Authoritarian Left "liberal" welfare-warfare Obamaites go after anti-war, anti-Big Government Wikileaks with Stalinist zeal

Liberals Smear Wikileaks
Mother Jones and Colbert go after Wikileaks
(AntiWar.com) -- by Justin Raimondo --

Activists intent on releasing evidence of crimes committed by a powerful government are harassed and followed by police and intelligence agents: a restaurant in which they are meeting comes under surveillance, and, subsequently, one of their number is detained by the police for 21 hours. Their leader is followed on an international flight by two agents: and, in a parking lot of foreign soil, one of their number is accosted by a "James Bond character" and threatened. Computers are seized, and on the group’s Twitter account the following message appears:

"If anything happens to us, you know why … and you know who is responsible."

Well, then, who is responsible? Surely it must be some totalitarian regime – say, the Chinese, or one of the Arab autocracies – but no. The culprits are the Americans, and their target is Wikileaks – the web site of record for leaked government and other official documents, which has so far done more real investigative reporting in the last few years to unnerve and expose the Powers That Be than the New York Times and the Washington Post, combined.

From the dicey activities of major banks, to the "Climate-gate" e-mails that revealed attempts by government scientists to falsify or "sex up" data to make the case for global warming, to the war crimes committed by US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, Wikileaks is fearlessly exposing the evil that stalks the world – and they, in turn, are being relentlessly stalked by the US government and its minions.

A US government document [.pdf] posted on Wikileaks, and authored by Michael D. Horvath, of something called the "Cyber Counterintelligence Assessments Branch," apparently a division of the Army Counterintelligence Center, declared Wikileaks to be a danger to national security. The report explored several ways to track the provenance of documents posted on the Wikileaks site, and take down the site itself. Horvath cites a supposed lack of "editorial review" which means "the Wikileaks.org Web site could be used to post fabricated information; to post misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda; or to conduct perception management and influence operations designed to convey a negative message to those who view or retrieve information from the Web site."

Oh no!

Furthermore, "it must be presumed that Wikileaks.org has or will receive sensitive or classified DoD documents in the future. This information will be published and analyzed over time by a variety of personnel and organizations with the goal of influencing US policy."

Shocking! Why, how dare these perfidious personnel and obviously subversive organizations presume to imagine they could possibly influence US policy! Horvath lists a number of "foreign" intelligence agencies – the Russians, the British, the Israelis – who have the technical capacity to shut Wikileaks down, and alludes to a more subtle effort by averring:

"Efforts by some domestic and foreign personnel and organizations to discredit the Wikileaks.org Web site include allegations that it wittingly allows the posting of uncorroborated information, serves as an instrument of propaganda, and is a front organization of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)."

Horvath goes on to detail all the criticism of Wikileaks that have appeared in the general media, including the blogosphere, and now that the "Collateral Murder" video has been released – with another one, showing similar atrocities in Afghanistan, on the way – the techniques described by Horvath are being implemented by the Obama administration’s media shills to discredit and marginalize Wikileaks, particularly targeting its founder, Julian Assange.

First up is Mother Jones magazine, a citadel of Bay Area high liberalism and the left-wing of the Obama cult, with a long article by one David Kushner. The piece is essentially a critical profile of Assange, who is described as an egotist in the first few paragraphs, and it goes downhill from there. Most of the article is a collection of dishy quotes from various "experts" – including from the apparently quite jealous (and obviously demented) editor of Cryptome.org, a similar site, who says Wikileaks is CIA front. Steven Aftergood, author of the Federation of American Scientists’ Secrecy News blog, "says he wasn’t impressed with WikiLeaks’ ‘conveyor-belt approach’ to publishing anything it came across. ‘To me, transparency is a means to an end, and that end is an invigorated political life, accountable institutions, opportunities for public engagement. For them, transparency and exposure seem to be ends in themselves,’ says Aftergood. He declined to get involved."...

Kushner has all bases covered: the white-wine-and-brie liberals who would rather look the other way while their hero Obama slaughters children on the streets of Baghdad, and the tinfoil hat crowd who can be convinced Wikileaks is a "false flag" operation.

The positive impact of Wikileaks is "debatable," avers Kushner – especially if you’re an Obamaite intent on covering up the fact of US war crimes, because of the political damage it might inflict on your "progressive" coalition. As evidence of this "debatability," Kushner tries to blame the assassination of two Kenyan dissidents on the publication of documents on Wikileaks exposing Kenyan corruption – which seems a blatant case of diverting the real blame from where it really belongs, and that is on the Kenyan government and its death squads. No, it just won’t wash – and this is certainly a curious argument for an ostensibly liberal magazine, supposedly devoted to human rights, to make. But then again, anything is possible if you’ve decided to become a government apologist and errand boy.

Speaking of government apologists and errand boys, Steven Colbert of The Colbert Report on Comedy Central had Assange on Monday night, and it was the Mother Jones piece with a snarky grin and a laugh track. Colbert dropped the comic mask, and let his true face as a loyal Obamaite shine through, reciting Pentagon lies and attacking Assange for having edited "Collateral Murder," and even for giving it that title. He then opined Assange was "emotionally manipulating" people – an echo of Horvath’s analysis, which denounced Wikileaks as "disinformation" and "propaganda." "Collateral Murder" was "an editorial," not real reporting, said Colbert, but looked a bit surprised when Assange calmly pointed out that the assertion of a nearby firefight is "a lie." "We have classified information" to the contrary, Assange said, with calm assurance. You could hear a pin drop when he said that the report of "some gunfire" preceded the killings by twenty minutes and miles away from the reported location.

What was supposed to have been a "gotcha" interview turned into a triumph for Wikileaks. Colbert, the court jester in King Obama’s court, missed his target by a country mile. This failed ambush, coupled with the Mother Jones hit piece, tell us all we need to know about what political discourse in Obama’s America is going to be like. Obama’s political police are after Wikileaks, and specifically Assange, and the liberal smear brigade is going to go after him hammer and tongs...MORE...LINK