David Walsh
WSWS

The New York Times posted a lengthy piece January 26 by Bill Keller, its executive editor, on the subject of the newspaper’s relations with WikiLeaks and its co-founder, Julian Assange. The Times is one of the media outlets that has published excerpts from WikiLeaks’ material on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and its mass of secret US diplomatic cables.

Keller attempts to cover all the bases in his essay, defending himself against accusations that the Times has endangered US “national security”—defaming Assange in the process—and making the case for a “responsible” (that is to say, compliant) media, while at the same time hypocritically opposing government prosecution of WikiLeaks.

Whatever he thinks he has done, Mr. Keller has in fact produced a devastating self-exposure. He has offered us a portrait of the journalist as a quasi-state official and propagandist.

Along these lines, Keller boasts about his efforts to vet the WikiLeaks material with the US government, and acknowledges that the Times collaborated on a daily basis with the State Department after it came into possession of the hundreds of thousands of secret American embassy cables in November 2010.

Above all else, Keller’s essay reveals the collapse of democratic consciousness within the American media and political establishment. The most extraordinary feature of his 8,000 word article is the shamelessness with which he spells out that the Times’ central concern is not enlightening the public, but concealing anything that might damage the US government, its foreign policy and its war aims.

Here is a spokesman for the leading newspaper in the United States who makes clear that he has no commitment to and no understanding of freedom of the press. For Keller and his Times colleagues, the freedom to publish means the freedom not to publish.

The emergence of WikiLeaks has proven an unpleasant turn of events for the Times and the American media as a whole. This small organization, with limited resources, has done what the major news outlets should have been doing for years and deliberately refused to do: shed light on the massive criminality of American diplomatic, intelligence and military activity around the globe.

How to respond to the WikiLeaks phenomenon has obviously been a vexing issue for Keller and the Times’ hierarchy. If they have reacted in part by serving as a conduit for some of the leaked material, it has been in the interests of controlling the exposures as much as possible, limiting their impact and preventing—in Keller’s phrase—“a state of information anarchy” (i.e., widespread access to news outside the official channels) from arising.

Keller intends to strike a pose of balance and moderation, but crass class interest in the form of hostility toward the WikiLeaks project makes its way into paragraph after paragraph of his essay.

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FAIR
Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting

U.S. media gloss over Washington's role in Egyptian repression

The political context of the current Egyptian uprising is clear: The United States has steadfastly supported dictator Hosni Mubarak, whose rule has been marked by sham elections and the jailing and torture of dissidents, propping up his regime since 1981 with some $60 billion in aid, most of it military.

But since U.S. corporate media are accustomed to viewing international affairs through the lens of U.S. elite interests, much of the current coverage elides Washington's role, or presents it as a "tightrope" balancing act for the Obama administration.

As one New York Times story (1/26/11) put it, "The administration has tried to balance its ties to Mr. Mubarak with expressions of concern about rigged elections and jailed dissidents in his country." USA Today (2/1/11) announced: "The upheaval in Egypt has put the United States in a delicate diplomatic situation: pressing for a more democratic Egypt, but wary that too much change could threaten the stability that Egypt helps bring to the Middle East."

On the PBS NewsHour, Margaret Warner (1/31/11) said, "The chaos in Egypt posed a delicate diplomatic challenge for the United States: appealing for democracy without alienating an ally." Or as NBC Nightly News anchor Kate Snow (1/29/11) asked: "Is it a bit of a tightrope that the U.S. has to walk here, though, in terms of wanting to promote democracy on the one hand, but being a longtime ally of the Mubarak administration?"

An L.A. Times editorial (1/28/11) implausibly argued that the U.S. record of support for Mubarak would assist efforts to promote democracy: "As an ally and benefactor, the United States has helped prop up the 82-year-old strongman since he took power 30 years ago, and today it is in a unique position to impress upon him the importance of democracy."

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Peter Kemp
WL Central

Dear Prime Minister
The world notes again your comments on Julian Assange reported in the Sydney Morning Herald, February 2nd 2011.

It is pleasing that you would welcome him back to Australia but your statement that the government cannot do anything to assist him in that regard is not strictly correct and springs from a factual error in you saying “They are charges and they've got to be worked through proper process.” Prime Minister, in brief these are the relevant facts and applicable law:

1) Mr Assange has not ever been charged by Sweden or anybody else.
2) The Swedish authorities have initiated an extradition process which is contrary to the European Arrest Warrant (“EAW”) system in that they want him back in Sweden for the purposes of investigation, not explicitly to charge him.
3) The EAW is a fast track extradition process between EU member states brought into effect to allow decisions to be made between EU judicial systems, not between politicians.

The European arrest warrant is a judicial decision issued by a Member State with a view to the arrest and surrender by another Member State of a requested person, for the purposes of conducting a criminal prosecution or executing a custodial sentence or detention order.

Note Prime Minister, that UK explanatory document above extracted from EAW law says criminal prosecution, not criminal investigation, and you may recall that in Australian law, and in many other parts of the world, police can only hold a suspect for a limited time (eg NSW four hours plus time-outs) for the purposes of investigation only.

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Mazin Qumsiyeh
Ramallah Online

Transformation in the Arab World

“Mubarak has been an ally of ours in a number of things and he’s been very responsible on, relative to geopolitical interest in the region, the Middle East peace efforts; the actions Egypt has taken relative to normalizing relationship with Israel.… I would not refer to him as a dictator” ~ US Vice President Joe Biden ( a lackey of AIPAC)

I first visited Egypt 30 years ago in 1981 to do research for my master’s thesis which was later published in my first book “The Bats of Egypt”. I visited Egypt twice since then and I recall vividly police abuse of their own people and yet the Egyptians I encountered mocked and joked about dictatorship. We tried at least from a distance to support our Egyptian brothers and sisters as they struggle for freedom. Arabs everywhere (yes even here in occupied Palestine) are talking about a transformation and about revolution. But all such transformations carry pain. Over 200 Egyptians were killed, thousands injured, and there is much destruction. Yet in a nation of 85 million people this is still a relatively peaceful transformation. While dealing with the present is critical we must also at this juncture start to look post dictatorship in the Arab world and plan the future.

I recall vividly a talk by [an elderly], self-described “Liberal Zionist” (an oxymoron) at Duke University on 1 March 1981. At 77, he had no inhibitions in saying “Zionists do not want democracy in the Arab world.” He explained that if Egypt was a democracy, it would not have signed a peace deal with Israel since the sentiments of the Arab people does not accept such arrangements that could be done with someone like President Sadat or King Hussein. On this point he was absolutely correct but in the long run such short-sighted perspective is self-destructive (1).

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Sherwood Ross

You might give the FBI the benefit of the doubt that it had some incriminating evidence when it raided the homes of eight antiwar activists in Minneapolis and Chicago September 24th except for the fact that its past record in such cases is stinko. The F.B.I. broke down Mick Kelly's door around 7 a.m., and it wasn't to get an early cup of coffee from a man employed as a food service worker at the University of Minnesota. The agents were probing to see if the occupants of any of the homes they burst into were supporting “terror organizations.” Uncle Sam here might be a trifle jealous of private citizens' backing violent entities when it has always assumed it had a superpower's exclusive franchise to fund violence. The Midwest raids are correctly seen as “a U.S. government attempt to silence those who support resistance to oppression and violence in the Middle East and Latin America,” by the International Action Center of New York, an anti-militarist group. Kelly, after all, was a key figure in organizing the successful 2008 anti-war street protests that embarrassed the Republican National Convention in St. Paul. In today's America, standing up for peace automatically makes you a terror suspect.

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