Neil Clark - how the neo-cons smear anyone who is anti-war #FreeAssange

Julian Assange ushering in a “new global information order?”

The selective release of around a quarter million US State Department cables, some of them redacted after screening by corporate media entities such asThe New York Times, The Guardian, Der Spiegel,and Le Monde, among others, comes at a time when there are calls by governments, including officials of the Obama administration, to restrict information content on the Internet.

In fact, the release of the State Department cables may have served as a digital “9/11,” an event that has spurred on the agenda of neo-conservatives who continue to exercise influence outside and within the Obama administration to bring about total government control of the flow of information in cyberspace.

The CIA has established a Wikileaks Task Force, or “WTF,” at CIA headquarters to examine the effects of the Wikileaks cable release. However, the CIA was relatively unaffected by the Wikileaks releases, but the WTF will, nevertheless, conduct a thorough review and present their findings to senior agency officials. The CIA stated its special task force is made up of seasoned officers.

Neocon agenda for State Dept. benefits from Wikileaks affair

Is Julian Assange Helping the Neocons?

It turns out our government has been lying to us about whether we have troops in Pakistan engaging in combat operations. The Pentagon has said the mission of American soldiers is confined to “training Pakistani forces so that they can in turn train other Pakistani military,” but in fact our forces have been embedded in Pakistani fighting units, giving them electronic data and other support as they kill the enemy.

We know this because of WikiLeaks. It’s also thanks to WikiLeaks that we know about America’s arrangement with the President of Yemen: we kill Yemen-based terrorists and he claims that Yemen is doing the killing.

In these respects, I think, WikiLeaks is doing God’s work. I realize there are tactical rationales for both of these deceptions, but I don’t see them trumping the bedrock right of citizens in a democracy to know when their tax dollars are being used to kill people — especially when those people live in countries we’re not at war with. So, if we’re going to calculate Julian Assange’s net karma, I’d put this stuff on the positive side of the ledger.

Julian Assange: Neocon Tool?

These include many of the relationships that the neoconservatives who shaped Bush’s foreign policy were most willing to risk. Neocons have often encouraged policies and utterances that threatened relations with Russia and Turkey, as well as China, Iran and so on. Indeed, neoconservatism sometimes seems devoted to exacerbating the world’s major geopolitical fault lines. And now WikiLeaks has advanced the exacerbation. Maybe Assange, when he has time for some fresh conspiracy theorizing, can look into the possibility that neocons have implanted electrodes in his brain.

I don’t know if this change of course would make up for the considerable short-term damage wrought by WikiLeaks — the harm done to fragile and crucial relations with other states, the blowback that even now is starting to well up in Yemen, Pakistan and elsewhere. But if it does, then Assange’s initially pro-neocon impact could be dwarfed by his longer-term, more benign influence. And his karma, as I calculate it, would move into positive territory.