Wikileaks: The Book of Revelations?
Not if you read the MSM
The revelations come thick and fast, or faster than they were but
aside from the odd mention, you wouldn't know it if you relied on the
mainstream media. If ever we needed evidence of collusion between
corporate- so-called public broadcasting and the state then the way the
diplomatic cables published by Wikileaks have been almost entirely
ignored is the proof.
Anybody who has followed my (obsessive) collection of stories on the
Wikileaks saga will know that it started off with a grand flourish and
so far at least—and the statistics prove it—has faded from view without a
whimper from the corporate/state media stranglehold on the news.
Google 'Adrian Lamo and BBC' for example and you get just three
stories, all pretty ancient news-wise and nothing at all about Lamo's
role as a government informant and the suppressed story of the Chat room
'logs' that formed the basis for Bradley Manning's arrest:
BBC News - Wikileaks site unfazed by arrest of US army 'source'
8 Jun 2010 ... Mr Manning's identity was reportedly revealed to the US
authorities by a former high-profile hacker, Adrian Lamo, whom Mr
Manning had ...
BBC News - Hacker explains why he reported 'Wikileaks source'
So news that former high-profile hacker Adrian Lamo had turned over an Army ...
BBC News - US intelligence analyst arrested over security leaks
The ex-hacker, Adrian Lamo, said Spc Manning "boasted" to him about passing ...
The BBC reports Lamo's accusations pretty much
verbatim
not even bothering to use the word 'alleged'. But what's worse about
the BBC's dereliction of duty to the public it is legally bound by
charter to
serve, is that the BBC has failed to follow up on
the story at all (all three BBC stories date from June, 2010, and all
three effectively a rehash of the original piece).
Google 'Nicola Calipari and BBC' and there's nothing later than 2005,
yet as reported by Michael Leonardi in 'What the Wikileaks Cable
Reveals concerning the Sgrena Affair: Covering Up the Murder of Nicola
Calipari', the US and Italian governments colluded to coverup the murder
in Iraq in 2005 of Nicola Calipari at the hands of US occupation
forces.
Back in 2005 when Calipari was murdered, the BBC carried dozens of
stories on the event. It was world news after all, so why no coverage
now?
"In a cable
that was released by Wikileaks, there is clear collusion between the
Italian and the US governments to bury the story of Nicola Calipari's
murder and to deter any future investigations into this case. This cable
has unleashed an outcry for justice and chorus of calls for a reopening
of the Calipari/Sgrena investigation. His wife Rosa Villecco Calipari
now a Member of parliament for the Democratic Party in Italy, called the
revelations proof that her husband had been betrayed not just once, but
two times by the Italian and American Governments and secret service
agencies. Giuliana Sgrena has also called for a reopening of the case as
have journalists and activists alike." -- 'Covering Up
the Murder of Nicola Calipari' -- 'What the Wikileaks Cable Reveals
concerning the Sgrena Affair: Covering Up the Murder of Nicola Calipari
By Michael Leonardi'-- Counterpunch
So where's the outcry from the corporate/state media now that we have
facts that reveal collusion to cover up what appears to have been the
deliberate assassination of Nicola Calipari?
In fact, aside from all the drivel about 'Cyber War' being drooled
all over us by the MSM, Wikileaks might well as never have happened.
Google 'Wikileaks and Nicola Calipari' and there's only one mention in the MSM and that's the actual cable on the Guardian website.
The BBC website carried approximately 103 stories on Wikileaks
between the day they broke, 28 November and today, 29 December. Of these
twenty-nine were exclusively about Julian Assange and his travails
leaving seventy-four stories actually about the cables, well kind of
(see below).
Just as interesting is the (diminishing) frequency of BBC stories on
the cables. Between 29 November and 10 December, the average is about
six per day but after this, aside from the 'bump' on 16-17 December (8
per day) when Assange's bail hearing occurred, the frequency dropped to
two per day on average (these figures include the stories about
Assange). The last story was published on the 26 December.
As of today, the 29 December, Wikileaks and even Julian Assange have
vanished from BBC coverage, at least on their Website (to be replaced by
the murder of an attractive young woman, that has been getting
wall-to-wall coverage since she vanished some time before Christmas).
A further analysis of the BBC's 'Wikileaks' stories reveals the following:
Of the 103, 35 referred to actual cables on: Sri Lanka, (the Tamil
Massacres), Thailand (royal succession), Kashmir (torture), the UK's
Liberal Democratic Party (badmouthing Nick Clegg and UK's paranoia about
its 'the special relationship' with the US), Fidel Castro (he nearly
died), Ghana (drugs of course), UK 'extremists' ('al-Qu'eda' in Britain,
of course), UK trains Bangla Desh death squads, Sudan (arms trade, of
course), China and Africa (aggressive China, of course), Megrahi
(Lockerbie bombing), Australia and China, US plans for the Baltic, US
'vital facilities' list, China and Google, Egypt and Sudan, Gordon
Brown, Mexico (drugs, of course), Russia (the 'Mafia', of course), US
cluster bombs, Cuba and Venezuela (Cuban spies, of course) and finally
Pakistan.
The remaining 69 either deal with Assange himself (29) or 'Cyber War'
and 'hackers' or the attempts silence Wikileaks (40). In other words
there are more stories on events surrounding Wikileaks than there are on the cables themselves.
