I just want to add a little more and a different take to the excellent Wikileak diaries being posted at this site.
It is not just that a NSA report revealed that a fake incident was part of the justification for the US to go to war with Vietnam - costing millions of Vietnamese and American lives: "[I]t is not simply that there is a different story as to what happened; it is that no attack happened that night."
It is not just that, as seen on ABC News, "... America's top military leaders reportedly drafted plans to kill innocent people and commit acts of terrorism in U.S. cities to create public support for a war against Cuba." The Wikileaks furor is about much more:
It is not just that George W. Bush's justification for the invasion of Iraq was based on the flimsiest of reasoning and evidence, and all of that was eventually shown to be dubious-to-false - costing at least hundreds of thousands of American and Iraqi lives.
Much more than those millions of lives in fact, it has been true throughout history that:
"The common people never want war, but it is an easy matter to bring them to the bidding of the leaders, regardless of whether the government is a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a communist dictatorship. All the leaders have to do is to tell the common people they are being attacked, and accuse the pacifists of lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger." - Hermann Goering at Nuremberg
Today, this week, governments around the world are looking for excuses and doing everything they can to shut down Wikileaks - claiming some of the documents they have leaked may endanger lives. But it is clear that throughout history, it is government that has wasted and destroyed lives on false pretenses - by the millions - using secrecy and deceptions.
Might Wikileaks have saved millions of lives had it been around in decades past? It well might have. We cannot know that for sure, but while the governments want us to be concerned that Wikileaks activities may endanger lives, it is also possible that they might save lives. Perhaps millions.
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We do know for sure that there is a ferocious war taking place today. This week. As pointed out in the Washington Post:
"I can use my credit card to send money to the Ku Klux Klan, to antiabortion fanatics, or to anti-homosexual bigots, but I can't use it to send money to WikiLeaks," said Jeff Jarvis, a new-media critic and director of the interactive journalism program at the City University of New York's Graduate School of Journalism. "The New York Times published the same documents. Should we tell Visa and MasterCard to stop payments to the Times?"
"There is an information war, and it's about control," he said. "The choice is to either live in a transparent world or shut down the Internet."
Who knows? How many are noticing this week's war may determine it's outcome, and lives lost or saved.
crossposted at http://www.worldforallpeople.org