The War on Transparency

The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness. Niels Bohr. Julian Assange- the founder of Wikileaks- is in the eye of a perfect storm. On 7th December he voluntarily surrendered to the British Police in London after Sweden issued an arrest warrant for his alleged sex crimes in Sweden. The Swedish authorities want to question the 39 year old Australian about rape and sexual molestation. But the charges are shrouded in controversy as it is not clear whether Assange committed rape or if he is merely guilty of having unprotected sex with Swedish women he met in Stockholm this summer. Under an obscure Swedish Law called Surprise Sex, if a woman withdraws her consent at any time during the intercourse and if her partner continues, then the consensual act becomes rape. This is not a crime under US and UK law but in Sweden it is a punishable offence with a fine of $715.[i] The charges against Assange appear flimsy and suggest a frame up. The Prime complainant Anna Ardin has allegedly ties with US financed anti-Castro and anti-communist groups with CIA links. The second complainant Sofia Wilen aged 26, who is Annas friend, admitted to the police that she worked hard to bed Assange. It appears that Assange was a victim of a diabolically executed honey trap and the CIA brought pressure on the Swedish Secret Service to harass Assange on spurious charges of rape.[ii] The hysteria of an International manhunt was a concocted smear campaign to damage the personal reputation of Assange and destroy the credibility of Wikileaks as a crusader against corruption in high places. It was also extremely unusual for the Interpol to put Assange on the most wanted list as he was not convicted of any crime or a fugitive. As soon as the arrest warrant was served, he gave himself up to the police in London.[iii] Under siege Wikileaks earned the fury of the US government and its allies in the Western government as the website leaked thousands of war logs and secret diplomatic cables exposing the corruption and duplicity of the US government in its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Soon after the release of these cables the US government under Obama resorted to extra legal methods to close the website. First the funding channels of Wikileaks were closed down without any charges being framed against the website. Paypal in January 2010 suspended the donation account and froze its assets without assigning any reasons whatsoever. In October 2010, Moneybookers Ltd- the donation card processing company- terminated the accounts acting under the instructions of the US and Australian governments. Its bank account was frozen in Sweden. As its servers came under repeated attacks by hackers, Wikileaks moved its servers to Amazons servers. But Amazon closed the servers and Wikileaks had to move their servers to France. Now its servers are located throughout Europe. It has its headquarters in Sweden as it affords maximum protection for journalists against disclosure of sources. The staff of Wikileaks came under surveillance and harassment by intelligence agencies including detention, seizure of computers and covert photographic surveillance. After the leak of US diplomatic cables which started in November 2010, several companies severed their links with Wikileaks. Notable among them were Visa and MasterCard who shut off their operations with Wikileaks on 6th December and 7th December 2010. PostFinance- a Swiss bank- froze the assets belonging to Assange amounting to 31,000 Euros. More ominous news for Assange is that the US government is conducting criminal investigation to book him under the Espionage Act. The US attorney general Eric Holder has confirmed that

