Western Civilization Has Shed Its Values

by , December 06, 2010

Western Civilization no longer upholds the values it proclaims, so what is the basis for its claim to virtue?

For example, the U.S. print and TV media and the U.S. government have made it completely clear that they have no regard for the First Amendment. Consider CNN’s Wolf Blitzer’s reaction to the leaked diplomatic cables that reveal how the U.S. government uses deceptions, bribes, and threats to control other governments and to deceive the American and other publics. Blitzer is outraged that information revealing the U.S. government’s improprieties reached the people, or some of them. As Alexander Cockburn wrote, Blitzer demanded that the U.S. government take the necessary steps to make certain that journalists and the American people never again find out what their government is up to.

The disregard for the First Amendment is well established in the U.S. media, which functions as a propaganda ministry for the government. Remember the NSA leak given to the New York Times that the George W. Bush regime was violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and spying on Americans without obtaining warrants from the FISA court? The New York Times spiked the story for one year and did not release it until after Bush’s reelection. By then, the Bush regime had fabricated a legal doctrine that “authorized” Bush to violate U.S. law.

Glenn Greenwald writing at Salon has exposed the absence of moral standards among WikiLeaks’ critics. WikiLeaks’ critics could not make it clearer that they do not believe in accountable government. And to make certain that the government is not held accountable, WikiLeaks’ critics are calling for every possible police state measure, including extra-judicial murder, to stamp out anyone who makes information available that enables the citizenry to hold government accountable.

The U.S. government definitely does not believe in accountable government. Among the first things the Obama regime did was to make certain that there would be no investigation into the Bush regime’s use of lies, fabricated “intelligence,” and deception of the American public and the United Nations in order to further its agenda of conquering the independent Muslim states in the Middle East and turning them into U.S. puppets. The Obama regime also made certain that no member of the Bush regime would be held accountable for violating U.S. and international laws, for torturing detainees, for war crimes, for privacy violations or for any of the other criminal acts of the Bush regime.

As the cables leaked by a patriotic American to WikiLeaks reveal, the U.S. government was even able to prevent accountable government in the UK by having British prime minister Brown “fix” the official Chilcot Inquiry into the deceptions used by former prime minister Tony Blair to lead the British into serving as mercenaries in America’s wars. The U.S. was able to do this because the British prime minister does not believe in accountable government either.

The leaked documents show that the last thing the U.S. government wants anywhere is a government that is accountable to its own citizens instead of to the U.S. government.

The U.S. government’s frontal assault on freedom of information goes well beyond WikiLeaks and shutting down its host servers. In a Dec. 2 editorial, “Wave Good-bye to Internet freedom,” the Washington Times reports that Federal Communications Commission chairman Julius Genachowski has “outlined a plan to expand the federal government’s power over the Internet.”

The obvious, but unasked, question is: Why does the U.S. government fear the American people and believe that only news that is managed and spun by the government is fit to print? Is there an agenda afoot to turn citizens into subjects?

Perhaps the most discouraging development is the accusation that is being spread via the Internet that Julian Assange is a dupe or even a covert agent used by the CIA and Mossad to spread disinformation that furthers U.S. and Israeli agendas. This accusation might come from intelligence services striving to protect governments by discrediting the leaked information. However, it has gained traction because some of the cables contain false information. Some have concluded, incorrectly, that the false information was put into the documents for the purpose of being leaked.

There is another explanation for the false information. Diplomats concerned with advancing their careers learn to tell their bosses what they want to hear, whether true or false. Diplomats understand that the U.S. government has agendas that it cannot declare and that they are expected to support these agendas by sending in reports that validate the undeclared agendas. For example, the U.S. government cannot openly say that it is endeavoring to create a climate of opinion that gives the U.S. a green light for eliminating the independent Iranian government and re-establishing an American puppet state. U.S. “diplomats,” a.k.a. spies, understand this and fabricate the information that supports the agenda.

In my opinion, the most important of all the cables leaked is the secret directive sent by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to 33 U.S. embassies and consulates ordering U.S. diplomats to provide credit card numbers, email addresses, phone, fax and pager numbers, frequent-flyer account numbers, and biographic and biometric information including DNA information on U.N. officials from the secretary-general down, including “heads of peace operations and political field missions.”

The directive has been characterized as the spy directive, but this is an unusual kind of spying. Usually, spying focuses on what other governments think, how they are likely to vote on U.S. initiatives, who can be bribed, and on sexual affairs that could be used to blackmail acquiescence to U.S. agendas.

In contrast, the information requested in the secret directive is the kind of information that would be used to steal a person’s identity.

Why does the U.S. government want information that would enable it to steal the identities of U.N. officials and impersonate them?

The U.S. government loves to pretend that its acts of naked aggression are acts of liberation mandated by “the world community.” The world community has been less supportive of U.S. aggression since it learned that the Bush regime lied about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Consequently, the U.N. has not given Washington the green light Washington wants for a military assault on Iran. Neither has the U.N. given Washington the extreme sanctions that it wants the world community to impose on Iran.

As the U.N. refused Washington’s menu of sanctions, Washington unilaterally added its own sanction package to the U.N. sanctions, to the dismay of the Russians and other governments who believed that they had arrived at a compromise with Washington over the Iran sanctions issue.

Could it be that Washington wants to be able to impersonate U.N. officials and country delegates so that it can compromise them by involving them in fake terrorist plots, communications with terrorists real or contrived, money laundering, sex scandals, and other such means of suborning their cooperation with Washington’s agendas? All the CIA has to do is to call a Taliban or Hamas chief on a U.N. official’s telephone number or send a compromising fax with a U.N. official’s fax number or have operatives pay for visits to prostitutes with a U.N. official’s credit card number.

The report in the Guardian on Dec. 2 that the CIA drew up the U.N. spy directive signed off by Hillary Clinton is a good indication that the United States government intended to compromise the United Nations and turn the organization, as it has done with so many governments, into a compliant instrument of American policy.

Perhaps there is another plausible explanation of why the U.S. government desired information that would enable it to impersonate U.N. officials, but as a person who had a 25-year career in Washington I cannot think of what it might be.

Read more by Paul Craig Roberts