Here’s an example of the lack of transparency and dishonesty from the State Department that led to the most recent Wikileaks disclosures.
I have written previously about the case of Abdallah Abu Rahmah, a non-violent Palestinian activist who was jailed for making a peace sculpture out of the many tear gas canisters and spent concussion grenades shot by Israel Defense Forces at people in the occupied village of Bi’lin. Recently Abdallah’s prison sentence was completed but Israel still keeps him locked away in Ofer Prison.
The case has been in the news for more than a year. Thousands of people around the world have written to their politicians and diplomats about Abu Rahmah. Former President Carter, Desmond Tutu, and a number of European diplomats have all spoken out about his case. It is inconceivable that people in the State Department are as clueless as they pretend to be.
Matthew Lee of the AP wire service has been trying unsuccessfully for weeks to get a straight answer from State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley about Abu Rahmah’s political imprisonment. The following clip shows the lengths that the State Department has gone to in deep-sixing any real concern for political prisoners and in deferring to Israel about human rights abuses.
Al Jazeera has a series called Empire hosted by Marwan Bishara. Recently Bishara did a segment on Hollywood called “Hollywood and the war machine” which took an unflattering look at how — long before the American press began “embedding” with the military — sleeping with the Pentagon was Standard Operating Procedure in Hollywood. Bishara interviewed outsiders Oliver Stone, Michael Moore, and Christopher Hitchens for his segment. Although the United States has lost almost every war following World War II, Hollywood (with incredible Pentagon meddling) nevertheless projects an image of the military as an unstoppable victor. How can this be?
At one point in the video Michael Moore describes American war movies as “war porn.” A spot-on characterization of a nation that rarely succeeds in its conquests but still likes to fantasize that it can still get it up with anyone of its choosing.
Yesterday, with a second Depression afflicting the nation, two wars, Wikileaks, and the Tea Party rebellion, I discovered that TIME had decided to make Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, its new Person of the Year for “connecting more than half a billion people and mapping the social relations among them; for creating a new system of exchanging information; and for changing how we all live our lives.” TIME’s Richard Stengel sees Facebook as not just a new social mechanism; it’s “the connective tissue for nearly a tenth of the planet.”
Accepting the honor (on Facebook), Zuckerberg wrote:
“Being named as TIME Person of the Year is a real honor and recognition of how our little team is building something that hundreds of millions of people want to use to make the world more open and connected. I’m happy to be a part of that.”
The Wall Street Journal quickly put its seal of approval on TIME’s choice with an essay by a philosopher-ethicist, no less, on why Facebook is so important to us. Humans, it appears, were apparently built to “breathe, eat, drink, sleep, defecate, and check Facebook.”
Thus, to the visionaries at TIME and the WSJ, Facebook is not only a new social function but a new bodily function and has been elevated to a replacement for normal human relationships. NPR showed a bit more skepticism, though, wondering if perhaps better choices might have been available to TIME’s editors. NPR’s poll showed 75% of NPR listeners thought someone else should have been chosen. ComputerWorld saw the choice of Zuckerberg as a snub to Julian Assange, who was also the leader in the NPR poll. Many journalists wondered what was going on in Richard Stengel’s mind.
Like the Nobel Prize award to Obama last year, Zuckerberg’s award does not come as a surprise in our new Snookified world. We do live in a society in which basketball players earn a thousand times more than teachers and ex-cons like Martha Stewart and Buddy Cianci have their own TV and radio shows. And maybe it’s simply to avoid predictability that undeserved awards are given in the first place.
But undeserved? Is this really too harsh? How can one say that Zuckerberg, a white, privileged son of both a dentist and a psychiatrist, who came to Harvard via Philips Exeter academy and whose social networking creation may well be the result of theft or plagiarism, does notdeserve the award?
After all, who doesn’t love self-indulgent narcissism? This is the true product of our collective use of Facebook — billions of digital pork sausages oozing from the grinder. If talking to one’s friends on a cell phone while visiting a rest room isn’t enough, Facebook lets people disclose even more about their one-night stands, drunken binges, the games they play on company time, or the fragile state of their mental health. You can post thousands of photos of yourself on Facebook. If you’re deranged, you can even post your suicide note, as Clay Duke did. How can something like this not be vital to the functioning of a society? We can get our 15 minutes of fame every day on Facebook.
Stengel tries to apply lipstick to the pig by describing how Facebook and Wikileaks are “two sides of the same coin”:
“Both express a desire for openness and transparency. While Assange attacks big institutions and governments through involuntary transparency with the goal of disempowering them, Zuckerberg enables individuals to voluntarily share information with the idea of empowering them. Assange sees the world as filled with real and imagined enemies; Zuckerberg sees the world as filled with potential friends.”
