US embassy cables: The job of the media is not to protect the powerful from embarrassment

THE WIKILEAKS IMBROGLIO—
It is for governments – not journalists – to guard public secrets, and there is no national jeopardy in WikiLeaks’ revelations

IS IT JUSTIFIED? Should a newspaper disclose virtually all a nation's secret diplomatic communication, illegally downloaded by one of its citizens? The reporting in the Guardian of the first of a selection of 250,000 US state department cables marks a recasting of modern diplomacy. Clearly, there is no longer such a thing as a safe electronic archive, whatever computing's snake-oil salesmen claim. No organisation can treat digitised communication as confidential. An electronic secret is a contradiction in terms.
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     Anything said or done in the name of a democracy is, prima facie, of public interest. When that democracy purports to be "world policeman" – an assumption that runs ghostlike through these cables – that interest is global. Nonetheless, the Guardian had to consider two things in abetting disclosure, irrespective of what is anyway published by WikiLeaks. It could not be party to putting the lives of individuals or sources at risk, nor reveal material that might compromise ongoing military operations or the location of special forces.
     In this light, two backup checks were applied. The US government was told in advance the areas or themes covered, and "representations" were invited in return. These were considered. Details of "redactions" were then shared with the other four media recipients of the material and sent to WikiLeaks itself, to establish, albeit voluntarily, some common standard.
     The state department knew of the leak several months ago and had ample time to alert staff in sensitive locations. Its pre-emptive scaremongering over the weekend stupidly contrived to hint at material not in fact being published. Nor is the material classified top secret, being at a level that more than 3 million US government employees are cleared to see, and available on the defence department's internal Siprnet. Such dissemination of "secrets" might be thought reckless, suggesting a diplomatic outreach that makes the British empire seem minuscule.
     The revelations do not have the startling, coldblooded immediacy of the WikiLeaks war logs from Iraq and Afghanistan, with their astonishing insight into the minds of fighting men seemingly detached from the ethics of war. The's disclosures are largely of analysis and high-grade gossip. Insofar as they are sensational, it is in showing the corruption and mendacity of those in power, and the mismatch between what they claim and what they do.
     Few will be surprised to know that Vladimir Putin runs the world's most sensational kleptocracy, that the Saudis wanted the Americans to bomb Iran, or that Pakistan's ISIis hopelessly involved with Taliban groups of fiendish complexity. We now know that Washington knows too. The full extent of American dealings with Yemen might upset that country's government, but is hardly surprising. If it is true that the Pentagon targeted refugee camps for bombing, it should be of general concern. American congressmen might also be interested in the sums of money given to certain foreign generals supposedly to pay for military equipment.
     The job of the media is not to protect power from embarrassment. If American spies are breaking United Nations rules by seeking the DNA biometrics of the UN director general, he is entitled to hear of it. British voters should know what Afghan leaders thought of British troops. American (and British) taxpayers might question, too, how most of the billions of dollars going in aid to Afghanistan simply exits the country at Kabul airport.
     No harm is done by high-class chatter about President Nicolas Sarkozy's vulgarity and lack of house-training, or about the British royal family. What the American embassy in London thinks about the coalition suggests not an alliance at risk but an embassy with a talent problem.
     Some stars shine through the banality such as the heroic envoy in Islamabad, Anne Patterson. She pleads that Washington's whole policy is counterproductive: it "risks destabilising the Pakistani state, alienating both the civilian government and the military leadership, and provoking a broader governance crisis without finally achieving the goal". Nor is any amount of money going to bribe the Taliban to our side. Patterson's cables are like missives from the Titanic as it already heads for the bottom.
     The money‑wasting is staggering. Aid payments are never followed, never audited, never evaluated. The impression is of the world's superpower roaming helpless in a world in which nobody behaves as bidden. Iran, Russia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, the United Nations, are all perpetually off script. Washington reacts like a wounded bear, its instincts imperial but its power projection unproductive.
     America's foreign policy is revealed as a slave to rightwing drift, terrified of a bomb exploding abroad or of a pro-Israeli congressman at home. If the cables tell of the progress to war over Iran or Pakistan or Gaza or Yemen, their revelation might help debate the inanity of policies which, as Patterson says, seem to be leading in just that direction. Perhaps we can now see how catastrophe unfolds when there is time to avert it, rather than having to await a Chilcot report after the event. If that is not in the public's interest, I fail to see what is.
    Clearly, it is for governments, not journalists, to protect public secrets. Were there some overriding national jeopardy in revealing them, greater restraint might be in order. There is no such overriding jeopardy, except from the policies themselves as revealed. Where it is doing the right thing, a great power should be robust against embarrassment.
     What this saga must do is alter the basis of diplomatic reporting. If WikiLeaks can gain access to secret material, by whatever means, so presumably can a foreign power. Words on paper can be made secure, electronic archives not. The leaks have blown a hole in the framework by which states guard their secrets. The Guardian material must be a breach of the official secrets acts. But coupled with the penetration already allowed under freedom of information, the walls round policy formation and documentation are all but gone.          All barriers are permeable. In future the only secrets will be spoken ones. Whether that is a good thing should be a topic for public debate.
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Simon Jenkins is a journalist and author. He writes a column twice weekly for the Guardian and weekly for the Sunday Times, as well as broadcasting for the BBC. Previously he wrote columns for the Times and the London Evening Standard, both of which newspapers he edited.  His career began on Country Life magazine and continued on the Times Educational Supplement, the Economist (political editor) and the Sunday Times (books editor). He served on the board of British Rail and London Transport in the 80s and was deputy chairman of English Heritage and a Millennium commissioner. He was Journalist of the Year in 1988 and Columnist of the Year in 1993. His books include works on London architecture, the press and politics and, more recently, England's Thousand Best Churches (1999) and Thousand Best Houses (2003).

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BONUS FEATURE:

New WikiLeaks revelations confirm

Obama administration targets Iran for aggression

By Patrick Martin 
30 November 2010

The Obama administration has devoted enormous attention and effort to a worldwide campaign to destabilize Iran and open the way to direct military aggression, the latest mass of documents released by WikiLeaks confirms. The first batch of more than 250,000 secret diplomatic cables between the State Department and 270 US embassies and missions around the world were made public Sunday night by the Internet-based organization, which is opposed to US militarism.

