Thursday Reads

Posted: December 30, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: U.S. Politics, Wikileaks | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | 43 Comments

Good Morning!!

The media is all worked up about how badly NY Mayor Michael Bloomberg handled the blizzard that hit the Northeast early this week. Can we please put aside all the talk about this man running for President? He’s really not that bright, judging by his stupidity in the face of a little winter weather. Bloomberg didn’t even have the brains to declare an emergency parking ban so plows could clear the streets! In Boston, parking bans are routinely declared in advance of a big storm.

From the NYT: Inaction and Delays by New York as Storm Bore Down

At 3:58 a.m. on Christmas Day, the National Weather Service upgraded its alert about the snow headed to New York City, issuing a winter storm watch. By 3:55 p.m., it had declared a formal blizzard warning, a rare degree of alarm. But city officials opted not to declare a snow emergency — a significant mobilization that would have, among other things, aided initial snow plowing efforts.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority entered the holiday weekend with modest concerns about the weather. On Friday, it issued its lowest-level warning to subway and bus workers. Indeed, it was not until late Sunday morning, hours after snow had begun to fall, that the agency went to a full alert, rushing to call in additional crew members and emergency workers. Over the next 48 hours, subways lost power on frozen tracks and hundreds of buses wound up stuck in snow-filled streets.

By 4 p.m. Sunday, several inches of snow had accumulated when Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg made a plea for help at his first news conference about the escalating storm: he asked people with heavy equipment and other kinds of towing machinery to call the city’s 311 line to register for work. A full day had gone by since the blizzard warning had been issued.

Yes, you read that correctly. Bloomberg called for help from private contractors DURING the blizzard! What a dope. You’d think New York had never experienced a snowstorm before.

Speaking of stupid, did you catch Floyd Abrams’ op-ed at the WSJ yesterday? Abrams presents his lame arguments against Wikileaks by discussing how the Wikileaks revelations differ from the Pentagon Papers.

In 1971, Daniel Ellsberg decided to make available to the New York Times (and then to other newspapers) 43 volumes of the Pentagon Papers, the top- secret study prepared for the Department of Defense examining how and why the United States had become embroiled in the Vietnam conflict. But he made another critical decision as well. That was to keep confidential the remaining four volumes of the study describing the diplomatic efforts of the United States to resolve the war.

Not at all coincidentally, those were the volumes that the government most feared would be disclosed. In a secret brief filed with the Supreme Court, the U.S. government described the diplomatic volumes as including information about negotiations secretly conducted on its behalf by foreign nations including Canada, Poland, Italy and Norway. Included as well, according to the government, were “derogatory comments about the perfidiousness of specific persons involved, and statements which might be offensive to nations or governments.”

Um…duh. But so what? Is he claiming that the diplomatic cables that major newspapers are publishing are analogous to peace negotiations? Doesn’t Abrams understand that Wikileaks released the cables to these newspapers so that they could make educated journalistic judgments about which parts should be made public and which should be redacted or kept secret?

Furthermore, the analogy that Daniel Ellsberg has made is not between Wikileaks and the Pentagon Papers but between himself and Bradley Manning. They were both whistleblowers who revealed government lies and corruption. As for the diplomatic cables, there is no evidence that Manning gave those to Wikileaks.

Abrams even tries to blame Manning and Assange for the overkill reactions of the Obama administration:

Mr. Assange is no boon to American journalists. His activities have already doomed proposed federal shield-law legislation protecting journalists’ use of confidential sources in the just-adjourned Congress. An indictment of him could be followed by the judicial articulation of far more speech-limiting legal principles than currently exist with respect to even the most responsible reporting about both diplomacy and defense. If he is not charged or is acquitted of whatever charges may be made, that may well lead to the adoption of new and dangerously restrictive legislation. In more than one way, Mr. Assange may yet have much to answer for.

What a load of garbage. Abrams once fought in defense of the first amendment. Now he’s just another enabler of government corruption and lies. I guess he spent too much time hanging out with Judith Miller, because he seems to have adopted her views on journalism. We have every right to know what our corporate-sellout politicians are doing.

Here’s what Emptywheel had to say about Abrams’ piece:

Abrams’ purported rhetorical questions–can anyone doubt that WikiLeaks would have published the diplomatic volumes of the Pentagon Papers? can anyone doubt he wouldn’t have paid the slightest heed to efforts to end the war?–are one of two things that dismantle his entire argument laying the responsibility for the government’s overreaction to Assange with Assange. Because–as Digby has explained at length–we have every reason to doubt whether WikiLeaks would have published the diplomatic volumes of the Pentagon Papers. And we have solid evidence that WikiLeaks would shield really dangerous information.