Apparently TIME’s editors, one would have supposed champions of the Fourth Estate’s responsibilities, don’t see transparency in government as something which empowers citizens in any way. For TIME, narcissism is true empowerment. Taking flak for his choice, Stengel said that “I do think something is going on deep down in the human character that’s changing and evolving. […] Is there a bigger story than that? I don’t think so.”
Stengel also justified passing over Julian Assange: “There is no Julian Assange without Bradley Manning,” he wrote, referring to the presumed source of many of the leaked classified documents.
The latest Call of Duty Black Ops advertisement is absolutely, 100% correctly, titled “There’s a Soldier in All of Us.”
We have seen the enemy, and he is indeed us.
In the ad, to a track from the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” (the “Let it Bleed” album), a variety of businessmen, celebrities, fast-food, hotel, and office workers, a young girl, and a short-order cooks blast, shoot, bomb, and kill their way through some unspecified Middle Eastern country. How appropriate! We are, after all, precisely the folks who voted for these wars and donated our children’s bodies and souls to fight them.
loonwatch has previously reported the links between the Tea Party and the far-right English Defense League or individual loons like Rick Lazio, Rabbi Nachum Shifren, and a Brooklyn group protesting Park51. We’ve posted Tea Party Express organizer Mark Williams’ “Allah is a Monkey God, Muslims are His Animals” remarks along with his amusing charges that the NAACP is a “racist” group. We’ve posted the NAACP’s resolution condemning racism within the Tea Party.
The complete 94-page report, which studies six of the national Tea Party organizations and includes a forward by NAACP President Benjamin Todd Jealous, notes several efforts that the various Tea Party organizations have made to soften criticism for their racism. For instance, Mark Williams was eventually fired for his Islamophobic remarks, as was Tim Ravndal for his calls for violence against gays. It also cautions that not everyone within the Tea Party movement is a racist:
“It would be a mistake to claim that all Tea Partiers are nativist vigilantes or racists of one stripe or another, and this report manifestly does not make that claim. As this report highlights, however, all of the national Tea Party factions have had problems in these areas. Of the national factions, only FreedomWorks Tea Party, headquartered in the Washington, D.C. area, has made an explicit attempt to narrow the focus of the movement as a whole to fiscal issues – an effort that has largely failed, as this report documents.”
But the report takes the Tea Party to task for the nativism found within most groups, suggesting that its core issues are less economic and more xenophobic:
“The result of this study contravenes many of the Tea Parties’ self-invented myths, particularly their supposedly sole concentration on budget deficits, taxes and the power of the federal government. Instead, this report found Tea Party ranks to be permeated with concerns about race and national identity and other so-called social issues.”
“While Tea Partiers and their supporters are concerned about the current economic recession and the increase in government debt and spending it has occasioned, there is no observable statistical link between Tea Party membership and unemployment levels.”
The report warns:
“Tea Party organizations have given platforms to anti-Semites, racists, and bigots. Further, hard-core white nationalists have been attracted to these protests, looking for potential recruits and hoping to push these (white) protestors towards a more self-conscious and ideological white supremacy. One temperature gauge of these events is the fact that longtime national socialist David Duke is hoping to find money and support enough in the Tea Party ranks to launch yet another electoral campaign in the 2012 Republican primaries. […] The leading figures in one national faction, 1776 Tea Party (the faction more commonly known as TeaParty.org), were imported directly from the anti-immigrant vigilante organization, the Minuteman Project. Tea Party Nation has provided a gathering place for so-called birthers and has attracted Christian nationalists and nativists.”
The largest and fastest growing group is Tea Party Patriots. The report describes its May 2010 convention in Gatlinburg:
“Notable among the workshops were presentations by Pam Geller, an anti-Islam agitator; and a set by the Oath Keepers, a quasi-militia group that focuses on recruiting law enforcement officers and military personnel, and defending their version of the Constitution. A similar workshop with Spike Constitution Defenders, mixed a bit of Posse Comitatus-style rhetoric into their propaganda. Another workshop presenter, Samuel Duck, conducted a workshop advocating repeal of both the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Amendment.”
