Amy Goodman on Democracy Now. It's a fascinating, heartfelt and
penetrating discussion of the what and why of the documents release
and a powerful rejoinder to the self-serving critiques of the right and
the administration. Including the charge that it doesn't include Obama
and the pentagon's latest strategy. This is one not to be missed. -Ed
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/07/27
Wikileaks: Time to Celebrate, Time to Mourn
by Jeff Cohen
CommonDreams.org: July 27, 2010
It's time to celebrate.
It's a big win for Internet-based indy media that WikiLeaks.org posted its
"Afghan War Diary" based on 90,000 leaked U.S. military records detailing a
failing war in which U.S. and allied forces have repeatedly killed innocent
civilians. This on-the-ground material is vaster than the Daniel
Ellsberg-leaked Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War, and was much faster
in reaching the public.
Thanks to the Internet and new technologies, it's easier than ever for a
whistleblower to anonymously leak documents exposing official abuses and
deception, easier to copy and disseminate vast quantities of material, and
easier for journalists and citizens to cull through all the data.
I spent hours with Dan Ellsberg this weekend at the Progressive Democrats
meeting in Cleveland, where he spoke after a screening of the brilliant
documentary, "The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the
Pentagon Papers".
In 1971, it was Henry Kissinger who called Ellsberg "the most dangerous man
in America." The movie shows how Ellsberg (aided at times by his own kids
and pal Tony Russo) laboriously copied 7,000 pages of classified high-level
documents - which exposed that every president from Truman to Johnson had
publicly lied about Vietnam. It took many months before a newspaper
published the documents and much longer before they all were gathered in a
book.
Today, the "most dangerous man in the world" may be Julian Assange of
WikiLeaks. At least that's how he's seen by the various governments that
have threatened to prosecute him for revealing their secrets. But as a
stateless and office-less news organization operating in cyberspace,
WikiLeaks is almost untouchable.
Throughout this decade of war, Ellsberg has been an evangelist beseeching
government employees to engage in leaking and "unauthorized truth telling".
His prayers have now been partially answered - with Assange boasting that
the 2004-2009 Afghan war logs constitute "the most comprehensive description
of a war to have ever been published during the course of a war."
The Internet has changed the game since the Pentagon Papers, says Assange:
"More material can be pushed to bigger audiences, and much sooner."
If Ellsberg is the most important whistle-blower in U.S. history, Internet
activist Assange is probably the most important aider-and-abetter of
whistle-blowers - using technology that Ellsberg couldn't have imagined as
he labored over his now ancient Xerox machine.
Launched less than four years ago with a focus on helping Chinese
dissidents, the donation-supported WikiLeaks has continuously posted
material embarrassing to business and governments. In April, WikiLeaks
posted horrific video of a 2007 U.S. Apache gunship attack in Baghdad that
killed a dozen civilians, including two Reuters journalists.
The video leak led to the jailing of 22-year-old Army intelligence analyst
Bradley Manning - suspected now in the Afghan leak. To its credit, WikiLeaks
is raising money for Manning's defense.
This is also a time to mourn.
Because some things don't seem to change - like endless war, based on
deceit.
Nearly forty years after the Pentagon Papers were leaked by Democratic
military analyst Ellsberg, a Democratic White House seems bent on public
deception and cheerleading on behalf of an immoral war that can't be won.
Team Obama decided to escalate the Afghanistan folly, knowing all that the
public now has access to thanks to WikiLeaks - such as NATO killing of so
many civilians ("blue on white" events); Task Force 373, a "black" special
forces unit that sometimes kills kids or Afghan allies as it hunts down
insurgents; widespread Afghan animosity toward U.S. forces; allied troops
firing on each other ("blue on blue" incidents); a steady increase in
Taliban attacks.
All the color-coded military jargon can't obscure the reality that
dishonesty often infects the original incident reports or intervenes soon
after, before any public statements are issued. Remember the lies about Pat
Tillman's death.
From Vietnam through Afghanistan, deceiving the public has been the
government's knee-jerk response. The Ellsberg documentary shows U.S. Defense
Secretary Robert McNamara going before TV cameras and boldly lying about all
the military progress in Vietnam - just minutes after McNamara had told
Ellsberg privately that he agreed there'd been no progress.