The documents reveal a wide range of efforts by the US government over the past decade, and especially in the last three years, to mobilize support for its campaign against Iran—as well as to forestall a premature Israeli air strike against the Islamic Republic, which US officials feared would be counterproductive and strengthen Iran in the long run.

The most provocative allegation contained in the documents is the claim, in a February 24, 2010 cable describing a US-Russian meeting, that North Korea had shipped Iran 19 medium-range, Russian-designed missiles, capable of delivering nuclear warheads. This claim was trumpeted in US media accounts of the WikiLeaks documents, as though it was a smoking gun, but it amounts to no more than an unsupported US government allegation, similar to lies used by the Bush administration to justify the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

The New York Times devoted a lengthy article to the claim of a “cache” of missiles which it said would give Iran the ability to strike cities 2,000 miles away: “If fired from Iran, that range, in theory, would let its warheads reach targets as far away as Western Europe, including Berlin. If fired northwestward, the warheads could easily reach Moscow.”

The Times account was crafted in collaboration with the Obama administration—as the newspaper’s editors shamelessly admit, explaining, “At the request of the Obama administration, The New York Times has agreed not to publish the text of the cable.”

The WikiLeaks documents also demonstrate that US embassies throughout the Middle East and Central Asia were instructed to focus their espionage activities on Iran, particularly in those countries with a common border. This was necessary because there has been no official US presence in Tehran since the 1979 takeover by militant students, who branded the embassy—with perfect justice—as a “nest of spies.”

Washington pursued a course of heavy-handed diplomatic pressure on countries with important economic relations with Tehran, particularly China, Russia and Germany. The Bush administration intervened with China in November 2007, seeking to intercept a cargo of missile stabilizers en route from North Korea to Iran via Beijing, one of at least a dozen such diplomatic exchanges targeting cargo ranging from carbon fiber to gyroscopes to ordinary chemicals.

Particularly significant are the repeated entreaties by the monarchs of Saudi Arabia and other Arab sheikdoms for American military intervention against Iran. All of the crowned heads of the Persian Gulf still tremble at the memory of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, which destroyed the absolute monarchy of the Shah, at the time the most powerful ruler in the Middle East.

As early as 2005, two years into the US war in Iraq, Arab rulers who nominally opposed the US invasion, because of overwhelming popular hostility, were urging Washington behind the scenes to extend its war of aggression into Iran. Tailoring their arguments to the lies used by the Bush administration to justify the attack on Iraq, they argued that Iran would certainly develop a nuclear bomb if left undisturbed.

Saudi King Abdullah frequently pressed the US to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities “to cut off the head of the snake,” while officials in Bahrain and Jordan also told their US interlocutors that military means should be used against Iran if necessary. “The danger of letting it go on is greater than the dangers of stopping it,” Bahrain’s King Hamad ibn Isa Al Khalifa told visiting US General David Petraeus.

The transparent falsity of these arguments—urgently warning that an Iranian bomb was “inevitable” in 2006, 2007 or 2008—provides a useful yardstick for evaluating similar arguments today, made by both the Obama administration and Israel.

The uncensored views of the Arab sheiks also shed light on a major foreign policy initiative of the Obama administration, the extension of US military relationships with the Persian Gulf states, and in particular, the resumption of massive arms sales to Saudi Arabia and its smaller neighbors. In September, the Pentagon publicly endorsed a record $60 billion sale of weapons, including advanced fighter jets, to Saudi Arabia.

These sales have both a political/diplomatic and a military/technical component, since the huge influx of US-built weapons means that American troops can operate seamlessly with their counterparts in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, the UAE and Oman. “We are helping these allied and partner nations create their own containment shield against Iran,” a US officer told the press at the time. “It is a way of deterring Iran, but helpful to us in so many other ways.”

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, while denouncing the WikiLeaks release of the documents, seized on the anti-Iranian comments reported by US diplomats in the Arab capitals as proof that the US concern over the supposed Iranian threat was widely shared. “I think that it should not be a surprise that Iran is a source of great concern, not only in the US,” she said, adding, “the comments reported in the cables prove that Iran poses a serious threat in the eyes of its neighbors, and beyond the region.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke in a similar vein, citing the WikiLeaks documents as proof that the Arab rulers shared Israel’s hostility to Iran. He declared, “Our region has been hostage to a narrative that is the result of 60 years of propaganda, which paints Israel as the greatest threat. In reality leaders understand that that view is bankrupt. For the first time in history there is agreement that Iran is the threat.”

Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, took the occasion of the WikiLeaks document release to reiterate US preparations for military action against Iran. Speaking Sunday on CNN, Mullen said, “Iran is still very much on a path to be able to develop nuclear weapons, including — and including weaponizing them, putting them on a missile and being able to use them.”

In response to a direct question from interviewer Fareed Zakaria, he said, “We’ve actually been thinking about military options for a significant period of time. And I’ve spoken with many others, that we’ve had options on the table. We continue to do that…and we will continue to do that in the future.”

Exactly what those “military options” are, Admiral Mullen did not say. But within 24 hours, a terrorist attack in the Iranian capital seemed to provide at least one answer. Two Iranian nuclear scientists were targeted for attack by groups of men riding motorcycles, who attached bombs to their cars, rode away, and then detonated them.

Majid Shahriari, a professor in the nuclear engineering department at Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran was killed, and Fereydoon Abbasi, a professor at the same university who is involved in nuclear research at the Defense Ministry, was wounded. The wives of both men and one other person were wounded in the attacks, which took place in two separate locations.

The organized, simultaneous character of the attack suggests that an intelligence service or services was involved. It is the fifth such attack on an Iranian nuclear expert in the recent period. Professor Shahriari was said to be an expert in the separation of isotopes and to have taught at the Supreme National Defense University, run by the Iranian Army. Iran’s nuclear facilities have also reportedly been targeted for cyber-warfare attack, with the Stuxnet worm, rumored to have been devised by the Israelis.

