israeli gunboats- all illegal, of course- to fish right near the shore where fishing is almost impossible because Israel has destroyed the power systems and sewage systems and the contamination is terrible. This is just a stranglehold to punish people for being there and for insisting on voting the wrong way. Israel decided, “We don’t want this anymore. Let’s just get rid of them.”

We should also remember, the U.S./Israeli policy- since Oslo, since the early 1990’s- has been to separate Gaza from the West Bank. That is in straight violation of the Oslo agreements, but it has been carried out systematically, and it has a big effect. It means almost half the Palestinian population would be cut off from any possible political arrangement that would be made. It also means Palestine loses its access to the outside world- Gaza should have and can have airports and seaports. Right now, Israel has taken over about 40% of the West Bank. Obama’s latest offers have granted even more, and they’re certainly planning to take more. What is left is just canonized. It’s what the planner, Ariel Sharon called Bantustans. And they’re in prison, too, as Israel takes over the Jordan Valley and drives Palestinians out. So these are all crimes of a piece.

The Gaza siege is particularly grotesque because of the conditions under which people are forced to live. I mean, if a young person in Gaza- student in Gaza, let’s say- wants to study in a West Bank university, they can’t do it. If it a person in Gaza needs advanced medical training or treatment from an East Jerusalem hospital where the training is available, they can’t go! Medicines are held back. It is a scandalous crime, all around.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you think the United States should do in this case?

NOAM CHOMSKY: What the United States should do is very simple: it should join the world. I mean, there are negotiations going on, supposedly. As they are presented here, the standard picture is that the U.S. is an honest broker trying to bring together two recalcitrant opponents- Israel and Palestinian Authority. That’s just a charade.

If there were serious negotiations, they would be organized by some neutral party and the U.S. and Israel would be on one side and the world would be on the other side. And that is not an exaggeration. It should not be a secret that there has long been an overwhelming international consensus on a diplomatic, political solution. Everyone knows the basic outlines; some of the details you can argue about. It includes everyone except the United States and Israel. The U.S. has been blocking it for 35 years with occasional departures- brief ones. It includes the Arab League. It includes the Organization of Islamic States. which happens to include Iran. It includes every relevant actor except the United States and Israel, the two rejectionist states. So if there were to be negotiations that were serious, that’s the way they would be organized. The actual negotiations barely reach the level of comedy. The issue that’s being debated is a footnote, a minor footnote: expansion of settlements. Of course it’s illegal. In fact, everything Israel is doing in the West Bank and Gaza is illegal. That hasn’t even been controversial since 1967.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to come back to this in a minute. Noam Chomsky, author and institute professor emeritus at MIT, as we talk about WikiLeaks and the state of the world today.

[music break]

AMY GOODMAN: Our guest is Noam Chomsky, world-renowned dissident, author of more than 100 books, speaking to us from Boston. Noam, you wrote a piece after the midterm elections called Outrage Misguided. I want to read for you now what Sarah Palin tweeted – the former Alaskan governor, of course, and Republication vice presidential nominee. This is what she tweeted about WikiLeaks. Rather, she put it on Facebook. She said, “First and foremost, what steps were taken to stop WikiLeaks’ director Julian Assange from distributing this highly-sensitive classified material, especially after he had already published material not once but twice in the previous months? Assange is not a journalist any more than the editor of the Al Qaeda’s new English-language magazine “Inspire,” is a journalist. He is an anti-American operative with blood on his hands. His past posting of classified documents revealed the identity of more than 100 Afghan sources to the Taliban. Why was he not pursued with the same urgency we pursue Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders?” Noam Chomsky, your response?

NOAM CHOMSKY: That’s pretty much what I would expect Sarah Palin to say. I don’t know how much she understands, but I think we should pay attention to what we learn from the leaks. What we learned, for example, is kinds of things I’ve said. Perhaps the most dramatic revelation, or mention, is the bitter hatred of democracy that is revealed both by the U.S. Government – Hillary Clinton, others – and also by the diplomatic service.

To tell the world– well, they’re talking to each other- to pretend to each other that the Arab world regards Iran as the major threat and wants the U.S. to bomb Iran, is extremely revealing, when they know that approximately 80% of Arab opinion regards the U.S. and Israel as the major threat, 10% regard Iran as the major threat, and a majority, 57%, think the region would be better off with Iranian nuclear weapons as a kind of deterrent. That is does not even enter. All that enters is what they claim has been said by Arab dictators – brutal Arab dictators. That is what counts.

How representative this is of what they say, we don’t know, because we do not know what the filtering is. But that’s a minor point. But the major point is that the population is irrelevant. All that matters is the opinions of the dictators that we support. If they were to back us, that is the Arab world. That is a very revealing picture of the mentality of U.S. political leadership and, presumably, the lead opinion, judging by the commentary that’s appeared here, that’s the way it has been presented in the press as well. It does not matter with the Arabs believe.

AMY GOODMAN: Your piece, Outrage Misguided. Back to the midterm elections and what we’re going to see now. Can you talk about the tea party movement?

NOAM CHOMSKY: The Tea Party movement itself is, maybe 15% or 20% of the electorate. It’s relatively affluent, white, nativist, you know, it has rather traditional nativist streaks to it. But what is much more important, I think, is the outrage. Over half the population says they more or less supported it, or support its message. What people are thinking is extremely interesting. I mean, overwhelmingly polls reveal that people are extremely bitter, angry, hostile, opposed to everything.

The primary cause undoubtedly is the economic disaster. It’s not just the financial catastrophe, it’s an economic disaster. I mean, in the manufacturing industry, for example, unemployment levels are at the level of the Great Depression. And unlike the Great Depression, those jobs are not coming back. U.S. owners and managers have long ago made the decision that they can make more profit with complicated financial deals than by production. So finance – this goes back to the 1970s, mainly Reagan escalated it, and onward- Clinton, too. The economy has been financialized.

Financial institutions have grown enormously in their share of corporate profits. It may be something like a third, or something like that today. At the same time, correspondingly, production has been exported. So you buy some electronic device from China. China is an assembly plant for a Northeast Asian production center. The parts and components come from the more advanced countries – and from the United States, and the technology . So yes, that’s a cheap place to assemble things and sell them back here. Rather similar in Mexico, now Vietnam, and so on. That is the way to make profits.

