WikiLeaks Documents: Imperialist Torture Machine in Iraq

DECEMBER 19—Barely one week after WikiLeaks began releasing a mass of leaked cables from U.S. envoys around the world, its founder, Julian Assange, was arrested in London on 7 December to face possible extradition to Sweden over allegations of sexual offences, slammed by his lawyer as politically motivated. Assange has now been released on bail. Extradition could also reportedly open the way to legal action by the vengeful U.S. government. There has been a worldwide outpouring of support for Assange and WikiLeaks in opposition to his arrest and the barrage of threats, including from Labor prime minister, Julia Gillard, who attacked Assange as having acted illegally.

Among the recent leaks are diplomatic cables documenting, unsurprisingly, the commitment of Australian imperialism to the counterrevolutionary U.S./Australia alliance, not least by successive ALP federal governments and the Laborite trade-union misleaders of the working class. Underscoring that this alliance targets in particular the Chinese deformed workers state, cables report on former prime minister Kevin Rudd advising the U.S. secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, to be prepared to use force against China. They confirm that Australian spy agencies target the Chinese military while the ramping up of Australian naval capabilities is aimed at countering China’s influence, including in the Asia-Pacific region. The Labor government rules for racist Australian capitalism against the interests of the workers and oppressed. Hands off Julian Assange and WikiLeaks!

The following article is slightly adapted from Workers Vanguard (No. 968, 5 November), newspaper of the Spartacist League/U.S.

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The whistle-blowers at WikiLeaks have struck again. On 22 October, WikiLeaks published the largest leak of classified military material in history—nearly 400,000 military field reports on the Iraq war and occupation. Mostly written by soldiers on the ground, the reports detail more than 109,000 deaths, most of them civilians, in the seven years since the U.S.-led imperialist invasion and occupation of Iraq. They capture a snapshot of how the U.S., aided by Australia, has pulverised what was once one of the more advanced countries of the Near East. They describe in nightmarish detail the torture of detainees, executions at U.S. checkpoints as well as the sectarian carnage unleashed by the occupation—atrocities started under the Bush administration and continued without respite under the “reduced” occupation force of Barack Obama.

The reports document accounts of torture that rival those at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison. Having been caught out in Abu Ghraib and other American torture centres in Iraq, the imperialist occupiers opted to subcontract some of their dirty work to their Iraqi puppet army and police, who tortured their victims through suspension and hanging, beating, whipping, electric shocks, burning, sensory deprivation and rape. Recalling that one of the bogus pretexts of the 2003 Iraq invasion was the “moral imperative” to put an end to the brutal Saddam Hussein regime, an editorial in the London Guardian (26 October) noted, “One can reasonably conclude that one set of torturers and thugs has been replaced by another.”

The latest WikiLeaks release was made available to the New York Times, the Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel and Al Jazeera. When the New York Times printed the exposures, the paper sought to minimise their impact by focusing obsessively on the documents’ depiction of the role played by Iran in Iraq. The U.S. bourgeoisie’s newspaper of record, which dutifully echoed each and every government lie that paved the road for the Iraq invasion, has joined the Obama administration’s sabre rattling against Iran, highlighting (22 October), “Iran’s military, more than has been generally understood, intervened aggressively in support of Shiite combatants, offering weapons, training and sanctuary and in a few instances directly engaging American troops.” It is vital for the international working class, not least in Australia, to oppose the imperialists’ military threats against Iran and any other semicolonial country. U.S. hands off Iran! All U.S., Australian and other allied troops out of Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan!

WikiLeaks’ release of nearly 400,000 documents this October follows their August release of 76,000 classified military field reports from the Afghanistan occupation documenting the brutality inflicted upon civilians, including by CIA-led forces operating out of a string of bases along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. In April, the WikiLeaks website posted a video showing a U.S. Apache helicopter in Baghdad in 2007 gunning down and killing at least 12 people, including two Reuters journalists. All this has put WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, in the crosshairs of U.S. imperialism.

Assange and whoever helped him obtain and release the documentation of these war crimes have performed courageous and useful acts on behalf of the victims of U.S. and Australian imperialism. While WikiLeaks has not divulged any of its sources, U.S. Army Private Bradley Manning, who was stationed in Iraq, was arrested last autumn, shipped to solitary confinement in a military prison in Kuwait and then to the Marine base at Quantico, Virginia. He faces a court martial next year, having been charged with leaking various materials, including the cockpit video of the Apache helicopter gunship killing in Baghdad. Manning could face up to 52 years in prison.

As for Assange, an Australian citizen, he is on the run, reportedly in hiding in London. Pentagon and Justice Department officials, according to the New York Times (23 October), “are weighing his actions under the 1917 Espionage Act,” under which Socialist Party leader Eugene V. Debs was imprisoned for his opposition to the First World War. Former State Department official Christian Whiton has attacked Assange for conducting “political warfare against the US” and has called for him and his associates to be declared “enemy combatants” who can be subjected to “non-judicial actions,”—i.e., kidnapping, torture, indefinite detention and worse.

Meanwhile, Assange’s bid for residence in Sweden has been rejected. With his British visa expiring early next year, Australian government spokesmen have made clear that they will cooperate with the U.S. in going after Assange, who noted that an Australian official ominously informed him, “You play outside the rules, and you will be dealt with outside the rules.” Assange continues to refuse to divulge WikiLeaks’ sources. He described Manning as a “political prisoner,” adding: “We have a duty to assist Mr. Manning and other people who are facing legal and other consequences.” Opponents of U.S. imperialism must demand: Free Bradley Manning now! Hands off Julian Assange and WikiLeaks!

The persecution of Manning and Assange recalls the U.S. government vendetta against Daniel Ellsberg, who in 1971 released the Pentagon Papers. The trove of documents provided an account of over two decades of government lies and cover-ups in the service of a very different war—the dirty, losing war against the revolutionary workers and peasants of Vietnam waged by the U.S. and its Australian jackal imperialist ally. For his efforts, Ellsberg was viciously attacked by the Nixon administration, taken into custody and charged with theft, conspiracy and espionage. Eventually, all charges against him were dropped.

Ellsberg recently noted of Obama: “In no way, in the general defense and homeland security area, is he less opaque, more transparent, than Bush. And as I say, he’s being even more aggressive in pursuing prosecution” of whistle-blowers (Democracy Now! 22 October). Joining Assange at a London press conference on 23 October, Ellsberg denounced the Pentagon’s demand that Assange return any “classified” documents, adding, “Secrecy is essential to empire.”

The capitalist rulers always have gone to great lengths to conceal their crimes, both at home and abroad, through disinformation, legal prosecution and even assassination. We applaud the brave acts of those like Ellsberg and Assange. But unlike the liberals and reformists who seize upon such exposures to pressure imperialism to adopt more “humane” policies, we Marxists seek to impart the understanding that imperialist war, with all its savagery, is inherent to capitalist class rule. As our U.S. comrades noted in “U.S. Imperialism’s Torture, Inc.” (Workers Vanguard No. 826, 14 May 2004): “Capitalist society was born in blood; modern imperialism continues the brutal practices of mass murder, torture and humiliation that accompany exploitation of labor and the ceaseless struggle between competing imperialist forces to dominate the world.”

Only when the system of capitalism is destroyed root and branch through victorious workers revolution internationally will humanity be rid of such horrors. We look to the model of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, which overthrew capitalist rule in one-sixth of the globe and became a beacon for working people and the oppressed throughout the world. The fight to smash U.S. imperialism, the most dangerous force on the planet, and its venal Australian junior partner requires building revolutionary workers parties independent of all capitalist parties and dedicated to the establishment of working-class rule.