Because they already have. And because they have now outsourced responsibility for choosing what is dangerous and newsworthy or not to a bunch of newspapers.

Indeed, back before WikiLeaks ceded that role to a bunch of newspapers, WikiLeaks was actually being more cautious with the publication of sensitive information than the NYT was.

So rather than blaming the government and the press for mischaracterizing what WikiLeaks has done here and then using that mischaracterization to justify an overreaction to that mischaracterization, Floyd Abrams just participates in it. WikiLeaks is responsible, Floyd Abrams says, and I’m going to misrepresent what they have done to prove that case.

Abrams either was never a liberal or he lost his liberalism along the way to his current rich and powerful status. He sounds more like a neocon to me.

At Slate, Jack Schaeffer is even more down on Abrams than I am.

Did an imposter steal Floyd Abrams’ identity and use it to sell an op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal? That’s the only explanation I can come up with after reading the First Amendment litigator’s wacky battering of WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange (“Why WikiLeaks Is Unlike the Pentagon Papers”).

Abrams, who represented the New York Times in both the Pentagon Papers and Judith Miller cases, applauds Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg because he withheld four volumes of papers—while releasing 43—because he “didn’t want to get in the way of the diplomacy.” That is, Ellsberg didn’t want to interfere with ongoing and confidential negotiations to end the war. Continuing his “Ellsberg good,” “Assange bad” formulation, Abrams asks, “Can anyone doubt that [Assange] would have made those four volumes [of the Pentagon Papers] public on WikiLeaks regardless of their sensitivity?”

Well, yes, I can doubt that.

Perhaps because Abrams listens to too much NPR or doesn’t read the New York Times very closely, he’s under the misconception that WikiLeaks has published all 251,287 U.S. diplomatic cables it claims to possess. It hasn’t, as NPR noted in a correction yesterday. WikiLeaks has released just 1,942 cables, which makes Assange’s ratio of released-documents to withheld-documents much, much smaller than Ellsberg’s. By that measure, Abrams should regard Assange as a more conscientious leaker than Ellsberg, not less conscientious.

‘Nuff said.

In his latest post at Truthdig, Chris Hedges’ argues that both Orwell and Huxley were right when they wrote their dystopian novels about the future. Now that we’re here, we’ve got the worst of both their worlds.

The two greatest visions of a future dystopia were George Orwell’s “1984” and Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.” The debate, between those who watched our descent towards corporate totalitarianism, was who was right. Would we be, as Orwell wrote, dominated by a repressive surveillance and security state that used crude and violent forms of control? Or would we be, as Huxley envisioned, entranced by entertainment and spectacle, captivated by technology and seduced by profligate consumption to embrace our own oppression? It turns out Orwell and Huxley were both right. Huxley saw the first stage of our enslavement. Orwell saw the second.

We have been gradually disempowered by a corporate state that, as Huxley foresaw, seduced and manipulated us through sensual gratification, cheap mass-produced goods, boundless credit, political theater and amusement. While we were entertained, the regulations that once kept predatory corporate power in check were dismantled, the laws that once protected us were rewritten and we were impoverished. Now that credit is drying up, good jobs for the working class are gone forever and mass-produced goods are unaffordable, we find ourselves transported from “Brave New World” to “1984.” The state, crippled by massive deficits, endless war and corporate malfeasance, is sliding toward bankruptcy. It is time for Big Brother to take over from Huxley’s feelies, the orgy-porgy and the centrifugal bumble-puppy. We are moving from a society where we are skillfully manipulated by lies and illusions to one where we are overtly controlled.

Orwell warned of a world where books were banned. Huxley warned of a world where no one wanted to read books. Orwell warned of a state of permanent war and fear. Huxley warned of a culture diverted by mindless pleasure. Orwell warned of a state where every conversation and thought was monitored and dissent was brutally punished. Huxley warned of a state where a population, preoccupied by trivia and gossip, no longer cared about truth or information. Orwell saw us frightened into submission. Huxley saw us seduced into submission. But Huxley, we are discovering, was merely the prelude to Orwell. Huxley understood the process by which we would be complicit in our own enslavement. Orwell understood the enslavement. Now that the corporate coup is over, we stand naked and defenseless. We are beginning to understand, as Karl Marx knew, that unfettered and unregulated capitalism is a brutal and revolutionary force that exploits human beings and the natural world until exhaustion or collapse.

