Spare a kind thought for my old friend Michael Morrell’s oldest son, Geoff, the Pentagon’s Press Secretary. The Defense Department has tasked poor Geoff with providing its public reaction to Julian Assange’s Wikileaks disclosure on Saturday of 391,832 documents relating to America’s war in Iraq. The new flood of “Pentagon Papers”-style documents detail a pattern of US soldiers murdering civilians at American checkpoints, of American-created Iraqi security forces torturing and raping, of a shadow war in Iraq between the US and Iran, and of official concealment of civilian death figures. Geoff’s is no easy job, especially when the Washington administration pretends the war is “officially” over and the troops who are still there have “officially” departed.
“The only responsible course of action for Wikileaks at this point is to return the stolen material and expunge it from their Web sites as soon as possible,” Geoff stated on Friday, knowing the documents were to be released at a Wikileaks press conference in London on Saturday with simultaneous publication in The New York Times, Britain’s Guardian, Der Spiegel, and Al Jazeera TV.
How do you restore a girl’s virginity after she’s given it away? (Someone within the defense establishment, after all, gave Wikileaks the documents.) The fact is, you can’t, and I suspect Geoff knows it. The documents are in the public domain. However, we could all help him out by delivering our copies of The New York Times, Guardian, and Der Spiegel to the Pentagon’s front gate. I don’t know how we’ll send them the TV broadcasts and the pages floating in cyberspace, but we can try. In fact, it is our patriotic duty. The people who made this war and who prolong it need secrecy. It is therefore every patriot’s job to send the stuff back and pretend we don’t know that at least 66,081 civilians, by US count, were killed in Iraq between 2004 and 2009 and that Americans permit the Iraqi security forces (created and still advised by the US) to torture thousands of their citizens.
Read the rest of this article on Taki’s Magazine.
