Afghan Sunshine (Wikileaks and Transparency vs. Corporate Tyranny)

 

Today Wikileaks, in collaboration with the NYT, the Guardian, and Der Spiegel, released 92,000 pages of documents on the Afghan war. So far it looks like strong reinforcement of everything we already knew.

 

From The Guardian:

 

The war logs also detail:

• How a secret “black” unit of special forces hunts down Taliban leaders for “kill or capture” without trial.

• How the US covered up evidence that the Taliban have acquired deadly surface-to-air missiles.

• How the coalition is increasingly using deadly Reaper drones to hunt and kill Taliban targets by remote control from a base in Nevada.

• How the Taliban have caused growing carnage with a massive escalation of their roadside bombing campaign, which has killed more than 2,000 civilians to date.

 

And the NYT:

 

The documents — some 92,000 reports spanning parts of two administrations from January 2004 through December 2009 — illustrate in mosaic detail why, after the United States has spent almost $300 billion on the war in Afghanistan, the Taliban are stronger than at any time since 2001……

The archive is a vivid reminder that the Afghan conflict until recently was a second-class war, with money, troops and attention lavished on Iraq while soldiers and Marines lamented that the Afghans they were training were not being paid.

The reports — usually spare summaries but sometimes detailed narratives — shed light on some elements of the war that have been largely hidden from the public eye:

• The Taliban have used portable heat-seeking missiles against allied aircraft, a fact that has not been publicly disclosed by the military. This type of weapon helped the Afghan mujahedeen defeat the Soviet occupation in the 1980s.

• Secret commando units like Task Force 373 — a classified group of Army and Navy special operatives — work from a “capture/kill list” of about 70 top insurgent commanders. These missions, which have been stepped up under the Obama administration, claim notable successes, but have sometimes gone wrong, killing civilians and stoking Afghan resentment.

• The military employs more and more drone aircraft to survey the battlefield and strike targets in Afghanistan, although their performance is less impressive than officially portrayed. Some crash or collide, forcing American troops to undertake risky retrieval missions before the Taliban can claim the drone’s weaponry.

• The Central Intelligence Agency has expanded paramilitary operations inside Afghanistan. The units launch ambushes, order airstrikes and conduct night raids. From 2001 to 2008, the C.I.A. paid the budget of Afghanistan’s spy agency and ran it as a virtual subsidiary.

 

This enhances the clarity of the general picture: administrative and strategic incompetence, corruption, an attitude of utter callousness toward civilian life, the increasing effectiveness of the Taliban’s defensive measures, above all how this is a corporate war being waged with hijacked public resources for criminal ends.

 

We in the blogosphere knew all this, but will Assange’s turning the jingo NYT into a journalistic accomplice help get the message out to a broader audience? 

 

By making the release of the documents a collaborative effort with major MSM outlets, Wikileaks founder and impresario Julian Assange seems to have made a smart tactical move. This co-opts the generally hostile MSM and tries to force focus on the story itself rather than the fraudulent meta-story of whether or not this information should have been released in the first place. (Though we’ll no doubt see plenty of that as well.)

 

[We should be on the lookout for another bogus media provocation. Who knows whether or not it was an accident that right-wing and liberal corporatists came together last week for a splendid little race flap just when the Washington Post’s extraordinary series on the Pentagon corporate welfare state should have been the dominant story.]

 

Assange won’t reveal his sources, so we don’t know if this was another example of Bradley Manning’s heroism. He hasn’t been charged in relation to any of these leaks. But regardless we should compare Manning’s position, that of someone who actually tried to do his duty as a soldier and a citizen and looks to be severely abused for it, to that of the great capital criminals of our own or any other time, the likes of Blankfein, Dimon, Hayward, the weapons purveyors, Obama and Bush, and all the corporate and government gangsters, how they have only prospered and seem to go from strength to strength as they destroy America for no ideal higher than their verminous greed.

 

(Obama’s reaction to the release is typical. He blames everything on Bush while condemning the exercise in transparency itself. It’s exactly the same combination of unaccountability, remorselessness, and hatred for democracy you’d expect. Have you ever seen cockroaches scatter when a light is turned on? A commitment to transparency, of course, was one of Obama’s key campaign promises. But from day one in power he has reviled any light shone upon him and his fellow criminals.)

 

The almost complete destruction of democracy is just one of their ultimate crimes. (They’re not completely there yet; while Citizens United was more the formal consummation of a crime than a significant change, the defeat of net neutrality and public broadband access would signal the eradication of Internet democracy itself, the last real democratic space available to those who can access it.)

 

This is why transparency is such a critical issue. It’s not just a point of process, the way a liberal would typically say; by now we must exalt and demand it as a sacred ideal in itself.

 

As I wrote before, the “secrets” of a country which faces no existential threat have no practical reason to exist. And in a country whose economy has matured and then become decrepit to the point of rentier oligopoly, there are similarly no valid economic secrets. By now all the produce of the mature sectors is simply the work of the society itself, and therefore all the information which exists is similarly the public’s property. Not the corporations’, and not the government’s.

 

So there are no practical or moral reasons for elite secrets to exist. Given what we know of how malevolent a role secrecy has almost always played throughout history, how no matter what its pretext it usually also was enlisted to serve the criminal ends of power elites, it follows that if elite secrecy has no practical or moral standing, then it becomes ipso facto impractical and immoral. It’s a moral affront to the rights of the people, and a clear and present danger to the health of our democracy. By now it’s a core duty of citizenship to demand total sunshine for all elite information. Or, to put it a different way, “elite” information has no right to exist. Just like every other elite monopoly, this one must be broken up and restituted to the people.

 

(As I said in that previous post, this doesn’t apply to our individual, personal, bottom-up information. That truly is our individual property. Of course there too the elites, whether it be Facebook or the government, try to steal what’s ours and use it for their own power and profit goals. So a corollary is that the elites have zero right to our informational property, since all their purposes are, as I described, illegitimate. By definition elite activities have no practical or moral standing.)

 

So we must hail the all-too-rare true journalism of transparency as exemplified by Julian Assange and Wikileaks. They’re doing great work. As for the incipient martyrdom of Bradley Manning, I don’t know what can be done there. Bloggers like Greenwald try to interest the populace in the plight of our heroic citizen whistleblowers who are under such assault by the same administration which refuses to “look backward” to the Bush administration’s veritably Nazi crimes because Obama’s committing all the same crimes himself. But so far the people don’t seem all that interested. Nor do they seem all that concerned about the crimes themselves.

 

Things look grim. But one thing which can only help is sunshine. The more the better. We the people should have zero tolerance for pretensions to secrecy on the part of any elite, and regard any such claim as if the elitist had uttered the worst racial slur. That’s how unacceptable elite claims of secrecy should be among civilized people.

 

So that just brings us back full circle to what’s always our starting question: Can we save civilization itself? Is there even anything left to save?