Hedges is right, IMHO.

As an antidote to the dystopian nightmares Hedges discusses, you might want to check out some idealistic utopian dreams. Alternet has an excerpt of a new book by Richard Fairfield, The Modern Utopian: Alternative Communes of the ’60s and ’70s (Process Media, 2010). It’s pretty interesting. Check it out if you have time.

Returning to grim reality, the WaPo has an article on high unemployment among returning war veterans.

As they return home to the worst labor market in generations, the veterans who are publicly venerated for their patriotism and service are also having a harder time than most finding work, federal data show.

While their nonmilitary contemporaries were launching careers during the nearly 10 years the nation has been at war, troops were repeatedly deployed to desolate war zones. And on their return to civilian life, these veterans are forced to find their way in a bleak economy where the skills they learned at war have little value.

Some experts say the grim employment landscape confronting veterans challenges the veracity of one of the central recruiting promises of the nation’s all-volunteer force: that serving in the military will make them more marketable in civilian life.

“That [promise] works great in peacetime,” said Lawrence J. Korb, an assistant secretary of defense for manpower under President Ronald Reagan who is now a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. “But that does not work too well in war. . . . If you are in there four years and deployed twice, what kind of skills have you learned other than counterinsurgency?”

Finally, Elizabeth Warren has piece up at Huffpo: New Consumer Agency Is Frightfully Necessary — And Late

No one has missed the headlines: Haphazard and possibly illegal practices at mortgage-servicing companies have called into question home foreclosures across the nation.

The latest disclosures are deeply troubling, but they should not come as a big surprise. For years, both individual homeowners and consumer advocates sounded alarms that foreclosure processes were riddled with problems.

[….]

First, several financial services companies have already admitted that they used “robo-signers,” false declarations, and other workarounds to cut corners, creating a legal nightmare that will waste time and money that could have been better spent to help this economy recover. Mortgage lenders will spend millions of dollars retracing their steps, often with the same result that families who cannot pay will lose their homes.

Second, this mess might well have been avoided if the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau had been in place just a few years ago.

Thanks for being one of the few people advocating for us, Ms. Warren.

Sooooooo…. What are you reading this morning?

Wednesday Reading: Wired Responds to Glenn Greenwald’s Critique of their Bradley Manning Coverage

Posted: December 29, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: indefinite detention, torture, Wikileaks | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | 18 Comments

Bradley Manning

Good Morning! Minkoff Minx is under the weather today, so I thought I’d write a little about the latest Wikileaks/Bradley Manning themed blog war between Glenn Greenwald of Salon and Kevin Poulsen of Wired.

Via Memeorandum, it appears that Glenn Greenwald struck a few nerves when he wrote his recent post accusing Wired of journalistic malpractice, because a response has been posted at the Threat Level blog.

Here is a bit of what Greenwald had to say:

For more than six months, Wired’s Senior Editor Kevin Poulsen has possessed — but refuses to publish — the key evidence in one of the year’s most significant political stories: the arrest of U.S. Army PFC Bradley Manning for allegedly acting as WikiLeaks’ source. In late May, Adrian Lamo — at the same time he was working with the FBI as a government informant against Manning — gave Poulsen what he purported to be the full chat logs between Manning and Lamo in which the Army Private allegedly confessed to having been the source for the various cables, documents and video that WikiLeaks released throughout this year. In interviews with me in June, both Poulsen and Lamo confirmed that Lamo placed no substantive restrictions on Poulsen with regard to the chat logs: Wired was and remains free to publish the logs in their entirety.

Despite that, on June 10, Wired published what it said was only “about 25 percent” of those logs, excerpts that it hand-picked. For the last six months, Poulsen has not only steadfastly refused to release any further excerpts, but worse, has refused to answer questions about what those logs do and do not contain. This is easily one of the worst journalistic disgraces of the year: it is just inconceivable that someone who claims to be a “journalist” — or who wants to be regarded as one — would actively conceal from the public, for months on end, the key evidence in a political story that has generated headlines around the world.

In June, I examined the long, strange and multi-layered relationship between Poulsen and Lamo, and in that piece raised the issue of Wired’s severe journalistic malfeasance in withholding these chat logs.

