Diplomatic secrecy and imperialist crimes

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Diplomatic secrecy and imperialist crimes
30 November 2010

The release by WikiLeaks of the first of some quarter of a million classified US
embassy cables from around the world has provoked expressions of outrage and
demands for retribution from Washington and its allies.

US Attorney General Eric Holder reiterated on Monday that the Justice
Department, aided by military intelligence, is conducting an “active, ongoing,
criminal investigation,” presumably aimed at WikiLeaks and its founder Julian
Assange.

Both Democratic and Republican politicians joined in the denunciations and
threats. Some went so far as to call for prosecution for treason and execution
of Army Private First Class Bradley Manning, charged with leaking to WikiLeaks
the so-called “Collateral Murder” video depicting the 2007 massacre of Iraqi
civilians by a US helicopter gunship.

Manning has been named as a “person of interest” in the subsequent leaks, which
have included WikiLeaks’ posting last July of some 92,000 battlefield reports
from Afghanistan documenting the killing over 20,000 Afghan civilians, and
another 400,000 documents on Iraq in October, exposing thousands of unreported
killings of civilians as well as the use and cover-up of torture.

Congressman Peter King (Republican, NY) called for WikiLeaks to be designated as
a “Foreign Terrorist Organization,” a ruling that presumably would make its
members subject to assassination by US intelligence or military death squads.

One of the more curious denunciations of WikiLeaks came from Senator Joseph
Lieberman, the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, who called
the latest leak “an offense against our democracy and the principle of
transparency,” because the organization had acted to “short circuit” the
“democratic process” by deciding to make public documents that the government
had deemed secret.

A similar position was put forward by a French minister speaking on behalf of
the Élysée Palace. “We are very supportive of the American administration in its
efforts to avoid what not only damages countries’ authority and the quality of
their services, but also endangers men and women who worked at the service of a
country,” said the spokesman, François Baroin. “I always thought that a
transparent society was a totalitarian society.”

This perverse attempt to equate state secrecy with freedom and democracy—and
exposure of secrets to the public as antidemocratic and totalitarian—speaks
volumes about the fraudulent character of “democracy” in the US and the rest of
the capitalist world as well as the rabidly reactionary character of the attacks
on WikiLeaks.

Delivering the main response to the posting of the new documents by WikiLeaks
was Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who also called for those responsible to
be punished.

Clinton insisted that, while there have been past instances in which “official
conduct was made public in the name of exposing wrongdoing, this is not one of
those cases.” The leaked cables, she claimed, merely showed “that American
diplomats are doing work we expect them to do” and “should make every one of us
proud.”

Clearly, Clinton is banking on no one reading the cables and on a pliant media
suppressing much of their content. Among the exposures that have come out so far
are:

    * A January 2010 cable describing a conversation between Gen. David Petraeus
and the corrupt dictator of Yemen President Ali Abdullah Saleh in which a deal
was hatched for the Yemeni regime to take responsibility for air strikes
secretly being carried out by the US military. Just weeks earlier a US cruise
missile had devastated a Yemeni hamlet, leaving 55 people dead, at least 41 of
them women and children.
    * State Department cables instructing US diplomats to gather personal
information ranging from credit card and frequent flyer account numbers to
Internet passwords, work schedules and even DNA samples on officials of foreign
governments and the United Nations.
    * A cable describing how the US government worked to intimidate Germany into
dropping arrest warrants against CIA agents involved in the kidnapping,
detention and torture of an innocent German citizen.
    * An October 2009 cable from the US Embassy in Tegucigalpa recognizing that
the overthrow of President Manuel Zelaya constituted an illegal and
unconstitutional coup. The cable documents Washington’s support and cover-up for
that coup and the repression that followed.

This comes from the posting of a small fraction of the documents to be released
by WikiLeaks over the coming months. If US officials are demanding that the
organization and its leaders be prosecuted—or worse—it is not because the
exposure of the secret cables is disrupting “efforts to work with other
countries to solve shared problems,” as Secretary Clinton claimed Monday. It is
because they lay bare crimes that have been carried out by the US government
which have real victims, from the murdered Yemeni civilians to the imprisoned,
tortured and assassinated workers and peasants of Honduras.

It is in the interests of working people in the United States and all over the
world that these secrets be laid bare.

In the media’s coverage of the WikiLeaks, its massive exposure of classified
material is almost invariably described as “unprecedented.” In reality, there is
one historical precedent. It accompanied the conquest of state power by the
Russian working class in October 1917.

One of the first acts of the new workers’ government was to publish the secret
treaties and diplomatic documents that had fallen into its hands. These treaties
laid bare the predatory war aims of Britain, France and Tsarist Russia in World
War I, which included the redrawing of national boundaries and re-division of
the colonial world. In exposing them, Russia’s new revolutionary workers’
government sought to advance its program of an immediate armistice to end the
slaughter.

Leon Trotsky, then People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, explained the
principles underlying the exposure of these state secrets. “Secret diplomacy,”
he wrote, “is a necessary tool for a propertied minority, which is compelled to
deceive the majority in order to subject it to its interests. Imperialism, with
its dark plans of conquest and its robber alliances and deals, developed the
system of secret diplomacy to the highest level. The struggle against
imperialism, which is exhausting and destroying the peoples of Europe, is at the
same time a struggle against capitalist diplomacy, which has cause enough to
fear the light of day.”

Ninety-three years later, these words stand the test of time. Underlying the
outraged denunciations of the Obama administration and the Republicans over
WikiLeaks’ undermining of US “national security” is the anger of a ruling
financial aristocracy that must pursue its own predatory and reactionary
interests in secret because they are opposed to the needs and aspirations of
working people in the US and around the world.

Bill Van Auken

http://wsws.org/articles/2010/nov2010/pers-n30.shtml

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