At a news conference, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said that “undoubtedly the hand of the Zionist regime and Western governments is involved” in the killing. Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of Iran’s nuclear development program, warned the US and its allies not to “play with fire.”

According to press reports, Abbasi was targeted by the US-sponsored sanctions regime adopted by the UN Security Council, which barred him from international travel since 2007 because of his alleged role in the Iranian nuclear and ballistic missile programs.

 

 

PATRICK MARTIN is a senior political analyst with the World Socialist Web Site.



On Korea, Here We Go Again

If American journalism should have learned one thing over the years, it is to be cautious and skeptical during the first days of a foreign confrontation like the one now playing out on the Korean Peninsula. Often the initial accounts from the “U.S. side” don’t turn out to be entirely accurate.

While you can delve back through history for plenty of examples, today’s U.S. journalists might remember events like the Gulf of Tonkin clash that opened the door to the disastrous Vietnam War and the misplaced certainty about Iraq’s WMD that led to a bloody U.S. invasion and occupation.

In both cases, contrary claims from the "enemy side" were discounted and mocked as U.S. journalists puffed out their chests and waved the flag.
BELOW: Defensive propaganda by North Korea, a nation almost universally vilified among those who follow Washington's lead. 
   Today's Korean crisis over an exchange of artillery fire between North Korea and South Korea is similar. Though the evidence is that South Korea fired first, you wouldn’t know that if you’ve been watching most U.S. news shows and reading the major newspapers, which have laid the blame squarely at the doorstep of North Korea.
   To get an inkling of the actual chronology, you'd have to read between the lines or carefully examine a graphic published in the New York Times. Along with a map of the conflict zone, the Times included this notation: “South Korea had been firing test shots from Baengnyeong Island, according to a South Korean official.”
   But you wouldn’t find much about that fact in the accompanying news articles. Instead, the Times, like other major U.S. news outlets, offered up ready-made narratives for the crisis – that North Korea was acting in an aggressive and provocative manner to shake down the international community for more aid, or to solidify the power of the ruling family, or some other self-serving reason.
BELOW RIGHT: Making fun of North Korean rulers is a long tradition in the West. Here Kim Jong Il rides Dr Strangelove's missile to ultimate doom.
   And, who knows? There might be some truth to that. However, it’s also possible, as the North Koreans have stated, that they were reacting to what they interpreted as an unprovoked barrage by the South Korean military from an island only a few miles off the North Korean coast.
In a backhanded way, the New York Times lead editorial does acknowledge this possibility, although the article mostly parrots the conventional wisdom about North Korean recklessness and the failure of China to rein in its dangerous neighbor.
   “On Tuesday,” the Times wrote, China “was still in denial. After the [North Korean] shelling [of a South Korean military base], China called only for a resumption of six-party nuclear talks.”
   However, the Times editorial then notes that  the North Korean “attack on Yeonpyeong Island occurred after South Korean forces on exercises fired test shots into waters near the North Korean coast. We hope South Korea’s president is asking who came up with that idea. But the North should have protested, rather than firing on a populated area.”
   So, at least the Times marginally acknowledges a competing narrative, that the ever-paranoid North Koreans interpreted a barrage against their shoreline as a provocation that merited a muscular response directed against a South Korean military base.
   Still, for the most prominent newspaper in the United States, a country that has repeatedly invaded and bombed other nations and killed hundreds of thousands if not millions of their inhabitants, isn't it a bit hypocritical to lecture a small country about how it should respond to an enemy firing at it?
Double Standards
But such is the never-ending disconnect between the U.S. news media’s righteous indignation about what adversarial countries do and what the United States and its allies do.
   The U.S. government, with its vast nuclear arsenal, leaves “all options on the table” when discussing how to confront fledgling nuclear programs in North Korea and Iran (which denies it even wants nuclear weapons). Meanwhile, Washington refuses to acknowledge that its ally, Israel, is a full-blown rogue nuclear state with a sophisticated and undeclared nuclear arsenal of its own.
   So, instead of anything approaching “objectivity,” the U.S. news media dishes out selective outrage. And those double standards were out in force regarding the latest Korean crisis.

The neoconservative Washington Post was back in full belligerency mode with a lead editorial urging a stern response against North Korea. Unlike the Times, which at least acknowledged the South Korean provocation, the Post saw only a black-and-white scenario, with South Korea wearing the white hat and the North the black hat.
   The Post’s editorial-page editors behaved much the same during the run-up to war with Iraq, stating as undisputed fact the existence of Iraq’s non-existent WMD programs. After the invasion – and the failure to find the WMD – Post’s editorial page editor Fred Hiatt noted in an interview with the Columbia Journalism Review in 2004:
   “If you look at the editorials we write running up [to the war], we state as flat fact that he [Saddam Hussein] has weapons of mass destruction. If that’s not true, it would have been better not to say it.”
But Hiatt, who remains in the same job more than six years later, was back doing the same thing on Wednesday in connection with another country from George W. Bush’s “axis of evil.”
“North Korea’s artillery attack against a South Korean island Tuesday was the latest and arguably most reckless in a series of provocations by its Stalinist regime,” the Post editors wrote, also citing as flat fact that the North had “torpedoed a South Korean warship, killing 46 sailors” earlier this year,  a charge North Korea denies.
   The Post continued: “Now comes the shelling of an area populated by civilians as well as South Korean troops, two of whom were killed. This blatantly criminal act will have the probably intended effect of forcing the Obama administration to pay attention to a regime it has mostly ignored. But it should not lead to the economic and political bribes dictator Kim Jong Il has extracted in the past.
“It's hard to know what is motivating Pyongyang's behavior; experts offer varying explanations even while conceding they don't know much.
BELOW RIGHT: The supposed nuclear threat represented by North Korea continues to be a staple of US propaganda against the Pyongyang government.

