WikiLeaks continues as one of the world's most remarkable organisations, despite numerous attempts to shut it down.
Its founder, Julian Assange, is gaoled in the United Kingdom's Belmarsh Prison as a "political" prisoner and faces extradition to the Medes-in-wait. Assange has not murdered anyone - but he is hounded as if he has.
WikiLeaks ignited widespread courage to shine a light on cursed darkness.
To quote playwright Bertolt Brecht from his Threepenny Opera:
Yet there are those prepared to challenge the wicked.
WikiLeaks exposed the killers and their keepers from the 12 July 2007 Baghdad airstrikes in which air-to-ground attacks deploying U.S. AH-64 Apache helicopters killed innocent civilians and journalists. Three years after this horrific incident, the world was aware of its inherent right to know when WikiLeaks released 39 minutes of "classified" footage of the slaughter of 18 innocents.
On 5 April 2010, WikiLeaks released classified U.S. military footage of the slaying of people in an Iraqi suburb. The civilians included two news staff from Reuters. There was no threat from them but soon they were dead.
It is said that no lie lives forever, but it is not my general experience that truth prevails. The tenet of a sane society should be "no lie is so grand it can be got away with".
In the first airstrike by the Apache crew, they fired on ten Iraqi civilians. Two were Reuters journalists: Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh. Seven were killed, including Noor-Eldeen in that first airstrike. Chmagh lay injured.
Saleh Matasher Tomal was driving by and instead of exclusively valuing his own life, he stopped to help the injured Chmagh. Tomal had his children with him. In a second airstrike, Chmagh and Tomal and three others were murdered. Two of Tomal's children were critically injured.
The Apache flew over injured Chmagh who was crawling, fighting to live. The gunner declared his disappointment that Chmagh had no weapon. When Tomal approached Chmagh in his van, he had been driving his children to school: nine-year-old Sajad and six-year-old Doaha. The children survived and would later insist their father wanted to help the injured man to hospital.
Despite Chmagh being unarmed, an Apache crew member kept repeating, "Let me engage... Come on... Let me engage... Light 'em all up, come on, fire".
Without permission, they fired, killing Chmagh and Tomal. The children were injured and the van burned.
The Apache strikes did not stop. It did not matter there were no signs of any threat. The Apache crew were huddled safely within the most advanced technology. They could see every detail on the ground. They fired, they killed.
In the panic, those on the ground who were able fled to a nearby building. A third airstrike fired AGM-114 Hellfire missiles into the building. Reuters was denied the right to view the footage of the incident but three years later, WikiLeaks let the whole world see it.
The moral force of WikiLeaks is bent on the truth in a world overflowing with lies.
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Haiti is the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere with more than 80% of the Haitian population living in abject poverty. The life expectancy of Haitians is 64 years. Around 61% of the population is literate and one child in five attends secondary school. Around 35% of Haitians lacked access to "safe" water.
In November 2010, WikiLeaks released 1,918 documents from 2003 to 2010 - ending six weeks after the 12 January 2010 earthquake which further devastated Haitian life. The documents were among the most disturbing I read of the files published by WikiLeaks on how the USA controlled policymaking in Haiti.
The cables begin nearly a year before a coup ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in February 2004. Rene Preval took over. Preval negotiated an oil buying deal with Venezuelan oil company PetroCaribe. The U.S. called in two major oil companies to do the dirty on the Haitian people. American oil companies operating in Haiti were to refuse to transport PetroCaribe oil.
In one cable, the U.S. ambassador to Haiti, Janet Sanderson, recommended
This followed Preval's visit to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to craft an energy agreement that would have brought electricity to millions of Haitian homes.
When Preval took office in 2004, Chavez was prepared to provide oil to beleaguered Haiti at below cost, with Haiti paying 60% upfront to Venezuela and the remainder payable at only one per cent interest over 25 years. Washington sabotaged this deal. Haitians suffered.
