Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
We're on ChaosRadioAustin.org and LRN.
FM.
And on the line, from where I wish I was, Austin, Texas, is Stephen C. Webster.
He's the something or other at RawStory.com.
Welcome to the show, Stephen.
Hey, Scott.
How's it going?
I'm doing great, man.
How are you doing?
I'm doing fantastic.
It's a beautiful December day in Austin.
Aw, man.
Nuts to you.
It's been raining in Los Angeles for like five days in a row.
I think it was in the mid-70s yesterday.
Aw, man.
Leave me alone, jerk.
Hey, what is your title there at RawStory?
I want to get that right.
Senior Editor.
Senior Editor at RawStory.com.
Now, you've got an exclusive article here.
U.S. helped subvert Colombia's Congress on military escalation deal.
Cable shows.
What's the story?
Well, basically, there was a cable composed in November 2008 by a U.S. embassy in Colombia amid the negotiations on a deal where U.S. troops would be stationed in the country.
Now, that wasn't announced until last year and finalized in September.
But it shows back then, I think, less the U.S. kind of influencing a foreign government, but more the willingness of a client state in South America to sort of capitulate to the U.S. and subvert their Congress, subvert their democracy, to go from a major escalation of U.S. military involvement to take that and just rename it.
That's literally all they did, this cable shows.
The U.S. considered this to be a major escalation, and by renaming their program, Colombia changed it to simply an extension of our existing cooperation.
Right.
It's all semantics and truth buried under jargon.
It's true doublespeak.
Well, so what kind of intervention or what kind of cooperation, as they would call it, I guess, was going on there before, and then to what degree was it really escalated here?
Well, the U.S. had been providing strategic support and intelligence.
Of course, there have always been ties between the Central Intelligence and Colombian drug trade.
But that notwithstanding, the New Deal basically puts U.S. troops in Colombian bases, and they said in the cable they didn't want to use the term bases because it sounded too much like a military escalation, to operate drones ostensibly to combat the drug trade, which is currently being run by left- and right-wing militias that may or may not be connected to elements within the current and former administration.
Well, now, geez, you talk about they're flying drones around down there.
Is that already going on?
I guess I'm just naive.
Okay, yeah, that's already going on.
They announced that was happening late summer of last year.
Now, are they armed?
I don't know.
I really don't know.
I'd like to find that out.
But the stated reason was that they were going to provide additional intelligence for the drug war.
I also think that it's got a lot to do with putting pressure on Hugo Chavez.
Colombia shares an eastern border with Venezuela.
And as soon as this deal was announced, Chavez was saying that Colombia was ready to start a war.
It shows Colombia's willingness to literally risk a regional war just to satisfy the U.S. demands.
Amazing.
Well, the government there, is it still Uribe as the president?
I don't even know.
They inaugurated a new president in August.
He's still the same right-wing, America-friendly kind of guy?
Yes, absolutely.
He demanded that we would have peace by reason or force.
Juan Manuel Santos, it says here, the former Secretary of Defense.
But they have their own problems, right?
I mean, last I knew about this, and it's been a long time, honestly, about this question anyway, the FARC controlled an area of Colombia about the size of Switzerland.
And this was a real problem.
It's not so much a secessionist movement or it's a civil war for control over the central government or something, but this is a problem that's not going away from the point of view of the central state.
Now they're going to pick a fight with the Venezuelans?
Well, the FARC was a leftist militia, and the dominant groups right now were connected to the country's military and they were allegedly demobilized in the 2003 to 2006 period.
A lot of human rights groups, Human Rights Watch, alleged that they had been fraudulently disconnected from the government, that they had retained their connection, these right-wing paramilitary groups, basically were soldiers that just put on a different uniform and started funding their operation with drug money, and they've been clashing with the left-wing militants, and basically the civilians are right in the middle.
So Colombia has a really high murder rate, especially Medellin.
But yeah, a lot of the right-wing militant groups have also been cited for antagonizing Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan military.
So yeah, the situation is really spiraling out of control, and adding U.S. soldiers to the mix just made that pot boil hotter.
Yeah, well, it was in the news the other day that the Congress or the Parliament or whatever it is down there in Venezuela had just given more emergency powers to rule by decree to Hugo Chavez, which of course just makes him a lot easier to demonize in the press, which is, you know, they spun it pretty bad here.
Not like it's a good thing or anything, but, you know, they spun it as, you know, more evidence of the perfidity of these terrible people down there.
Well, Chavez was a military man as well.