The second largest Tea Party group is ResistNet which is described as “notable” as a home to nativists and Islamophobes. It includes a number of militia members and anti-immigration activists, including Robert Dameron, founder of Citizens for the State of Washington (Yakima, WA); Wendell Neal, leader of the Tulsa Minutemen (Broken Arrow, OK); Mike Jarbeck, director of the Florida chapter of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps (Orlando, FL); David Caulkett, creator of IllegalAliens.us and Report Illegals (Pompano Beach, FL); Robin Hvidston of the Southern California Minuteman Project and Gilchrist Angels (Upland, CA); Ruthie Hendrycks, founder of Minnesotans Seeking Immigration Reform (Hanska, MN); Evert Evertsen, founder of Minutemen Midwest (Harvard, IL); and Rosanna Pulido, the founder of the Chicago Minutemen and a former staffer for the Federation for American Immigration Reform (Chicago, IL).
The report adds:
“Another ResistNet partner organization is TakeAmericaBack.org, a website launched in April 2009 to publish anti-immigrant propaganda. One article claimed that ‘multiculturalism’ demands that ‘Americans learn to speak Spanish so illegals can take over America with foreign cultures.’ Another article on this site concluded that ‘a Kenyan, Communist, son of a terrorist, as our wannabe president, who has not only expressed his hatred of America, but is also an avowed Muslim…’ Also included among the official partners is a trio of groups run by anti-Islam activist Pam Geller.”
“It is this untenable attempt to vilify President Obama as ‘non-American’ and ‘foreign’ that pushes a significant number of ResistNet Tea Partiers out of the ranks of a responsible opposition and into the columns of bigots and xenophobes.”
One minor quibble: it’s not just the attack on President Obama that moves these wackos into the column of bigotry and xenophobia.
Next in membership and growth is Tea Party Nation. Describing its Convention in Nashville in February 2010:
“Despite all of these pre-conference difficulties, the convention in Nashville was well attended. Sarah Palin spoke there, generating discussion about her speaking fee, rumored to be over $100,000. Underneath the hoopla attending Palin’s appearance, the convention highlighted the place of Christian conservatives, indeed Christian nationalism, inside this movement generally, and in Judson’s Tea Party Nation specifically. The convention also built bridges to nativists and so-called birthers. There was a marked shift away from a supposed focus on bailouts and budget deficits towards a culture war.”
The convention was also attended by an inexplicable (and to this Jewish writer, a disgusting) number of Jewish ultraconservatives, including Andrew Breitbart, Orly Taitz, and members of the Judeo-Christian Council for Constitutional Restoration. It wasn’t that long ago that we were reviled by such bigots; now some of us are sleeping with these people.
At the bottom of the list and the bottom of the barrel is the 1776 Tea Party, heavily loaded with vigilante militiamen. These guys (and the membership is overwhelmingly male) practically define the word “fringe.”
“On February 27, 2009, Robertson attended a Tea Party event in Houston with a sign reading ‘Congress = Slaveowner, Taxpayer = Niggar.’ He’s also sent out racist fundraising emails depicting President Obama as a pimp. Robertson also has a history of promoting anti-Semites on his ‘Tea Party Hour’ radio program. Both incidents increased the negative publicity surrounding the 1776 Tea Party, but its notoriety did not stop two leaders of an anti-immigrant vigilante group, Minuteman Project, from stepping in to run the 1776 organization.”
The report includes a chapter, Tea Parties – Racism, Anti-Semitism and the Militia Impulse. The Tea Party is riddled with anti-Semites, Holocaust deniers, white supremacists, militia members, and Christian Identity spokesmen. Dale Robertson, chairman of the 1776 Tea Party, supports the views of Pastor John Weaver:
“According to [Weaver’s] particular theology, Jews are considered a satanic force (or the incarnation of Satan himself), and people of color are considered less than fully human. By contrast, the white people of northern Europe are considered racial descendants of the Biblical tribes of Israel, and the United States of America is considered their ‘promised land;’ a theory descended from a theology known as British-Israelism. Although Weaver describes his particular outlook as a variant of ‘Dominionism,’ his essay, ‘The Sovereignty of God and Civil Government’ was listed in a book catalogue published by the British-Israel World Federation. As such, this would place Weaver just one step to the right of the most radical forms of Christian fundamentalism. The list of out-front anti-Semites on Tea Party platforms includes an event in July 2009. One thousand people gathered in Upper Senate Park for a rally in D.C. A full line-up of speakers included representatives from several tax reform groups, FreedomWorks, and talk show hosts. Also on the platform that day was the band Poker Face, playing music, providing technical back up, and receiving nothing but plaudits from the crowd. The band, from Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania, already had a reputation for anti-Semitism. Lead singer Paul Topete was on the public record calling the Holocaust a hoax, and writing and performing for American Free Press – a periodical published by Willis Carto, the godfather of Holocaust denial in the United States. According to Topete, ‘The Rothschilds set up the Illuminati in 1776 to subvert the Christian basis of civilization.’ Because of their bigotry, the band had been kicked off venues at Rutgers University in 2006 and a Ron Paul campaign event in 2007. But they made it to the stage of the Tea Party without any questions asked.”
