Democracy Now! has spent this week examining the revelations behind the first installments of State cables released by WikiLeaks on Sunday. Below is a collection of the outlet’s interviews and broadcasts covering torture, renditions, secret U.S. War Ops in Pakistan, U.S. pressure on other countries to thwart justice, and the most startling leaks that have yet to come.

WikiLeaks Reveals U.S. Tried to Thwart Spanish Probes of Gitmo Torture and CIA Renditions

The latest disclosures from the massive trove of diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks reveal U.S. officials tried to influence Spanish prosecutors and government officials to drop court investigations into torture at Guantánamo Bay and CIA extraordinary rendition flights. We speak to Scott Horton, an attorney specializing in international law and human rights and a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine.

Leaked Cables Reveal U.S. Pressured Spain to Drop Case of Cameraman Killed in 2003 Attack on Journalists in Baghdad

Leaked U.S. embassy cables from Madrid reveal the United States pressured the Spanish government to close a court case brought by the family of a Spanish cameraman, José Couso. Couso was killed in Baghdad when a U.S. Army tank fired on the Palestine Hotel, which was filled with journalists, on April 8, 2003. Three U.S. soldiers have been indicted in Spanish court for Couso’s death. “I am outraged,” says Javier Couso, the brother of José Couso. “I can’t believe my government conspired with a foreign government… It seems we are citizens, or at least a small province, of the empire of the United States.”

Jeremy Scahill: WikiLeaks Cables Confirm Secret U.S. War Ops in Pakistan

Despite sustained denials by the Pentagon, the leaked cables from WikiLeaks confirm that U.S. military special operations forces have been secretly working with the Pakistani military to conduct offensive operations and coordinate drone strikes in the areas near the Afghan border. A U.S. embassy cable from October of 2009 states: “These deployments are highly politically sensitive because of widely-held concerns among the public about Pakistani sovereignty and opposition to allowing foreign military forces to operate in any fashion on Pakistani soil.” The cables confirm aspects of a story about the covert U.S. war in Pakistan published in The Nation magazine last year by investigative journalist and Democracy Now! correspondent Jeremy Scahill.

“We Have Not Seen Anything Yet”: Guardian Editor Says Most Startling WikiLeaks Cables Still to be Released

In the coming days, we are going to see some quite startling disclosures about Russia, the nature of the Russian state, and about bribery and corruption in other countries, particularly in Central Asia,” says Investigations Executive Editor David Leigh at the Guardian, one of the three newspapers given advanced access to the secret U.S. embassy cables by the whistleblower website, WikiLeaks. “We will see a wrath of disclosures about pretty terrible things going on around the world.” Leigh reviews the major WikiLeaks revelations so far, explains how the 250,000 files were downloaded and given to the newspaper on a thumb drive, and confirms the Guardian gave the files to the New York Times. Additional cables will be disclosed throughout the week.

U.N. Special Rapporteur Juan Méndez: Instead of Focusing on Assange, U.S. Should Address WikiLeaks Disclosure of Torture

One of the leaked U.S. State Department cables released by WikiLeaks urges diplomats to gather intelligence about “plans and intentions of member states or U.N. Special Rapporteurs to press for resolutions or investigations into U.S. counter-terrorism strategies and treatment of detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan or Guantanamo.” We speak to Juan Méndez, the new U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishment. He has called on the United States to investigate and prosecute torture committed under former President George W. Bush. He also said he hopes to visit Iraq and Guantánamo Bay to probe widespread torture allegations. Méndez says, “We seem to be focusing on whether disclosing [the cables] merits some kinds of action against Julian Assange… I am very concerned about the documents that show that thousands of people first imprisoned by U.S. forces [were] transferred to the control of forces in Iraq and perhaps even in Afghanistan, where they knew they were going to be tortured.”

photograph by Jan Krömer 

RAW STORY– The Soviet Union couldn’t win in Afghanistan, and now the United States is about to have something in common with that futile campaign: nine years, 50 days.

