Saturday, December 18, 2010

Stay out of trouble by not speaking to Western spies


By Robert Fisk

"...It was fascinating, though, to watch Hillary Clinton initially denouncing the WikiLeaks flood as an "attack on the international community". She twice warned journalists that they might also find their names in the embassy cables – so no more bleating about freedom of the press when WikiLeaks might betray the warriors of the media..........

The problem, of course, is that it is not a hoax. And the pompous way in which La Clinton felt it necessary to explain to us the difference between embassy cables (which have a certain relationship to reality, if not always very literate) and the policy papers that emerge from her own diminished office told us almost as much as the WikiLeaks horde. For this lady, who could not write her own autobiography, ordered – and still I have to shake my head to believe this – her flunkies to spy on the United Nations.

That La Clinton should want her State Department slaves to play secret agents on the poor old UN donkey – the beast that forever clip-clops on stage to mop up America's failed policies in the Middle East, this decrepit skyscraper on the East River packed with enough asbestos to kill a nation of peacekeepers, this bureaucratic shambles with its pathetic Secretary-General whose English is still in need of vast improvement – shows what an utterly worthless institution the US State Department has become......

When Mubarak hears the name of his presidential opponent Ayman Nour – a perfectly charming man whom I met in Beirut just before the election – he claims, according to the WikiLeaks cable, to "feel sick". Which is just how Nour felt when Mubarak banged him up in the Tora prison complex after the 2005 election. We are still waiting, naturally, to see what US diplomatic reports really said about the ghastly Yasser Arafat and – more importantly – the Israeli colonial government in the West Bank. But fear not, any truth contained therein will not be reflected in those haughty "policy" papers churned out by La Clinton and her predecessors. More and more, WikiLeaks is exposing the hopeless nature of US foreign policy and that of its supposed "allies". Attack on the international community indeed!"

No comments: