The Secrets of Wikileaks
Part Two
In Part One of this long article we proved that the US was
secretly funnelling money into Belarus to fund the unelected opposition.
Previously, the claim had been routinely denied. Now we have sterling proof. It
is engraved in a confidential cable from a US Embassy to the State Department.
It is undeniable.
That is, if you found the cable and were able to
understand it.
And you happened to
understand the political background of the cable.
The cables are raw data. Not as raw as Afghan Diaries, the
previous coup of Wikileaks, but still quite raw. They are written in obscure
state department lingo; much of the story is implied as the cables were composed
for colleagues and definitely not for strangers. They simply have to be
explained, interpreted, annotated and then finally delivered to the reader.
Dumping raw cables onto the web would not do: you’d never find the relevant
cables and probably you wouldn’t be able to understand its significance even if
you did find it.
The main job of a newspaper or news website is to process raw
data and transmit it to a reader. This work requires an experienced and highly
qualified staff. Not every newspaper or website has such resources, and none of
the independent sites can compete with the mainstream outlets for readership. If
all the cables were published in a local newspaper in Oklahoma or Damascus, who
would read them? In order to get our news to you, our reader, we are forced to
make use of the dreaded mainstream media.
That is why Julian Assange chose to partner with a few
important Western liberal newspapers of the mainstream media. Let us make it
perfectly clear that we understand that all mainstream media is at its heart
embedded; it is in bed with the Pentagon, the CIA, with Wall Street and all
its counterparts. Let us also make it clear that we understand that not every
journalist on the staff of The Guardian, Le Monde or The
NY Times is a crooked enforcer of imperialist ideology; no, not even every
editor. We do understand that not everyone is willing to sacrifice their career
to field a story that will attract storms of protest. From this point of view,
the difference between the soft liberal and the hardline imperialist media is
one of style only.
For instance, if they plan to attack Afghanistan, the
hardline Fox News would simply demand a high-profile strike against the sand
rats, while the liberal Guardian would publish a Polly Toynbee piece
bewailing the bitter fate of Afghani women. The bottom line is the same: war.
Modern embedded media is the most powerful weapon of our
rulers. The modern Russian writer Victor Pelevin succinctly explained their
modus operandi: The embedded media does not care about the content and
does not attempt to control it; they just add a drop of poison to the stream in
the right moment.
Furthermore, they skilfully arrange the information in order
to mislead us. The headline might scream MURDER MOST FOUL but the article
describes an unavoidable accident. We do not look beyond the headline, but the
headline has been written by the editor and not the journalist who penned the
article. Twitter is nothing but a mess of headlines; we are being trained to
think in terms of slogans.
In the case of Belarus, the Guardian published three
cables the day before elections in order to maximize the exposure and to
influence the results of the election. One of the headlines, published on
December 18, 2010 said: “WikiLeaks: Lukashenka’s fortune estimated at 9
billion USD”. It was a very misleading headline. Wikileaks made no claims about
Lukashenko’s wealth. Read the entire article, and you will find that it was
nothing more than a US embassy employee who had heard a rumour and transmitted
it to the State Department. Only in the second to last sentence of the article
do they mention that the cable admits: “the embassy
employee couldn’t verify the sources (sic!) or accuracy of the information”.
So a corrected headline would read: “Wikileaks reveals: US
diplomats spread unverifiable rumors about Lukashenko’s personal wealth.” But
the Guardian made it appear as if it was Wikileaks itself that made the
claim.
Let us suppose that one day Wikileaks will publish cables
from the Russian Embassy in Washington to Moscow Centre. Shall we expect to see
in the Guardian a screaming headline like:
WikiLeaks: The Mossad behind 9/11!!
Isn’t it more likely we would be soberly told: “Wikileaks
reveals that Russian diplomats in Washington report the persistent rumors on
Israeli involvement in 9/11”?