 

   “Some say Mr. Kim is creating an atmosphere of crisis to help smooth a transition of power to his son. Others contend the regime is hoping to force the lifting of U.S. sanctions and the resumption of international aid, which has dwindled since Mr. Kim failed to fulfill a nuclear disarmament agreement.”
   The Post makes no reference to the possibility that North Korea simply overreacted to what it saw as an attack from the South. Nor has the Post ever acknowledged that President George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq -- endorsed by the Post and causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis -- was a "blatantly criminal act."
A Hard Line
While urging the Obama administration to take an especially hard line today, the Post criticized prior administrations for granting North Korea “political and economic concessions in exchange for promises of disarmament. In each case, Mr. Kim pocketed the benefits but refused either to fully disclose or to irreversibly dismantle his nuclear weapons and missiles.”
   The Post, however, has never been known to criticize Israel for pocketing billions of dollars in U.S. aid – and counting on unwavering U.S. political support – without ever disclosing or dismantling its array of nuclear weapons and delivery systems, which are far more sophisticated than North Korea’s.
BELOW: The people of North Korea have paid dearly for their independence from Washington's dictates. And the constant threat of war and invasion by the US/South Korea have forced a huge redeployment of this poor nation's resources to self-defense, a situation similar to Cuba's.
   Instead, the Post was again applying double standards, again beating the war drums. It called on the Obama administration to “make clear … that the United States is prepared to help South Korea defend itself from attack.”
   The Post also demanded more sanctions on North Korea and more pressure on China. “The United States and its allies should hold Beijing responsible for putting a stop to Mr. Kim's dangerous behavior,” the Post declared.
   However, before the war rhetoric gets completely out of control again – and creates another political dynamic that leads toward a bloody escalation – perhaps the U.S. news media should reflect for a moment on all the other times the American press corps has let itself and the country be stampeded into a dangerous misunderstanding of an international incident.
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Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press 'Project Truth' are also available there. Or go to Amazon.com.  
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http://www.consortiumnews.com/2010/112410.html

 



New WikiLeaks documents expose US foreign policy conspiracies

By David Walsh 
29 November 2010 | [print_link]

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The batch of 250,000 US classified documents released by WikiLeaks to several news outlets, some of whose content was made public Sunday, sheds new light on the sordid nature of American imperialist intrigue and conspiracy around the globe.
     The WSWS will analyze the documents more thoroughly in a subsequent article, but “highlights” published by the Guardian and the New York Times are revealing.
     The leaked material consists of classified cables from US embassies, some dispatched as recently as early 2010. The cables, most of which date from 2007-2010, contain US officials’ comments on foreign governments and leaders and speculation about the activities and maneuvers of the latter, as well as details about American foreign policy operations.
    In a revelation that should surprise no one, the US State Department and American diplomacy in general turn out to be a vast nest of spies.
    The Guardian explains that the WikiLeaks documents “reveal how the US uses its embassies as part of a global espionage network, with diplomats tasked to obtain not just information from the people they meet, but personal details, such as frequent flyer numbers, credit card details and even DNA material.
     “Classified ‘human intelligence directives’ issued in the name of Hillary Clinton or her predecessor, Condoleezza Rice, instruct officials to gather information on military installations, weapons markings, vehicle details of political leaders as well as iris scans, fingerprints and DNA.”
     The British newspaper reports that Washington’s “most controversial target was the leadership of the United Nations.” One of the leaked directives requests “the specification of telecoms and IT systems used by top UN officials and their staff and details of ‘private VIP networks used for official communication, to include upgrades, security measures, passwords, personal encryption keys.’” In response, a UN spokesperson discreetly commented, “We are aware of the reports.”
     Among other revelations: Officials from numerous Arab regimes have repeatedly urged the US to bomb Iran and destroy its nuclear program. The Financial Times, based on the documents, reports: “The Saudi ambassador to Washington … spoke to General David Petraeus, then incoming central command chief, in April 2008 about King Abdullah’s ‘frequent exhortations to the US to attack Iran.’”
     The reactionary Arab states “fear a nuclear-armed Iran would make it the undisputed superpower in the region, particularly at a time when the power of their own ally, the US, has receded.”
     Moreover, notes the Financial Times, “The leaks will reinforce suspicions that Israel is considering an attack on Iranian facilities. According to reports of the cables, Ehud Barak, the defence minister, warned in 2009 that the world had six to 18 months to deal with Iran’s nuclear programme.”
     The new WikiLeaks exposé also reveals that the US has been trying since 2007 “to remove from a Pakistani research reactor highly enriched uranium that American officials fear could be diverted for use in an illicit nuclear device.” (New York Times) For its part, the Pakistani regime is fearful that if the media were to get word of the fuel removal, they would portray it as the US taking Pakistan’s nuclear weapons.
     The New York Times reports this gem as well: “When American diplomats pressed other countries to resettle detainees, they became reluctant players in a State Department version of ‘Let’s Make a Deal.’ Slovenia was told to take a prisoner if it wanted to meet with President Obama, while the island nation of Kiribati was offered incentives worth millions of dollars to take in Chinese Muslim detainees, cables from diplomats recounted. The Americans, meanwhile, suggested that accepting more prisoners would be ‘a low-cost way for Belgium to attain prominence in Europe.’”
