Thread by @MurdochCadell

Seymour Hersh is right. For various reasons, which I will explain in this thread, Wikileaks did more to keep the US safe than those failed institutions of the CIA, FBI, and the corporate media.

If there had been a #Wikileaks in the 1980s and 1990s, there may never have been 9/11

https://twitter.com/deepa_driver/status/1476644170517278734

As @StateDept knows, the US will eventual fail if it’s reputation around the world as corrupt and duplicitous reaches a critical mass. Powerful as they are, the US needs allies and markets to survive. Like ‘fossil fuels’, they are vulnerable to popular and progressive opinion.

In this regard the US at times needs protection from its own worst self: rapacious and unchecked nationalism and capitalism. In the 1960s & 70s this check came from mainstream journalism. Today it comes from independent journos with info from insider sources. like #Wikileaks

Because the Cold War of the Reagan years saw nationalism trump ‘legal principles’, no one saw the sponsoring of Islamic ‘freedom fighters’ and supporting corrupt secular ME regimes as a problem.

Had anyone looked ‘clear eyed’ at the billions of dollars in arms and training going towards people, like OBL, who were diametrically opposed to US policy in the ME, the coming world firestorm of the 2000s would have been clear.

While it was exhilarating for people like Reagan, Bill Casey and Charlie Wilson to see the damage inflicted on the Soviets by the mujahideen, they missed the essential fact: they had taught people with a grievance against the US that, given enough violence, empires could fall.

While this risk may have been papered over by the likes of the NYT, the devil is always revealed by the details. #Wikileaks if nothing else, is concerned with details: who gets money, how much, and what they intend to do with it.

The fatal triangle of Pakistan’s need to control Afghanistan, the Saudi’s need to be seen as new ‘Islamic’ force in the world, and the CIAs duplicity in supporting anyone who fought the Russians (no matter how far they were from ‘American values’) created al Qaeda.

Blinded as they were by the Soviet collapse, had @wikileaks revealed the details of the Afghan resistance, as they did the details of the Iraq and Afghan wars in the #IraqWarLogs #CableGate etc, the ‘better US’ would have taken some action to address the coming storm.

As it was, as with the failed wars that followed, the CIA’s attempts to stop AQ never got any more nuanced than simply ‘finding them and killing them’. It didn’t work, anymore than treating a burn while the body was still in the flames would work. It just made them madder.

The US propaganda war post 9/11 has successfully painted the grievances against them by AQ as ‘religious’ in nature, but they were truly more about corruption and repression. The best way to fight AQ, would have been to fight the excess of US Foreign Policy domestically.

Hard fact that it may be for many to swallow, OBL’s burning hatred stemmed from corruption, murders and duplicity by the KSA, in conjunction with the US. While his methods were violence, that too was taught to him, by example at least, by the way the CIA fought the Soviets.

9/11 was only the ‘beginning’ of the Afghan war in the most simplistic understanding. As @johnpilger and @AbbyMartin have shown, the US were meddling in Afghanistan as early as the 1970s. All without serious mainstream journalistic scrutiny. #Wikileaks would have changed that.

As @SeymourHersh says, getting mainstream journalism interest is not straightforward, or guaranteed, no matter how big the story. The story of Abu Ghraib showed this: the photos got the story published, but also limited it: the Corporals got punished, the Generals escaped.

If the US really wants no more ‘9/11s’ they would do better to watch their foreign policy extremes than to spend more and more on monitoring their potential ‘enemies’. They should encourage #Wikileaks, not destroy them. #Wikil are better value than the CIA and FBI.

Julian Assange, like @snowden is no anarchist. He helped Aust law enforcement track pedophiles. Wikileaks would have no problem helping law enforcement track terrorists carrying out dangerous attacks. They simply realise that corrupt officials are a strategic weakness to a nation

The CIA has the ability to track the US enemies, but no ability to address the root causes that cause people to hate the US. #Wikileaks, by enabling corruption prosecutions, does have that ability. In effect they protect the US better than the CIA. Perhaps that explains the hate.

The present USG is like a bomb disposal technician, deciding to ‘cut the red wire, or the blue wire’. One choice is to stifle all dissent, the other to allow it to flourish, and when appropriate, act on it.

Whichever they chose, they will likely get the result they deserve.

I tried for over two years to get mainstream journalist interest in what I saw as the ‘really big issue’ in the #Afghanfiles : High level ADF and Govt collusion (in the coverups of war crimes, et al). I’m incredibly grateful to @DanielMOakes and @abc730 who eventually ran it.

The world needs #Wikileaks and people like Julian Assange. We have nothing to fear by govt corruption being exposed, and a lot to lose if they end up with a ‘blank cheque’ to dictate our future.

The scandal that was the Iraq War, based on deliberately falsified information, should be lesson enough, but there are many more examples. We are increasingly led by criminals, not statesman. Everyone should fight for #Assange. God knows, he fought for us.
#WhyWikileaksMatters