It destroys the society here, but that’s not the concern of the ownership class and the managerial class. Their concern is profit. That is what drives the economy. The rest of it is a fallout. People are extremely bitter about it, but don’t seem to understand it. So the same people who are a majority, who say that Wall Street is to blame for the current crisis, are voting Republican. Both parties are deep in the pockets of Wall Street, but the Republicans much more so than the Democrats.

The same is true on issue after issue. The antagonism to everyone is extremely high – actually antagonism – the population doesn’t like Democrats, but they hate Republicans even more. They’re against big business. They’re against government. They’re against Congress. They’re against science –

AMY GOODMAN: Noam, we only have thirty seconds. I wanted ask if you were President Obama’s top adviser, what would you tell him to do right now?

NOAM CHOMSKY: I would tell him to do what FDR did when big business was opposed to him. Help organize, stimulate public opposition and put through a serious populist program, which can be done. Stimulate the economy. Don’t give away everything to financiers. Push through real health reform. The health reform that was pushed through may be a slight improvement but it leaves some major problems untouched. If you’re worried about the deficit, pay attention to the fact that it is almost all attributable to military spending and this totally dysfunctional health program.

By Noam Chomsky & Amy Goodman

 

Embassy dispatches show America used spying, threats and promises of aid to get support for Copenhagen accord

Hidden behind the save-the-world rhetoric of the global climate change negotiations lies the mucky realpolitik: money and threats buy political support; spying and cyberwarfare are used to seek out leverage.

The US diplomatic cables reveal how the US seeks dirt on nations opposed to its approach to tackling global warming; how financial and other aid is used by countries to gain political backing; how distrust, broken promises and creative accounting dog negotiations; and how the US mounted a secret global diplomatic offensive to overwhelm opposition to the controversial “Copenhagen accord”, the unofficial document that emerged from the ruins of the Copenhagen climate change summit in 2009.

Negotiating a climate treaty is a high-stakes game, not just because of the danger warming poses to civilisation but also because re-engineering the global economy to a low-carbon model will see the flow of billions of dollars redirected.

Seeking negotiating chips, the US state department sent a secret cable on 31 July 2009 seeking human intelligence from UN diplomats across a range of issues, including climate change. The request originated with the CIA. As well as countries’ negotiating positions for Copenhagen, diplomats were asked to provide evidence of UN environmental “treaty circumvention” and deals between nations.

But intelligence gathering was not just one way. On 19 June 2009, the state department sent a cable detailing a “spear phishing” attack on the office of the US climate change envoy, Todd Stern, while talks with China on emissions took place in Beijing. Five people received emails, personalised to look as though they came from the National Journal. An attached file contained malicious code that would give complete control of the recipient’s computer to a hacker. While the attack was unsuccessful, the department’s cyber threat analysis division noted: “It is probable intrusion attempts such as this will persist.”

The Beijing talks failed to lead to a global deal at Copenhagen. But the US, the world’s biggest historical polluter and long isolated as a climate pariah, had something to cling to. The Copenhagen accord, hammered out in the dying hours but not adopted into the UN process, offered to solve many of the US’s problems.

The accord turns the UN’s top-down, unanimous approach upside down, with each nation choosing palatable targets for greenhouse gas cuts. It presents a far easier way to bind in China and other rapidly growing countries than the UN process. But the accord cannot guarantee the global greenhouse gas cuts needed to avoid dangerous warming. Furthermore, it threatens to circumvent the UN’s negotiations on extending the Kyoto protocol, in which rich nations have binding obligations. Those objections have led many countries – particularly the poorest and most vulnerable – to vehemently oppose the accord.

Getting as many countries as possible to associate themselves with the accord strongly served US interests, by boosting the likelihood it would be officially adopted. A diplomatic offensive was launched. Diplomatic cables flew thick and fast between the end of Copenhagen in December 2009 and late February 2010, when the leaked cables end.

Some countries needed little persuading. The accord promised $30bn (£19bn) in aid for the poorest nations hit by global warming they had not caused. Within two weeks of Copenhagen, the Maldives foreign minister, Ahmed Shaheed, wrote to the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, expressing eagerness to back it.

By 23 February 2010, the Maldives’ ambassador-designate to the US, Abdul Ghafoor Mohamed, told the US deputy climate change envoy, Jonathan Pershing, his country wanted “tangible assistance”, saying other nations would then realise “the advantages to be gained by compliance” with the accord.

A diplomatic dance ensued. “Ghafoor referred to several projects costing approximately $50m (£30m). Pershing encouraged him to provide concrete examples and costs in order to increase the likelihood of bilateral assistance.”

The Maldives were unusual among developing countries in embracing the accord so wholeheartedly, but other small island nations were secretly seen as vulnerable to financial pressure. Any linking of the billions of dollars of aid to political support is extremely controversial – nations most threatened by climate change see the aid as a right, not a reward, and such a link as heretical. But on 11 February, Pershing met the EU climate action commissioner, Connie Hedegaard, in Brussels, where she told him, according to a cable, “the Aosis [Alliance of Small Island States] countries ‘could be our best allies’ given their need for financing”.

The pair were concerned at how the $30bn was to be raised and Hedegaard raised another toxic subject – whether the US aid would be all cash. She asked if the US would need to do any “creative accounting”, noting some countries such as Japan and the UK wanted loan guarantees, not grants alone, included, a tactic she opposed. Pershing said “donors have to balance the political need to provide real financing with the practical constraints of tight budgets”, reported the cable.

Along with finance, another treacherous issue in the global climate negotiations, currently continuing in Cancún, Mexico, is trust that countries will keep their word. Hedegaard asks why the US did not agree with China and India on what she saw as acceptable measures to police future emissions cuts. “The question is whether they will honour that language,” the cable quotes Pershing as saying.

Trust is in short supply on both sides of the developed-developing nation divide. On 2 February 2009, a cable from Addis Ababa reports a meeting between the US undersecretary of state Maria Otero and the Ethiopian prime minister, Meles Zenawi, who leads the African Union’s climate change negotiations.

The confidential cable records a blunt US threat to Zenawi: sign the accord or discussion ends now. Zenawi responds that Ethiopia will support the accord, but has a concern of his own: that a personal assurance from Barack Obama on delivering the promised aid finance is not being honoured.

US determination to seek allies against its most powerful adversaries – the rising economic giants of Brazil, South Africa, India, China (Basic) – is set out in another cable from Brussels on 17 February reporting a meeting between the deputy national security adviser, Michael Froman, Hedegaard and other EU officials.

Froman said the EU needed to learn from Basic’s skill at impeding US and EU initiatives and playing them off against each in order “to better handle third country obstructionism and avoid future train wrecks on climate”.

Hedegaard is keen to reassure Froman of EU support, revealing a difference between public and private statements. “She hoped the US noted the EU was muting its criticism of the US, to be constructive,” the cable said. Hedegaard and Froman discuss the need to “neutralise, co-opt or marginalise unhelpful countries including Venezuela and Bolivia”, before Hedegaard again links financial aid to support for the accord, noting “the irony that the EU is a big donor to these countries”. Later, in April, the US cut aid to Bolivia and Ecuador, citing opposition to the accord.

Any irony is clearly lost on the Bolivian president, Evo Morales, according to a 9 February cable from La Paz. The Danish ambassador to Bolivia, Morten Elkjaer, tells a US diplomat that, at the Copenhagen summit, “Danish prime minister Rasmussen spent an unpleasant 30 minutes with Morales, during which Morales thanked him for [$30m a year in] bilateral aid, but refused to engage on climate change issues.”

After the Copenhagen summit, further linking of finance and aid with political support appears. Dutch officials, initially rejecting US overtures to back the accord, make a startling statement on 25 January. According to a cable, the Dutch climate negotiator Sanne Kaasjager “has drafted messages for embassies in capitals receiving Dutch development assistance to solicit support [for the accord]. This is an unprecedented move for the Dutch government, which traditionally recoils at any suggestion to use aid money as political leverage.” Later, however, Kaasjager rows back a little, saying: “The Netherlands would find it difficult to make association with the accord a condition to receive climate financing.”

Perhaps the most audacious appeal for funds revealed in the cables is from Saudi Arabia, the world’s second biggest oil producer and one of the 25 richest countries in the world. A secret cable sent on 12 February records a meeting between US embassy officials and lead climate change negotiator Mohammad al-Sabban. “The kingdom will need time to diversify its economy away from petroleum, [Sabban] said, noting a US commitment to help Saudi Arabia with its economic diversification efforts would ‘take the pressure off climate change negotiations’.”

The Saudis did not like the accord, but were worried they had missed a trick. The assistant petroleum minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman told US officials that he had told his minister Ali al-Naimi that Saudi Arabia had “missed a real opportunity to submit ‘something clever’, like India or China, that was not legally binding but indicated some goodwill towards the process without compromising key economic interests”.

The cables obtained by WikiLeaks finish at the end of February 2010. Today, 116 countries have associated themselves with the accord. Another 26 say they intend to associate. That total, of 140, is at the upper end of a 100-150 country target revealed by Pershing in his meeting with Hedegaard on 11 February.

The 140 nations represent almost 75% of the 193 countries that are parties to the UN climate change convention and, accord supporters like to point out, are responsible for well over 80% of current global greenhouse gas emissions.

At the mid-point of the major UN climate change negotiations in Cancún, Mexico, there have already been flare-ups over how funding for climate adaptation is delivered. The biggest shock has been Japan’s announcement that it will not support an extension of the existing Kyoto climate treaty. That gives a huge boost to the accord. US diplomatic wheeling and dealing may, it seems, be bearing fruit.

By Damian Carrington

© 2010 Guardian/UK

The Wikileaks disclosure this week of confidential cables from United States embassies has been debated chiefly in terms either of the damage to Washington’s reputation or of the questions it raises about national security and freedom of the press.

The headlines aside, most of the information so far revealed from the 250,000 documents is hardly earth-shattering, even if it often runs starkly counter to the official narrative of the US as the benevolent global policeman, trying to maintain order amid an often unruly rabble of underlings.

Is it really surprising that US officials appear to have been trying to spy on senior United Nations staff, and just about everyone else for that matter? Or that Israel has been lobbying strenuously for military action to be taken against Iran? Or even that Saudi Arabia feels threatened by an Iranian nuclear bomb? All of this was already largely understood; the leaks have simply provided official confirmation.

The new disclosures, however, do provide a useful insight, captured in the very ordinariness of the diplomatic correspondence, into Washington’s own sense of the limits on its global role — an insight that was far less apparent in the previous Wikileaks revelations on the US army’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Underlying the gossip and analysis sent back to Washington is an awareness from many US officials stationed abroad of quite how ineffective — and often counter-productive — much US foreign policy is.

While the most powerful nation on earth is again shown to be more than capable of throwing its weight around in bullying fashion, a cynical resignation nonetheless shines through many of the cables, an implicit recognition that even the top dog has to recognise its limits.

That is most starkly evident in the messages sent by the embassy in Pakistan, revealing the perception among local US officials that the country is largely impervious to US machinations and is in danger of falling entirely out the ambit of Washington’s influence.

In the cables sent from Tel Aviv, a similar fatalism reigns. The possibility that Israel might go it alone and attack Iran is contemplated as though it were an event Washington has no hope of preventing. US largesse of billions of dollars in annual aid and military assistance to Israel appears to confer zero leverage on its ally’s policies.

The same sense of US ineffectiveness is highlighted by the Wikileaks episode in another way. Once, in the pre-digital era, the most a whistleblower could hope to achieve was the disclosure of secret documents limited to his or her area of privileged access. Even then the affair could often be hushed up and make no lasting impact.

Now, however, it seems the contents of almost the entire system of US official communications is vulnerable to exposure. And anyone with a computer has a permanent and easily disseminated record of the evidence.

The impression of a world running out of American control has become a theme touching all our lives over the past decade.

The US invented and exported financial deregulation, promising it to be the epitome of the new capitalism that was going to offer the world economic salvation. The result is a banking crisis that now threatens to topple the very governments in Europe who are Washington’s closest allies.

