Last week, the website Wikileaks began to release more than 250,000 secret US government documents to the public. The documents are a series of communications between US diplomats. The US government claims they were copied by an US Army private named Bradley Manning and given to Wikileaks. Earlier in the year Wikileaks released hundreds of thousands of other documents about the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those documents just proved what many already suspected that the US government lies about the number of Iraqis and Afghans that are being killed; that it hands over people to the Iraqi military knowing full-well they will be tortured; and that these wars have no end in sight.
The latest documents released by Wikileaks also confirm what we already suspected: that this system is run by criminals who lie to us on a daily basis. The documents show us how US diplomats spy on officials from other governments so they can blackmail them into supporting US government policies. They show us how the US regularly intervenes in the affairs of other governments. They show us that the US has no problem supporting corrupt governments when it is in their interests, like in Afghanistan. And they prove the US government is expanding its war in Afghanistan into Pakistan.
Obviously, the response of US officials and the US media to the leak has not been to discuss the lies and crimes that are revealed in the documents. It has been to attack Wikileaks and to try and prevent people from reading the documents. Some politicians have called Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, a terrorist. They also want Wikileaks to be classified as a terrorist organization so they can cut off its money and arrest any person who gives support to it. Some politicians have even called for the execution of Bradley Manning, who is currently sitting in solitary confinement at a military base in Virginia.
Shortly after the leak, the Obama administration sent out a memo to all government employees warning them that they could be arrested if they view the leaked documents while in the office, or at home. And since the leak, access to the Wikileaks website has been made difficult by constant government attacks on websites carrying the documents. US officials have pressured US companies Amazon and Paypal to cut Wikileaks off from their network.
US officials say Wikileaks has damaged US relations with other governments in the world and has put peoples lives at risk by exposing government secrets. But don’t we have a right to know what is being done in the world in our name, with our money? And who really has blood on their hands, Wikileaks or the government officials who are lying to us about torture and how many people their wars have killed? Did Wikileaks make the recent decision to send tens of thousands of more troops to Afghanistan? Is Julian Assange ordering the secret drone attacks into Pakistan that are murdering thousands of Pakistanis? Of course not!
US officials are attacking Wikileaks because it is putting the proof of their crimes and lies out into the open. It has exposed what the people who run this system want to hide from us and that’s why they hate it. We are told by US officials that they keep secrets because of “national security.” But Wikileaks shows us that they keep secrets from us because they are violating their own laws and are guilty of crimes against humanity and don’t want people to know about it.
US officials and the US media would like to have us believe that Wikileaks and all those involved are criminals. But thanks to Wikileaks, the whole world is now getting more evidence about who the real criminals are in this society.