     US officials were thoroughly aware of the deep-going corruption of the Afghan government, the documents reveal. The Times reports that United Arab Emirates officials discovered that Afghan vice president Ahmed Zia Massoud was carrying $52 million in cash when he tried to enter that country last year. According to one of the cables, Massoud “was ultimately allowed to keep [the money] without revealing [its] origin or destination.”
     The US government is outraged that the world’s population is getting a glimpse into its dirty operations. In a deeply hypocritical statement, the White House issued a statement Sunday denouncing WikiLeaks for its “reckless and dangerous action.” The press release claimed that WikiLeaks had “put at risk not only the cause of human rights but also the lives and work of these individuals [named in the documents].”
     On the eve of the new release of documents, the US State Department wrote WikiLeaks a threatening letter, claiming that making the material publicly available was illegal and would “place at risk the lives of countless individuals.” The November 28 letter also asserted, without providing any proof, that the leaks would “place at risk on-going military operations,” and “place at risk on-going cooperation between countries.”
     On Sunday afternoon, WikiLeaks reported that its web site had been compromised. “We are currently under a mass distributed denial of service attack,” WikiLeaks said on its Twitter page. A DDOS attack is an attempt to make a given web site unavailable to the public, usually by flooding it with requests for data.
     The State Department letter, signed by legal adviser Harold Hongju Koh, was addressed to WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange and the latter’s lawyer, Jennifer Robinson. Assange and Robinson had written to Louis B. Susman, US ambassador to the United Kingdom, asking which individuals would be put at risk by the new disclosures and apparently offering limited redactions.
     In his reply, Koh asserted that “We will not engage in a negotiation regarding the further release or dissemination of illegally obtained U.S. Government classified materials.” The State Department official’s letter has two indignant references to the “violation of U.S. law” involved in the documents being provided to WikiLeaks and that organization’s holding and publishing them.
     The analogy hardly does justice to the present situation, but Koh’s effort might be likened to a Mafia hit man writing to an eyewitness of a mob slaying and complaining bitterly about his or her upcoming testimony. The US actions in Iraq and Afghanistan are criminal and murderous on a massive scale. WikiLeaks not only has the legal right, it has the moral obligation to do anything in its power to disrupt these bloody operations. It is to the everlasting shame of the mainstream media that it has not exerted any of its efforts along the same lines.
Washington attempted to weaken the impact of the WikiLeaks material by leaking its own story in regard to the material in the middle of last week. US officials and diplomats, including Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, have been scurrying about the past few days, attempting to alert and reassure some of the governments and leaders referred to in the documents.
    By video link from an undisclosed location on Sunday, Assange (right) told reporters that “The material that we are about to release covers essentially every major issue in every country.” The WikiLeaks founder faces trumped up sexual assault charges in Sweden.
     Among the apparent revelations not yet to appear in the Guardian or the Times, which are releasing the material piecemeal, is that the US has for years supported the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in Turkey, an organization that both Washington and Ankara have placed on their lists of “terrorist” groups.
     Deborah Guido, spokeswoman for the US embassy in Ankara, told the media that the American government’s policy “has never been nor will ever be in support of the PKK. Anything that implies otherwise is nonsense.” Turkish commentators were more inclined to believe the report.
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MEHMET YEGIN, an expert at the Center for American Studies at the USAK research organization, suggested, according to the English-language version of the Turkish newspaperHurriyet, “that U.S. support for the PKK could have been a result of Turkey’s decision in 2003 not to allow the United States to enter Iraq through Turkish soil.”
Some of the more sensitive material yet to be published involves the US-UK relationship. The US diplomatic cables reportedly include scathing remarks about British operations in Afghanistan and Prime Minister David Cameron. The Daily Mail in Britain reports: “The documents include highly damaging and embarrassing communiques from U.S. embassies around the world, especially from London--revealing the truth behind the so-called ‘special relationship’ between the U.K. and the U.S.
     “The U.S. ambassador to London made an unprecedented personal visit to Downing Street [the British prime minister’s residence] to warn that whistleblower website WikiLeaks was about to publish secret assessments of what Washington really thinks of Britain.”
     The global diplomatic crisis triggered by the WikiLeaks documents speaks to the extremely volatile international situation and the number of flashpoints, which do not require much fuel to be ignited.
     Furthermore, that a small organization with a computer bank and sympathizers within the US military and intelligence apparatus can wreak such havoc is testimony to the decline of American imperialism and the chaos and disorientation that characterize its daily activities. The US foreign policy establishment lurches from one improvised and violent plan to the next, resentful and fearful of foes and “friends” alike.
DAVID WALSH is a senior political and cultural analyst with the World Socialist Web Site.
Copyright © 1998-2010 World Socialist Web Site - All rights reserved
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BONUS FEATURE
What the criminal Empire and its minions would want (and may do soon enough)—
SOURCE: The scumbag rightwing site NEWSMAX, which specializes in presenting the truth upside down. 