the legislation would soon be passed to bring Assange- a non- US citizen- under the act. Where secrecy or mystery begins, vice or roguery is not far off The original objective of Wikileaks is in exposing oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, but it also expected to be of assistance to people of all regions who wished to reveal unethical behavior in their governments and corporations.[iv] The early exposures included documents pertaining to the corruption of Daniel Arap Moi- a former leader of Kenya. It had also targeted the Somali leader Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys who had signed an order for the assassination of government officials. The website also exposed the illegal activities of Bank Julius Baer but the bank obtained a permanent injunction ordering its shutdown. This decision was subsequently reversed and the website became active online again. In the year 2008, Sarah Palin e-mail account was hacked and made available to Wikileaks. This attracted media attention as Sarah Palin violated Public record laws by sending work related emails on her personal yahoo account. The website created ripples in the international media when it published the Afghan War logs in July 2010 covering the period of conflict between 2004 and end of 2009. The logs painted the war as a cruel and relentless tragedy where the coalition forces killed hundreds of civilians through military action and by remote controlled drones commanded from Nevada. It also nailed the lie of the US government that the Afghan War was going in favour of the coalition forces and highlighted the fact that the Taliban forces were growing in strength and hitting hard at coalition forces. Wikileaks attained media celebrity in October 2010 when it took on the US government by releasing some 400000 classified documents revealing unpleasant truth about the War in Iraq. The documents show that there were 1, 09,000 violent deaths between 2004 and end of 2009. The documents also pointed to a large and tragic death toll of innocent civilians of around 66,000. The documents also disclosed that the Iraqi detainees suffered tortures of electrocution, pain inflicted with electric drill and summary executions without trial at the hands of the Iraqi Security Forces which were deliberately ignored by the US occupation forces. There were other incidents which tarnished the image of the US army. These include the killing of innocent journalists, children, civilians and the cold blooded killing of insurgents who wanted to surrender.[v] But it was the torrential release of secret diplomatic cables in November 2010 which exposed the US government to Global diplomatic crisis. The rattled Obama government quickly switched to damage control mode and warned its allies in the Western World and elsewhere about the damaging impact of the leaks. The cables provided an unwelcome insight into the conduct of US foreign policy. The biggest revelation was that the US embassies all over the world were a part of a global spy network. The US diplomats actively engage in collecting personal information of the foreign dignitaries they meet. The personal information includes frequent flier numbers, credit card details, and even DNA material. As Alexander Cockburn in his news letter Counter Punch sardonically observes: Years ago Rebecca West wrote in her novel The Thinking Reed of a British diplomat who, even when he was peering down a womans dress at her breasts managed to look as though he was thinking about India. In the updated version, given Hillary Clintons orders to the State Department, the US envoy, pretending to admire the figure of the charming French cultural attach, would actually be thinking how to steal her credit card information, obtain a retinal scan, her email passwords and frequent flier number.

More shocking was the disclosure that Secretaries of State(US) Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton gave signed orders making the United Nations the target of US surveillance operations which did not even spare the Secretary General. There were other murky details as well. The US officials brought pressure on the German government in 2007 not to enforce arrest warrants for CIA officials for kidnapping an innocent German citizen and holding him in illegal custody in Afghanistan for months. There were other details such as the US support for Pakistani ISI which was responsible for the terrorist attack in Mumbai in 2008. The US allies namely the Saudi were identified as financiers of Sunni militant groups. The cash and carry government of Hamid Karzai was embarrassed when it came to light that the Vice president Zia Massoud was carrying $52 million in cash when he was stopped during a visit to UAE. The cables also revealed the unflattering assessment of world leaders by US diplomats. The Libyan Leader Moammar Gadhafi as one of the cable says relies heavily on his long-time Ukrainian nurse, Galyna Kolotnytska, described as a voluptuous blonde who is possibly his lover. The Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi is described as feckless, vain and ineffective as world leader. Hamid Karzai- the president of Afghanistan and an US ally- is referred to as an extremely weak man who did not listen to facts. Angela Merkel of Germany is contemptuously dismissed as boring and uncreative. There were other disparaging remarks about Putin (prime minister of Russia) referred to as alpha-dog while Medvedev (president of Russia) is said to be playing robin to Batman (Putin). While it is true that some of the information gleaned from the cables is of gossipy value, perhaps the most interesting cable which came to light was the assessment of Russian ballistic experts who refuted the US allegation that Iran had missiles (BM-25) specifically targeting European capitals. Significantly, The New York Times and Washington Post did not mention the detailed refutation of Russian experts but merely carried the story about Irans hostile missile capability. Even though the Obama government bayed for Assanges blood, it did not prevent the administration from cynically exploiting the leaks to discredit Iran as an evil empire. For instance Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, quoting from some cables said that even the Arab leaders from Jordan, Bahrain, UAE and Saudi Arabia wanted Iran to be destroyed by US. In fact, the King of Saudi Arabia reportedly urged US to cut the head of the snake (Iran). The Israeli PR machine swung into operation with an I told you so campaign to cast Iran as an evil empire worthy of destruction. Chomsky refutes US- Israeli position regarding Iran by saying that the cables reflect the personal opinion of Arab dictators friendly to US interests and not Arab public opinion. In fact the Brookings Institute released extensive polls of Arabs showing that 80% of them view Israel as the main threat while 77% hold that US as second major threat to the region. Only 10% of the Arabs view Iran as a threat to the region. On the issue of nuclear weapons there is 57% majority support for Iran going nuclear. [vi] Asad Abukhalil, a visiting professor at UC Berkeley, does not mince his words when he says: What is very striking about all these documents on the Middle East is that the Arab people are not going to be surprised that much. They all along have known that they are ruled by a bunch of liars and deceivers who go to extra lengths to appease and please the United States. What is going to be particularly revealing are the details, the lengths to which these rulers go in order to please the United States. And we find that they are not capable of making independent decisions. Whatever the instincts of the United States are, those rulers go along with them. And, in fact, they seem to compete with one another, for example, in showing how much they are hostile to Iran.[vii]

