One day, a monk
and two novices found a heavy stone in their path. “We will throw it away,”
said the novices. But before they could do so, the monk took his ax and cleaved
the stone in half. After seeking his approval, the novices then threw the
halves away. “Why did you cleave the stone only to have us throw it away?” they
asked. The monk pointed to the distance the half stones had traveled. Growing
excited, one of the novices took the monk’s ax and rushed to where one half of
the stone had landed. Cleaving it, he threw the quarter, whereupon the other
novice grabbed the ax from him and rushed after it. He too cleaved the stone
fragment and threw it afield. The novices continued on in this fashion,
laughing and gasping, until the halves were so small they traveled not at all
and drifted into their eyes like dust. The novices blinked in bewilderment,
“Every stone has its size,” said the monk.
At the time of writing, WikiLeaks has published
2,325,961 diplomatic cables and other US State Department records, comprising
some two billion words. This stupendous and seemingly insurmountable body of
internal state literature, which if printed would amount to some 30,000
volumes, represents something new. Like the State Department, it cannot be grasped
without breaking it open and considering its parts. But to randomly pick up
isolated diplomatic records that intersect with known entities and disputes, as
some daily newspapers have done, is to miss “the empire” for its cables.
Each corpus has its size.
To obtain the right level of abstraction, one which
considers the relationships between most of the cables for a region or country
rather than considering cables in isolation, a more scholarly approach is
needed. This approach is so natural that it seems odd that it has not been
tried before.
The study of empire has long been the study of their
communications. Carved into stone or inked into parchment, empires from Babylon
to the Ming dynasty left records of the organizational center communicating
with its peripheries. However, by the 1950s students of historical empires
realized that somehow the communications medium was the empire. Its methods for organizing the inscription,
transportation, indexing and storage of its communications, and for designating
who was authorized to read and write them, in a real sense constituted the
empire. When the methods an empire used to communicate changed, the empire also
changed. (1)
Speech has a short temporal range, but stone has a
long one. Some writing methods, such as engraving into stone, suited the
transmission of compressed institutional rules that needed to be safely
communicated into future months and years. But these methods did not allow for
rapidly unfolding events, or for official nuance or discretion: they were set
in stone. To address the gaps, empires with slow writing systems still had to
rely heavily on humanity’s oldest and yet most ephemeral communications medium:
oral conventions, speech.
Other methods, such as papyrus, were light and fast
to create, but fragile. Such communications materials had the advantage of
being easy to construct and transport, unifying occupied regions through rapid
information flow that in turn could feed a reactive central management. Such a
well-connected center could integrate the streams of intelligence coming in and
swiftly project its resulting decisions outwards, albeit with resulting
tendencies toward short-termism and micromanagement. While a sea, desert, or
mountain could be crossed or bypassed at some expense, and energy resources discovered
or stolen, the ability to project an empire’s desires, structure, and knowledge
across space and time forms an absolute boundary to its existence.
Cultures and economies communicate using all manner
of techniques across the regions and years of their existence, from the
evolution of jokes shared virally between friends to the diffusion of prices
across trade routes. This does not by itself make an empire. The structured
attempt at managing an extended cultural and economic system using
communications is the hallmark of empire. And it is the records of these
communications, never intended to be dissected, and so especially vulnerable to
dissection, that form the basis for understanding the nature of the world’s
sole remaining “empire”.
ANATOMY OF THE US EMPIRE
And where is this empire? (2)
Each working day, 71,000 people across 191 countries
representing twenty-seven different US government agencies wake and make their
way past flags, steel fences, and armed guards into one of the 276 fortified
buildings that comprise the 169 embassies and other missions of the US
Department of State. They are joined in their march by representatives and
operatives from twenty-seven other US government departments and agencies,
including the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the
Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the various branches of the US military.
Inside each embassy is an ambassador who is usually
close to domestic US political, business or intelligence power; career
diplomats who specialize in the politics, economy, and public diplomacy of
their host state; managers, researchers, military attachés, spies under
foreign-service cover, personnel from other US government agencies (for some
embassies this goes as far as overt armed military or covert special operations
forces); contractors, security personnel, technicians, locally hired
translators, cleaners, and other service personnel. (3)
Above them, radio and satellite antennas scrape the
air, some reaching back home to receive or disgorge diplomatic and CIA cables,
some to relay the communications of US military ships and planes, others
emplaced by the National Security Agency in order to mass-intercept the mobile
phones and other wireless traffic of the host population.
The US diplomatic service dates back to the
revolution, but it was in the post-World War II environment that the modern
State Department came to be. Its origins coincided with the appointment of
Henry Kissinger as secretary of state, in 1973. Kissinger’s appointment was unusual
in several respects. Kissinger did not just head up the State Department; he
was also concurrently appointed national security advisor, facilitating a
tighter integration between the foreign relations and military and intelligence
arms of the US government. While the State Department had long had a cable
system, the appointment of Kissinger led to logistical changes in how cables
were written, indexed, and stored. For the first time, the bulk of cables were
transmitted electronically. This period of major innovation is still present in
the way the department operates today.
