We kill to liberate, clearly

Wikileaks shames the vast majority of mainstream journalists once again by releasing thousands of pages of active insurgency and counterinsurgency doctrine from the US, UK and Indian military.

The conclusions? When “we” commit terrorism, it’s self-defence. When “they” do it, it’s terrorism.

As usual, most corporate journalists simply republish whatever the Pentagon gives them. They should be more questioning, but then, they wouldn’t be corporate journalists:

The Wikileaks release provides a partial antitote to the shaping of public attitudes by US Gen. Petraeus and others which journalists have uncritically relayed the last two years. Journalists should remember that documents designed to be public, such as the so-called “Petraeus doctrine” published by Chicago University Press in 2007, and publicly promoted by the Pentagon, are sanitized and should be preferentially ignored least journalists find themselves pushing propaganda onto an unsuspecting public.

Example quotes from the Wikileaks material (in this case US Special Forces doctrines).

“[T]he psychological effectiveness of the CSDF [paramilitary] concept starts by reversing the insurgent strategy of making the government the repressor. It forces the insurgents to cross a critical threshold-that of attacking and killing the very class of people they are supposed to be liberating.”

“The United States reserves the right to engage in nonconsensual [extra-territorial] abductions for three specific reasons…”

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