 

King: WikiLeaks Should Be Declared Terrorists

 

Monday, 29 Nov 2010

WikiLeaks, the group that released the sensitive documents on U.S. military, intelligence and diplomatic policy, may end up causing the deaths of Americans and our allies through its actions. So it stands to reason that the government must do something to punish the organization. Rep. Pete King, R-N.Y., the incoming chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee calls for a strong response, The Hill reports. 







"I am calling on the attorney general and supporting his efforts to fully prosecute WikiLeaks and its founder for violating the Espionage Act. And I'm also calling on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to declare WikiLeaks a foreign terrorist organization," King told 1010 WINS radio in New York. "By doing that, we will be able to seize their funds and go after anyone who provides them help or contributions or assistance whatsoever," King explains. "To me, they are a clear and present danger to America."

 




MSM: Doctors say Medicare cuts force painful decision about elderly patients

FROM The Washington Post

The scandalous but inevitable consequences of Obama’s pseudo fix of the American health access system begin to crop up across the nation. The bottom line is that you can’t have capitalist values run an essential resource such as health services. 

By N.C. Aizenman
Washington Post Staff Writer--
Friday, November 26, 2010
Want an appointment with kidney specialist Adam Weinstein of Easton, Md.? If you're a senior covered by Medicare, the wait is eight weeks.
   How about a checkup from geriatric specialist Michael Trahos? Expect to see him every six months: The Alexandria-based doctor has been limiting most of his Medicare patients to twice yearly rather than the quarterly checkups he considers ideal for the elderly. Still, at least he'll see you. Top-ranked primary care doctor Linda Yau is one of three physicians with the District's Foxhall Internists group who recently announced they will no longer be accepting Medicare patients.
   "It's not easy. But you realize you either do this or you don't stay in business," she said.
Doctors across the country describe similar decisions, complaining that they've been forced to shift away from Medicare toward higher-paying, privately insured or self-paying patients in response to years of penny-pinching by Congress.
   And that's not even taking into account a long-postponed rate-setting method that is on track to slash Medicare's payment rates to doctors by 23 percent Dec. 1. Known as the Sustainable Growth Rate and adopted by Congress in 1997, it was intended to keep Medicare spending on doctors in line with the economy's overall growth rate. But after the SGR formula led to a 4.8 percent cut in doctors' pay rates in 2002, Congress has chosen to put off the ever steeper cuts called for by the formula ever since.
   This month, the Senate passed its fourth stopgap fix this year - a one-month postponement that expires Jan. 1. The House is likely to follow suit when it reconvenes next week, and physicians have already been running print ads, passing out fliers to patients and flooding Capitol Hill with phone calls to convince Congress to suspend the 25 percent rate cut that the SGR method will require next year. LEFT: Bay Area specialists. All medical practices are being affected by the health insurance mess. 
   Such temporary reprieves have increased the potential pain down the road, compounding not only the eventual cut but the cost of doing away with it for good, now estimated in the tens of billions.
   The lobbying blitz by doctors also comes amid concern in Washington that Medicare spending is spiraling up so fast the nation can't afford to boost it further by significantly raising doctors' pay. And government analysts and independent experts suggest that although doctors could not absorb a 25 percent fee cut, the claim that they have been inadequately compensated by Medicare until now is wildly exaggerated.
   Among the top points of contention is the complaint by doctors that Medicare's payment rate has not kept pace with the growing cost of running a medical practice. As measured by the government's Medicare Economic Index, those expenses rose 18 percent from 2000 to 2008. During the same period, Medicare's physician fees rose 5 percent.
   "Physicians are having to make really gut-wrenching decisions about whether they can afford to see as many Medicare patients," said Cecil Wilson, president of the American Medical Association.
   But statistics also suggest many doctors have more than made up for the erosion in the value of their Medicare fees by dramatically increasing the volume of services they provide - performing not just a greater number of tests and procedures, but also more complex versions that allow them to charge Medicare more money.
   From 2000 to 2008, the volume of services per Medicare patient rose 42 percent. Some of this was because of the increasing availability of sophisticated treatments that undoubtedly save lives. Some was because of doctors practicing "defensive medicine" - ordering every conceivable test to shield themselves from malpractice lawsuits down the line.
LEFT: Poorer seniors are increasingly victimized by the right/centrist/Obamian assault on Medicare.  
   "Then you have doctors who order an MRI for an unremarkable headache or at the first sign of back pain," said Robert Berenson, a Commissioner of the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, an independent congressional agency. "It's pretty well documented that it doesn't help patients to have those scans done in these cases. But if you have the machine in your office ... why not?"
   Whatever the cause, the explosion in the volume of services provided helps explain why Medicare's total payments to doctors per patient rose 51 percent from 2000 to 2008.
   A review of physicians' incomes suggests that specialists - who have more opportunities to increase the volume of the services they offer than primary-care doctors - reaped most of the benefit.
   On average, primary-care doctors make about $190,000 a year, kidney specialists $300,000, and radiologists close to $500,000, figures that reflect the income doctors receive from both Medicare and non-Medicare patients. The disparity has prompted concern that Medicare is contributing to a growing shortage of primary doctors.
   Still, even if primary-care doctors had to rely exclusively on Medicare's lower payment rates their incomes would only drop about 9 percent, according to a recent study co-authored by Berenson, who is also a fellow at the non-partisan Urban Institute.
"The argument that doctors literally can't afford to feed their kids [if they take Medicare's rates] is absurd," said Berenson. "It's just that doctors have gotten used to a certain income and lifestyle."
   Regardless of their motivation, if doctors skew their patient base away from Medicare too drastically seniors' access to medical care could be limited.
   Is that happening? Again, opinions vary. Based on its studies as well as those done by others others, the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission has concluded the share of affected seniors has been small, and perhaps most significantly, lower than the share of privately insured patients ages 50 to 64 who also report access problems.
   But the American Medical Association cites a recent online survey that it commissioned in which nearly one-third of primary-care doctors said they are currently restricting the number of Medicare patients in their practice.
   For Michael Trahos, the geriatric specialist in Alexandria, that has meant spacing out routine visits by his Medicare patients such that their share of his weekly appointments has dropped from about half to less than one-third. Trahos said that if a Medicare patient has a serious condition, he will see the person more frequently. But Trahos said it makes him uneasy to push even apparently healthy elderly patients back to twice yearly visits.
   "Is it the proper thing to do? Probably not," he said. "These are patients who should be scheduled for proper maintenance every three months."
   Adam Weinstein, the kidney specialist in Easton, has taken to supplementing his three-doctor practice by doing medical IT consulting several hours a week. But although the pay is far greater than what he would receive seeing Medicare patients, who make up 70 percent of his practice, the side work means he has less time to serve them. Not only must Weinstein make them wait longer for an appointment, he said, he can no longer afford to answer their phone calls.
   "It has definitely made my patients feel more distant from me, and I don't know how to deal with that," Weinstein said.
   Financial concerns also prompted Weinstein's group to turn down a request from Chester River Hospital Center in Chestertown, Md., an hour's drive north, to do daily consultations with their mainly elderly patients.
   That was disheartening news for the doctor who is currently consulting at Chester River. At 69, David Knutson is semi-retired and said he is satisfied with the payments he has been getting from Medicare. But Knutson grew animated as he spoke of all the ways he would use his time if he could find another doctor to take over coming into the hospital six days a week.
   "Gardening, sailing, fishing, hunting, going to the opera," he said. "I'm almost 70. If I'm ever going to do all these things that I've been talking about I better start."
   Linda Yao, of the District's Foxhall Internists, has opted for the most extreme response - pulling out of Medicare. The group prides itself on keeping the number of scheduled visits low so that patients who need a last-minute appointment can be accommodated the same day. They also offer half-hour office visits, instead of the 15 minutes on which Medicare reimbursements are predicated. It makes for a white-glove experience for patients, but high overhead for doctors.
   After 11 years of serving a patient base of whom as many as half were covered by Medicare, Yao concluded the numbers were no longer adding up. As of April, seniors with Medicare must pay their entire bill out of pocket or through supplemental insurance. So far, only 100 of her approximately 1,750 Medicare patients have elected to stay on.
   Could doctors see more Medicare patients if they accepted lower incomes?
Perhaps, said Yao, 42.
   But, "the whole system would need to change. ... I graduated medical school $100,000 in debt. I worked 110 hours a week during my residency for $30,000 a year and sacrificed all through my 20s. And even now, you're still seeing people all day, with meetings and paperwork at night, on top of the emotional side of worrying when the patients you care for aren't doing well. This is life-and-death stuff. And I feel like that should be compensated."
aizenmann@washpost.com
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NOTE: Images not the responsibility of the Washington Post.