The US Department of State is unique among the formal
bureaucracies of the United States. Other agencies aspire to administrate one
function or another, but the State Department represents, and even houses, all
major elements of US national power. It provides cover for the CIA, buildings
for the NSA mass-interception equipment, office space and communications
facilities for the FBI, the military, and other government agencies, and staff
to act as sales agents and political advisors for the largest US corporations. (4)
One cannot properly
understand an institution like the State Department from the outside, any more
than Renaissance artists could discover how animals worked without opening them
up and poking about inside. As the diplomatic apparatus of the United States,
the State Department is directly involved in putting a friendly face on empire,
concealing its underlying mechanics. Every year, more than $1 billion is
budgeted for “public diplomacy,” a circumlocutory term for outward-facing
propaganda. Public diplomacy explicitly aims to influence journalists and civil
society, so that they serve as conduits for State Department messaging. [Kate
Welch & that pimp of hers. Bertrand Tavernier.]
While national archives have produced impressive
collections of internal state communications, their material is intentionally
withheld or made difficult to access for decades, until it is stripped of
potency. This is inevitable, as national archives are not structured to resist
the blowback (in the form of withdrawn funding or termination of officials)
that timely, accessible archives of international significance would produce. What
makes the revelation of secret communications potent is that we were not
supposed to read them. The internal communications of the US Department of
State are the logistical by-product of its activities: their publication is the
vivisection of a living empire, showing what substance flowed from which state
organ and when.
Diplomatic cables are not produced in order to
manipulate the public, but are aimed at elements of the rest of the US state
apparatus, and are therefore relatively free from the distorting influence of
public relations. Reading them is a much more effective way of understanding an
institution like the State Department than reading reports by journalists on
the public pronouncements of Hillary Clinton, or Jen Psaki.
While in their internal communications State
Department officials must match their pens to the latest DC orthodoxies should
they wish to stand out in Washington for the “right” reasons and not the
“wrong” ones, these elements of political correctness are themselves noteworthy
and visible to outsiders who are not sufficiently indoctrinated. Many cables
are deliberative or logistical, and their causal relationships across time and
space with other cables and with externally documented events create a web of
interpretive constraints that reliably show how the US Department of State and
the agencies that inter-operate with its cable system understand their place in
the world.
Only by approaching this corpus holistically – over
and above the documentation of each individual abuse, each localized atrocity –
does the true human cost of empire heave into view.
NATIONAL SECURITY RELIGIOSITY AND THE INTERNATIONAL
STUDIES ASSOCIATION
While there exists a large literature in the
structural or realpolitik analysis of key institutions of US power, a range of
ritualistic and even quasi-religious phenomena surrounding the national
security sector in the United States suggests that these approaches alone lack
explanatory power. These phenomena are familiar in the ritual of flag-folding,
the veneration of orders, and elaborate genuflection to rank, but they can be
seen also in the extraordinary reaction to WikiLeaks’s disclosures, where it is
possible to observe some of their more interesting features.
When WikiLeaks publishes a US government documents
with classification markings – a type of national-security “holy seal,” if you
will – two parallel campaigns begin: first, the public campaign of downplaying,
diverting attention from, and reframing any revelations that are a threat to
the prestige of the national security class; and, second, an internal campaign within
the national security state itself to digest what has happened. When documents
carrying such seals are made public, they are transubstantiated into forbidden
objects that become toxic to the “state within a state” – the more than 5.1
million Americans (as of 2014) with active security clearances, and those on
its extended periphery who aspire to its economic or social patronage. (5) There is a level of hysteria and
non-corporeality exhibited in this reaction to WikiLeaks’s disclosures that is
not easily captured by traditional theories of power. Many religions and cults
imbue their priestly class with additional scarcity value by keeping their
religious texts secret from the public or the lower orders of the devoted. This
technique also permits the priestly class to adopt different psychological
strategies for different levels of indoctrination. What is laughable,
hypocritical, or Machiavellian to the public or lower levels of “clearance” is
embraced by those who have become sufficiently indoctrinated or co-opted into
feeling that their economic or social advantage lies in accepting that which
they would normally reject. Publicly, the US government has claimed, falsely,
that anyone without a security clearance distributing “classified” documents is
violating the Espionage Act of 1917. But the claims of the interior “state
within a state” campaign work in the opposite direction. There, it orders the
very people it publicly claims are the only ones who can legally read
classified documents to refrain from reading documents WikiLeaks and associated
media have published classification markings on them, lest they be
“contaminated” by them. While a given document can be read by cleared staff
when it issues from classified government repositories, it is forbidden for the
same staff to set eyes on the exact same document when it emerges from a public
source. Should cleared employees of the national security state read such
documents in the public domain, they are expected to self-report their contact
with the newly profaned object, and destroy all traces of it.
This response is, of course, irrational. The
classified cables and other documents published by WikiLeaks and associated
media are completely identical to the original versions officially available to
those with the necessary security clearance, since this is where they
originated. They are electronic copies. Not only are they indistinguishable –
there is literally no difference at all between them. Not a word. Not a letter.
Not a single bit.
The implication is that there is a non-physical
property that inhabits documents once they receive their classification
markings, and that this magical property is extinguished, not by copying the
document, but by making the copy public. The now public document has, to devotees
of the national security state, not merely become devoid of this magical
property and reverted to a mundane object, it has been inhabited by another
non-physical property: an evil one.
