On June 13, 1971, the New York Times published the first batch of the Pentagon Papers. A few days later, it was revealed that the documents had been leaked by Daniel Ellsberg, a research fellow at M.I.T. who worked before for Robert McNamara, the then-Defense Secretary. As a result, President Richard Nixon became furious, and ordered the then-Attorney General John Mitchell to obtain a court order and stop the publication of the documents. However, two weeks later, the Supreme Court upheld the right to publish the Pentagon Papers with a majority vote of six to three. I almost wanted to say, 40 years later, that history is repeating itself. However, there is one fundamental difference that cancels out the apparent resemblance with the Afghanistan war document leaks: the newspaper that published the Vietnam War documents has been succeeded by the blog Wikileaks. The blog's name is derived from two words, Wiki- in line with the electronic encyclopedia Wikipedia-, and the English word ‘leaks'. Recall that in two years after the Pentagon Papers were published, the Washington Post singlehandedly uncovered what was to become the Watergate scandal, which dates back to 17/6/1972, when five burglars broke into the office of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate building. They were caught and convicted and turned out to be connected to Nixon's re-election commission. The Post's reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein relied on a secret informant whom they called Deep Throat in their book ‘All the President's Men'. The informant's name was not revealed until 1/5/2005, when it was revealed he would be named in a report to be published by Vanity Fair magazine in that year's July issue. His name was Mark Felt, the second man in the FBI. He died on 19/12/2008. He was 95 years old. (Nixon had implicated himself when investigators discovered that he recorded conversations in his office, including some that prove he tried to cover-up the truth. He resigned on 9/8/1974 before the Congress could impeach him, and was succeeded by Gerald Ford, who then issued a presidential pardon for Richard Nixon.) From Daniel Ellsberg to Mark Felt and now Julian Assange, an Australian citizen and the founder of Wikileaks, and also Bradley Manning, the man who leaked the documents to Assange: The website published 75 thousand documents out of 90 thousand leaked by Private First Class Bradley Manning. Assange said that he withheld the remaining documents to protect those collaborating with the Americans and mentioned in the documents. However, this does not seem to have prevented the Defense Secretary Robert Gates, along with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Michael Mullen, from talking about ‘blood on the hands' of Assange or the site Wikileaks, a strange accusation as blood must be on the hands of the invading troops instead. The leaked documents provided an accurate and almost daily description of the progress of the war between 2004 and 2009, i.e. George W. Bush's years. The documents cite 144 attacks by U.S troops in which Afghan civilians were killed (whose hands have blood on them then?) and the special operations carried out by Task Force 373 to detain or assassinate wanted individuals without trial. In truth, Wikileaks has been the target of a fierce campaign by the American right and the Israel gang, both of which having actively lobbied for the war on Afghanistan and then for the war on Iraq. Fox News went further and described the leaks to be a ‘criminal enterprise', while the Likudnik websites attacked Assange and attempted to undermine his work. Former officials in the Bush administration also called for the site to be shut down and for Assange to be brought to justice by any means possible, which made think of the Task Force 373, and the possibility of it detaining the man or assassinating him, or forcing him to confess by waterboarding him, as we heard had happened with the detainees at Gitmo. What concerns me personally in this matter is that the mainstream American media and the press that held medals for their role in the Watergate affair and the Pentagon Papers, -and even news channels such as CNN which was the first to start the 24 hour news model- in that all these failed to uncover the Bush administration's fabrication of false intelligence information in preparation for the war on Iraq. The American media also failed to shed light on the war criminals, from Bush Jr. onwards, when definitive information was available on the war that claimed the lives of one million Iraqis, and thousands of young American men and women for oil-related and Israeli calculations. Not only did the mainstream American media fail to tell the truth to prevent the war before it was waged, but it was often complicit with the warmongering cabal when it published on its front pages falsified news quoting dubious sources known for their connections with Israel, or exiled Iraqi traitors who cannot be trusted. This American media is paying today the price for its complicity in the crimes of the Bush administration, without ever trying to atone for these sins by launching a campaign to prosecute the war advocates, for instance. The traditional printed press then went downhill, and people today rely on blogs when seeking the truth. I shall continue tomorrow. [email protected]
