The last four days have been exhilarating and somewhat exhausting. Each day brings another wave of stories from The Guardian, Der Spiegel, the New York Times, Le Monde and other print and Internet news sources, which unveils secrets that were unknown.
Glenn Greenwald gives a quick rundown for people like Jonathan Capehart at Washington Post who think nothing new has been revealed:
(1) the U.S. military formally adopted a policy of turning a blind eye to systematic, pervasive torture and other abuses by Iraqi forces;
(2) the State Department threatened Germany not to criminally investigate the CIA's kidnapping of one of its citizens who turned out to be completely innocent;
(3) the State Department under Bush and Obama applied continuous pressure on the Spanish Government to suppress investigations of the CIA's torture of its citizens and the 2003 killing of a Spanish photojournalist when the U.S. military fired on the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad (see The Philadelphia Inquirer's Will Bunch today about this: "The day Barack Obama Lied to me");
(4) the British Government privately promised to shield Bush officials from embarrassment as part of its Iraq War "investigation";
(5) there were at least 15,000 people killed in Iraq that were previously uncounted;
(6) "American leaders lied, knowingly, to the American public, to American troops, and to the world" about the Iraq war as it was prosecuted, a conclusion the Post's own former Baghdad Bureau Chief wrote was proven by the WikiLeaks documents;
(7) the U.S.'s own Ambassador concluded that the July, 2009 removal of the Honduran President was illegal -- a coup -- but the State Department did not want to conclude that and thus ignored it until it was too late to matter;
(8) U.S. and British officials colluded to allow the U.S. to keep cluster bombs on British soil even though Britain had signed the treaty banning such weapons, and,
(9) Hillary Clinton's State Department ordered diplomats to collect passwords, emails, and biometric data on U.N. and other foreign officials, almost certainly in violation of the Vienna Treaty of 1961.
I would like to propose the temporary formation of an OpEdNews Team -- a WikiLeaks Task Force -- that can cooperate and do analysis of the cables. While it might be best to let The Guardian and others just produce the articles, which can be posted here as quicklinks, this is an opportunity to get OEN out there and turn OEN into a place to visit for the latest on the WikiLeaks story.
More cables are being released each day. We are at 607 and there are still hundreds of thousands of cables to go. Reporting on this story will continue into January.
If you are interested, leave a comment. Then we can begin to correspond amongst a group and take beats. Perhaps, we divide up the embassies have each person take a few to cover. We can regularly update each other on what we are finding and maybe if we find something where there is a tie -- like if a number of embassies are dealing with detainees at Guantanamo or the issue of the war in Afghanistan, etc -- we cooperate and publish an article that is a collaboration.
Please consider my appeal. I am working on a story on U.S. dismissing "'bureaucratic' Foreign Office concern that Lebanese Hezbollah suspects might be tortured," which The Guardian did an article on. And, I am looking at how US defended the use of cluster bombs and tried to get around the treaty after Afghanistan signed the Cluster Munitions Ban. And, without a team, it's impossible to cover all of this and there's no guarantee that OpEdNews has every important story posted on this site for its readers.
Thank you