This kind of religious thinking has consequences. Not
only is it the excuse used by the US government to block millions of people
working for the “state within a state” from reading more than thirty different
WikiLeaks domains – the same excuse that was used to block the New York Times, Guardian, Der Spiegel, Le Monde, El País, and other outlets publishing WikiLeaks materials. (6)
In fact, in 2011 the US government sent what might be
called a “WikiLeaks fatwa” to every federal government agency, every federal
government employee, and every federal government security contractor:
The recent disclosure of US
Government documents by WikiLeaks has caused damage to our national security
... Classified information, whether or not already posted on public websites,
disclosed to the media, or otherwise in the public domain remains classified
and must be treated as such until such time it is declassified by an
appropriate US government authority ... Contractors who inadvertently discover
potentially classified information in the public domain shall report its
existence immediately to their Facility Security Officers. Companies are
instructed to delete the offending material by holding down the SHIFT key while
pressing the DELETE key for Windows-based systems and clearing of the internet
browser cache. (7)
After being contacted by an officer of the US
Department of State, Columbia University’s School of International and Public
Affairs warned its students to “not post links to these documents nor make
comments on social media sites such as Facebook or through Twitter. Engaging in these
activities would call into question your ability to deal with confidential
information, which is part of most positions with the federal government.”
A swathe of government departments and other
entities, including even the Library of Congress, blocked internet access to
WikiLeaks. (8) The US National Archives even
blocked searches of its own database for the phrase “WikiLeaks.” (9) So absurd did the taboo become that, like a
dog snapping mindlessly at everything, eventually it found its mark – its own
tail. By March 2012, the Pentagon had gone so far as to create an automatic
filter to block any emails, including inbound emails to the Pentagon,
containing the word “WikiLeaks.” As a result, Pentagon prosecutors preparing
the case against US intelligence analyst PFC Manning, the alleged source of the
Cablegate cables, found that they
were not receiving important emails from either the judge or the defense. (10) But the Pentagon did not remove the filter –
instead, chief prosecutor Major Ashden Fein told the court that a new procedure
had been introduced to check the filter daily for blocked WikiLeaks-related
emails. Military judge Col. Denise Lind said that special alternative email
addresses would be set up for the prosecution. (11)
While such religious hysteria seems laughable to
those outside the US national security sector, it has resulted in a serious
poverty of analysis of WikiLeaks publications in American international
relations journals. However, scholars in disciplines as varied as law, linguistics,
applied statistics, health, and economics have not been so shy. For instance,
in their 2013 paper for the statistics journal Entropy, DeDeo et al. – all US or UK nationals – write that
WikiLeaks’s Afghan War Diary “is
likely to become a standard set for both the analysis of human conflict and the
study of empirical methods for the analysis of complex, multi-modal data.” (12)
There is even an extensive use of WikiLeaks
materials, particularly cables, in courts, including domestic courts, from the United
Kingdom to Pakistan, and in international tribunals from the European Court of
Human Rights to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
Set against the thousands of citations in the courts
and in other academic areas, the poverty of coverage in American international
relations journals appears not merely odd, but suspicious. These journals,
which dominate the study of international relations globally, should be a
natural home for the proper analysis of WikiLeaks’s two-billion-word diplomatic
corpus. The US-based International
Studies Quarterly (ISQ), a major international relations journal, adopted a
policy against accepting manuscripts based on WikiLeaks material – even where
it consists of quotes or derived analysis. According to a forthcoming paper,
“Who’s Afraid of WikiLeaks? Missed Opportunities in Political Science
Research,” the editor of ISQ stated that the journal is currently “in an
untenable position,” and that this will remain the case until there is a change
in policy from the influential International Studies Association (ISA). The ISA
has over 6,500 members worldwide and is the dominant scholarly association in
the field. The ISA also publishes Foreign
Policy Analysis, International
Political Sociology, International
Interactions, International Studies
Review, and International Studies
Perspectives.
The ISA’s 2014-15 president is Amitav Acharya, a
professor at the School of International Service at the American University in
Washington, DC. Nearly half of the fifty-six members on its governing council
are professors at similar academic departments across the United States, many
of which also operate as feeder schools of the US Department of State and other
internationally-oriented areas of government.
That the ISA has banned the single most significant
US foreign policy archive from appearing in its academic papers – something
that must otherwise work against its institutional and academic ambitions –
calls into question its entire output, an output that has significantly
influenced how the world has come to understand the role of the United States
in the international order.
This closing of ranks within the scholar class around
the interests of the Pentagon and the State Department is, in itself, worthy of
analysis. The censorship of cables from international relations journals is a
type of academic fraud. To quietly exclude primary sources for non-academic
reasons is to lie by omission. But it points to a larger insight: the
distortion of the field of international relations and related disciplines by
the proximity of its academic structures to the US government. Its structures
do not even have the independence of the frequently deferent New York Times, which, while it engaged
in various forms of cable censorship, at least managed to publish over a
hundred. (13)
These journals’ distortion of the study of
international relations and censorship of WikiLeaks are clear examples of a
problem. But its identification also presents a significant opportunity: to
present an analysis of international relations that has not been hobbled by the
censorship of classified materials.
