Catholic Worker Commentary: Ciaron O'Reilly: On Recent WikiLeaks Disclosure of Unredacted Cables

Guardian Initiates WikiLeaks Ass-Kicking Party while Circling the Wagons to Protect its own Butt!

by Ciaron O’Reilly

We are ten years into a war on Aghanistan, 20 years into a war on Iraq and 250+ daze into the confinement without charge of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange who has done so much to expose the true nature of these wars. Wars that have no end date, no popular support and presently little visible opposition.

Julian Assange

Julian Assange remains the target of powerful forces and has been largely left hung out to dry by both the legitimate voices of dissent and those who continue to prosecute these wars and isolate and crush any resistance to them. In the U.K. a lot of this isolation can be put down to the Guardian (a national British paper with an international multimedia presence) in its role as the Pravda of the liberal left (their niche market if not their personal politics of those who run the newspaper.) The Guardian sets the party line for the liberal left on which wars to support, oppose or tolerate and which dissidents are worth our sympathy or should be abandoned to the state.

The roots of the Guardian's animosity towards Assange and WikiLeaks is not clear. Whether it is borne of class tensions (the Guardian's public schoolboy journalists dislike of a hippy kid who does not know his place), cultural disdain (an antipodean rocking the boat in London town) or an economic and status fear (journalists like being the "guardian"/ gatekeepers of secrets... along comes WikiLeaks and short circuits them...."here's the cables from the horses mouth - you work it out!"). Who knows what their motives are, but there has clearly been a vitriolic campaign by the Guardian boys against Assange, a campaign that has demobilised sectors of support as he is pursued by the forces running the war.

Last week, WikiLeaks was forced to announce that the full stock of U.S. embassy cables were already out on the internet. This was not by strategic design but a combination of actions taken at a high stress time for WikiLeaks workers (not Guardian employees) when Julian Assange was imprisoned (where the British state hope to keep him...opposing bail in December 2010). This was a time when the stress free Guardian was working on its book attacking Assange and busy selling the movie rights to Spielberg. The Guardian's book included the password that could access the remaining embassy cables that had been secretly placed on Bit Torrent by a WikiLeaks worker at this time.

Caught between a rock and hard place, WikiLeaks decided to formally announce the state of play and publish the remaining cables this past week.

In the past daze, acting to type, the Guardian have published a number of articles in the lead-up to the ruling on Assange's July 2011 High Court appeal against extradition to Sweden, which is expected some time soon.

Here the Guardian tells us that they condemn WikiLeaks. They share this condemnation with the U.S. military and the five previous media partners – the Guardian, New York Times, El Pais, Der Spiegel and Le Monde – which had previously worked with WikiLeaks publishing carefully selected and redacted documents.

Here they show how you can become a real serious journalist with a real newspaper and be taken really seriously if you jump ship.

Here they devote an editorial condemning (one more time now, with feeling!) Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.

And here they rejoice that even if Julian should win his appeal, he's lost--the Australians are going to get him.

These articles are to make the liberal left in the U.K. feel relaxed and comfortable as Julian Assange is shafted in London and shunted to a U.S. prison via Stockholm or Sydney. This process mirrors the mainstream media's role throughout these long years of war, to keep us silent and sedated as the government wreak terror and destruction on the peoples of Iraq and Afghanistan. The war-making state, whether run by neocons or liberals, no longer requires our proactive support for their brutality inflicted on enemy poplations or domestic dissidents who have touched a nerve.

Here is some rebuttal.

NYT on WikiLeaks: Move Along, No Atrocity to See Here by Peter Hart

Facts and Myths in the WikiLeaks/Guardian Saga by Glenn Greenwald

Schnews take: Leaky Arguments

Refuse to be distracted! View once again the collateral murder footage and refocus.

Twenty years into a war on the people of Iraq, 10 years into a war on the people of Afghanistan, with millions dead, maimed, displaced and orphaned, civil infrastructure destroyed, WikiLeaks has confronted us with the nature of this war... the ongoing butchery of civilians. The powers that be, from the masters of war to the manufacturers of consent, want us to avert our gaze.

Support Bradley Manning who is in chains and accused of leaking this footage, Julian Asssange tagged and pursued for distributing this footage and Michael Lyons presently imprisoned for refusing to deploy to Afghanistan after viewing this footage.

*** YOUTUBE (16 mins) Julian Assange conference after UK court hearing (15-Jul-11)