Al-anwar Newspaper English news in Australia
By: MRT
The US war campaign in Afghanistan was a “great 20-year lie” that only benefited the US military-industrial complex and private contractors. he claimed this Wednesday to MRT the editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, Kristinn Hrafnsson. As the journalist pointed out, what is currently surprising is not the ongoing withdrawal of US troops and their allies from Afghan territory, but the fact that the mainstream media will not notice the “lies” that prolonged the conflict.
WikiLeaks published a set of documents that “painted a true picture of what was happening in Afghanistan 11 years ago“Hrafnsson recalled, referring to the so-called ‘Afghanistan War Diaries’, a collection of internal US military records, diplomatic cables and CIA documents spanning the period between January 2004 and December 2009.
The leak, which included more than 91,000 documents, was considered one of the largest in US military history and led to the arrest and prosecution of Bradley Manning (later Chelsea Manning) – a former intelligence analyst who provided the classified information – and put the organization and its founder, Julian Assange, in the crosshairs of Washington.
However, despite the release of the documents, somehow the general perception of the Afghan war did not change and “the lies continued,” said the editor-in-chief, calling the situation “staggering.” “It is extremely surprising how long this lasted“he opined, adding that the conflict became a” forgotten war, “overshadowed by another US military campaign: the Iraq War.
He explained that the debates about what was really happening in the Afghan territory were “largely avoided” until The Washington Post revealed it again. to post in 2019 ‘The Afghanistan Papers’. Those key person interviews and unpublished memos painted a picture of a sustained effort by various US administrations to mislead the public about engagement in Afghanistanadded. Hrafnsson accused the Western media, which did not pay attention to reality, of being “complicit in hiding this truth” and of allowing it. “In my opinion, journalists have to do a great soul-searching,” he said.
The WikiLeaks editor said that ultimately it was the US military industrial complex that benefited from what appears to be a tremendous waste of money. “More than a trillion dollars went into the pockets of the US military industrial complex and from private contractors who were supposedly training the Afghan Police, “he explained, adding that the largest arms manufacturers saw” tenfold “the value of their shares during the nearly 20-year war.
According to Hrafnsson, the truth about the war has today been laid bare for the whole world to see, as Washington and its allies are frantically withdrawing from Afghanistan, which fell into the hands of the Taliban.* in just a few weeks. However, this is unlikely to change the political course of Western elites, who they still prefer to “punish those who tell the truth” instead of drawing lessons from his own mistakes, he said.
“The war that is now is the war against journalism and a war against Julian Assange, who has yet to spend time in jail in London,” he declared, adding that Assange’s prosecution is “political.” “It is no longer about the law … Will the truth matter there? I doubt it,” he concluded.