THE WORLD ACCORDING TO US EMPIRE
This book begins to address the need for scholarly analysis
of what the millions of documents published by WikiLeaks say about
international geopolitics. The chapters use a constellation approach to these
documents to reveal how the United States deals with various regional and
international power dynamics. It is impossible to cover the wealth
of material or relationships in this first volume, but I hope that this work
will stimulate longform journalists and academics to eclipse it.
Chapter 1 reflects on
America’s status as an “empire,” and considers what this means, seeking to
characterize US economic, military, administrative, and diplomatic power with
reference to the long sweep of global history over the last century. The
chapter establishes the “imperialism of free trade” framework that the rest of
Part II then develops – a framework wherein American military might is used,
not for territorial expansion, but to perpetuate American economic preeminence.
Both themes are considered in more detail in Chapter 2 and Chapter 3. Chapter 1
also situates WikiLeaks in the context of an unprecedented growth in American
official secrecy, and the evolution of US power following the commencement of
the “war of terror.”
Chapter 2 examines the
WikiLeaks materials on the so-called “war on terror.” Besides provoking
a keen summary of the war crimes and human rights abuses documented in
WikiLeaks publications, along with a detailed historical overview of the US
invasion and occupation of Iraq and the consequent unfolding disaster there,
the chapter also draws conclusions about the ideological and conceptual
substructure of America’s “war on terror,” and investigates how an aspect of
the imperial prerogative of the United States is to exercise decisive power to
ensure that terms like “just war,” “torture,” “terrorism,” and “civilian” are
defined in its own favor. The argument adduces evidence from the full range of
WikiLeaks publications, along with other sources, such as the recent CIA
torture report. In the process, the chapter also examines the double standards
and problems arising from the misuse of these concepts (including the attempt
to delegitimize and marginalize WikiLeaks itself).
Chapter 3 embarks on a
thoroughgoing discussion of the “empire of free trade” – the relationship of
the American form of empire with the worldwide promotion of neoliberal economic
reform, providing American corporations with access to “global markets.” The
chapter draws on State Department cables published by WikiLeaks, as well as
WikiLeaks publications dating back to 2007 concerning the “private sector,”
including material on banks and global multilateral treaty negotiations. The
chapter provides luminous examples of how the drive toward economic integration
buttresses the position of the United States as an arms-length empire, and
provides the underlying rationale for the patterns of intervention, military or
otherwise, pursued in Latin American and beyond.
Chapter 4 is a do-it-yourself
guide on how to use WikiLeaks’s Public Library of US Diplomacy (PlusD), written
by investigations editor Sarah Harrison. At the time of writing, PlusD
contains 2,325,961 cables and other diplomatic records. The State Department
uses its own logic to create, transmit and index these records, the totality of
which form its primary institutional memory. Harrison explains how to get
started searching, reading and interpreting cable metadata and content, from
the infamous CHEROKEE restriction to the use of State Department euphemisms
such as “opposing resource nationalism.”
The history of US policy regarding the International
Criminal Court (ICC) is a rich case study in the use of diplomacy in a
concerted effort to undermine an international institution. In Chapter 5, Linda Pearson documents what he cables reveal
about the efforts of successive US administrations to limit the ICC’s
jurisdiction. These include the use of both bribes and threats by the
George W. Bush administration to corral states signed up to the ICC into
providing immunity from war crimes prosecutions for US persons – and, under
Obama administration, more subtle efforts to shape the ICC into an adjunct of
US foreign policy.
Japan and South Korea have been epicenters of US
influence within East Asia for decades. The cables document nearly a decade of
US efforts to affect domestic political outcomes within these two countries in
line with its own long-term interests. In Chapter 14,
investigative journalist Tom Shorrock examines the geopolitical triangle created
by US relations with both countries, including its attempts to play one off
against the other, as part of long-term efforts to undermine left-wing
governments and policies within the region.
Of global GDP growth over the last decade, over 50
percent has been in Southeast Asia. This understanding has led to an explicit
reassignment of military, diplomatic, and surveillance assets to Southeast
Asia, epitomized by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as a strategy of
“forward deployed diplomacy.” (14) In Chapter 15, Richard Heydarian examines the cables on
Southeast Asia and situates his findings within a broader historical critique
of US influence in the region.
The critique of Western imperialism is most contentious in regions of
the world that have historically been US protectorates, such as western Europe.
So indoctrinated are European liberals in modern imperialist ideology that even
the idea that the United States might be administering a global empire is
routinely dismissed with references to concepts like “right to protect,”
demonstrating a willful deafness not only to the structure of US power around
the world, but also to how it increasingly talks about itself as an “empire.”
[Émy Guerrini. Bertrand Tavernier. Steven Soderbergh. Bill Maher.] In Chapter 6, Michael Busch examines the broad patterns of
influence and subversion pursued by the global superpower on the political
systems of Europe and its member states. Themes include European
government collusion with the CIA’s rendition and torture programs, the
subversion of European criminal justice and judicial systems to rescue alleged
US government torturers from prosecution, and the use of US diplomacy to open
up European markets to US aerospace companies, or to invasive, monopolistic
technologies and patents, such as Monsanto’s genetically modified organisms.
