Government Lies Exposed

Here are some clear reasons why the Wikileaks disclosures are relevant:

Daniel Ellsberg : Antiwar Radio with Scott Horton and Charles Goyette:

"Ellsberg: That’s true; you’ve put it well. Actually I’ve had a laugh over some of the statements of the administration which take the form, “We’ve learned nothing new from these.” Well, duh. You know, surprise. These are their own reports. They’re not supposed to be seeing something new from their own reports that hopefully they’ve been reading over the years.

But when President Obama says, “Well, this has all been a matter of public discussion before” – yes, as you say, it’s been charged by Afghans that civilians were being killed; it’s been charged by President Karzai that civilians were being killed and that it was being covered-up. But that’s been accompanied by official denials that we were hitting civilians, or statements, “We are investigating,” which itself is almost surely untrue. There’s no evidence of real investigations in these many thousands of pages of documents. But what is true is that a lot of the reporting was perfectly knowledgeable that civilians were being killed and that official denials were false."

...

Ellsberg: In other words, we have been making life hell – literally hell – for Afghanistan, not just for two years here, not for ten years, but for thirty years.  The quotes you’re talking about from Brezinski go back to 1979 and 1980, and for all that period we have been fueling conflict in Afghanistan of a kind that did not exist before the Soviets were provoked to come in.  It’s a terrible, terrible thing we’ve been doing, and it’s really time to stop.

There’s a spill of blood, like the spill of oil in the gulf, that’s been beneath the surface, like the oil, for so long and one thing these reports do – which the administration, of course, has not – is to bring that flood of blood near the surface, where we can see it a little.  It’s really brought it into public consciousness where I hope it really will make a difference.