So, I mean, we've got to realize the overreaching authoritarian mentality of the leaders of pretty much all these countries.
Yes, indeed.
It doesn't appear that the U.S. was actively saying, no, you need to subvert your Congress.
It appears that the U.S. was saying, well, your proposal to subvert your Congress is good.
That sounds fine to us.
That doesn't interrupt our interests.
But I think the most important thing to note about this story, about this cable, is that it kind of just came out of nowhere.
I got curious.
I just started going through them one by one.
It's really easy.
Anybody can do this.
And just find interesting tidbits in these cables and then go do a Google search.
Go do a Google search for keywords in news from the time period that cable was written and start connecting the dots.
Anybody can follow the logical progression of questions that arises from some of the juicier bits in these diplomatic cables.
And anybody, anybody can publicize this stuff.
I really ‑‑ it's shocking to me how the U.S. media has kind of declined in recent weeks on reporting on these cables instead of focusing on this soap opera, this reality show.
You know, the prosecution of Dulé Nassaj, the political circles reacting to WikiLeaks, you know, calling them terrorists and whatnot.
I mean, yeah, that's a story, calling them terrorists.
But it's a better story finding out that Hillary Clinton ordered U.S. diplomats to spy on the United Nations.
I think this is one that I saw on Raw Story, Stephen, was about how one of these cables had the State Department guys, you know, kind of readily admitting that all that hype about, you know, perhaps Iran and Venezuela are going to work together on nuclear technology and maybe Iran is in Venezuela seeking uranium or whatever, they knew that that was a lie.
That was just for the Fox News losers to believe and repeat to each other, quaking in terror.
But they knew that it wasn't true all along.
Sure.
Wasn't that in one of these WikiLeaks?
Didn't you all run a story like that?
Well, we probably did.
We've had dozens of stories on WikiLeaks.
Raw Story has been dedicated to bring that up.
Hey, your phone's messing up and we're going out to break.
So hold it right there.
Everybody, it's Stephen Webster from rawstory.com.
Senior editor there.
We'll be right back.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Wharton and I didn't find it at Raw Story, but here it is in McClatchy Newspapers.
There's no uranium deposits in Venezuela to be sold to the Iranians.
And that was all a bunch of hype, but it made for a good narrative, a good scare story for conservative cowards for a couple of days there, I guess.
And now I think where we left off at the commercial break there, Stephen Webster from rawstory.com, you were saying you guys have been covering a lot of WikiLeaks stories, and I think your first and most important one was Larissa Alexandrovna's about the Iranians trying to blackmail the United States in a war with Iran and their talk of support for terrorist groups against that country.
But I'm sure there's a lot of other important stories there as well.
What have you taken note of?
Well, in recent days, Raw Story has been focused intensely on just reading the latest cables, going through them individually, seeing what's interesting, seeing what lines we can connect with current events or events of the day when that cable is authored.
Just recently we were talking about the MPAA, the RIAA, and the PSA, which is the Business Software Association, or it might be the Software Alliance, lobbying on behalf of their business interests, their members, the French lawmakers to influence their Internet disconnection law.
France has a law that says if a person gets caught downloading illegal material, copyrighted material, three times, they're disconnected from the Internet for a year and fine.
What?
If they get caught on another network after that, during their ban, while they're blacklisted, that data service provider could be fined up to €5,000.
So it's one of the world's most stringent copyright enforcement laws, and the MPAA, according to a cable that WikiLeaks released last week, called it a very important part of their overall strategy.
So here we see U.S. businesses able to influence the laws in a foreign country.
This is not unusual.
Right, yeah.
The most egregious case of that, I think, is all the pressure that the State Department was putting on, probably is still putting on, the governments of Germany, Italy, and Spain to quash any attempt by them to prosecute torture, rendition, kidnapping on their soil, torture their citizens.
Well, and another example that RawStory.com published the other day was a U.S. ambassador threatening to publish a retaliation list of locations where genetically modified foods were being grown around Europe, where right now most genetically modified crops are banned in Europe, and the U.S. has kind of been pushing to get more biotech foods in there, basically exports from Monsanto.
They want to get Monsanto crops growing all over Europe.
So because France, in particular, had been leading the effort to block U.S. efforts to bring these crops into Europe, the U.S. ambassador in the cable recommended that the U.S. strengthen its negotiating hand with France by releasing this list, this retaliation list.
Now they said it should be measured and not vicious because we need it for, like, a long-term thing.
The idea was that if they selectively leaked information about GMO crops in Europe, activists would then go and destroy these crops, and it would cause lawmakers these huge headaches.
