Joseph Kishore
WSWS

In the ongoing campaign of persecution against WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange, the New York Times, the principal voice of American liberalism, has played a particularly filthy role.

Since the initial release of US State Department documents late last month, the Times has sought to downplay the significance of the revelations. It has largely ceased publication of new articles on the cables, confining those that it does produce to its inside pages. From the start, it has tailored its coverage to bolster US interests. The more significant exposures of US criminality are ignored.

As for the escalating international campaign targeting Assange, the Times has maintained a deliberate silence. It has not published a single editorial on Assange’s arrest or the calls from sections of the US political and media establishment for him to be killed and for WikiLeaks to be branded a terrorist organization. This is tantamount to tacit support for this campaign.

The role of the Times as an adjunct of the state was brazenly proclaimed by Executive Editor Bill Keller in extraordinary comments posted November 29 in response to a series of letters arguing that the Times has no right to report on the classified documents.

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Joseph Kishore
WSWS

US president Barack Obama added his own comments to the increasingly vitriolic campaign against WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, over the weekend. Obama called the actions by WikiLeaks, which have helped reveal Washington’s sordid machinations in various parts of the world, “deplorable.”

According to the White House, the president called Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip and “expressed his regrets for the deplorable action by WikiLeaks.” The White House said that the two leaders agreed the leaked cables—including thousands from the US embassy in the Turkish capital of Ankara—would “not influence or disrupt the close co-operation between the United States and Turkey.”

Obama made similar remarks in a telephone call to Mexican president Filipe Calderon.

The statements were the first direct comments from the president, who has allowed Secretary of State Hilary Clinton and Attorney General Eric Holder to take the lead in attacking WikiLeaks and threatening prosecution. Holder said last week that American authorities were actively pursuing some means of charging Assange and WikiLeaks for the release of the cables. Assange’s lawyers have warned that a US indictment against their client may be imminent.

While condemning WikiLeaks, Obama has said nothing about the repeated calls from sections of the US media and political establishment for the assassination of Assange or the designation of WikiLeaks as a terrorist organization—thus tacitly legitimizing what amounts to an incitement to murder.

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Joseph Kishore
WSWS

"The WikiLeaks documents—only a small fraction of which have as yet been made public—provide a glimpse of the nexus of corrupt relations and criminal operations carried out in secret by the US government."

As diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks continue to be published—revealing each day new information on the sordid maneuvers of American imperialism in various parts of the world—the US government is going on the offensive. It is leading an international campaign targeting WikiLeaks founder Jullian Assange and the organization’s web site.

To justify the witch-hunt against WikiLeaks, which has not committed any crime, innumerable government officials and media commentators have come to the defense of secret diplomacy, declaring the practice of conducting negotiations, hatching plots and making deals behind the backs of the people a positive virtue and even a bulwark of peace and democracy.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has been among the most vocal in denouncing WikiLeaks, declaring that the publication of thousands of cables “is an attack on the international community, the alliances and partnerships, the conventions and negotiations that safeguard global security and advance economic prosperity.”

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Joseph Kishore
WSWS

As part of efforts to block the release of documents obtained by WikiLeaks, there is an escalating campaign, led by the US government, to bring down the organization’s web site. This effort is taking place in parallel with an international dragnet targeting WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

Late on Thursday US time, the domain name hosting service for WikiLeaks, EveryDNS.net, announced that it had cut off WikiLeaks for violating its terms of service. The DNS host links a domain name (e.g., wikileaks.org) to a specific computer server address that holds the content of a web site.

As a consequence of the action of EveryDNS, wikileaks.org no longer directs to WikiLeaks’ servers. The site was functionally inaccessible for about 6 hours, before being reopened on Friday at several other domain names: wikileaks.ch, wikileaks.de, wikileaks.fi, and wikileaks.nl. There were reports Friday that EveryDNS also serviced wikileaks.ch and had blocked that address as well.

To justify its action, EveryDNS claimed that the WikiLeaks web site posed a danger to all the domain names served by the company as a result of persistent distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on the site. Since a few days before the recent release of US State Department cables, WikiLeaks has been subject to an escalating Internet-based attack involving massive and continual requests for data aimed at overloading the organization’s servers.

The stated reasons given by EveryDNS for its actions, however, cannot be taken at face value, and it is very possible that commercial or political pressure was brought to bear. EveryDNS was purchased earlier this year by Dyn Inc., which also owns DynDNS. The buyout is part of the consolidation of the free DNS market, which poses significant dangers for the freedom of the Internet.

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Joseph Kishore
WSWS

The American state, its spokesmen in the mass media, and its allies around the world are engaged in an international campaign of vilification and persecution against WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange.

This campaign has nothing to do with any supposed crime he has committed, since he has committed none. He is the target of an international manhunt for his role in lifting the lid on the lies and criminal operations of imperialist powers the world over—above all, in the United States.

The same mafia-type criminality is now being deployed with full force against WikiLeaks and Private Bradley Manning, who is charged with leaking some of the documents. In the US, politicians of both parties are united in their determination to see Assange arrested. The Obama administration has branded the leakers, as well as WikiLeaks, “criminals,” with the US attorney general pledged to “close the gap” by inventing a pseudo-legal basis for prosecution if one does not exist at present.

Former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee and ex-military officials have demanded the death penalty for Manning, while Sarah Palin has insisted that WikiLeaks be branded a terrorist organization.

Washington’s junior partners abroad have been equally adamant in their attack. Tom Flanagan, a former adviser to the Canadian prime minister, declared that Assange should be “assassinated,” that Obama should “put out a contract and maybe use a drone or something.” And the fact that Assange is a citizen of Australia did not prevent Julia Gillard, the prime minister of that country, from declaring, without any evidence, that Assange’s actions were “illegal,” while placing her government at the service of the US witch-hunt.

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Joseph Kishore
WSWS

[Photo: The IRC estimates that at least 60% of the people killed in the assault of Fallujah are women, children and elderly. dahr.org (The WE!)]

"The corporate aristocracy that has unleashed such violence on Iraq will not hesitate to use violence and terror against the American working class to protect its wealth and power. The forces turned into hardened killers and sociopaths in colonial wars such as Iraq and Afghanistan will eventually be flung against those fighting within the US against unemployment, poverty and homelessness."

The nearly 400,000 documents released by WikiLeaks give some indication of the barbaric reality of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq. The military reports contain ample evidence of war crimes, for which the highest levels of the US military and political establishment are responsible.

The major revelations contained in the documents include:

● Reports of thousands of previously undisclosed civilian causalities. The Iraq Body Count, which has kept a conservative estimate of the number of deaths based on reports in the media, has found in the military logs some 15,000 civilians deaths not included in its earlier count. This is despite the fact that the documents report no civilian deaths in connection with major US atrocities, including the US assault that reduced much of Fallujah to ruins in 2004. The documents lend credence to other reports giving a much higher death toll, including one study by the medical journal Lancet estimating over one million killed.

="#3D2B1F">● Clear evidence of specific war crimes. This includes the killing of two Iraqis seeking to surrender to a US helicopter gunship in February 2007. The soldiers in the helicopter spoke by radio with an army lawyer who advised them that people cannot surrender to aircraft—a falsehood—and they proceeded to kill the individuals in cold blood. The soldiers were part of the same crew that was involved in the July 2007 killing of 12 unarmed civilians, including two Reuters journalists, captured in a video released by WikiLeaks earlier this year.

● The killing by US forces of 834 people at military checkpoints, including at least 681 civilians and 30 children.

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