The Wired article is divided into two parts–the first part written by Wired editor Evan Hanson and the second part written by Poulsen. Greenwald’s point is that Wired is holding back on some of the evidence that led to Manning’s arrest. In his defense of Poulsen, Hanson skirts that issue by appearing to claim that only he and Poulsen know best which parts of the Manning-Lamo logs should be released to the public.

Armchair critics, apparently unhappy that Manning was arrested, have eagerly second-guessed our motives, dreamed up imaginary conflicts and pounded the table for more information: Why would Manning open himself up to a complete stranger and discuss alleged crimes that could send him to prison for decades? How is it possible that Wired.com just happened to have a connection with the one random individual Manning picked out to confide in, only to send him down for it?

Not one single fact has been brought to light suggesting Wired.com did anything wrong in pursuit of this story. In lieu of that, our critics — notably Glenn Greenwald of Salon, an outspoken Wikileaks defender — have resorted to shocking personal attacks, based almost entirely on conjecture and riddled with errors.

Of the chat logs, he writes:

We have already published substantial excerpts from the logs, but critics continue to challenge us to reveal all, ostensibly to fact-check some statements that Lamo has made in the press summarizing portions of the logs from memory (his computer hard drive was confiscated, and he no longer has has a copy).

Our position has been and remains that the logs include sensitive personal information with no bearing on Wikileaks, and it would serve no purpose to publish them at this time.

That doesn’t mean we’ll never publish them, but before taking an irrevocable action that could harm an individual’s privacy, we have to weigh that person’s privacy interest against news value and relevance.

This is a standard journalistic balancing test — not one that we invented for Manning. Every experienced reporter of serious purpose recognizes this, and the principal is also embodied in the Society of Professional Journalists’ code of ethics:

Recognize that gathering and reporting information may cause harm or discomfort. Pursuit of the news is not a license for arrogance…. Only an overriding public need can justify intrusion into anyone’s privacy. Show good taste. Avoid pandering to lurid curiosity.

Hansen claims that Wired is protecting Manning’s privacy by their refusal to publish the remaining 75% of the logs that they have kept secret. But why should we believe that? Aren’t they really protecting Lamo while he (as Greenwald argues), as the only source of knowledgeable information about the contents of the logs:

has been allowed to run around making increasingly sensationalistic claims about what Manning told him; journalists then prominently print Lamo’s assertions, but Poulsen’s refusal to release the logs or even verify Lamo’s statements prevents anyone from knowing whether Lamo’s claims about what Manning said are actually true.

In addition, Greenwald argues that:

There are new, previously undisclosed facts about the long relationship between Wired/Poulsen and a key figure in Manning’s arrest — facts that Poulsen inexcusably concealed [and] Subsequent events gut Poulsen’s rationale for concealing the logs and, in some cases, prove that his claims are false.

And on top of all that, Greewald points out that Poulsen himself reported that Lamo is a “convicted felon” who was “involuntarily hospitalized” for psychiatric problems shortly before his on-line interactions with Manning.

In the second part of Wired’s defense, Poulsen claims that Greenwald’s accusations against him are based on false information:

On Monday, Salon.com columnist Glenn Greenwald unleashed a stunning attack on this publication, and me in particular, over our groundbreaking coverage of WikiLeaks and the ongoing prosecution of the man suspected of being the organization’s most important source. Greenwald’s piece is a breathtaking mix of sophistry, hypocrisy and journalistic laziness.

I can’t wait for Greenwald’s response to that!

Poulsen’s piece is basically a screed in which he accuses Greenwald of multiple violations of journalistic ethics. Poulsen discusses his long-time relationship with Lamo, but as far as I can tell, Poulsen’s only information about Manning comes secondhand from Lamo.

Wired.com was the first to report, last June, on the then-secret arrest of Pfc. Bradley Manning. I learned of the arrest from Adrian Lamo, a well-known former hacker on whom I reported extensively from 2000 to 2002. It was Lamo who turned Manning in to the Army and the FBI, after Manning — isolated and despondent — contacted him online and began confiding the most intimate details of his life, including, but by no means limited to, his relationship with WikiLeaks, and the vast databases he claimed to have provided them.