And there’s a lot more in the IREHR document: David Duke, European fascists, neoconservatives, and loons like Pamela Geller. But in the interests of space and time, read the frightening report yourself.
There is a scene in the film A Few Good Men in which Jack Nicholson’s character, Colonel Nathan Jessep, must answer for a soldier’s hazing death. He explodes, “You can’t handle the truth!” before his classic monolog, explaining how lesser men will never understand the darker side of what it takes to create an effective military.
This scene absolutely nails the American relationship to authoritarian power, but it applies equally toward foreign policy and our rapidly expanding security apparatus. Guantanamo, the end of habeas corpus, imaginary WMDs to justify war, lying at the UN, airport scanners, and now the Wikileaks revelations all illustrate the same principle with painful clarity. We just want mommy to make it better. We don’t care how she does it. Maybe Colonel Jessep had it right: we can’t handle the truth.
Pundits have had their fun with the Wikileaks disclosures. If you’re on the left, they are a confirmation of everything we have learned about our endless wars and the hopeless prospects for “democracy building.” If you’re on the right, they justify a third American war in a decade in Iran. The Wikileaks documents portray compulsive data-gatherers sitting in their offices trying to fit what they have learned into neat little boxes reflecting American interests. Or of dispatches from diplomats who only hear what they want to hear. Or — as former ambassador Charles Freeman notes — who are often told only what they want to hear by their foreign contacts.
Why do we accept military and foreign policy conducted in an antiseptic environment, free of “trivial” moral concerns or inconvenient transparency? We may not usually get it, but we have an expectation of transparency in our elections, economics, health care, tax laws, banking, and other domains. Why should disclosures of foreign policy missteps by both the Bush and Obama administrations be so violently attacked?
Yes, violently. Canadian Conservative Party advisor Tom Flanagan called for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange’s assassination, as did Bill O’Reilly, Mike Huckabee, and Sarah Palin. National Review Author Jonah Goldberg asked why Assange hasn’t been garroted yet. Daniel Ellsberg, no stranger to leaks himself, believes Assange is in physical danger. Senator Joe Lieberman pressured Amazon.com to stop hosting Wikileaks in the United States, and domains throughout the world have been under constant denial of service attacks.
Wikileaks have provided many opportunities for political posturing. For example, Senator Charles Schumer, who wants the US to release Jonathan Pollard, a spy in federal prison for revealing military secrets to a foreign country, now wants new laws to prosecute Assange (an Australian) for publishing military statistics and embarrassing diplomatic cables.
The mainstream press can’t quite believe its good luck at the endless stream of stories Wikileaks has generated. In general it has shown more interest in what is “newsworthy” than what is valuable to an informed public, depending on “embedded” reporters, softball questions, remaining addicted to talking heads instead of reporting real news. The Rolling Stone’s interview with Stanley McChrystal was a striking exception, and it occurred only after the public really started questioning the war. The truth is: it has taken a dramatic flood of documents from Wikileaks to really get the mainstream media to focus on what is really happening in Iraq and Afghanistan. And, rather than focusing, much of their attention is on the salacious details of Assange’s whereabouts, his safety, or the raciest snippets from the cables. But, like any business, the media only give us what we really want.
Wikileaks was founded in 2006 by political dissidents. Within a year it had already published over a million documents. As long as those documents related to China, Somalia, Peru, Iran, Ivory Coast, Kenya, or non-Western states, Wikileaks garnered approval from human rights groups, Western governments and the mainstream media.
But last April Wikileaks posted a video of the wanton killing of a number of Iraqi civilians in July 2007, including two Reuters photographers, by American Apache helicopters. In July Wikileaks released 92,000 documents from Afghanistan. Last October Wikileaks released 392,000 documents from Iraq which provided a glimpse into the war between 2004 and 2009. Both collections of documents painted a picture of the failed use of force in nations we simply do not understand. Then this month the first of a quarter million diplomatic cables began to be released. And they haven’t been flattering either.
China, Somalia, and Burma don’t have anything on us. Murder, torture, terror, repression, duplicity, lying, and all the things that Colonel Jessep hinted at do not apply to just our enemies. We can do them as well as anybody.
Transparency. We have a right to know. And I believe we can handle the truth.
