{"id":198031,"date":"2021-10-25T12:00:22","date_gmt":"2021-10-25T11:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=198031"},"modified":"2021-10-21T06:15:11","modified_gmt":"2021-10-21T05:15:11","slug":"assange-a-threat-to-war-itself","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2021\/10\/assange-a-threat-to-war-itself\/","title":{"rendered":"Assange: A Threat to War Itself"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>20 Oct 2021 – <\/em>The Pentagon\u2019s offer of \u201ccondolence money<\/a>\u201d to the relatives of the ten people (seven of them children) who were killed in the final U.S. drone strike in Afghanistan \u2014 originally declared righteous and necessary \u2014 bears a troubling connection to the government\u2019s ongoing efforts to get its hands on WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and punish him for exposing the inconvenient truth of war.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

You know, the \u201cclassified\u201d stuff \u2014 like Apache helicopter crewmen laughing<\/a> after they killed a bunch of men on a street in Baghdad in 2007 (\u201cOh yeah, look at those dead bastards\u201d) and then smirked some more after killing the ones who started picking up the bodies, in the process also injuring several children who were in the van they just blasted. This is not stuff the American public needs to know about!<\/p>\n

At the time of the release of that particular video, in 2010, then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates decried the fact that the public was seeing a fragment of the war on terror \u201cout of context.\u201d And, indeed, he was right. As I later wrote<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Department of Defense is supposed to have total control over context; on the home front, war is 100 percent public relations. The public\u2019s role is to be spectators, consumers of orchestrated news; they can watch smart bombs dropped from on high and be told that this is protecting them from terrorism and spreading democracy. That\u2019s context.\u201d<\/p>\n

Assange\u2019s crime was collaborating with whistleblowers to expose hidden data and disrupt that context. Over the course of a decade, WikiLeaks published some 10 million secret documents, more than the rest of the world\u2019s media combined, according to a Progressive International video. This is the organization that has launched the Belmarsh Tribunal<\/a>, which is demanding that Assange be released from British prison and not be extradited to the United States. The Tribunal, modeled after the 1966 tribunal organized by Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre to hold the U.S. accountable for its actions in Vietnam, will put the country on trial for its 21st century war crimes.<\/p>\n

The government\u2019s desperation to extradite, try and essentially get rid of Assange is profoundly understandable. He is a threat to war itself \u2014 that is to say, to the abstraction of war, i.e., \u201cnational defense,\u201d which claims a trillion dollars a year in unquestioned (and ever-increasing) funding and sits in the public consciousness as just the way things are. By penetrating the realities of war and pulling it out of its carefully orchestrated public context, by publicizing its raw horrors, he became a danger to the country\u2019s political status quo.<\/p>\n

So much so, in fact, that: \u201cIn 2017,\u201d Yahoo New<\/a>s reported a month ago, \u201cas Julian Assange began his fifth year holed up in Ecuador\u2019s embassy in London, the CIA plotted to kidnap the WikiLeaks founder, spurring heated debate among Trump administration officials over the legality and practicality of such an operation.<\/p>\n

\u201cSome senior officials inside the CIA and the Trump administration even discussed killing Assange, going so far as to request \u2018sketches\u2019 or \u2018options\u2019 for how to assassinate him. Discussions over kidnapping or killing Assange occurred \u2018at the highest levels\u2019 of the Trump administration, said a former senior counterintelligence official. \u2018There seemed to be no boundaries.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

The disaster known as the Vietnam War, which ended in U.S. disgrace \u2014 which had to<\/em> end because the country\u2019s own troops had turned against it in huge numbers \u2014 led to something called \u201cVietnam Syndrome,\u201d a public disgust for war itself. What an inconvenience for the government, which was still engaged in its Cold War with the communists but could only wage proxy wars, e.g., in Nicaragua, where the contras had to do the dirty work.<\/p>\n

Finally, in 1991, as George H.W. Bush <\/a>launched Gulf War One in Iraq, he declared: \u201cBy God, we\u2019ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.\u201d<\/p>\n

The U.S.A. was finally free to militarize its propaganda again, that is to say, to spread democracy around the globe with the help of bombs and bullets. Since the Soviet Union had collapsed and the Cold War had ended, a new enemy had to be found, but that was no problem. A decade later, Bush Jr. launched the War on Terror and the endless wars of the 21st century began.<\/p>\n

And they were good.<\/p>\n

Well, they were good as long as the Department of Defense had control over their context. Assange, by defying all restrictions on the truth and exposing the raw realities of these wars \u2014 the lies, the hell \u2014 could bring the statistics of war to life, e.g.:<\/p>\n

\u201cAt least 801,000 people have been killed by direct war violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan,\u201d according to Brown University\u2019s Costs of War Project<\/a>. \u201cThe number of people who have been wounded or have fallen ill as a result of the conflicts is far higher, as is the number of civilians who have died indirectly as a result of the destruction of hospitals and infrastructure and environmental contamination, among other war-related problems.\u201d<\/p>\n

And: \u201cMillions of people living in the war zones have also been displaced by war. The U.S. post-9\/11 wars have forcibly displaced at least 38 million people in and from Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, the Philippines, Libya, and Syria. This number exceeds the total displaced by every war since 1900, except World War II.\u201d<\/p>\n

The U.S. government has apologized for ten of those deaths, and only \u2014 only!<\/em> \u2014 because the incident was investigated and came to public attention.<\/p>\n

______________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> Robert C. Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based peace journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His book, <\/em>Courage Grows Strong at the Wound (Xenos Press) is still available. Contact him at koehlercw@gmail.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 commonwonders.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

20 Oct 2021 – The Pentagon\u2019s offer of \u201ccondolence money\u201d to the relatives of the ten people (seven of them children) who were killed in the final U.S. drone strike in Afghanistan \u2014 originally declared righteous and necessary \u2014 bears a troubling connection to the government\u2019s ongoing efforts to get its hands on WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and punish him for exposing the inconvenient truth of war.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":77939,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[93,867,918,1106,1126,1050,91,112,1759,95,70,481,113],"class_list":["post-198031","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tms-peace-journalism","tag-afghanistan","tag-anglo-america","tag-assange","tag-drones","tag-hegemony","tag-imperialism","tag-nato","tag-pentagon","tag-targeted-assassination","tag-us-military","tag-usa","tag-warfare","tag-wikileaks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198031","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=198031"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198031\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/77939"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=198031"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=198031"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=198031"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}