As the contagion of bad debt spreads through the system, we are likely to see a growing destabilisation of the Washington order across the globe.

At the same time, the US army’s invasions in the Middle East are stretching its financial and military muscle to tearing point, defining for a modern audience the problem of imperial over-reach. Here too the upheaval is offering potent possibilities to those who wish to challenge the current order.

And then there is the biggest crisis facing Washington: of a gradually unfolding environmental catastrophe that has been caused chiefly by the same rush for world economic dominance that spawned the banking disaster.

The scale of this problem is overawing most scientists, and starting to register with the public, even if it is still barely acknowledged beyond platitudes by US officials.

The repercussions of ecological meltdown will be felt not just by polar bears and tribes living on islands. It will change the way we live — and whether we live — in ways that we cannot hope to foresee.

At work here is a set of global forces that the US, in its hubris, believed it could tame and dominate in its own cynical interests. By the early 1990s that arrogance manifested itself in the claim of the “end of history”: the world’s problems were about to be solved by US-sponsored corporate capitalism.

The new Wikileaks disclosures will help to dent those assumptions. If a small group of activists can embarrass the most powerful nation on earth, the world’s finite resources and its laws of nature promise a much harsher lesson.

By Jonathan Cook

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.

 

 

The public needs to know the truth about wars. So why have journalists colluded with governments to hoodwink us?

In the US Army manual on counterinsurgency, the American commander General David Petraeus describes Afghanistan as a “war of perception . . . conducted continuously using the news media”. What really matters is not so much the day-to-day battles against the Taliban as the way the adventure is sold in America where “the media directly influence the attitude of key audiences”. Reading this, I was reminded of the Venezuelan general who led a coup against the democratic government in 2002. “We had a secret weapon,” he boasted. “We had the media, especially TV. You got to have the media.”

Never has so much official energy been expended in ensuring journalists collude with the makers of rapacious wars which, say the media-friendly generals, are now “perpetual”. In echoing the west’s more verbose warlords, such as the waterboarding former US vice-president Dick Cheney, who predicated “50 years of war”, they plan a state of permanent conflict wholly dependent on keeping at bay an enemy whose name they dare not speak: the public.

At Chicksands in Bedfordshire, the Ministry of Defence’s psychological warfare (Psyops) establishment, media trainers devote themselves to the task, immersed in a jargon world of “information dominance”, “asymmetric threats” and “cyberthreats”. They share premises with those who teach the interrogation methods that have led to a public inquiry into British military torture in Iraq. Disinformation and the barbarity of colonial war have much in common.

Of course, only the jargon is new. In the opening sequence of my film, The War You Don’t See, there is reference to a pre-WikiLeaks private conversation in December 1917 between David Lloyd George, Britain’s prime minister during much of the first world war, and CP Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian. “If people really knew the truth,” the prime minister said, “the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don’t know, and can’t know.”

In the wake of this “war to end all wars”, Edward Bernays, a confidante of President Woodrow Wilson, coined the term “public relations” as a euphemism for propaganda “which was given a bad name in the war”. In his book, Propaganda (1928), Bernays described PR as “an invisible government which is the true ruling power in our country” thanks to “the intelligent manipulation of the masses”. This was achieved by “false realities” and their adoption by the media. (One of Bernays’s early successes was persuading women to smoke in public. By associating smoking with women’s liberation, he achieved headlines that lauded cigarettes as “torches of freedom”.)

I began to understand this as a young reporter during the American war in Vietnam. During my first assignment, I saw the results of the bombing of two villages and the use of Napalm B, which continues to burn beneath the skin; many of the victims were children; trees were festooned with body parts. The lament that “these unavoidable tragedies happen in wars” did not explain why virtually the entire population of South Vietnam was at grave risk from the forces of their declared “ally”, the United States. PR terms like “pacification” and “collateral damage” became our currency. Almost no reporter used the word “invasion”. “Involvement” and later “quagmire” became staples of a news vocabulary that recognised the killing of civilians merely as tragic mistakes and seldom questioned the good intentions of the invaders.

On the walls of the Saigon bureaus of major American news organisations were often displayed horrific photographs that were never published and rarely sent because it was said they were would “sensationalise” the war by upsetting readers and viewers and therefore were not “objective”. The My Lai massacre in 1968 was not reported from Vietnam, even though a number of reporters knew about it (and other atrocities like it), but by a freelance in the US, Seymour Hersh. The cover of Newsweek magazine called it an “American tragedy”, implying that the invaders were the victims: a purging theme enthusiastically taken up by Hollywood in movies such as The Deer Hunter and Platoon. The war was flawed and tragic, but the cause was essentially noble. Moreover, it was “lost” thanks to the irresponsibility of a hostile, uncensored media.

Although the opposite of the truth, such false realties became the “lessons” learned by the makers of present-day wars and by much of the media. Following Vietnam, “embedding” journalists became central to war policy on both sides of the Atlantic. With honourable exceptions, this succeeded, especially in the US. In March 2003, some 700 embedded reporters and camera crews accompanied the invading American forces in Iraq. Watch their excited reports, and it is the liberation of Europe all over again. The Iraqi people are distant, fleeting bit players; John Wayne had risen again.

The apogee was the victorious entry into Baghdad, and the TV pictures of crowds cheering the felling of a statue of Saddam Hussein. Behind this façade, an American Psyops team successfully manipulated what an ignored US army report describes as a “media circus [with] almost as many reporters as Iraqis”. Rageh Omaar, who was there for the BBC, reported on the main evening news: “People have come out welcoming [the Americans], holding up V-signs. This is an image taking place across the whole of the Iraqi capital.” In fact, across most of Iraq, largely unreported, the bloody conquest and destruction of a whole society was well under way.

In The War You Don’t See, Omaar speaks with admirable frankness. “I didn’t really do my job properly,” he says. “I’d hold my hand up and say that one didn’t press the most uncomfortable buttons hard enough.” He describes how British military propaganda successfully manipulated coverage of the fall of Basra, which BBC News 24 reported as having fallen “17 times”. This coverage, he says, was “a giant echo chamber”.