The Deficit Scare Rolls On Unchallenged

Why the Deficit Is Simply Not an Economic Problem Now, or in Future Decades

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet
| November 19, 2010

http://www.alternet.org/story/148915/ [print_link]
Despite ubiquitous claims to the contrary, the United States does not have a “deficit problem,” over either the short or the long term. That’s because a large fiscal deficit is an economic issue, and what we face is a political problem -- a profound disconnect between what Americans expect to receive from the government in services, and what they expect to pay for it in taxes.
That’s fueled, in large part, by a well-funded conservative movement that has convinced a significant portion of the population that they can live in a modern, highly developed country with decent infrastructure and a modest safety net, get an endless series of tax breaks and not take on a mountain of debt as a result.          
   That mathematical impossibility represents a different problem; namely, a public that’s poorly informed about taxes and spending. It’s a low information problem.
   We would have a deficit problem -- an economic problem -- if the right’s narrative of “runaway government spending” had some basis in reality.  But it doesn’t. Using data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development -- the “rich countries’ club” whose members represent most of the world’s leading economies -- Sabina Dewan and Michael Ettlinger showed that between 2004 and 2007, the U.S. ranked 24th out of 26 countries in overall government spending as a share of our economic output.  Only Ireland and South Korea, both relative newcomers to the club, had a more “limited government” than we did during that span.
   That share will rise in the coming years as the baby boomers move into their golden years and we offer health insurance to millions of Americans who couldn’t previously afford it, but given that our spending was about 7 percentage points below the OECD average -- and almost 20 percentage points beneath that of big spenders like France -- we still won’t have a very “big” government relative to the rest of the developed world.
   We would also have an economic problem if we couldn’t afford to raise taxes to pay for what we, as citizens of a democracy, want the government to do -- if the Right’s narrative that we’re “being taxed to death” had some basis in reality. But, again, it doesn’t. In 2008, we ranked 26th out of the 30 OECD countries in our overall tax burden -- the share of our economy we fork over to the government -- coming in almost 9 percentage points below the average of the group of wealthy nations, and, again, some 20 percentage points below highly taxed countries like Denmark.
   One can’t call something that’s readily fixable a “serious" problem, and economically our “budget gaps” are readily fixable -- we could raise revenues with the addition of, say, a Value Added Tax (probably the easiest way, politically), and we could do that as soon as the economy recovers or in 20 years from now.
   Of course, raising taxes so they cover our government’s relatively modest spending is deeply unpopular with the electorate, which is, again, a political problem. And because that political reality is driven by the widespread but false belief that we have out-of-control government spending and are taxed to death, it is, again, a problem of an electorate with bad information.
   The reason it’s important to understand that our budget gap is a not a structural economic problem is simple: presenting it as such -- and getting pretty much everyone to repeat the claim -- is giving America’s elites an opportunity to steal your Social Security, make seniors and vets pay a bigger chunk for their health care, and otherwise deepen their brutal assault on working America’s economic security.
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Smart Framing Leads to Effective Propaganda
If you can frame the terms of a debate, you’ve gone a long way toward winning it, and the deficit hawks have been wildly successful in portraying our budget gap as a structural economic problem, driven by rising “entitlement” costs, that will get worse if unaddressed. The narrative has been echoed across the media -- NPR called the budget gap a “great problem,” the Washington Post reported on ”the gravity of the country's deficit problems,” and in Pete Peterson’s Fiscal Times, Henry Aaron falsely claimed that “all responsible budget analysts agree that the United States faces a daunting deficit problem” (emphasis mine).
   These claims echo an ideologically driven framing of the issue -- one that assumes we spend too much and must cut back on the size of government, whether we would otherwise opt to do so or not. The solution, we are told again and again, is some “painful” combination of spending cuts and tax hikes.
   But when one sees the deficit more accurately -- as a result of undertaxation relative to what we want the government to do, driven by a political problem caused by decades of conservative demagoguery about taxes -- different solutions arise, solutions that wouldn’t require “painful cuts” to popular domestic programs.
   One could also just as easily choose to view the budget gap in other ways. As economist Dean Baker notes, “If the United States paid the same amount per person for health care as any of the 35 countries with longer life expectancies, we would be looking at huge budget surpluses for the indefinite future.” So we could look at it as a health-care costs problem, which could be addressed by opening up Medicare to all comers.  
   According to some estimates, over 90 percent of our national debt is the result of our “defense” spending, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could turn out to effectively represent “unfunded mandates” of more than $3 trillion dollars. So we could look at the budget gap as an unsustainably expensive military problem, and address that issue directly without being forced to accept those “painful cuts” to Social Security, Medicare and other popular programs.
   Tax reporter David Cay Johnston points to hundreds of billions in potential tax revenues being sheltered, legally and otherwise, in offshore havens and through various loopholes -- and tax subsidies -- worked by corporate America and the country’s highest earners. While tightening the tax code and stepping up enforcement might not close the entire budget gap, it’d go a long way in that direction, so one could easily view the issue we need to grapple with as a rich tax-dodger problem. Fixing that would not only be good policy, but also incredibly popular politics.
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Not an Economic Problem in the Short or Long Term
As far as the conventional wisdom is concerned, the only question subject to debate is whether the deficit problem is an imminent threat that must be addressed now, or a long-term issue with which we’ll have to deal with, painfully, down the road at some point.
   The former view is dangerously incoherent at a time when consumer demand -- which represents about 2/3 of America’s economic activity -- has fallen through the floor.  The short-term budget outlook is bad right now because tax revenues are down at a time when people need assistance the most. The federal government is acting as ‘the buyer of last resort’ -- boosting demand -- and keeping cash-strapped states from going under. To not run big short-term deficits at a time like this would be deeply irresponsible and inflict very significant economic pain.
