Wikileaks: The Pentagon Papers Escalating into Watergate -- and More

Remember the BP disaster, America's Chernobyl? It gets better! All this year, Wikileaks has been posting all kinds of classified US government material that was leaked by a single disgruntled Army private named Bradley Manning. I haven't been keeping track of the disaster that's been snowballing for the American Empire here, since in recent months I've been too busy retweeting the news. Thus, I missed the opportunity to comment on what I immediately recognized as the Iraq/Af-Pak War counterpart to the Pentagon Papers (which you can read here). Now that this new Pentagon Papers scandal is exploding into a full-blown Watergate, I have to say something. First: a quick rundown of the events:

• On April 5, Wikileaks released classified video of an American helicopter attack intended to massacre Iraqi civilians in Baghdad, and for no other reason. Wikileaks' name for the incident: Collateral Murder.
• On July 25, they released over 90,000 classified US military documents on the Afghan war, collectively known as the Afghan War Diary. This was what reminded me of the Pentagon Papers. Once again, the Empire got egg on its collective face.
• On October 22, they released nearly 400,000 secret US Army field reports in the biggest leak in American military history, known as the Iraq War Logs. This leak focused not just on American massacres of unarmed civilians, but the occupation authorities' tolerance of murders by the Iraqi police and military.
• November 28 was the first day of the most embarrassing leak yet, which Wikileaks has dubbed Cablegate and Justin Raimondo of Antiwar.com calls simply The Big Dump. The first 291 of over 250,000 diplomatic cables from the US State Department were released. In an attempt to stop it and hopefully destroy Wikileaks, the US government had a cyberagent codenamed "Jester" pull a massive denial of service attack against the site. The attack failed; the site was back up within hours and began releasing the cables. Still, Obama and Clinton warned every single government leader in the world about the leak right before it started.

Sure enough, all the world's governments and the entire corporate media establishment have declared war against Wikileaks. Interpol has declared Wikileaks' founder and mastermind, Julian Assange, to be global public enemy #1, ostensibly over a sex crimes charge in Sweden but really because he is now considered the most dangerous threat to the world system itself. The US government is charging Assange with espionage charges; like Manning, Assange faces execution by firing squad for treason. It's likely the American imperial authorities will get impatient and simply have the CIA send a sniper to summarily execute him, possibly even before the year's out.

Right now, Julian Assange is the most important person in the world.

This is bigger than just spilling government secrets. The current world system of government, technocracy, is based ultimately on keeping as many things secret from those lower in the hierarchy as possible. Currently, all governments keep all their diplomacy as secret as their espionage. Cablegate blows the lid off this. Secrecy, it turns out, is a cover for hypocrisy: the governments are saying one thing to their subjects citizens, but another to each other. Authoritarianism and citizenship do not mix, and the current system of government is every bit as authoritarian as the previous one (absolute monarchy).

Wikileaks' slogan is: We Open Governments. In a sense, Wikileaks is the democratic ideal of open government taken to its logical extreme. What government and big business are doing to their subjects victims suckers citizens/customers, Wikileaks is now doing to the governments and corporations. The end of privacy is now cutting both ways.

I completely agree with Assange when he demands that Hillary Clinton must resign as US Secretary of State. Hillary Clinton, the goddess of war. She claims that the latest leak "attack[ed] America's foreign policy interests" and the "international community". But what are "America's foreign policy interests?" Here's what they're really are: "Full Spectrum Dominance", which in basic American means invading the whole damn world. In this, Obama and Clinton are no different from Bush and his neocon cabal. We saw what Clinton was capable of when her husband put her in charge of his health care proposal back in 1993, and it wasn't pretty. And if flaky Christian Right neocon sex symbol du jour Christine "I am not a witch" O'Donnell wants Clinton to run for president, Clinton's bad news indeed. I've already talked about Obama here, here, and here. And I've been vindicated: George W. Bush is praising Obama. This is not a good thing.

And don't think Big Business is safe. The Trafigura scandal? That was Wikileaks' doing, too. Their next corporate victim? The Bank of America.

Can the US government with all its resources take Wikileaks out? No. In fact, all the DDoS attack did was to convince Wikileaks to move into the cloud, which is invulnerable to such attacks.

I guessed I missed the big news because I was thinking it would merely embarrass the American Empire. Well, the leaks keep coming, Wikileaks keeps posting millions of embarrassing documents online, and sooner or later it's going to reach the tipping point. What is now a matter of a few lonely voices crying out in the wilderness is going to lead to mass protests in the streets and ultimately some big changes in the political system.

This is bigger than you think. Stay tuned...

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