Another cable on Belarus published on the same day was headlined: “US
embassy cables: Belarus president justifies violence against opponents”. Again,
a misleading headline, and again the majority will never read beyond it. In
reality, this very interesting report contains the debriefing of the Estonian
Foreign Minister after his long chat with President Lukashenko. The most
interesting factoid was deliberately not highlighted in the article:
Lukashenko told the Estonian visitor that the
opposition in Belarus would never unite, and only existed “to live off western
grants.” When you read the article, your eye gravitates to the highlighted
section, skipping the valuable information just above. In fact, the highlighted
section itself says nothing about justifying violence against opponents.
The text says something completely different: “Lukashenko stated the opposition
should expect to get hurt when they attack the riot police”. Again, it is
sterling truth: in every country, people who attack riot police end up getting
hurt. In Israel they also get shot, but that’s another story.
Thus the Guardian made use of Wikileaks in order to
influence Belarus voters and Western audiences, and prepare them for an Election
Day riot.
So here we are: in order to get valuable data to the people,
Julian Assange had to make a deal with the devil: the mainstream media. It was
most natural for him to deal with the liberal flank of the mainstream, for the
hardliners would not even touch it. But since the liberal papers are also
embedded, they freely distort the cables by attaching misleading headlines and
misquoting from the text.
For me, a Guardian reader since I worked at the BBC in
mid-1970s, it is painful to say that the Guardian has become an impostor.
This paper pretends to provide the thinking liberal and socialist people of
England with true information; but at the moment of truth, the Guardian,
like a good Blairite, will switch sides.
Next, the Guardian apparently decided to destroy
Wikileaks after using it. The Moor did his job, the Moor may go. The
Guardian’s embedded editors, understanding full well that the Wikileaks crew
won’t be tamed or subverted, are preparing a book called
The Rise and Fall of Wikileaks. It’s not quite released yet; they have
still to arrange for the fall.
This will be done in two ways.
First, by slandering the Wikileaks chief Julian Assange.
Destroy the head, and the body will wither and die. This is not the place
to deal with allegations in detail, but I’ve never seen an article more crooked
and lying than the
one the Guardian published recently on Assange - and I’ve seen some
beauties. It is trial by media in the best tradition of Pravda 1937. Its author
Nick Davies ingratiated himself into the vicinity of the trustful Julian and
then bit him in the best scorpion’s manner. Davies wrote years ago in his
Flat Earth News that the
practice of journalism in the UK is "bent"; now he proven it beyond a doubt by
his own writing.
There is no doubt: Assange never raped. The day after the
alleged rape, the alleged victim boasted to her friends in a twitter that she
had a wonderful time with the alleged rapist. It was all
published.
Moreover, if Swedish authorities are primarily concerned
about prosecuting Julian for rape, why do they attach a special condition to
their demands of extradition, specifically reserving the right to pass him on to
US authorities?
Nick Davies clearly performed a cruel hatchet job. But was
publishing the article a simple case of bad judgement by the Guardian, or
the beginning of a smear campaign? "Once is
happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action",
as James Bond in Goldfinger put it neatly. Here is the
second attack. The
third piece was surprisingly an attempt to smear Assange by association with
me.
This last attack was written by the notorious Church-hater
Andrew Brown, the man who luridly
insinuated the Pope is gay. This Andrew Brown was
described as “The Guardian‘s resident moron”, and for good reason. I
always enjoy discussing my views, though Brown completely missed the subtleties
and nuances of my writings. Andrew Brown is a man who understands the public’s
need for screaming headlines. Now we are left with a lot of crazy bloggers who
claim I am the Mossad’s liaison to Wikileaks and that Wikileaks is a wholly
owned subsidiary of the Mossad.
I do not for a moment think that anybody sane takes these
ridiculous accusations seriously – they are just more things to throw at Julian.
I am not a member of Wikileaks, not even a spokesman, just a friend. But even
without me, Brown will still be able to attack Assange for
quoting Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize winner and “notorious antisemite whose
works are being published by a racist site.” Quoting a popular
blog, Brown “is beneath contempt, and, from now
on, beneath notice”. Still, the Guardian editors let him off his leash
from time to time, to their eternal disgrace.