   But the claim that we face a dire long-term budget problem is highly questionable as well, and not only because it implies that the deficit is structural when we could make it go away by raising the U.S. tax burden not to Swedish or French levels, but just to the middle of the pack in the developed world.
   It’s also dubious because even if we were to do nothing at all, those jumbo deficits supposedly looming in our future may never materialize. That’s because virtually every statement you hear about the deficit, whether uttered by a pundit, wonk or politician, is based on a set of projections put out by the Congressional Budget Office. And, as University of Texas economist James Galbraith argued in a recent interview with Ezra Klein of the Washington Post, those projections are, “strictly speaking, nonsense.”
   Of the CBO’s assumption about how fast health-care costs will rise, Galbraith told Klein, “if health care does get that expensive, and we're paying 30 percent of GDP while everyone else is paying 12 percent, we could buy Paris and all the doctors and just move our elderly there.” Another way of looking at it is that instituting  Medicare-for-all is a political problem that will be overcome long before we end up spending 30 percent of our income in the health sector.
   Galbraith explained another crucial flaw in the CBO forecasts to me via email: their assumption that short term interest rates will rise by 5 percent over the next 5 years, while they expect the rate of inflation to remain constant. “It's plainly preposterous,” he said. “Why would the Federal Reserve raise nominal interest rates by five points if inflation doesn't change at all?” It’s an incoherent narrative because the Fed raises interest rates to make government debt more attractive to investors when inflation is pressing down the value of the dollar. And inflation, for better or worse, results in our debt load decreasing relative to the overall economy. So if the inflation rate ends up being higher than forecast, or the interest the government has to pay on its debt ends up lower, that changes the whole long-term picture significantly.
   Long-term projections are very sensitive to flawed assumptions. “It's that short-term interest rate combined with that low inflation rate that allows them to generate, quite mechanically, these enormous future deficit forecasts,” Galbraith told Klein. “At this point, the whole thing is completely incoherent…These numbers need to come together in a coherent story, and the CBO's forecast does not give us a coherent story.” So virtually everything that is said about our long-term “deficit problem,” is, according to Galbraith, “nonsense.”
   That’s a vitally important point. Long-term projections have limited value in large part because they must err on the pessimistic side in order to have any value for planners. It’s certainly possible that the most dire fiscal projections could come to pass. Yet that means that every single news story you read about our “looming deficit crisis” provides a distorted view of the issue. Every one of them should in fact read, “possibledeficit problem sometime in the future” -- that’s the objective reality.
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It’s a Set-Up
As I write in my book, The Fifteen Biggest Lies About the Economy, practically everyone understands that “entitlements”—Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare -- and other programs that provide a cushion of sorts for working families are quite popular. That presents a challenge for conservatives: you just don’t get very far in American politics on the promise of cutting grandma’s health benefits.
   Although many Americans respond positively to the idea of small government in the abstract, when it comes to specifics, people really like most, if not all, of what the government does.
   So the Corporate Right has had to frame the debate on different terms. Armed with the rather dubious projections discussed above, they’ve presented the issue as a structural economic problem, arguing that the United States is headed toward a gazillion-dollar deficit just around the corner, and that the only way to stave off this looming budgepocalypse is to swallow the bitter medicine of “entitlement reform.”
   As Glenn Hubbard, former chair of George W Bush’s Council of Economic Advisors, explained, “we have designed entitlements for a welfare state we cannot afford.” But it’s worth noting that in the CBO’s dire projections, the cost of those entitlements, if we do nothing at all to change them, is expected to increase by seven percentage points of GDP over the next 30 years -- which we could cover, if everything else remained constant, by bringing our tax burden up to the OECD average.
   The problem for the rest of us is that, as is too often the case, the Right’s preferred narrative has been almost universally embraced by the mainstream media and pretty much our entire political class. But that doesn’t make the ‘deficit crisis’ story objectively true -- at least not in an economic sense -- or any less of a scam.
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JOSHUA HOLLAND is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet. He is the author of The 15 Biggest Lies About the Economy (and Everything else the Right Doesn't Want You to Know About Taxes, Jobs and Corporate America). Drop him an email or follow him on Twitter.
© 2010 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
 View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/148915/
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BONUS FEATURE:
8 in 10 Strongly Opposed to Social Security Cuts Recommended By Deficit Commission Proposal
Lake Research Partners released a new poll Thursday with dire implications for Democrats should Social Security cuts happen on their watch. And once again, the economy and jobs combined whomped the deficit as the primary concern of voters, 42 to 6.
Overall, of the 1,200 likely voters surveyed, 82% of respondents oppose Social Security cuts to reduce the deficit, including 83% of Dems, 78% of Independents, 82% of Republicans, and 74% of Tea Party supporters.
The implications for Democrats are serious.
• According to national exit poll data, Democrats lost seniors by historic proportions—21 points—in the November mid‐terms. Even in 1994, Democrats only lost seniors by 2 points.
• The survey reveals Democrats no longer have the advantage they traditionally have enjoyed on Social Security. However, candidates who made Social Security an issue often saved their seats, and voters who say Social Security was a top voting issue voted more for Democratic candidates.
• As we have seen in previous work, voters see little relationship between the deficit and Social Security.
• Voters strongly oppose cutting Social Security benefits, even under the rationales of reducing the deficit or making the program more solvent in the long run. They strongly oppose cutting benefits for those earning above $60,000, and they strongly oppose raising the retirement age to 69 years‐old. This includes voters of all ages and partisan groups, including Republicans and Tea Party supporters.
• There is also strong bipartisan support for lifting the cap to impose Social Security taxes on all wages above $106,800. Support for this is stronger when both employers and employees are taxed.
...Social Security was a particularly important voting issue for independents who voted for a Democrat in this election, voters aged 65 to 74, and older voters who are women, independent, moderate, white and African American.
Draw your own conclusions. The implications are obvious.