The CIA, Wikileaks, Collateral Murder, and the Collapse of European Support for Imperial Adventures

With this post I will further develop and expand upon some of the themes I first discusses in my February 20th post entitled “The American Empire and the Crisis of European Public Opinion”. The empire is beginning to show signs of strain as European public opinion sways further and further away from the goals of the sycophants in Washington. As previously mentioned, the Dutch have simply refused to extend its contribution to the military mission in the morass that is Afghanistan. Other countries have faced, and continue to face, a crisis in public opinion. In Germany, for example, the percentage of the population that wanted a withdrawal has nearly doubled in the last 5 years, from 34% wanting a withdrawal to a healthy 62%. Much of this sentiment has been caused by September’s Kunduz scandal.

In response to the collapse of Dutch support, and to the general deterioration of support across Europe, the CIA undertook in March to evaluate the European public opinion situation, and to develop a strategy to stem the tide through the use of subterfuge and propaganda. What the CIA did not count on, however, was that Wikileaks, a website that facilitates the release of sensitive documents according to their theory of radical transparency and accountability, would acquire the document and release it, much to the dismay of the CIA. The document is entitled “CIA report into shoring up Afghan war support in Western Europe” (PDF), and it was released by Wikileaks on March 26th, 2010. To exemplify the kind of nefarious work the CIA is capable of I will site a few passages:

“Political fallout from the German-ordered Kunduz airstrike in September 2009 which killed dozens of Afghan civilians, demonstrated the potential pressure on the German Government when Afghanistan issues come up on the public radar. Concern about the potential effects of Afghanistan issues on the state-level election in North Rhine-Westphalia in May 2010 could make Chancellor Merkel—who has shown an unwillingness to expend political capital on Afghanistan—more hesitant about increasing or even sustaining Germany’s ISAF contributions.”

and some Germany specific information from the document:

• Underscoring the contradiction between German pessimism about ISAF and Afghan optimism about the mission’s progress could challenge skeptics’ assertions that the mission is a waste of resources. The same ABC/BBC/ADR poll revealed that 70 percent of Afghans thought their country was heading in the right direction and would improve in 2010, while a 2009 GMF poll showed that about the same proportion of German respondents were pessimistic about ever stabilizing Afghanistan.

• Messages that dramatize the consequences of a NATO defeat for specific German interests could counter the widely held perception that Afghanistan is not Germany’s problem. For example, messages that illustrate how a defeat in Afghanistan could heighten Germany’s exposure to terrorism, opium, and refugees might help to make the war more salient to skeptics.

• Emphasis on the mission’s multilateral and humanitarian aspects could help ease Germans’ concerns about waging any kind of war while appealing to their desire to support multilateral efforts. Despite their allergy to armed conflict, Germans were willing to break precedent and use force in the Balkans in the 1990s to show commitment to their NATO allies. German respondents cited helping their allies as one of the most compelling reasons for supporting ISAF, according to an INR poll in the fall of 2009.

It is quite alarming, albeit interesting, that America would seek to manipulate the public opinions of the various European allies in this way, although I cannot say I am surprised by this. Obviously it does not help the American propaganda machine make its case when internal documents like this and other classified materials receive the light of day. In fact, the US government has plans for Wikileaks, which have been intercepted and published by Wikileaks itself, that can be found here (PDF). The executive summary of the document characterized Wikileaks in the following way:

“Wikileaks.org, a publicly accessible Internet Web site, represents a potential force protection, counterintelligence, operational security (OPSEC), and information security (INFOSEC) threat to the US Army. The intentional or unintentional leaking and posting of US Army sensitive or classified information to Wikileaks.org could result in increased threats to DoD personnel, equipment, facilities, or installations. The leakage of sensitive and classified DoD information also calls attention to the insider threat, when a person or persons motivated by a particular cause or issue wittingly provides information to domestic or foreign personnel or organizations to be published by the news media or on the Internet. Such information could be of value to foreign intelligence and security services (FISS), foreign military forces, foreign insurgents, and foreign terrorist groups for collecting information or for planning attacks against US force, both within the United States and abroad.”

On April 5th, Wikileaks further agitated the American military apparatus by releasing a video, which it has entitled Collateral Murder, that shows a US helicopter shooting a group of people, including two Reuters journalists. Here is the video:

It is easy to understand how an organization like wikileaks might get under the skin of the Imperial Gauleiters, and some additional online articles have some interesting takes on the situation, which can be found here, here, and here. The bottom line is that the situation in Afghanistan is collapsing as is the support amongst the publics of US’s European friends. Wikileaks is helping to expedite this process by releasing embarrassing documents that harm US-European relationships, but I suspect that this only hastens the inevitable.

Concerning the situation in Afghanistan, one only needs to look at the recent media coverage to realize that there are missive problems there, which the propaganda machine is likely doing everything it can to hide or mischaracterize. Just the issue of Obama – Karzai relations is demonstrative of the very serious problems faced by the Untied States, and more can be read about this here, here, here here and here.

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