In Chapter 13, Phyllis Bennis
opts for a broad overview of WikiLeaks’s publications on Afghanistan –
including not just the State Department cables, but also the Significant Action
Reports (SIGACTs) published by WikiLeaks as the Afghan War Diary, and Congressional Research Projects and other
documents on Afghanistan published by WikiLeaks prior to 2010. What
emerges is a stark assessment of the folly of US military involvement in
Afghanistan since 2001 and its cost in terms of human life and societal
well-being.
Geopolitics is complicated, and all the more so in
relation to a country like Israel. Israel’s military
dominance in the Middle East; its diplomatic relations with other regional players
such as Egypt, Syria, Iran, Lebanon, and Turkey; its role as an avatar for US
imperial policy within the area; its wayward exploitation of its protected
status in pursuing its own genocidal policies toward the Palestinian people –
all of these themes are brought to the fore in Chapter 9, by Peter Certo and
Stephen Zunes, which carefully interrogates the relevant State Department
cables.
In Chapter 11, on Iran,
Gareth Porter provides an excellent companion to the chapter on Israel,
choosing to focus on what the cables reveal about the tripartite geopolitical
standoff between the US, Israel, and Iran, and the shadow this structure casts
on the rest of the Middle East. In particular, Porter focuses on the
P5+1 talks about Iran’s nuclear enrichment program, on US efforts to
misrepresent intelligence in order to tip the international consensus against
Iran, and on the role of Israel as both a catalyst for and an agent of US
policy in the Middle East.
The conflict in Iraq is the
focus of Chapter 12, by journalist Dahr Jamail, which draws on a wide range of
WikiLeaks materials to argue that the United States had a deliberate policy of
exacerbating sectarian divisions in Iraq following its invasion and occupation,
in the belief that the country would be easier to dominate in such
circumstances. The consequent devastation is documented in painstaking
detail using WikiLeaks materials, including US cables, Congressional Research
Reports dating between 200 and 2008, and the Iraq War Logs from 2010. Jamail pays specific attention to the
“Sahwa” movement – the US-sponsored program of counter-insurgency that was
implemented to respond to the growing influence of al-Qaeda affiliates among
Sunni Iraqis disaffected by the Shia-dominated US-client government of Nouri
al-Maliki. The United States paid large numbers of Iraqis to defect from the
Sunni insurgency and instead fight against al-Qaeda, on the promise of
receiving regular employment through integration into the Iraqi military. As
Jamail argues, the failure of the Maliki government to honor this promise saw
huge numbers of US-trained, US-armed, and US-financed – but now unemployed –
Sunni militants return to the insurgency, eventually swelling the ranks of the
former al-Qaeda affiliate in Iraq, which in 2014 became known as ISIS, or the
“Islamic State.”
Across Iraq’s northeastern border, in Syria, the
cables also describe how the scene was set for the emergence of ISIS. Since the
outbreak of the Syrian civil war in 2011, warmongers in the media have demanded
the Western military pounding of Syria to depose Bashar al-Assad – presented,
in typical liberal-interventionist fashion, as a “new Hitler.” The emergence of
the Islamic State, to which the Assad government is the only viable
counterweight within Syria, has thrown this propagandistic consensus into
disarray. But US government designs on Syrian regime change, and its devotion
to regional instability, long pre-date the Syrian civil war, as is demonstrated
in the cables. Chapter 10, by Robert Naiman, offers a
careful reading of the Damascus cables, pointing out important historical
presentiments of the current situation in Syria, and unpicking the
benign-sounding human rights constructions of US diplomats to bring into focus
the imperialist inflection of US foreign policy and rhetoric toward Syria –
including concrete efforts within the country to undermine the government and
bring about the chaos of recent months during the entire decade preceding 2011.
Clichés abound about Turkey being a “bridge between
East and West,” but it cannot be denied that this country of some seventy-five
million people occupies an important position – both as a regional player
within Middle Eastern geopolitics and as a large and economically powerful
nominal democracy on the fringes of Europe. As Conn
Hallinan argues in Chapter 8, State Department cables illustrates US efforts to
exploit the rich geopolitical significance of Turkey. Hallinan uses the
cables as a pretext to provide a tour of Turkey’s regional alliances, strategic
concerns, and internal affairs. Among the topics he covers are the complex
strategic energy calculations that necessitate Turkey’s delicate relations with
Iran and Russia, even as it cultivates the United States, Europe, and Israel in
its efforts to gain access to Western markets. The chapter also examines
Turkey’s bargaining power, demonstrated in its use of a veto against the
election of former Danish prime minister Anders Rausmussen as the head of NATO,
in order to force the United States to pressure the Danish government into
suppressing a Denmark-based Kurdish television channel. The essay also deals
with Turkey’s internal issues, such as government policy toward Kurdish
separatist groups, and the extraordinary underground political conflict and
intrigue between Recep
Tayyip Erdoğan and the expatriate political figure Fethullah Gülen.