He said the quote was, we should cause some pain across Europe.
How very interesting to see how into the corporate warfare the government gets.
They don't see any line between, I guess, you know, somebody with some private interest with a successful lobbying firm and the national interest of the United States.
Certainly not.
They don't see a distinction between the State Department and Monsanto, which I guess is no surprise to anyone, but I like the anecdote.
Yeah, it was effectively a U.S. official threatening diplomatic reprisal if they didn't act according to the wishes of a major U.S. biotech firm.
Well, and you guys also pointed out over at Raw Story that Julian Assange, back in October of 2009, mentioned that he had five gigs of Bank of America e-mails and Lord knows what technology there and brought that back up.
Apparently that's what the insurance file is, or maybe not.
Maybe that's all the State Department files.
I don't know.
But this has come back up, and I think it's probably worth noting, too, Stephen, that on TV the way they talked about this is they quoted Assange out of context saying that, you know, we could bring down an American bank, and they made it sound like he was saying, we're going to steal all the money of everybody who's an American citizen who's got some money in a Bank of America account, when all he was saying was, you know, the executives could get in trouble for the things that they'd done.
He was, you know, some James Bond villain who's got some, you know, Die Hard 3 plan to steal all the money out of all the Bank of America accounts.
But that was the way CNN put it, basically.
But what can you tell us?
Do you know anything more about this, the rumored Bank of America cash that WikiLeaks is sitting on?
No, I really don't know anything more than anybody else.
The thing is, Raw Story kind of got the scoop, but in sort of a quasi-Internet scoop sort of way.
There was a Forbes interview that was published where Assange said, oh, well, we have this information that could bring down a financial institution or two.
Right.
But the interviewer didn't go looking to see if, you know, maybe that had been mentioned before.
So the Forbes piece is out and the whole mainstream press is talking about it.
And I thought, wait a second, I remember reading something about this a year ago because I've been following WikiLeaks since they first showed up on the scene.
I thought, you know, a technology platform for the anonymous release of secret information.
How brilliant is that?
Right.
Here we are, and I just happen to remember, hey, wait a second, there was a thing a while back, a really quick search.
Yeah, what do you know, Computer World had it.
So the whole mainstream press is talking about financial institutions could it be.
And I'm like, well, power of the Internet.
Here you go.
Influence coverage that day, Bank of America, their stock dropped 10% by that afternoon.
Wow, yeah, because people assume that whatever is going on there is criminal.
And if the secret gets out, we might be ruined.
That's probably a safe assumption.
It remains to be seen.
We'll find out.
But I think this plays to the broader issue that's at stake right now, which is the freedom of the Internet.
Not just freedom of the press, but freedom of the Internet.
You probably noted that yesterday the SEC passed the so-called net neutrality laws, which was just a great, great travesty.
Yeah, it's going to protect neutrality of traffic on the public Internet.
But 10 years from now, the Internet is not going to be on the public Internet.
The Internet is going to be on the super tiers.
What does that mean?
Well, the super tiers, basically the regulations are going to allow certain types of communication to be prioritized.
Now, the telecoms are going to have to justify what communication gets prioritized.
But the first thing that's probably going to go is their video services.
And so you're going to start seeing tiered packages where if you want to get Netflix on your Internet, you're going to have to pay an extra $1.95 to your ISP in addition to paying your Netflix service.
Or Hulu will try and compete in that arena.
And the Comcast NBCU merger is going to play into the politics of how net neutrality and how the development of these super tiers emerges.
But net neutrality regulations in the United States are just the beginning.
All around the world, ostensibly modernized countries are cracking down on their Internet and bringing their laws into sync with effectively what China has.
The United States is doing that plain as day.
We've been using ICE to shut down hip-hop websites all over the place.
And nobody is giving these domain owners any reason why they're being shut down other than, well, general copyright.
You know, they're not like, hey, take this material down or else.
Well, no, those hip-hop websites and the torrent sites and stuff, I read something the other day about how the affidavit was finally released or the indictment or whatever it was was finally released and how the Homeland Security agent on the case had no idea what he was talking about whatsoever.
It was classifying all these websites and torrent files and search engines and whatever.
It was all the same thing.
And, yeah, well, if the Internet was going to be free, it would be in America.
But, you know, if we don't get angry and fight back about things like this, it's going to be just like Joe Lieberman said, like China.
Just like I said.
All right, well, thanks, everybody.
That's Steven Webster.
He's using the Internet for what it's worth now at rawstory.com.
Cheers.
