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Leaking The Truth

By Dr. Chandra Muzaffar

02 November, 2010
Countercurrents.org

It has now been revealed that one of the 25 most censored news items in the United States in 2009--2010 was a report on “ The War Crimes of the US General, Stanley McChrystal” by that outstanding investigative journalist, Seymour Hersh. Hersh shows that McChrystal who headed the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) during the presidency of George Bush junior ran a highly secretive elite unit directed towards “black operations.” The unit, which reported to Vice-President Dick Cheney, specialized in the assassination of individuals in foreign countries who it deemed a threat to US interests. Though such assassinations were against US law, they were carried out, Hersh alleges, in various countries in Latin America and the Middle East. The unit and the JSOC were also implicated in the torture of prisoners in secret ghost detention centres. Camp Nama in Iraq was one such facility which was concealed from the International Committee of the Red Cross(ICRC), tasked with ensuring that an occupying power complies with the Geneva Conventions. It appears that since Barack Obama assumed the presidency in January 2009, the JSOC has become less clandestine and more regulated.

These revelations about General McChrystal should be seen in the larger context of the massive military leaks pertaining to Afghanistan and Iraq since July 2010. In that month WikiLeaks’ founder, Julian Assange exposed to the public 75,000 military reports on civilian massacres, tortures and detentions in connection with the US led war in Afghanistan. They implicated not just the US armed forces and its NATO partners but also the Afghan government. The cruel misdeeds of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban are also laid bare in those documents.

In October, WikiLeaks released almost 400,000 military messages related to the war in Iraq which showed how prisoners had been tortured, raped and murdered by Iraqi security personnel; how private US military contractors such as Blackwater, now renamed Xe services, killed civilians ; and how the US army sought to cover up civilian death tolls. The leaks also tell us that hundreds of civilians were murdered at checkpoints. Al-Qaeda’s exploitation of children and the mentally challenged in suicide bombings are detailed in various military dispatches just as they also spell out the involvement of Iranian agents in the training and arming of Iraqi militants.

The leaks in a sense confirm what Afghan and Iraqi war veterans have been sharing with American journalists for years. But the mainstream media, dominated by corporate interests sometimes linked to the US military machine, have chosen to ignore the truth knowing full well that it would have jeopardized their interests and the interests of the political establishment. It is not surprising that certain mainstream media outlets are now going all out to character assassinate Julian Assange.

We should not allow those who speak – or leak--- the truth to be subjected to such injustice and indignity. Global public opinion should rally around Assange. We should also come to the defence of Private Bradley Manning, the 22 year-old, who leaked classified military information including a video of a US army helicopter gunning down Iraqi civilians in 2007, and is now in military detention in Virginia in the US. Citizens groups should demand his unconditional release. More important, both the horrendous human rights violations committed by the US and its allies and the Afghan and Iraqi governments, on the one hand, and the excesses of those who are resisting occupation, on the other, should be condemned by the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.

Dr. Chandra Muzaffar is President of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST) and Professor of Global Studies, Universiti Sains Malaysia.

Malaysia.

31st October 2010.