Blood on whose hands in Afghanistan?

Accusations from Obama administration officials and the media that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and his sources have “blood on their hands” for revealing information on US military operations and informants in Afghanistan are contemptible slanders. Responsibility for blood spilled in Afghanistan lies with the US government, which launched the war.

Such accusations are all the more repugnant as the Obama administration is openly preparing an escalation of US military bloodletting in Afghanistan. Yesterday, a New York Times’ front-page article was headlined “Targeted Killing is New US Focus in Afghanistan.” It praised Task Force 373, the covert death squad revealed by the documents published by WikiLeaks, noting that “commando raids” killed “more than 130 significant insurgents” in the last five weeks.

Washington’s latest plans are for mass killings to terrorize the Afghan population into surrender. At last Tuesday’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, Senator Richard Lugar explained: “For the negotiating to be successful, we have to demonstrate strength. As bloody as this sounds, it’s critical that we kill a lot of Taliban.”

The fascistic mindset underlying such plans is no different than that of Hitler and his henchmen as they prepared wars and the repression of resistance forces in Europe.

In today’s degraded political environment, the media—which have systematically and deliberately concealed the crimes revealed by WikiLeaks—are lending themselves to the campaign against Assange. In a press conference last Thursday, Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Assange and his sources “might have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family.”

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