What Wikileaks Reveals: Cables, Lies & Murder: Discussion at Revolution Books

On November 28, Wikileaks began publishing batches of 251,287 secret State Department diplomatic cables from 274 U.S. embassies and consulates around the world—the largest batch of secret government documents ever made public. These documents had been leaked to Wikileaks, a website dedicated to government transparency. Wikileaks aims to release all the cables, which date from 1966 to February 2010 (with most from the past three years), in stages over the next several months. This follows Wikileaks' releases of secret documents on the U.S. wars in Afghanistan in July and Iraq in October.

The U.S. struck aggressively against Wikileaks and its founder Julian Assange in the wake of these latest disclosures: the domain name (wikileaks.org) was shut off, their web servers were shut down, their bank accounts frozen, and credit card companies have shut off contributions to their website. Obama's Attorney General is talking about criminal prosecution. Fox "news" mouthpiece and touted Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee said "anything less than execution is too kind a penalty."

In Yemen, the State Department, the U.S. embassy and diplomacy did not prove to be an "alternative" to violence or war. Instead, they helped facilitate, orchestrate, and then cover up the U.S. assassinations.

In Germany, the actions of U.S. diplomats served to cover up illegal torture and rendition, to protect those who had committed these crimes, to hide evidence of the global U.S. torture network from public view, to illegally intervene in the legal proceedings of another country, and to help preserve the U.S. government’s ability to render and torture people to this day—all in violation of international law.

Wikileaks has revealed that the U.S. State Department under both Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton has ordered department personnel to engage in widespread, extensive spying on all foreign leaders and officials they meet, including obtaining detailed personal information such as passport and frequent flier numbers, credit card information, phone numbers, email and computer passwords, even their DNA.

The revelations also expose the Obama presidency: what was an effort to burnish the image of the U.S. tarnished by the Bush regime, around the world and domestically, is exposed as more of the same.

Nobody should ever listen to U.S. government pronouncements the same way again, without thinking "yes, but what's the real deal? What do their secret cables say about this?"