The sheer magnitude of Iraqi suffering in the onslaught had little place in the news. Standing outside 10 Downing St, on the night of the invasion, Andrew Marr, then the BBC’s political editor, declared, “[Tony Blair] said that they would be able to take Baghdad without a bloodbath and that in the end the Iraqis would be celebrating, and on both of those points he has been proved conclusively right . . .” I asked Marr for an interview, but received no reply. In studies of the television coverage by the University of Wales, Cardiff, and Media Tenor, the BBC’s coverage was found to reflect overwhelmingly the government line and that reports of civilian suffering were relegated. Media Tenor places the BBC and America’s CBS at the bottom of a league of western broadcasters in the time they allotted to opposition to the invasion. “I am perfectly open to the accusation that we were hoodwinked,” said Jeremy Paxman, talking about Iraq’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction to a group of students last year. “Clearly we were.” As a highly paid professional broadcaster, he omitted to say why he was hoodwinked.

Dan Rather, who was the CBS news anchor for 24 years, was less reticent. “There was a fear in every newsroom in America,” he told me, “a fear of losing your job . . . the fear of being stuck with some label, unpatriotic or otherwise.” Rather says war has made “stenographers out of us” and that had journalists questioned the deceptions that led to the Iraq war, instead of amplifying them, the invasion would not have happened. This is a view now shared by a number of senior journalists I interviewed in the US.

In Britain, David Rose, whose Observer articles played a major part in falsely linking Saddam Hussein to al-Qaida and 9/11, gave me a courageous interview in which he said, “I can make no excuses . . . What happened [in Iraq] was a crime, a crime on a very large scale . . .”

“Does that make journalists accomplices?” I asked him.

“Yes . . . unwitting perhaps, but yes.”

What is the value of journalists speaking like this? The answer is provided by the great reporter James Cameron, whose brave and revealing filmed report, made with Malcolm Aird, of the bombing of civilians in North Vietnam was banned by the BBC. “If we who are meant to find out what the bastards are up to, if we don’t report what we find, if we don’t speak up,” he told me, “who’s going to stop the whole bloody business happening again?”

Cameron could not have imagined a modern phenomenon such as WikiLeaks but he would have surely approved. In the current avalanche of official documents, especially those that describe the secret machinations that lead to war – such as the American mania over Iran – the failure of journalism is rarely noted. And perhaps the reason Julian Assange seems to excite such hostility among journalists serving a variety of “lobbies”, those whom George Bush’s press spokesman once called “complicit enablers”, is that WikiLeaks and its truth-telling shames them. Why has the public had to wait for WikiLeaks to find out how great power really operates? As a leaked 2,000-page Ministry of Defence document reveals, the most effective journalists are those who are regarded in places of power not as embedded or clubbable, but as a “threat”. This is the threat of real democracy, whose “currency”, said Thomas Jefferson, is “free flowing information”.

In my film, I asked Assange how WikiLeaks dealt with the draconian secrecy laws for which Britain is famous. “Well,” he said, “when we look at the Official Secrets Act labelled documents, we see a statement that it is an offence to retain the information and it is an offence to destroy the information, so the only possible outcome is that we have to publish the information.” These are extraordinary times.

By John Pilger

www.johnpilger.com

• The War You Don’t See is in cinemas and on DVD from 13 December, and is broadcast on ITV on 14 December at 10.35pm

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

An open letter from the Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers and Afghans for Peace

As the Obama administration releases its December Review of U.S. war in Afghanistan, the Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers, along with Afghans for Peace, have issued a review of their experiences. To express support for their letter, follow this link .

We Want You Out: an open letter from the Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers and Afghans for Peace

To all the leaders of our world, the leaders of the US-led coalition, the Afghan government, the ‘Taliban/Al-Qaeda’ and regional countries,

We are intolerably angry.

All our senses are hurting.

Our women, our men and yes shame on you, our children are grieving.

Your Afghan civilian-military strategy is a murderous stench we smell, see, hear and breathe.

President Obama, and all the elite players and people of the world, why?

America’s 250-million-dollar annual communications budget just to scream propaganda on this war of perceptions, with its nauseating rhetoric mimicked by Osama and other warlords, is powerless before the silent wailing of every anaemic mother.

We will no longer be passive prey to your disrespectful systems of oligarchic, plutocratic war against the people.

Your systems feed the rich and powerful. They are glaringly un-equal, they do not listen, do not think and worst, they do not care.

We choose not to gluttonize with you. We choose not to be trained by you. We choose not to be pawned by you.

We henceforth refuse every weapon you kill us with, every dollar you bait us with and every lie you manipulate us with.

We are not beasts.

We are Afghans, Americans, Europeans, Asians and global citizens.

Yes, you have the false, self-appointed power to arrest us over expressing the public opinion of ordinary folk, students, farmers, shepherds, labourers, teachers, doctors . . . , people who now have nowhere to turn and nowhere to hide. ( Open Letter to our World Leaders )

This world public opinion against the Afghan war has been clearly expressed and is larger than any number of Wikileaks you seek to suppress. So, come arrest us all as we civilly disobey you. Come arrest us all. ( See excerpt below from Wikipedia’s ‘International public opinion on the war in Afghanistan’ )

Yes, you have the army, police and apparatchik to smother us and to bribe those who are Pavlov-reflexed to money, but you cannot stop us from restoring our voice.

We refuse to prostitute our hearts and minds.

We refuse you.

Not you the human person, but you the greedy system of self-interested power.

Again and again here in Afghanistan, we have seen a hope for non-violence light up; every day we see a yearning for humane relationships, and because of this, love is how we now firmly take our stand.

We will listen to the People on December 19th, on the Global Day of Listening to Afghans and we invite every one of you to pick up your phone to call us, to share one another’s pain, and to call our world to urgent reconciliation. We invite the world public opinion to overwhelm us! (email youthpeacevolunteers@gmail.com to arrange a call).

We wish to invite all the people of the world because when the powers are not listening to the people, listening becomes an act of love, it becomes a solidarity of non-violent resistance.

How can we do any less?

14-year-old Abdulai’s father was killed by the ‘Taliban’ and so, like every other human being, he copes with sorrow, hate, fear and anger.