Commenting on the diplomatic communications released by Wikileaks, Alexander Cockburn sums up in his characteristic pugnacious manner: The bulk of them merely illustrate the well-known fact that in every capital city round the world there is a building known as the U.S. Embassy inhabited by people whose prime function is to vanquish informed assessment of local conditions with swaddling clothes of ignorance and prejudice instilled in them by what passes for higher education in the United States, whose governing elites are now more ignorant of what is really happening in the outside world than at any time in the nations history.[viii] Privatization of Censorship From an historical perspective Western Liberal Democracies have viewed the State as a potential source for tyranny and oppression. Political philosophers like Locke, Mill, and Montesquieu and in more recent times Hayek have argued for curbing state power. The separation of the state into Executive, Legislature and the judiciary in modern democratic societies was meant to curtail the concentration of power of the state and enhance individual freedom. But in the so called free market economies state power is aligned to serve the business interests of corporations. In this model the threat to human freedom emanates from powerful corporations especially when they own media. Here the freedom of expression is carefully managed by big media corporations by tailoring discussions to suit narrowly defined business interests. In corporate controlled democracies public consent is manufactured through propaganda. Information is filtered and information is purged of any content which harms corporate control of political and economic agenda. The assault on Wikileaks is a recent instance when corporate power clamped down on the freedom of expression with impunity. This happened when the website was hit by corporations when they withdrew support to Wikileaks. PayPal, Visa, MasterCard, Moneybookers Ltd, Amazon severed their links with Wikileaks. The media channels like Fox TV drummed up the hysteria that Assange was a traitor and should be assassinated. Assange referred to the witchhunt as Privatized censorship. In the land of the free It is deeply ironic that when the self styled free world has honoured Liu Xiaobo- the Chinese dissident- at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony at Oslo, Julian Assange is rotting in prison in London as his bail application was rejected by the court. Another whistle blower Bradley Manning -an intelligence analyst in the US army- reportedly leaked a damaging video showing US helicopter killing in cold blood journalists and civilians. He is also said to have leaked 2, 50,000 cables relating to the Iraq war. He is also kept in military prison without proper charges being framed. When platitudes are uttered by the free media about freedom of expression and dissident activity, there must be sustained protests exposing the double standards adopted by the Free world. Oslo could be the venue for such protests. Pressure should be brought on the Nobel Peace Committee to include Julian Assange and Bradely Manning for the next years joint peace prize. Unless powerful governments are made accountable to the rule of law, Wikileaks like another in depth study called the Documents from the US Espionage Den (1982)[ix] would be consigned to the dustbin of historical archives. And that would be a defeat for the real free world.

C R Sridhar