The second mode of attack on Wikileaks is to use it as a
source of misinformation. These US State
Department cables are double-edged swords. They are full of rumors,
trial balloons, and hopeful thinking. Worse, the newspaper headlines often
declare that Wikileaks is the source of the rumour, and leave it to the
discerning reader to discover that an embassy staffer was the real source of the
story. Readers often do not understand that headlines are little more than
come-ons, and reflect a very loose interpretation of the article content. They
tend to believe the misleading headline that says, “Wikileaks: Iran prepares
nuclear weapons” or, “Wikileaks: all Arabs want the US to destroy Iran”.
Wikileaks never said it! It was the Guardian and the NY Times
that said it, and loudly. A corrected headline would look like this:
Wikileaks reveals that US diplomats spread unsubstantiated
rumours on the Iran nuclear program in order to ingratiate themselves with the
State Department
But you will not live long enough to see this headline. More
and more people are saying that Wikileaks is just a tool of the State
Department, or CIA, or Mossad. This is the payment for using mainstream media:
they will eventually poison the purest source.
However, I would rather place my bet on Assange. He is smart,
and he has a mind of a first-class chess player. He has many surprises up his
sleeve. It is possible that the Guardian will have to rename their book
The Rise and Rise of Wikileaks.
The Israeli Angle
Now you can understand the mystery of Israeli satisfaction
with Wikileaks. While the US officials were furious at the disclosure, Israelis
were rather smug and complacent. Haaretz has this
headline: Netanyahu: WikiLeaks revelations were good for Israel.
Simple-minded conspiracy junkies immediately concluded that
Wikileaks is an Israeli device, or, in the words of a particularly single-minded
man: a “Zionist poison”.
The truth is less fantastic, but much more depressing. The
Guardian and the New York Times, Le Monde and Spiegel
are quite unable to publish a story unacceptable to Israel. They may pen a
moderately embarrassing piece of fluff, or a slightly critical technical
analysis in order to convince discerning readers of their objectivity. They may
even let an opponent air his or her views every once in a blue moon. But they
could never publish a story really damaging to Israel. This is true for all
mainstream media.
Furthermore, no American ambassador would ever send a cable
really unacceptable to Israel – unless he intended to retire the next month. Yet
even supposing this kamikaze ambassador would send the cable, the newspapers
would overlook it.
Even with thousands of secret cables about Israel in their
hands, the mainstream media delays and prevaricates. They don’t want anyone to
yell at them. That is why they have postponed publishing the articles. Once
forced by circumstance or competition to publish the contents of the cables, you
can bet they’ll twist the revelations into toady headlines and bury the truth in
the final paragraph.
Always kind, Julian Assange attributes this behavior to the
“sensitivity of the English, German and French audience”. I am not that kind; I
call it cowardice, or if you insist, prudence. Any journalist who confronts the
Jewish state will be made to suffer. They have thousands of bloggers and
hundreds of newspapers who have been trained to attack
swarm-style, like they once attacked President Carter. Attacks against me
appear on a daily basis, ranging from all over the world: from a big Norwegian
newspaper to an insignificant Antipodean blog.
A young Swedish journalist wrote a
story ten years ago about how Israeli representatives work with the Swedish
media and influence them. He interviewed six colleagues; later, two of the six
denied their words. This is typical: people under the shadow of the Zionist
swarm often deny what they say. Nowadays we have tape recorders, yet even these
cannot help us, as the denier will simply claim that the words were taken out of
context. For these ten years, this poor Swedish journalist has been hunted by
the swarm.
In such a situation, the mainstream media just can’t help us.
Professional journalists have families and careers to protect. We can’t count on
them when the rubber meets the road. We shall never know and will never fully
understand the truth behind any Israel-connected event as long as the cables
remain in the hands of the mainstream media.
This is why we must ask Julian Assange to give non-mainstream
sites like this one access to all unpublished material. We are alternative media
and we must be given our chance to be tested in the fires of controversy, if we
are to be a real alternative.