But, he wakes up to the chronic war days in his land sensing that ‘something is very wrong with the world I’m caught up in’, ‘these elders of the world are not getting it…..’.

How does trillion-deficit killing, followed by the strategy of escalated killing and yet another review for more killing, work?

How does it make anyone safer?

How does it solve the incorruptible corruption, unequalled inequality and inviolate violence we face daily?

Your policies, skewed-ly ‘diagnosed’ and ‘reviewed’ in a cold clinical manner divorced from reality, have been deaf to the concerns and needs of the people, thus we endeavour to have a People’s Afghanistan December Review, because that’s what ordinary people can do.

We would try not to ‘throw’ our shoes at you. We would try to recognize the better side of all human beings and thus continue to serve our commoner’s tea and bread to one and all. But we do ask, plead and demand that you stop your unsustainable, superpower militarism.

We want peace.

We want you out.

With singular sincerity,

Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers

Afghans for Peace

Notes :

“My people, the suppressed millions, are my heroes. They are the real source of any positive change in Afghanistan and their power is stronger than anything else. And anti-war protesters around the world, those who are standing against the destructive policies of world powers. There is a superpower in the world besides the US government — world public opinion.” Malalai Joya

Excerpts from Wikipedia :

International public opinion is largely opposed to the war in Afghanistan.

The 25-nation Pew Global Attitudes survey in June 2009 reported that majorities or pluralities in 18 out of 25 countries want U.S. and NATO to remove their military troops from Afghanistan as soon as possible.

Despite American calls for NATO allies to send more troops to Afghanistan, there was majority or plurality opposition to such action in every one of the NATO countries surveyed: Germany (63% opposition), France (62%), Poland (57%), Canada (55%), Britain (51%), Spain (50%), and Turkey (49%).

In Europe, poll after poll in France, Germany and even Britain show that the European public want their troops to be pulled out and less money spent on the war in Afghanistan

ABC News/BBC/ARD/Washington Post poll of 1,691 Afghan adults from Oct. 29-Nov. 13, 2010

Afghans indicated they were more pessimistic about the direction of their country, less confident about U.S.-led coalition troops providing security and more willing to negotiate with the Taliban than a year ago.

More than half of Afghans interviewed said U.S. and NATO forces should begin withdrawing from the country in mid-2011 or sooner.

“There are the occupation forces from the sky, dropping cluster bombs and depleted uranium, and on the ground there are the fundamentalist warlords and the Taliban, with their own guns. If I should die, and you should choose to carry on my work, you are welcome to visit my grave. Pour some water on it and shout three times. I want to hear your voice.” Malalai Joya

By Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers & Afghans for Peace

 

 

 

 

 

 

Guardian Editor Says Most Startling WikiLeaks Cables Still To Be Released

“In the coming days, we are going to see some quite startling disclosures about Russia, the nature of the Russian state, and about bribery and corruption in other countries, particularly in Central Asia,” says Investigations Executive Editor David Leigh at the Guardian, one of the three newspapers given advanced access to the secret U.S. embassy cables by the whistleblower website, WikiLeaks. “We will see a wrath of disclosures about pretty terrible things going on around the world.” Leigh reviews the major WikiLeaks revelations so far, explains how the 250,000 files were downloaded and given to the newspaper on a thumb drive, and confirms the Guardian gave the files to the New York Times. Additional cables will be disclosed throughout the week. [includes rush transcript]

AMY GOODMAN: The Obama Administration is threatening to prosecute the online whistleblower WikiLeaks while scrambling to contain the global fallout from the group’s latest release of secret government documents. A trove of over 250,000 diplomatic cables from 274 American embassies has sent shockwaves worldwide. The revelations include new details of U.S. espionage on foreign and UN officials, the cover-up of U.S. bomb strikes in Yemen, the urging of Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah for a U.S. attack on Iran, and disparaging internal portraits of foreign leaders. New cables released today show Chinese officials have voiced support for the reunification of the Korean peninsula, should North Korea collapse. Also of note is a memo from the U.S. Embassy in Honduras from 2008 that clearly states the military coup that ousted President Manuel Zelaya was illegal and unconstitutional. The cables also reveal Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, privately questioned the mental health of Argentine President Cristina Kirchner and asked U.S. diplomats to investigate whether she takes medication.

On Monday, Attorney General Eric Holder said the Justice Department and Pentagon are conducting an active, ongoing criminal investigation into the leaking and publication of the documents. The Washington Post reports federal authorities are considering charging WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange under the Espionage Act. At the White House, press secretary Robert Gibbs said the Obama Administration is weighing a range of punitive measures.

ROBERT GIBBS: Obviously, there is an ongoing criminal investigation about the stealing of and dissemination of sensitive and classified information. Secondly, under the administration- I should say administration-wide- we are looking at a whole host of things and I wouldn’t rule anything out.

AMY GOODMAN: An Army intelligence analyst, Bradley Manning, has been imprisoned since May when he was arrested on charges of leaking the classified material. In her first public comments since the cables’ publication, Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, denounced WikiLeaks, calling the latest release an attack on the international community.

HILLARY CLINTON: The United States strongly condemns the illegal disclosure of classified information. It puts people’s lives in danger, threatens our national security, and undermines our efforts to work with other countries to solve shared problems. This disclosure is not just an attack on America’s foreign policy interests. It is an attack on the international community. The alliances and partnerships, the conversations and negotiations that safeguard global security and advance economic prosperity. I am confident that the partnerships that the Obama Administration has worked so hard to build, will withstand this challenge. The president and I have made these partnerships a priority and we are proud of the progress that they have helped achieve and they will remain at the center of our efforts. There is nothing laudable about endangering innocent people. And there is nothing brave about sabotaging the peaceful relations between nations on which our common security depends. There have been examples in history in which official conduct has been made public in the name of exposing wrongdoings or misdeeds. This is not one of those cases.

