Who Is Investigating [WikiLeaks]?

The circumstances surrounding the ongoing efforts of the invaders, who are still busy bolstering their occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan, draw attention to the following two issues.

First, news of war-crime trials of soldiers accused in civilian killings, based on documented cases by countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom, is noteworthy considering that some individuals already have been convicted and sentenced in this context.

Second, following the suspicious publication of some documents about the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the aforementioned countries, along with others such as Australia, have announced their own investigations into the leaked documents.

These countries attempt to portray this sequence of events as evidence of their well-functioning democracies — even calling on other countries to follow their example. However, an examination of their response betrays other realities.

1) Countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom are obligated to reduce their involvement and complete their withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan in accordance with the demands of the people and the governments of those countries as well as signed treaties. It seems, however, that excuses are being made — such as war-crime tribunals and investigation of WikiLeaks documents — to lay the ground for an ongoing occupation of Iraq and interventions in its internal affairs. Through these activities, these countries try to reduce the populace’s wrath toward the occupying forces’ atrocities.

2) It is also worth noting that the occupying countries form domestic investigative committees to review the issues raised, effectively barring international organizations and other investigative groups from looking into the cases of atrocities committed by the occupiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. This scheme has resulted in minimal disclosure of atrocities and of the intentions behind the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan by countries such as the United Kingdom and the United States. Those who invoked preemptive strategy to attack and occupy Iraq and Afghanistan now resort to preemptive trial tactics to keep their atrocities from being investigated. In other words, under the guise of pursuing justice in human rights violation cases, they effectively and rampantly violate human rights by preventing the formation of international investigative bodies in these cases.

3) One of the considerations in forming the so-called war-crime tribunals addressing accusations in Iraq and Afghanistan has been to spare the main perpetrators from justice, namely, the top officials from the United States, the United Kingdom and other NATO allies. These countries know that the world demands that the main war perpetrators face justice; thus by forming phony war-crime tribunals and trying a few low-key soldiers, they forestall the world’s demand. The important point is that the publication of leaked documents such as those on WikiLeaks is nothing but an instrument to vindicate top officials and convict low-key military or political officials.

Considering the points raised here, it suffices to say that the occupiers’ orchestrating their own investigative committees and trying a few soldiers for war crimes in Iraq have revealed the occupiers’ hand: They intend to prolong their presence and involvement in the affairs of Iraq and Afghanistan as well as cover up the real perpetrators of these atrocities. All of this, of course, is performed with the beautifully sounding rhetoric of the struggle for human rights.