On Friday, the U.S.-led coalition will have been fighting in this South Asian country for as long as the Soviets did in their humbling attempt to build up a socialist state. The two invasions had different goals — and dramatically different body counts — but whether they have significantly different outcomes remains to be seen.

What started out as a quick war on Oct. 7, 2001, by the U.S. and its allies to wipe out al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and the Taliban has instead turned into a long and slogging campaign. Now about 100,000 NATO troops are fighting a burgeoning insurgency while trying to support and cultivate a nascent democracy.

A Pentagon-led assessment released earlier this week described the progress made since the United States injected 30,000 more troops into Afghanistan earlier this year as fragile.

The top U.S. military commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David Petraeus, has said NATO’s core objective is to ensure that Afghanistan “is never again a sanctuary to al-Qaida or other transnational extremists that it was prior to 9/11.”

He said the only way to achieve that goal is “to help Afghanistan develop the ability to secure and govern itself. Now not to the levels of Switzerland in 10 years or less, but to a level that is good enough for Afghanistan.”

To reach that, there is an ongoing effort to get the Taliban to the negotiating table. President Hamid Karzai has set up a committee to try to make peace, and the military hopes its campaign will help force the insurgents to seek a deal.

Read full story about the US/Afghan Slog Being as Long as Vietnam.

Photo by US Army on flickr

© COPYRIGHT RAW STORY, 2010

MEDIA ROOTS- Two important news stories this past week illuminate a trend toward the crumbling privacy rights of the public, while corporations are expanding their rights to trump those of living, breathing American citizens.

Back in September, the New York Times reported that the Obama administration’s Internet Wiretapping Proposal was Met with Silence. Last week, the story continues with the report that FBI Director Robert Mueller met on Tuesday with top executives of several Silicon Valley firms including Google and Facebook, in an intensified push to expand government wiretapping of online communications.

This move would be carried out by an expansion of the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, which, at present, requires phone and broadband network providers to immediately comply with wiretapping orders.

In this story we learn that companies such as Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft and Research in Motion, as well as providers of encrypted email and messaging services like Skype, would be required to design systems to intercept and decode encrypted messages. Any services that are based overseas and accessed by users in the United States would also be mandated to re-route communications through a server on US soil for accessible wiretapping.

The second story comes from the independent press– As the government’s surveillance program further closes in on our privacy and threatens the constitutional rights of Americans, AT&T is making precedent setting challenge to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in a Supreme Court battle that could remove what transparency is left regarding corporate activity. AT&T is doing this by invoking FOIA exemptions that are created to help protect an individual’s private data by claiming to be a “corporate citizen” entitled to “personal privacy.”

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and a coalition of public interest groups urged the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday in an amicus brief to reject “privacy” protections for corporations under FOIA, arguing that the intent of FOIA’s privacy provisions have always been unmistakably interpreted by law to protect individuals, not corporations.

In an article for the EFF Rebecca Jeschke explains,

If AT&T is allowed to expand the law’s privacy protections to “corporate citizens” then broad new swaths of previously public records will be hidden from view. It’s not hard to imagine how documents on the BP oil spill, or coal mine explosions, or the misdeeds of Bernie Madoff’s investment firm might be significantly harder to find if AT&T’s misguided arguments prevail.

But this is only the most obvious problem with the idea of “personal privacy” for “corporate citizens.” Currently, government agencies routinely post reports and data about corporate activities on their websites without a specific FOIA request. But under the appeals court decision, this kind of free flow of information will be chilled by the fear of a lawsuit. Additionally, this interpretation of the FOIA would require government agencies to consult with corporations before the release of any information that arguably implicated their “privacy” interests. This would create more delays in an already lengthy FOIA process, and allow even more opportunities for corporations to block important records from the public eye. Tellingly, corporate entities would end up enjoying more privacy protections than the law currently affords individuals, who are not given any notice about potential record releases under FOIA.