AMY GOODMAN: Clinton herself is implicated in one of the biggest revelations to emerge from the WikiLeaks cables. The documents show both Clinton and her predecessor, Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, issued directives for spying on foreign officials. U.S. diplomats have been asked to obtain information from the foreign dignitaries they meet including frequent flier numbers, credit card details and even DNA material, like finger prints, iris scans. The United Nations is also a target of the espionage with one cable listing information gathering priorities for U.S. officials at the UN headquarters in New York. At the UN, the spokesperson for Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, Farhan Haq, declined to comment directly on the spying.

FARHAN HAQ: The United Nations is not in a position to comment on the authenticity on the document purporting to request information gathering activities on UN officials and activities. The UN is by its very nature a transparent organization that makes a great deal of information about its activities public and member states.

AMY GOODMAN: Despite refusing to directly criticize the U.S., Haq added that the UN relies on member states to adhere to treaties and agreements about respecting the privileges and immunities of the UN and other member states. Senior U.N. officials have reportedly approached the U.S. government about the spying and could soon make a formal complaint. Meanwhile, Ecuador has offered WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange residency in the country.

For more, I’m joined now from London by David Leigh, Investigations Editor of the Guardian of London. The Guardian and four other newspapers were provided advanced copies of the documents before WikiLeaks made them public. David Leigh, thanks again for joining us on Democracy Now! why don’t you lay out for us what you think are the most important revelations in these cables and why you decided to release them as well.

DAVID LEIGH: These revelations aren’t over yet. In fact, they’ve barely started. We at the Guardian and the other international news organizations will be making revelations, disclosures from now, day-by-day, for probably the next week or more. So, we haven’t seen anything yet, really. We’ve seen so far seen the surprising intelligence about North Korea, that China is willing to see it collapse, in effect. We’ve seen that the Arab leaders are keen to see the UN or United States bomb Iraq- I’m sorry, bomb Iran. We bombed Iraq already. These are the kinds and level of things we’re getting so far. In the coming days, we’re going to see some quite startling disclosures about Russia, the nature of the Russian state and about bribery and corruption in other countries, particularly in Central Asia. We’re going to see a wrath of disclosures about pretty terrible things going on around the world.

AMY GOODMAN: David Leigh, How did you get the documents?

DAVID LEIGH: We got the documents from WikiLeaks.

AMY GOODMAN: And the New York Times, this time around, though it joined with the Guardian and Der Spiegel and a few other news outlets around the world last time in getting them directly from WikiLeaks, this time they didn’t. Explain what happened.

DAVID LEIGH: We don’t regard that as having much significance. The documents were passed around among the media partners in the usual way. Remember, this is the third time that this group of newspapers has done this. We did the Iraq war logs and the Afghanistan war logs also with Der Spiegel in Berlin and with the New York Times. So, it’s the same deal as before.

AMY GOODMAN: So, did – was it you, The Guardian, that gave the Wikileaks documents over to the New York Times this time?

DAVID LEIGH: We were the ones who physically passed them over. I don’t know what significance you have for that.

AMY GOODMAN: Um, hm. Can you compare the release of these documents, this latest trove of diplomatic cables to what has been released before to the Iraq war logs and Afghanistan before that?

DAVID LEIGH: Well, it’s a different quality of material. Those were logs that were pretty sort of raw snapshots in military jargon of ongoing incidents. They were sort of field reports. “Now this is happening. Now that is happening.” This is a completely different kind of material. It’s essentially diplomatic dispatches. They’re written in English, written as pieces of connected prose, and they are carefully considered analysis of reports back to what ambassadors and their subordinates in all these foreign countries want to tell Washington what is going on.

AMY GOODMAN: One of the pieces you’ve done and you’ve done many of them on all of these leaks, but the latest one, David, how 250,000 U.S. embassy cables were leaked from a fake Lady Gaga city to a thumb drive that is a pocket-sized bombshell, the biggest intelligence leak in history. Take us through it.

DAVID LEIGH: Well, you want me to take you through how the mechanism of the leak?

AMY GOODMAN: Yes.

DAVID LEIGH: Well, as we understand it, all of this starts with the United States itself. What they did was they created this gigantic data base of –an archive of these 250,000 cables. They put them not only on the State Department’s classified embassies’ websites, but on SIPRNET, which is the US Defense Department’s military Internet. That circulated to soldiers all across the world, everywhere the U.S. has got bases. As a result, it was accessible to a junior soldier cleared to the secret level and above, a 22-year-old Bradley Manning, according to the subsequent indictment. According to the chat logs Manning had with somebody else, he went in there with a CD marked Lady Gaga, reported to lips sync to it and nod his head to the time of the non-existing music, while all the while covertly downloading this stuff. He walked out with a CD. By the time the Guardian got it, it was on a thumb drive, a tiny little thumb drive and had 1.6 gigabytes of material, which contains 250 million words.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you believe he is the only source of these documents?

DAVID LEIGH: My personal opinion- which isn’t evidence, is yes- he is the only source.

AMY GOODMAN: Does it astound you that a low-level soldier, a low-level intelligence soldier in Iraq, could have access to this amount of information from so many different sources?

DAVID LEIGH: It seems to me and it seems to British diplomats when you tell them about this, a very dumb thing for the state department to have done, in the name of intelligence sharing and information sharing, to have distributed this stuff in such a way that these junior people could get access to it. If they didn’t want it out, it’s in their hands. Don’t create a data base like this. Don’t circulate it to everybody. I know they said it was in the wake of 9/11 that everyone wants to share intelligence, but I do not think it helps anybody. Although, now that it’s happened, the material in there is of immense the value to historians and journalists. So, I’m glad it’s come out.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, the Obama administration threatens to prosecute WikiLeaks. Some influential lawmakers are calling for even harsher actions. On Monday, the incoming Chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, in the United States, Republican Congress member Peter King of New York, says WikiLeaks should be declared a foreign terrorist organization. King spoke to NBC’s Matt Lauer.

MATT LAUER: You would like to see WikiLeaks, the organization that has really served as the messenger for these leaked documents to be declared an FTO or a foreign terrorist organization. That would put them in the same category as Al Qaeda, basically.

PETER KING: Right.

MATT LAUER: What is the likelihood of that happening?