Since the end of the Cold War, and especially during
the so-called “war on terror,” US diplomacy has leaned toward South, Central,
and East Asia. Except in the case of one or two flare-ups, US-Russian relations
receded from the popular consciousness as the main geopolitical dynamic. This
of course has changed as a result of the conflict in the Ukraine. But popular
consciousness is not reality. As Russ Wellen shows in
Chapter 7, in the decade following the century’s turn the US has pursued a
policy of aggressive NATO expansion, challenging Russia’s regional hegemony
within Eastern Europe and the former Soviet area and seeking to subvert nuclear
treaties to maintain its strategic advantage. As the cables show, these
efforts have not gone unnoticed by Russia, and are recurring points of conflict
in US-Russian diplomatic relations, even during the most cordial of periods. The
chapter provides the necessary context for recent East-West tensions centering
around Syria, Ukraine, and the granting of asylum to Edward Snowden, and yields
critical insight into a geopolitical relationship that, if mishandled,
threatens the survival of our civilization and even of our species.
Perhaps no region of the world demonstrates the full
spectrum of US imperial interference as vividly as Latin America. Since the
1950s, US policy in Central and South America has popularized the concept of
the CIA coup d’état, deposing democratically elected left-wing governments and
installing US-friendly right-wing dictatorships; inaugurating legacies of
brutal civil war, death squads, torture, and disappearances; and immiserating
millions to the benefit of the American ruling class. As
Alexander Main, Jake Johnston, and Dan Beeton note in the first of their
chapters on Latin America, Chapter 17, the English-speaking press saw no evil
in the State Department cables, concluding that they did not fit “the
stereotype of America plotting coups and caring only about business interests
and consorting with only the right wing.” The exact opposite is true:
the cables demonstrate a smooth continuity between the brutal US policy in
Latin America during the Cold War and the more sophisticated plays at toppling
governments that have taken place in recent years. Chapter
17 offers a broad overview of the use of USAID and “civil society”
astroturfing, as well as other, more direct methods of pursuing “regime change”
in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Haiti. Chapter 18, by the same
authors, focuses on Venezuela, the socialist enemy of the day, and specifically
on US efforts to undermine the country as a regional left-wing bulwark in the
wake of the failed US-backed coup against the Chàvez government in 2002.
The response of the United States to the release of
the WikiLeaks materials betrays a belief that its power resides in a disparity
of information: ever more knowledge for the empire, ever less for its subjects.
In 1969, Daniel Ellsberg – later famous for leaking
the Pentagon Papers – had a top-secret security clearance. Henry Kissinger had
applied for his own top-secret clearance. Ellsberg warned him of its dangers:
Kissinger was not rushing to end our conversation that
morning, and I had one more message to give him. “Henry, there’s something I
would like to tell you, for what it’s worth, something I wish I had been told
years ago. You’ve been a consultant for a long time, and you’ve dealt a great
deal with top secret information. But you’re about to receive a whole slew of
special clearances, maybe fifteen or twenty of them, that are higher than top
secret.
“I’ve had a number of these myself, and I’ve known
other people who have just acquired them, and I have a pretty good sense of
what the effects of receiving these clearances are on a person who didn’t
previously know they even existed.
And the effects of reading the information that they will make available to
you.
“First, you’ll be exhilarated by some of this new
information, and by having it all – so much! incredible! – suddenly available
to you. But
second, almost as fast, you will feel like a fool for having studied,
written, talked about these subjects, criticised and analysed decisions made by
presidents for years without having known of the existence of all this
information, which presidents and others had and you didn’t, and which must
have influenced their decisions in ways you couldn’t even guess. In particular,
you’ll feel foolish for having literally rubbed shoulders for over a decade
with some officials and consultants who did have access to all this information
you didn’t know about and didn’t know they had, and you’ll be stunned that they
kept that secret from you so well.
“You will feel like a fool, and that will last for
about two weeks. Then, after you’ve started reading all this daily
intelligence input and become used to using what amounts to whole libraries of
hidden information, which is much more closely held than mere top secret data,
you will forget there ever was a time you didn’t have it, and you’ll be aware
only of the fact that you have it now and most others don’t... and that all
those other people are fools.
“Over a longer period of time – not too long, but a
matter of two or three years – you’ll eventually become aware of the
limitations of this information. There is a great deal that it doesn’t tell
you, it’s often inaccurate, and it can lead you astray just as much as the New York Times can. But that takes a
while to learn.
“In the meantime it will have
become very hard for you to learn from anybody who doesn’t have these
clearances. Because you’ll be thinking as you listen to them: ‘What would this
man be telling me if he knew what I know? Would he be giving me the same
advice, or would it totally change his predictions and recommendations?’ [A proof of
Cartesian common sense.] And that mental
exercise is so torturous that after a while you give it up and just stop
listening. [Accurate.] I’ve seen this with my superiors, my colleagues ... and with
myself.
“You will deal with a person who doesn’t have those
clearances only from the point of view of what you want him to believe and what
impression you want him to go away with, since you’ll have to lie carefully to
him about what you know. In effect, you will have to manipulate him. You’ll
give up trying to assess what he has to say. The danger is, you’ll become something like a moron.
You’ll become incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter
how much experience they may have in their particular areas that may be much
greater than yours.” [Samantha Power. Hillary Clinton.] (15)
Freed from their classified seals, the WikiLeaks
materials bridge the gulf between the “morons” with security clearances and
nothing to learn, and us, their readers.