Co-writer Kim Zetter and I followed up the story four days later with a piece examining Manning’s motives. The Washington Post had just run a fine story about Manning’s state-of-mind: At the time of his discussions with Lamo, he’d been through a bad breakup and had other personal conflicts. But I felt — and still do feel — that it’s a mistake to automatically ascribe Manning’s actions to his feeling depressed. (For one thing, his breakup occurred after the leaking.) There’s an implicit political judgment in that conclusion: that leaking is an aberrant act, a symptom of a psychological disorder. Manning expressed clear and rational reasons for doing what he did, whether one agrees with those reasons or not.

So we went into the logs of the chats Manning held with Lamo — which Lamo had provided Wired and The Washington Post — and pieced together a picture of why Manning took his historic actions, based on his own words (“Suspected Wikileaks Source Described Crisis of Conscience Leading to Leaks”). As a sidebar to the article, we published excerpts from those chat logs.

Poulsen argues that “everything of consequence” about Manning from the logs has already been published. But why should we believe Poulsen when he has a long-time relationship with Lamo and no relationship with Manning?

You’ll have to read the rest to get the entire convoluted explanation. Most troubling to me is that neither Hansen nor Poulsen mentions the treatment that Manning is getting in prison–that by any civilized country’s standards, he is being tortured.

We’ll have to stay tuned for Greenwald’s response to all this. I’ll bet it will be a doozy. Meanwhile, what do you think?

————————————————————————————————————————————-

UPDATE 1 9:42AM Eastern: Greenwald has a response up now. He begins with this:

Last night, Wired posted a two-part response to my criticisms of its conduct in reporting on the arrest of PFC Bradley Manning and the key role played in that arrest by Adrian Lamo. I wrote about this topic twice — first back in June and then again last Sunday. The first part of Wired’s response was from Wired.com Editor-in-Chief Evan Hansen, and the second is from its Senior Editor Kevin Poulsen. Both predictably hurl all sorts of invective at me as a means of distracting attention from the central issue, the only issue that matters: their refusal to release or even comment on what is the central evidence in what is easily one of the most consequential political stories of this year, at least.

That’s how these disputes often work by design: the party whose conduct is in question (here, Wired) attacks the critic in order to create the impression that it’s all just some sort of screeching personality feud devoid of substance. That, in turn, causes some bystanders to cheer for whichever side they already like and boo the side they already dislike, as though it’s some sort of entertaining wrestling match, while everyone else dismisses it all as some sort of trivial Internet catfight not worth sorting out. That, ironically, is what WikiLeaks critics (and The New York Times’ John Burns) did with the release of the Iraq War documents showing all sorts of atrocities in which the U.S. was complicit: they tried to put the focus on the personality quirks of Julian Assange to distract attention away from the horrifying substance of those disclosures. That, manifestly, is the same tactic Wired is using here: trying to put the focus on me to obscure their own ongoing conduct in concealing the key evidence shining light on these events.

In a separate post, I fully address every accusation Hansen and Poulsen make about me as well as the alleged inaccuracies in what I wrote. But I’m going to do everything possible here to ensure that the focus remains on what matters: the way in which Wired, with no justification, continues to conceal this evidence and, worse, refuses even to comment on its content, thus blinding journalists and others trying to find out what really happened here, while enabling gross distortions of the truth by Poulsen’s long-time confidant and source, the government informant Adrian Lamo.

The link to Greenwald’s previous post goes to “page not found.” I’ll update when he fixes the link. About the substance of the argument between Greenwald and Poulsen, Greenwald writes:

The bottom line from Hansen and Poulsen is that they still refuse to release any further chat excerpts or, more inexcusably, to comment at all on — to verify or deny — Lamo’s public statements about what Manning said to him that do not appear in those excerpts. They thus continue to conceal from the public 75% of the Manning-Lamo chat. They refuse to say whether Lamo’s numerous serious accusations about what Manning told him are actually found anywhere in the chat logs. Nor will they provide the evidence to resolve the glaring inconsistencies in Lamo’s many public tales about the critical issues: how he came to speak to Manning, what Lamo did to include these disclosures, and what Manning said about his relationship to WikiLeaks and his own actions. Every insult Wired spouts about me could be 100% true and none of it changes the core fact: Wired is hiding the key evidence about what took place here, thus allowing Lamo to spout all sorts of serious claims without any check and thus drive much of the reporting about WikiLeaks.