When Ellsberg leaked the papers, the Nixon White House prosecuted him for
espionage and burglarized his psychiatrist's office searching for dirt -
after failing in court to prevent newspapers from publishing the papers.
The Obama White House didn't try to stop the New York Times from publishing
the Afghan logs (hopeless since WikiLeaks had also provided them to foreign
publications - Germany's Der Spiegel and the British Guardian, whose initial
coverage focused much more on civilian casualties than did the Times.)
But the Obama administration denounced WikiLeaks as "irresponsible" and
non-objective - and argued that the president had announced "a new strategy"
for Afghanistan last December "precisely because of the grave situation that
had developed over several years." The "new strategy" claim is hardly more
credible than Nixon's claim in 1968 that he had a plan to end the Vietnam
War.
Asked by Der Speigel whether he, following in Ellsberg's footsteps, was
"today's most dangerous man," Assange responded: "The most dangerous men are
those who are in charge of war. And they need to be stopped."
Obama recently asked Congress for $33 billion more to pay for his 30,000
increase in U.S. troops to Afghanistan. That vote could happen any day.
Will they be stopped?
Jeff Cohen is an associate professor of journalism and the director of the
Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College, founder of the media
watch group FAIR, and former board member of Progressive Democrats of
America. In 2002, he was a producer and pundit at MSNBC (overseen by NBC
News). His latest book is Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in
Corporate Media.
***
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/24/science/earth/24plume.html?ref=us
Scientists Confirm Underwater Plumes Are From Spill
By John Collins Rudolf
NY Times: July 23, 2010
Florida researchers said Friday that they had for the first time
conclusively linked vast plumes of microscopic oil droplets drifting in the
Gulf of Mexico to the Deepwater Horizon disaster.
The scientists, from the University of South Florida, matched samples taken
from the plumes with oil from the leaking well provided by BP. The findings
were the first direct confirmation that the plumes were linked to the spill,
although federal scientists had said there was overwhelming circumstantial
evidence tying them to BP's well.
The discovery of the plumes several weeks into the oil leak alarmed
scientists, who feared that clouds of oil particles could wreak havoc on
marine life far below the surface. Plumes have been detected as far as 50
miles from the wellhead, although oil concentrations at those distances are
extremely low, about 750 parts per billion.
This is well below the level considered acutely toxic for fish and marine
organisms, but could still affect eggs and larvae, the scientists fear.
"There are a lot of things that are potentially at risk," said David
Hollander, an oceanographer with the University of South Florida who is
studying the plumes. "There's not a lot known of the toxic effects of oil on
organisms living in deeper waters."
The announcement by the Florida researchers came as federal scientists
released their own report on the oil formations. The multiagency report
describes the presence of large plumes of microscopic oil droplets within
several miles of the wellhead at a depth of 3,280 to 4,265 feet. Oil
concentrations there are as high as 10 parts per million, or the equivalent
of one tablespoon of oil in 130 gallons of water.
The plumes closest to the well may be concentrated enough to pose a threat
to nearby deepwater coral reefs, which host a diversity of ocean life, said
Steve Murawski, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's chief
scientist for the spill response. "We know that even low concentrations can
be harmful to the eggs and larvae of the deep coral," he said.
The federal report also described a drop in dissolved oxygen levels in deep
water near the well, which it said probably resulted from the rapid
reproduction of oil-eating microbes. Yet the reduction did not signal
conditions that could cause a die-off in sea life, the report concluded.
The ultimate impact of the oil plumes on sea life in the gulf remains open
to debate. A plume has been found near DeSoto Canyon, an underwater valley
south of the Florida Panhandle where ocean currents push nutrient-rich water
up onto the continental shelf. Some scientists fear that oil, even in the
low concentrations found in the plumes, could be driven into the shelf's
life-rich shallow waters and cause harm.
"It's almost an express route up there," Dr. Hollander said. "That's what
raises the concerns of the biologists."
Yet federal scientists say they believe that the oil concentrations in the
deepwater plumes are too low to have much of an effect on the gulf's
commercially valuable fisheries.
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