1.
For a fascinating account of the communications
used in historical Empires, see Harold Innis, Empire and Communications (Oxford: Clarendon, 1950).
2.
In 2002, US writer Charles Krauthammer observed
that people were “now coming out of the closet on the word ‘Empire,’ reflecting
the unrivaled dominance of the United States ‘culturally, economically
technologically and militarily.’” Google Statistics for words in books
published in English over the thirty-year period to 2008 show a 450 percent
increase in the use of the phrase “US Empire” between 2000 and 2008, without
any corresponding increase in the left-wing phrase “US Imperialism” (Google
Books Ngram Viewer, at books.google.com). On January 5, 2003, the Sunday magazine
for the New York Times ran with a
cover declaring: “American Empire: Get Used To It.” Even military
operations are starting to adopt the World. For example, the yearly combined
Anglophone Space, Air, and Ground intelligence and targeting fusion exercise
led by the United States, which posits an insurgent challenge to occupying
Anglophone Forces, is called “Operation Empire Challenge.” (https://wikileaks.org/wiki/Anglo_spy_fusion:_Operation_Empire_Challenge_-_87_documents,_2008).
3.
“The United States may
conduct some ARSOF [Army Special Operation Forces] UW [Unconventional Warfare]
operations in states that are not belligerents. The US Ambassador and his
Country Team may in fact have complete or significant Control over ARSOF inside
the ambassador’s host country of responsibility. In such cases, the
relationship between ARSOF conducting UW and the Country Team requires the best
possible coordination to be effective and appropriate.” This quote is from what
is probably the single most important book for understanding the current US
approach to bringing all elements of US national power (diplomatic, media,
financial, law enforcement, intelligence, commercial, and military) to bear in
order to coerce smaller states into submission. The range of possible outcomes
ascends to and includes covertly overthrowing the state’s government through
the use of surrogate forces controlled by US Special Operations Command. The
handbook, which is active policy, was not for public release, but was released
by WikiLeaks. “Army Special Operations Forces Unconventional Warfare, FM
3-05.130, 30 Sep 2008,” Chapter 2-2: “Diplomatic Instrument of United States
National Power and Unconventional Warfare,” at https://wikileaks.org/wiki/US_Army_Special_Operations_Forces_Unconventional_Warfare,_FM3-05.130,_30_Sep_2008. It should be read together with the counter-revolution
equivalent, also released by WikiLeaks, “US Special Forces Foreign Internal
Defense Operations, FM 3-05.202, Feb 2007, at https://wikileaks.org/wiki/US_Special_Forces_Foreign_Internal_Defense_Operations,_FM_3-05.202,_Feb_2007, and the 2003 version of “Unconventional Warfare,” at https://wikileaks.org/wiki/US_Special_Forces_Unconventional_Warfare_Operations:_overthrowing_governments%2C_sabotage%2C_subversion%2C_intelligence%2C_and_abduction%2C_FM_3-05.201%2C_Apr_2003.
4.
“Strategic Plan, FY 2014-2017,” at http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/223997.pdf.
5.
Brian Fung, “5.1 Million Americans Have Security
Clearances. That’s More than the Entire Population of Norway,” Washington Post, March 24, 2014.
6.
“US Air Force Blocked Websites,” at
muckrock.com.
7.
Defense Security Services, “Notice to
Contractors Cleared under the National Industrial Security Program on
Protecting Classified Information and the Integrity of Government Data on
Cleared Contractor Information Technology (IT) Systems,” February 11, 2011, at
muckrock.s3.amazonaws.com; “1-24-14_MR9321_RES_ID2014-095.pdf,” pp. 36-46, at
muckrock.s3.amazonaws.com.
8.
Rachel Slajda, “Library of Congress Blocks
Access to WikiLeaks,” TPM, December 3, 2010, at talkingpointsmemo.com; Matt
Raymond, “Why the Library of Congress Is Blocking WikiLeaks,” December 3, 2010,
Library of Congress, at blogs.loc-gov.
9.
Subsequently reversed. Kevin Gosztola, “US
National Archives Has Blocked Searches for ‘WikiLeaks,’” The Dissenter, November 3, 2012, at dissenter.firedoglake.com.
10.
