By Michael Faulkner – December 19, 2010
As long as there are states there will be state secrets, and
the elites who wield power will do all they can to prevent them falling into
the hands of those deemed unfit to have access to them. While paying lip-service
to their commitment to freedom of information, it is taken for granted that
such freedom must, “in the national interest”, be limited. Even the most
libertarian of critics will find it hard to argue that there are never
circumstances in which secrecy can be defended. One only has to think of the
exigencies of war. Revealing the secret planning for Operation Overlord in 1944
would have served only to alert the Nazis to the actual location of the planned
Normandy landings.
The present hysteria in high places about the WikiLeaks
revelations reveals something rather shabbier than the justifiable need for
secrecy in the face of a palpable threat to national existence. The rage and
fury in Washington, London, Paris, Peking and elsewhere is because the gaff has
been blown on the lies, the hypocrisy, the arrogance and pomposity that are the
common currency of governments of powerful states. They seethe and they rage,
threatening dire retribution against those who have dared to lay bare the home
truths about the way they conduct their business; to reveal what they really
think about those who are supposed to be their allies, what their armed forces have
really done in Iraq are doing in Afghanistan, how the US state department would
spy upon the UN secretary general, and so forth. Anyone who is not a willing
dupe of state propaganda, anyone with half an interest in what is happening in
the world, will not be surprised by most of the information that has so far
been forthcoming from the 250.000 leaked US state department cables. For
example, anyone familiar with the methods employed by the US to pressurize
members of the UN Security Council to support an invasion of Iraq, will not be
surprised to learn that Hilary Clinton has illegally directed diplomats to gather
information on the UN leadership. In Britain it will come as no surprise to
anyone not blinded by adulation of the royal family, to learn that the Duke of
York (Prince Andrew), who is a British trade envoy, is also an atavistic
right-winger who ridicules the French and excoriates the serious fraud office
for trying to expose corruption in the dealings of BAE systems with the Saudi
royal family. Neither should it come as a surprise that the Saudis have urged
the US to attack Iran. And, as
this column has argued, the “special relationship” between Britain and the US,
so fondly nurtured by successive British governments, is now formally exposed
as something of an embarrassment to the senior partner, for whom it is at best
a political convenience.
And so we have this continuing release of information,
private diplomatic correspondence revealing embarrassing details of what goes
on behind the scenes of international discourse; things that ordinary mortals
are not supposed to know. We are expected to believe that such information,
legitimately in the hands of about 3 million people “cleared” to read it, must
in no circumstances be placed in the hands of millions more who do not have
such clearance. Now that it has
been leaked, there must be a reckoning. Those responsible must be hunted down
and stopped for good. We can now see what happens when those wielding state
power feel themselves to be threatened, and what is emerging is quite
frightening.
At the time of writing (December 7th) the founder
of the WikiLeaks website, Julian Assange, has been arrested in London in
connection with charges of rape leveled against him in Sweden – charges
that he strenuously denies. He has been refused bail. There is much about the
Assange saga to arouse suspicion. It seems highly likely that he has been set
up on the rape charges. At this stage one can only speculate, but here is a
possible scenario:
The US government is determined to get him. They know that
he has a widespread and growing global following and that they will have
difficulty nailing him on criminal charges for the WikiLeaks leaks. He is an
Australian, not a US citizen. Either the two women with whom he admits to
having had consensual sex, have been persuaded, or paid, to bring rape or
harassment charges against him, or he was deliberately set up for entrapment. His
accusers could be working for the CIA. The advantage to his enemies of nailing
him on rape charges is obvious. If they can be made to seem plausible, his
credibility will be completely destroyed. It looks very much like a conspiracy.
After these charges were first brought against him they were later withdrawn as
having no foundation. The fact that they have been resurrected suggests that
there has been some pressure on the Swedish prosecutors. Assange’s lawyers have
denounced the extradition warrant issued by the Swedes as a “political stunt”.
They argue that if he is extradited to Sweden, he could be deported to the
United States.
The most alarming development in this story has been the demand
from prominent political figures for Assange’s execution. In Canada, Tom
Flanagan, a senior advisor to the Canadian prime minister and professor at the
University of Calgary, says he should be assassinated. In the US, senior
Republican Mike Huckabee says that “anything less than execution is too kind a
penalty”, and Sarah Palin refers to him as “an anti-American with blood on his
hands”. Has anyone issued warrants
for the arrest of Flanagan and Huckabee on charges of incitement to murder? If
not, why not? We are living in strange and dangerous times. To understand just
how dangerous this situation is we might try to put the WikiLeaks story into a
wider context.
Global capitalism is still in the most severe crisis. In
Europe the unprecedented bail-outs of the financial system in 2008 have not
brought stability. The crisis has brought Greece and Ireland to their knees and
the contagion threatens to engulf Portugal and Spain. Everywhere the working
people are expected to bear the burden, paying for the rescue of the banks with
the harshest austerity measures since the Second World War. In the United
States Obama has caved in to his Republican opposition on virtually all fronts
and lost the sympathy of most of his 2008 support base. The Middle East is a
tinder-box. Palestinian national statehood remains a chimera, less likely to be
achieved now than ever. Iraq, nearly eight years after the invasion, is a
broken, violent, corrupt and unstable entity riven by ethnic and sectarian
conflict. The unwinnable war in Afghanistan drags hopelessly into its tenth
year, stoking ever more intense opposition to the NATO occupation forces. The
beneficiary of all this is Iran. Any attempt by the US or Israel to launch a
military strike against Iran’s nuclear plants would unleash uncontrollable
retaliation, the least of which would be the closing of the Strait of Hormuz
and the blocking of 40% of the world’s oil supplies.
In Britain resistance is mounting against the coalition
government’s austerity programme. Those who complacently assumed that because
of a weakened trade union movement there would be no serious challenge, are in for a rude awakening. To
everyone’s surprise, young people – students and school children –
have been at the forefront of a growing street militancy that has been directed
primarily at the Liberal Democrats, junior partners in the coalition, who have
reneged on their election promise not to increase university student fees. The
intense discomfiture of the Lib Dems threatens to tear apart the coalition. New
and innovative forms of public protest have taken off, coordinated via the
internet. A website called UK Uncut has mobilized determined contingents of
mainly young people in a high profile campaign of lightening demonstrations and
sit-ins at the high street premises of Vodaphone and Top Shop, companies
accused avoiding paying billions of pounds in taxes. A new form of guerilla
warfare is taking shape. The public mood is such that actions of this kind are
gaining support.
Although the resistance is in its early stages there is
reason to believe that it will continue to grow. The power elites’ reaction to
the WikiLeaks revelations reflects the seriousness of the systemic global
crisis. The Guardian’s editorial (8th December) dealing with the
arrest of Assange, perceptively described him in its headline as “The Man who
Kicked the Hornet’s Nest”, echoing the title of the final volume of Stieg
Larsson immensely popular best-selling Millennium Trilogy, in which a young
female computer hacker outwits and defeats the sinister representatives of
corrupt corporate power. We may be
sure that the powerful global forces, led by the White House and its minions,
who want to destroy Assange and WilkiLeaks, will stop at nothing in their
attempt to do so. But they are unlikely to succeed. The battle is joined and
the new guerilla forces are mustering world-wide to co-ordinate an intensified
assault on the hornet’s nest.