... In response to Hosenball's story, Obama officials naturally tried to salvage the integrity of their statements, insisting that "there has been substantial damage" and that there were unspecified "specific cases where damage caused by WikiLeaks' revelations have been assessed as serious to grave." But the only specific cases anyone could identify were ones where the U.S. was caught by these documents lying to its own citizens or, at best, concealing vital truths -- such as the far greater military role the U.S. is playing in Yemen and Pakistan than Obama officials have publicly acknowledged.
And this, of course, has been the point all along: the WikiLeaks disclosures are significant precisely because they expose government deceit, wrongdoing and brutality, but the damage to innocent people has been deliberately and wildly exaggerated -- fabricated -- by the very people whose misconduct has been revealed. There is harm from the WikiLeaks documents, but it's to wrongdoers in power, which is why they are so desperate to malign and then destroy the group.
Just as was true in 2003 -- when the joint, falsehood-based government/media demonization campaign led 69% of Americans to believe that Saddam Hussein participated in the planning of the 9/11 attacks (the Bush era's most revealing fact about American politics) -- this orgy of anti-WikiLeaks propaganda has succeeded, with polls reliably showing the American public largely against the group and even favoring its prosecution (citizens in countries not subjected to this propaganda barrage view the group far more favorably). As has been demonstrated over and over, when the U.S. Government and its media collaborate to propagandize, its efficacy is not in doubt. And as Marcy Wheeler notes, these lies were told not only to distort public opinion and justify prosecuting WikiLeaks for doing nothing more than engaging in journalism, but also to coerce private corporations (MasterCard, Amazon, Visa, Paypal) to cut all services to the group.
The case against WikiLeaks is absolutely this decade's version of the Saddam/WMD campaign. It's complete with frivolous invocations of Terrorism, grave public warnings about National Security negated by concealed information, endlessly repeated falsehoods, a competition among political and media elites to advocate the harshest measures possible, a cowardly Congress that (with a few noble exceptions) acquiesces to it all on a bipartisan basis and is eager to enable it, and a media that not only fails to subject these fictions to critical scrutiny, but does the opposite: it takes the lead in propagating them. One might express bewilderment that most American journalists never learn their lesson about placing their blind faith in government claims, but that assumes -- falsely -- that their objective is to report truthfully. ...
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