Unfortunately, Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission already set the legal precedent that AT&T will rely on to claim this victory. How will the Supreme Court be able to deny AT&T, and other corporations, the protections that human individuals receive under FOIA, when the Supreme Court has already baptized corporations as constitutionally protected individuals, like you or I?

Shadowed by the mainstream media’s studious disregard, corporations continue to claim victory over a fight to expand their power and domain, while the citizens of this country struggle to maintain their rights and increasingly eroded political clout.

Many democrats and progressives that helped to elect Obama through a record number of individual financial contributions believed that his administration would stop the corporate power push, while restoring our civil liberties. On the campaign trail, Obama promised to restrict the warrantless wiretaps of the Bush administration’s Orwellian Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act, also known as the USA PATRIOT ACT. Yet, when it comes to protecting our civil rights, this President is no different than his predecessor– in February, Obama signed the PATRIOT ACT extension without reform.

Then, as if Obama had never been educated in Constitutional Law or held qualm with the illegal wiretapping under Bush, he stood in defense of warrantless wiretapping while invoking the State Secrets Privilege. Thankfully, in March, a federal judge deemed the National Surveillance Agency’s program of warrantless wiretapping illegal, despite the Obama administrations attempts to dismiss the suit by claiming a trial would lead to the disclosure of “state secrets”.

Interestingly, attorney Steven Goldberg explains in an interview with DemocracyNow! that there have been warrantless wiretapping cases that have not been allowed to proceed in court, because people could not prove that they had been wiretapped. Goldberg represented an Islamic charity that filed suit against the government after receiving a classified document that proved them victims of warrantless eavesdropping. This is the case that brought forward the decision against the NSA, and it is the only case that has been able to prove wiretapping.

It is difficult to know how the government is using its extensive surveillance powers or what other privileges may be drafted and justified through propagandized fear and base emotion. As our government and courts paved the path for the expanding power and influence of corporations, elected leaders and unelected businessmen are working close together shaping policies and ideas as they share positions in think tanks, on boards of directors and in political cabinets. An authoritarian government begins to emerge when unelected leaders join government leaders to institute laws and policies that serve their interest above those of the people, whose rights and political influence are increasingly diminished to nothing more than the symbolic act of voting.

Article by alicia, editor for Media Roots

Image by charles fettinger/flickr

SALON– The Obama Administration has U.S. military trainers on the ground in Yemen and has already launched an attack and possibly multiple attacks in the country, drawing relatively little public attention and virtually no debate in Congress. Analysts and news reports suggest that the administration is now poised to escalate the secret war in Yemen, possibly by launching drone attacks targeting suspected terrorists.

The attention of the U.S. media briefly re-centered on Yemen late last month after explosives originating from the Gulf nation were found on two cargo planes in Britain and Dubai. The Obama Administration has fingered the Yemen-based group Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) as responsible for the failed attempt. (AQAP also claimed responsibility.)  This is the same group that claimed responsibility for the failed attempt by Nigerian national Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to blow up a Detroit-bound plane on Christmas Day 2009.

But less attention has been paid to U.S. attacks on targets in Yemen — of which there have been at least two since 2002 — and the U.S. military role in training Yemeni forces as well as helping them carry out air strikes.

All of this is taking place in a nation that is beset by a struggling economy, two civil conflicts, and what has been called a “looming” water shortage.

Here’s a quick survey of U.S. military involvement in Yemen in recent years. There are two attacks that are widely thought to have been carried out by the United States. There are many other episodes in which the U.S. likely had some role; it’s often hard to say for sure because much of what we know comes from often contradictory news reports. The U.S. does not officially acknowledge the strikes.

Click to continue reading the full article: Obama set to escalate secret war in Yemen

Article written by Justin Elliott, a Salon reporter. Reach him by email at [email protected] and follow him on Twitter @ElliottJustin

Photo by Joe Crimmings Photography

© COPYRIGHT SALON, 2010