Chelsea (formerly Bradly) Manning was detained without trial
for 1,103 days, an infringement of her right to speedy Justice. The United
Nations special rapporteur for Torture, Juan Méndez, formally found that
Manning had been treated in a manner that was cruel and inhuman, and that
possibly amounted to Torture. See Ed Pilkington, “Bradly Manning’s
Treatment Was Cruel and Inhuman, UN Torture Chief Rules,” Guardian, March 12, 2012. The Government charged Manning – accused
of being a journalistic source for WikiLeaks – with thirty-four individual
counts of violations of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, including parts
of the Espionage Act, the combined maximum sentence for which was over one hundred
years in Prison. See Kim Zetter, “Bradley Manning Charged with 22 New Counts,
Including Capital Offense,” Wired,
February 3, 2011, at wired.com. Manning was prohibited by the court from making
defense arguments as to public interest, motive, or the lack of actual harm
resulting from her alleged actions (see Ed Pilkington, “Bradly Manning Denied
Chance to Make Whistleblower Defence,” Guardian,
January 17, 2013), and she offered a limited guilty plea (see Alexa O’Brien,
“Pfc. Manning’s Statement for the Providence Inquiry,” Alexaobrien.com,
February 28, 2013). This plea was refused by the Government, which sought to
convict Manning on the full charge sheet. The case went to trial in June 2013
under conditions of unprecedented Secrecy, against which WikiLeaks and the
Center for Constitutional Rights litigated. In August 2013 Manning was found
guilty on seventeen counts and sentenced to thirty-five years in Prison. See
Tom McCarthy, “Bradley Manning Tells Lawyer After Sentencing: ‘I’m Going to Be
OK’ – as it happened,” Guardian,
August 21, 2013. At the time of publication, she is appealing her case to the
United States Army Court of Criminal Appeals, and a hearing is expected in mid
2015. See “Chelsea Manning’s 35-Year Prison Sentence Upheld by US Army General,”
Guardian, April 14, 2014.
11.
Josh Gerstein, “Blocking WikiLeaks Emails Trips
Up Bradly Manning Prosecution,” Politico,
March 15, 2012, at www.politico.com.
12.
Simon DeDeo, Robert X.D. Hawkins, Sara
Klingenstein, and Tim Hitchcock, “Bootstrap Methods for the Empirical Study of
Decision-Making and Information Flows in Social Systems,” Cornell University
Library website, February 5, 2013, at arxiv.org. “Scholars in other disciplines
have been more willing to make use of leaked information. In fields as varied
as informatics, applied Mathematics, Geography, and Economics, researchers have
enthusiastically turned to the leaked information of the Afghan War Diary and
the Iraq War Logs as invaluable data sources for modeling and predicting
conflict (O’Loughlin et al., 2010; Linke et al., 2012; Zammit-Mangion et al.,
2012; Cseke et al., 2013; Rusch et al., 2013; Zammit-Mangion et al., 2013).
Indeed, DeDeo et al. say that the Afghan War Diary ‘is likely to become a
standard set for both the analysis of human conflict and the study of empirical
methods for the analysis of complex, multi-modal data’ (p.2,257). Legal
scholars have also begun to discover the value of the Cablegate corpus as a data source. Khoo and Smith (2011) and Mendis
(2012) both cite WikiLeaks cables to support their analyses of international
relations in Asia. More recently, El Said (2012) quotes extensively from leaked
diplomatic cables to elucidate the bilateral free trade agreement negotiations
between the United States and Jordan.” Gabriel J. Michael, “Who’s Afraid of
WikiLeaks? Missed Opportunities in Political Science Research,” Review of Policy Research, December 22,
2014 (forthcoming).
13.
An example of political censorship by the New
York Times involved the cable 10STATE17263. The cable, which is lengthy, covers
discussions between Russian and American diplomats about the rumour that Iran
had acquired ballistic missiles from North Korea. The New York Times claimed the cable showed that the North Korean
missiles would let Iran’s “warheads reach targets as far away as Western
Europe, including Berlin.” However, the overwhelming majority of the cable’s
11,150 words present the view that the shipment, if it occurred at all, was for
research or part salvage, and was of little consequence, as North Korea had not
even successfully tested the design. The New
York Times actively misrepresented the content of the cable “on the request
of the Obama administration,” gutting the document almost in its entirety,
using only the twenty-six words that supported its stance on Iran, and
censoring the other 99.97 percent of the original cable. William J. Broad, James Glanz, and David E. Sanger, “Iran
Fortifies Its Arsenal with the Aid of North Korea,” New York Times, November
28, 2010. See also Peter Hart, “NYT Oversells WikiLeaks/Iranian Missiles
Story,” FAIR, November 29, 2010, at fair.org.
Most of our Media partners engaged in
similar kinds of selective censorship of our materials. Among the more prolific
of the censors were the New York Times,
the Guardian and El País. The website Cabledrum has assembled Statistics on the
instances of censorship by some of our major partners. See Cabledrum, “Short
Analysis of Cablegate Redactions,” Cabledrum, October 3, 2011 (see also
Cabledrum, “Cable Publications by Mainstream Media,” Cabledrum, October 2011).
Cabledrum has also assembled a list of particularly serious instances of
political censorship. See Cabledrum, “Cablegate Redactions Abused for
Censorship,” Cabledrum, October 3, 2011. See also Cabledrum, “Redacted Company
Names,” Cabledrum, October 2011. All of the above references are available at
cabledrum.net.
The topic of censorship among our Media
partners is discussed at length in my other work. See Julian Assange, Cyberpunks (New York: OR Books, 2012),
pp. 121-4, and endnotes 104-12; Julian Assange, When Google Met WikiLeaks (New York: OR Books, 2014), pp. 167-70,
and footnotes 259-63.
14.
Hillary Rodham Clinton, “America’s Engagement in
the Asia-Pacific,” US Department of State, October 28, 2010, at state.gov.
15.
Daniel Ellsberg to Henry Kissinger, 1969, quoted
in Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the
Pentagon Papers (London: Penguin, 2010), p. 238.
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