Hands off WikiLeaks!

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Hands off WikiLeaks!
14 June 2010

Pentagon officials have announced the detention of Army private Bradley Manning,
as well as stepped-up efforts to locate Julian Assange, the founder of the
WikiLeaks web site, in a security crackdown sparked by the release of
politically damaging video of a US military massacre in Iraq.

On June 7, Defense Department officials confirmed that Manning was in
confinement in Kuwait “for allegedly releasing classified information.” Three
days later, Pentagon investigators told the web site Daily Beast that they were
looking for Assange in connection with the Manning investigation. The
Australian-born WikiLeaks founder had scheduled speaking engagements in New York
City and Las Vegas last week, but canceled them, citing “security considerations.”

WikiLeaks, which solicits leaks of government and corporate criminality
worldwide and makes them public to a global audience on the Internet, published
a decrypted and edited version of the video footage in April, using a special
web site entitled “Collateral Murder.” The original video was shot by the US
military in 2007 in the course of a helicopter assault in eastern Baghdad which
left some 15 people dead, including two Reuters journalists.

The video and the accompanying voiceover of radio traffic, in which American
soldiers joked about exterminating Iraqis, sparked widespread international
outrage and a furious counterattack by the American military/intelligence
apparatus. Defense Secretary Robert Gates denounced the release of the video,
although he conceded that the footage was produced by the US military and had
not been doctored.

According to press accounts, Manning was detained May 26 after he made the
mistake of confiding in an online acquaintance, Adrian Lamo, an experienced
hacker. Manning told Lamo that, in the course of his work as an Army military
intelligence analyst at Forward Operating Base Hammer, east of Baghdad, he had
been able to acquire a vast stockpile of internal military and State Department
documents and communications, including the original footage from which
“Collateral Murder” was produced. Lamo turned Manning in to the Army and FBI.

Manning is reportedly being held at a military facility in Kuwait. Several
computer hard drives taken from him arrived in Washington Thursday and are now
being analyzed by government computer experts to determine what documents
Manning downloaded and what he did with them.

Manning enlisted in the Army in 2007 and held a Top Secret/SCI clearance. He
reportedly told Lamo that he had been looking through military and government
networks for more than a year and found “incredible things, awful things… that
belonged in the public domain, and not on some server stored in a dark room in
Washington DC.”

Besides the video which became “Collateral Murder,” Manning said he supplied
WikiLeaks with a second video showing a May 2009 US air strike near the village
of Garani in Afghanistan, in which more than 100 people were killed, including
many children.

The main focus of the military/FBI investigation is Manning’s claim to have
downloaded some 260,000 secret diplomatic cables, which he described as showing
“almost criminal political back dealings.” Manning added, according to an e-mail
to Lamo, “Hillary Clinton and several thousand diplomats around the world are
going to have a heart attack when they wake up one morning and find an entire
repository of classified foreign policy is available, in searchable format, to
the public.”

WikiLeaks has denied being in possession of the 260,000 secret cables. Assange
has reportedly offered to help finance Manning’s legal defense.

The detention of Manning and the pursuit of Assange must be opposed by all those
who defend democratic rights. The American people, and the people of the entire
world, have a right to know of the crimes committed by the American
military/intelligence apparatus under the orders of the American president.

The attack on WikiLeaks and its collaborators is part of a broader security
crackdown by the Obama administration. As reported by the New York Times this
week, the White House has decided to go ahead with the prosecution of Thomas
Drake, a whistleblower at the National Security Agency, who sought to expose
financial mismanagement at the NSA by providing information to a reporter for
the Baltimore Sun.

According to the Times article, “The indictment of Mr. Drake was the latest
evidence that the Obama administration is proving more aggressive than the Bush
administration in seeking to punish unauthorized leaks. In 17 months in office,
President Obama has already outdone every previous president in pursuing leak
prosecutions.”

This stepped-up crackdown on leaks came the same week as the issuance of a
report by Physicians for Human Rights that doctors working for the CIA
collaborated with interrogators who conducted torture of prisoners. The doctors
monitored the torture sessions to make sure the prisoners did not die—so they
could be interrogated and tortured further—and to refine the methods used to
make them more painful and effective. The report’s title speaks for itself:
“Experiments in Torture: Human Subject Research and Evidence of Experimentation
in the ‘Enhanced’ Interrogation Program.”

The Obama administration is striving to plug leaks, not out of concern that the
lives of American soldiers could be endangered, as it habitually claims, but for
the same reasons that motivated the Bush administration: top government
officials—in the Pentagon, CIA, NSA and in the White House itself—could face war
crimes charges, either in the United States or before an international tribunal,
based on the evidence produced by such revelations.

Relatives of those killed in the helicopter gunship attack in Iraq criticized
Manning’s detention. Nabil Noor-Eldeen, whose brother Namir was one of the
Reuters employees killed in the assault, told the press, “Justice was what this
US soldier did by uncovering this crime against humanity. The American military
should reward him, not arrest him.”

Manning is not a criminal, but someone evidently motivated by revulsion against
the crimes committed by “his” military and “his” government. The World Socialist
Web Site joins with all those demanding that Manning be released without any
charges being brought against him. We further demand the dropping of all efforts
to investigate and suppress the activities of Julian Assange and other WikiLeaks
activists.

Patrick Martin

http://wsws.org/articles/2010/jun2010/pers-j14.shtml

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