It gets worse. Haiti's minimum wage during Preval's time was 24 cents hourly. Preval went for an increase by 37 cents to 61 cents. Washington saw this as a 150% "wage rise". The U.S. instead backed exploitative major brand American manufacturers. These companies wanted profit margins on the back of Haitian slave wages.
Two major manufacturers lobbied Washington to harass the Haitians to cap the wage rise to an additional seven cents an hour. Ambassador Sanderson pressured Preval to drop the 31 cents hourly increase for the textile industry workers. Sanderson argued to Preval to keep daily pay to less than $3. Preval had been pushing for at least $5 per day.
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American Embassy to Haiti deputy chief David Lindwall wrote of Preval's $5 a day plea as appeasing 'the unemployed and underpaid masses'. One of the American companies was paying nearly 3,200 Haitians $2 a day to sew T-shirts. The company's annual turnover from Haitian-manufactured T-shirts was $4 billion in sales with a profit of $220 million. The increase to $5 a day in wages would have only cost the company $1.5 million from their $220 million profit.
WikiLeaks continues hounded and Julian Assange's mortal coil is pursued by the Medes.
The Syrian cables tell how the U.S. assisted in igniting the Syrian bloodbath. In 2010, WikiLeaks released 251,287 classified U.S. State Department cables. Some of these cables were from as far back as 2006. A 13 December 2006 cable written by William Roebuck at the U.S. Embassy in Damascus provided destabilising strategies.
Roebuck focused on how to create conflict:
Publicly, the U.S. favoured economic reforms in Syria but privately would seek to undermine the potential of these reforms. Publicly, the U.S. was opposed to the threat posed by Islamist extremists but considered them an opportunity to destabilise Syria in private.
In other cables, Roebuck advised the U.S. Government on how to divide the Shia and Sunnis:
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The justice system has failed to defend the principles it should protect in the case of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, so the public must wake up to the necessity of peaceful global protest to run parallel with Assange's legal battle.
These cables were sent to the White House - to the Secretary of State. At the time, the George W Bush administration publicly denounced the Sunni and Shia sectarian violence in Iraq, but Roebuck advised a similar predicament should be ignited in Syria. Roebuck would be trusted with subsequent posts in Iraq and Libya.
In another cable, Roebuck advised:
Julian Assange is being crucified for our sins
Julian Assange is being slowly murdered by the forces of the U.S. and British states, his crime has been to expose their crimes.
Roebuck was the U.S.'s top diplomat in Syria. WikiLeaks' offence to the powerful is to expose their crimes, brutality, inhumanity, slaughter of human life, narratives contrived to bring on civil strife, human suffering and misery, a climate of death.
WikiLeaks published the Iraqi War Logs, revealing thousands of reports of the most abominable, degrading, injurious abuse and torture by Iraqi Security Forces and American personnel. The Geneva Conventions - their pursuit of humaneness - were sidelined by barbaric behaviours. America sold anger as the excuse. So now, anger, hate and inhumanity become permissible. Prisoners were hung from ceiling hooks - holes in their legs with electric drills. They were sexually abused, urinated upon and relentlessly bashed.
WikiLeaks revealed the Frago 242 order. In 2004, the Frago directive instructed no allegations of abuse were to be investigated. Ten years earlier, the United States signed the U.N. Convention Against Torture.
The George W Bush administration publicly insisted there were no official counts of Afghan and Iraqi casualties. WikiLeaks published the War Logs which exposed between 2004 and 2009 that 70% of deaths were of civilians.
The Barack Obama administration imprisoned more whistleblowers than all previous Washington administrations combined. There is an endlessness of laws made by governments to imprison and punish people into silence. In this context, stands by Julian Assange and WikiLeaks and by Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden must be realised as genuinely heroic.
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For far too long the Australian media has remained silent in the face of Julian Assange's persecution and that must change, writes Matilda Duncan.