PETER KING: I was disappointed when Miklaszewski said, “It does not appear the government is going to be taking tough legal action.” If American lives are at risk and every top military official had said that, then we have to be serious. We should go after them for violating the Espionage Act. The reason I say “foreign terrorist organization” is that they are engaged in terrorist activity. Their activity is enabling terrorists to kill Americans.

MATT LAUER: Well, aren’t they—

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to go to break. We just lost David Leigh, the Investigations Editor at The Guardian. We’ll try to get him back on, if we can.

By David Leigh & Amy Goodman

 

Dear Friends and Colleagues:

In the November 29th issue of The New Yorker, John Cassidy asks in a commentary: ”What good is Wall Street?”  He ends his article with a quote from Paul Woolly: “There was a presumption that financial innovation is socially valuable.  The first thing I discovered is that it wasn’t backed by any empirical evidence.  There’s almost none.”

Wall Street sustained losses of US$42.6 billion in 2008, but made US$55 billion in profits the very next year – when most people were coping, and many coping badly, with recession, unemployment and declining asset prices.  In the first quarter of 2010, traders at Goldman Sachs had their best quarter results ever – US$7.4 billion in net revenue.

In securities trading these days, institutional fund managers and speculative high frequency traders are most of the market.  Rarely do they provide capital for new or expanded business enterprise.  Mostly they take cash out of the economy through the buying and selling of existing securities which represent the present value of past capital investment.

Big trading houses hardly ever have a day when they lose money.  This is not taking a chance on a roll of the dice – this is loading the dice in their favor.  It is moving the chips around among the poker players; total wealth is not increased in a trade of securities; cash just changes hands.

If someone buys at five and sells at six to pocket a one dollar profit, what value have they added?   Some liquidity to the market for that security, to be sure, and there is a social good provided by liquid markets.  But beyond that?

They took the dollar profit in exchange for a legal claim on future income and/or capital – a security.  This is rent extraction, not wealth creation.  Rents are paid for access to legal or political authority – as when we pay rent to a landlord, we buy a share of his or her legal title to real property.  Patents and copyrights provide legal opportunities for rent extraction.  Without legal title and the power of government to enforce those property rights, no rents could be charged.

If prices for securities rise, however, there is what is called a “wealth effect.”  People then feel a rising tide of economic prospects and their psychology encourages consumption and borrowing, which do impact the real economy.

More realistic economic wealth creation through financial intermediation aggregates existing wealth from some to transfer its buying power to others to finance enterprise, innovation and growth.  This is most often done through new loans to business and new equity investment in companies, or through hybrid investments like warrants, preferred stock and convertible bonds and debentures.

Traditional banking, investment banking and venture capital provided these financial services.  Insurance and other forms of risk protection and diversification also add real economic value in encouraging investment in enterprise.

But from 1991 to 2000, some 150 venture capital-backed companies a year took in equity capital through Wall Street.  But since 2000, such annual IPO offerings have averaged only about 50 per year.

Capital markets seem to have lost faith in new enterprises and have become captivated by property, derivatives, bonds and every other asset class.

So where will the growth come from to hire workers and pay down national debts?

Lord Adair Turner, Chairman of the UK’s Financial Services Authority, wrote recently that “It is possible for financial activity to extract rents from the real economy rather than deliver economic value.”

If all financial innovation does is create new forms of rent extraction, what good does it do except to take money from the many and give it to the few?

In the United States, six firms – Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo – have assets of US$9.2 trillion – 63% of national GDP.

John Maynard Keynes famously aligned securities exchanges with casinos in their social utility. Did he have a point?  Casinos make a lot of money on millions of small transactions.  They win every time you lose at their tables.  What wealth do they create?  They just take your money and move it to other pockets.

So does a poker game, or craps.  Money moves among players, but the total pot sees no growth in value.  Some go home winners, but others leave as losers to that extent.

The bets made by many securities traders are calculated by algorithms that measure a price as a deviation (higher or lower) from a statistical norm and plot the odds of deviation associated with that price.  If you bet that the price will converge towards the norm, you can successfully arbitrage and make profits.

The algorithms that now control most trading in securities began as attempts to beat the odds in casinos.  Our financial system’s major profit seeking mechanism owes its life and its profits to the techniques of gambling.

Maybe Keynes had a point after all.

Gambling, I would suggest, is a form of extracting rents from the real economy.  Gamblers seek rents associated with their legal rights.  Gambling is all about getting power according to the rules.  The rules of gambling – poker, black-jack, craps, chemin de fer, bridge, if you will – create legal rights in players.  Two of a kind in poker beats any single high card, etc.  If the rules come down in your favor, you have a right to collect.  You suddenly have a valuable property in how the cards or the dice fell.  You can therefore trade in your property for some of the cash money put up by the other players, including the house.

Or, if you gain nothing to trade from the fall of cards or dice, you lose whatever price you paid to join the game.  That entrance fee is also a form of rent, paid to those who “own” the game for access to their assets.

All the money that changes hands in gambling is brought into the casino or the game from the outside – from the real economy.

Rent extraction in gambling brings about a kind of “irrational exuberance” on the part of many players that does not exist in normal market transactions where pricing future returns is more realistic.

The more rent extraction is at work, the less market mechanisms can do their job of providing economically efficient outcomes.  Where rent extraction is at work, the elasticity of supply and demand curves tightens; free market checks and balances have less effect; prices don’t signal true levels of demand or possible supply, and they are artificially high.  It is easier to make money through rent extraction than to be subject to market forces.

Monopolies and cartels create opportunities for rent extraction.  Adam Smith, in his book Wealth of Nations, noted that business owners and managers love to get together and conspire against the public by setting up rigged markets to increase the returns to rent.

Corruption by officials and politicians is another form of rent extraction: use of state power for selfish gain comes at a price paid to those in charge of state authority.  Here, too, market forces are too weak to control prices and economic outcomes.

If it is correct that financial intermediation has more and more become rent extraction, than it should also be correct that we need to give it less and less deference and government advantages.

The profits of financial houses should move back down in proportion to all profits roughly to the proportion that the financial industry contributes real wealth to national GDP.

Disproportionate rent extraction would appear to be highly unethical, in any industry.

Sincerely yours,

Stephen B. Young

Global Executive Director

Caux Round Table