Not surprisingly, the cables the BBC omits from its (limited) coverage paint a very different picture. See for example, 'WIKILEAKS: Yours Obediently, Europe' By David Cronin that covers the relationship between Europe (groveling) and the US (dictating).
Or the obvious problems with the source of Manning's arrest and
detention, Adrian Lamo, referred to above. Since reporting the original
story back in June, 2010 the BBC has completely ignored the topic, but
given the play it has given to Bradley Manning, you'd think it would be
anxious to inform the public, firstly that the logs had been heavily
redacted by Wired Magazine, which broke the story. Secondly, there all kinds of inconsistencies in Lamo's allegedly encrypted chat file that got Manning arrested in the first place.
Or the way the US lied about its knowledge of the assassination in
Dubai of the Hamas official Mahmoud al-Mabouh by Israel's Mossad, again a
story that's missing from the BBC's list of what it considers news.
"On February 25, 2010, State Department spokesperson Philip Crowley lied
when he told a press conference that he wasn’t aware of any request
from Dubai for assistance in tracking the Mossad killers of Mahmoud
al-Mabouh. To those who say that Wikileaks hasn’t told us anything we
didn’t already know–think again." -- 'Wikileaks: State Department Lied, Denying Dubai Asked for Assistance in Tracking Mossad Assassins', By Tikun Olum, Global Research, 28 December, 2010
Or the sordid story of US pressuring Ethiopia to invade Somalia in 2006:
"U.S.
officials were lying when they claimed to have attempted to restrain
Ethiopia from invading neighboring Somalia in late 2006. Newly unveiled
documents show that “the Bush Administration pushed Ethiopia to invade
Somalia with an eye on crushing the Union of Islamic Courts,” which had
established relative peace in much of the country." -- 'WikiLeaks Reveals U.S. Twisted Ethiopia's Arm to Invade Somalia' By Rob Prince, Global Research, 26 December, 2010
And what of the
US involvement in the coup d'etat in Honduras, also mentioned in the cables and not covered by the BBC?
"Wikileaks
has recently published documents suggesting that PR spin helped
determine the final outcome of the June 2009 Honduran coup. At the same
time that a July 2009 diplomatic cable from the U.S. Ambassador in
Honduras to top government officials confirmed that the Honduran
president’s removal was illegal, professional lobbyists and political
communicators were beginning a PR blitz, eventually managing to
manipulate America into believing the coup was a constitutional act." -- 'Honduras PR Coup', PR Watch, 21 December, 2010.
What the BBC's coverage reveals is the total lack of context and
history that enables us to make sense of it all. There's no attempt to
set the cables into the context of US foreign policy, for example, the
disparaging attitude toward its so-called allies in the 'War on Terror'
and no mention of US
bullying
and threats made toward countries that don't toe the US line. It's a
pattern that is apparent only when the cables as a whole are assessed as
an accurate reflection of US foreign policy. And this includes all the
speculation and pure drivel apparently churned out in an endless stream,
no doubt to impress their masters back on the Beltway.
And this view is verified by the choice of cables the BBC chose to
write about which when taken collectively reveal that the BBC presents
the cables as discrete events, totally unconnected to each other. They
get transformed into disposable 'news bites', mostly inconsequential but
occasionally embarrassing or even damaging, especially when connected
together, which of course the BBC doesn't do, except superficially.
This is media manipulation on a grand scale, made all the worse by Wikileaks actually collaborating with the gatekeepers, the Guardian, Der Spiegel, the New York Times and El Pais.
So the cables go through a double censorship, first by the corporate
media (in collaboration with the US state) that decides what's 'fit to
print' and then once again by the corporate/state media that puts the
'appropriate' spin on things before releasing them to the public.
We need only read John Stockwell's 'In Search of Enemies' or Philip
Agee's 'Inside the Company - CIA Diary' to understand how the cables fit
into the imperial scheme of things. All analysis stems from the a priori
viewpoint that it's the US against the world, thus agents in the field
be they diplomatic staff or CIA operatives (often the same thing) need
only reinforce the US worldview and back in those days it was the 'Red
Menace'.
"Another of
the forged [by the CIA] documents referred to a non-existent campaign of
the Cuban Embassy in Lima to promote the Ecuadorean position on the Rio
Protocol. Because not many Peruvians believed the documents to be
genuine, the [CIA] Lima station had great difficulty getting them
publicized.
/../
...[but] a recent
defector from the Cuban Embassy in Lima — present during the raid and
now working for the Agency — has 'confirmed' that the TSD documents are
genuine." -- 'Inside the Company' By Philip Agee. p.146, Quito, 30 December, 1960
This portion of Agee's diary was written just after the US had
engineered the overthrow of the president Manuel Araujo on 16 December,
1960 for being too friendly to Cuba, all part of the US 'War on
Communism'.
"...the CIA
maintains secret liaison with local security services wherever it
operates. Its stations are universally part of the official communities
of the host countries. Case officers live comfortable lives among the
economic elite; even "outside" or "deep cover" case officers are part of
that elite... They are ill at ease with democracies and popular
movements—too fickle and hard to predict." --'In Search of Enemies', By John Stockwell. p.49
The cables have to be viewed within the specific culture of the US
state's diplomatic staff, who as Stockwell points out live the lives of
colonial masters, regardless that they are residing in what is meant to
be a sovereign state. With vast stashes of cash available to be doled
out to the locals for 'services rendered' is it any wonder that the
cables reveal that the US diplomatic community behaves and thinks the
way it does; as agents of Empire.
