"More candidly, Amano noted the importance of maintaining a certain 'constructive ambiguity' about his plans, at least until he took over for DG ElBaradei in December 2009."
In other words, the emerging picture of Amano is of a bureaucrat eager to bend in directions favored by the United States and Israel, especially regarding Iran's nuclear program. Amano's behavior surely contrasts with how the more independent-minded ElBaradei resisted some of Bush's key claims about Iraq's supposed nuclear weapons program, denouncing some documents as forgeries.
Today, with some Republican presidential contenders falling over themselves to bond with Israel over its desire to attack Iran, this sort of detail puts the IAEA report into a fuller context that can help American voters judge whether another war is necessary or whether they're being misled again by hyped allegations.
These cables, which Manning allegedly gave to WikiLeaks, were first spotlighted by the Guardian newspaper in the U.K. in 2010. However, because the full cables were posted on the Internet, I could dig through them to find additional details, such as Amano asking for more U.S. money.
Without this level of "ground truth," Americans would be at the mercy of the major U.S. news media, which seems as much on board for a war with Iran as it was for war with Iraq. [For more on this topic, see Consortiumnews.com's "Dà ©jà vu Over Iran Nuke Charges" and "Big Media's Double Standards on Iran."]
Slaughtering Iraqis
Another example of how the material allegedly leaked by Manning helped educate the American people was the infamous gun-barrel video of U.S. attack helicopters mowing down seemingly defenseless Iraqi men, including two Reuters journalists, as they walked down a Baghdad street.
Not only did a U.S. military helicopter gunship slaughter the men amid macho jokes and chuckling -- apparently after mistaking a couple of cameras for weapons -- but the American attackers then blew away several Iraqis who arrived in a van and tried to take one of the wounded newsmen to a hospital. Two children in the van were badly wounded.
"Well, it's their fault for bringing their kids into a battle," one American remarked.
The videotaped incident -- entitled "Collateral Murder" by Wikileaks -- occurred on July 12, 2007, in the midst of President George W. Bush's much-heralded troop "surge," which the U.S. news media has widely credited for reducing violence in Iraq and bringing something close to victory for the United States.
But the U.S. press corps rarely mentions that the "surge" represented one of the bloodiest periods of the war. Beyond the horrific -- and untallied -- death toll of Iraqis, about 1,000 U.S. soldiers died during Bush's "surge" of an additional 30,000 troops into Iraq.
It's also unclear that the "surge" deserves much if any credit for the gradual decline in Iraqi violence, which had already reached turning points in 2006 -- before the "surge" -- with the death of al-Qaeda leader Musab al-Zarqawi, the U.S.-funded Sunni Awakening against al-Qaeda in Iraq, and the de facto ethnic cleansing of Iraqi cities with Sunnis and Shiites moving into separate neighborhoods.
Further putting the sectarian killing on a downward path was the Iran-brokered agreement with militant Shiite leader Moktada al-Sadr to have his militia stand down in exchange for an Iraqi government commitment to insist on a firm timetable for total U.S. military withdrawal, a process that has just been completed.
However, the U.S. news media continues to repeat the conventional wisdom about how U.S. troops protected Iraqis from violence through the "successful surge." The "Collateral Murder" video puts the lie to that smug consensus, showing the "ground truth" of how the "surge" -- and indeed the entire Iraq War -- truly operated.
Many Americans may want to put the unpleasant memories of the Iraq War behind them -- from "shock and awe" and the illegal invasion, to the leveling of Fallujah and the Abu Ghraib atrocities, to the incompetent U.S. occupation, the Haditha murders and the sectarian slaughters -- but a failure to face the reality honestly will only encourage future war crimes of similar or even greater magnitude.
Already, Republicans -- such as Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann and Mitt Romney -- are speaking as casually about going to war with Iran as George W. Bush and Dick Cheney did about war with Iraq.
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