Julian Assange Bradley Manning
The admirable Glenn Greenwald has written an aritcle about why the Obama Administration’s efforts to extend the occupation of Iraq failed. It seems that the release by WikiLeaks of a cable that revealed a war crime by the U.S. military turned the Iraqi parliament against the idea of giving legal immunity to U.S. troops. Greenwald explains:
- That cable was released by WikiLeaks in May, 2011, and, as McClatchy put it at the time, “provides evidence that U.S. troops executed at least 10 Iraqi civilians, including a woman in her 70s and a 5-month-old infant, then called in an airstrike to destroy the evidence, during a controversial 2006 incident in the central Iraqi town of Ishaqi.” The U.S. then lied and claimed the civilians were killed by the airstrike. Although this incident had been previously documented by the U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, the high-profile release of the cable by WikiLeaks generated substantial attention (and disgust) in Iraq, which made it politically unpalatable for the Iraqi government to grant the legal immunity the Obama adminstration was seeking. Indeed, it was widely reported at the time the cable was released that it made it much more difficult for Iraq to allow U.S. troops to remain beyond the deadline under any conditions.
This is why, as I explained in an earlier post, leftists are opposed to government secrecy. When people know what governments are actually trying to do, they will tend to oppose those actions.
Game over in Iraq. Unfortunately, the imperialist beast is still far from dead.
The Spanish Prisoner 
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