UPDATE 2: Jane Hamsher also has a post up on this story. She writes:

You would have to have been f&#%ing r#*&rded to believe that in an era of unprecedented intolerance for press leaks of any kind, that the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Division, the FBI, the NSA, the U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations and the Cyber Defense Crime Center knowingly and willingly not only allowed convicted hacker Adrian Lamo to hold on to chat logs that contained sensitive classified information, but to distribute them unexpurgated to the press.

I only see two possibilities. One, Wired had the chat logs before Lamo made any calls to authorities, and was a party to whatever subsequently happened. Or two, the copies of the chat logs that have been given to the press have been done so at the instigation of the US government, and with their full approval.

Of course there’s always c) all of the above, which is what I’m guessing is the most likely scenario.

Firedoglake has posted a database of all the available information on interactions between Manning, Lamo, and the U.S. government.

Stay tuned….

Wikileaks, Julian Assange, and Allegations of Sex Crimes

Posted: December 22, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: Feminists, U.S. Politics, Violence against women, Wikileaks, Women's Rights | Tags: , , , | 95 Comments

For the past three days, I’ve been reading as much as I could about the claims and counterclaims about Julian Assange and his alleged sexual misconduct during a visit to Sweden in August, 2010.

I have to be honest: when I first heard about the charges, I thought they were extremely convenient for the governments and corporations who want Assange and his organization silenced.

It should go without saying that I do not approve of Assange’s behavior if the allegations against him are true. Nevertheless, I still believe the allegations are very convenient for the powers that be. The elites who control our government and the powerful multinational corporations that have been “victims” of Wikileaks couldn’t care less whether Assange committed sex crimes in Sweden. All they care about is stopping publication of leaks that so far have revealed and/or substantiated suspicions about some pretty shocking behavior by governments around the world.

Furthermore, now that we have at least some information (filtered by Swedish police and prosecutors and journalists) about the basis for the allegations of sexual assault, I think that reactions by conservative Swedish politicians and the media in the U.S. and Great Britain have been far out of proportion to the usual government and media responses to allegations like the ones described by the Guardian.

In fact, according to Amnesty International, Sweden usually is terrible at prosecuting and convicting accused rapists (h/t Dakinikat for the link).

…an Amnesty International report on rape in the Nordic Countries took Sweden to task last autumn for what the human rights organization saw as an abysmally low conviction rate for rape cases.

Released in September 2008, the Amnesty report – Case Closed – examines issues surrounding rape and human rights in Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland.

Despite Sweden’s considerable emphasis on women’s rights, currently ranking an impressive 3rd place in the UN global gender-related development index, instances of reported violence against women are showing no signs of abating.

[….]

Amnesty’s most damning criticism of Sweden relates to the considerable disparity between the number of rapes reported and the conviction rate.

Case Closed highlights the damning evidence that, despite the number of rapes reported to the police quadrupling over the past 20 years, the percentage of reported rapes ending in conviction is markedly lower today than it was in 1965.

There’s a lot more information at the link. BTW, anyone who has read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and the two sequel might have suspected that Sweden isn’t that good at dealing with violence against women.

Knowing Sweden’s usual treatment of rape allegations, are we really supposed to believe that suddenly Sweden is so deeply concerned about two women who had consensual sex with the same man followed by unwanted sexual behavior, that they asked Interpol to issue a red alert to find this guy?

Are we to believe that it is SOP for Great Britain, without being asked to do so by Sweden, arrests and imprisons the man before releasing him on hundreds of thousands of dollars cash bail based solely on these accusations by two women?

A number of self-described feminist bloggers (for some background, see this post by Valhalla at Corrente) are outraged that Assange has not voluntarily returned to Sweden–not to face charges, because there aren’t any yet–but to talk to a prosecutor who allegedly had refused to meet with him for the five weeks that Assange spent in Sweden waiting for the meeting to happen.

Where were these feminists in November when a young woman was violently raped in her high school Muncie, Indiana and school officials refused to even report it to police and allowed the perpetrator to leave school and go home and clean up and change clothing? What other rapes of powerless young women have these bloggers highlighted in the past couple of months? Maybe they’ve been busy doing this, I don’t know. But I’ve searched for blog links to the case in Muncie and haven’t found any posts by the bloggers who are now so outraged about Julian Assange.

I think the allegations against Assange and the effects they may have on Wikileaks itself are worth discussing. Personally, I’m not absolutely sure how I feel about all of it yet. But I’ll share my thoughts so far.

First, I think Julian Assange and Wikileaks have revealed a great deal of important information that has struck fear in the hearts of governments and powerful corporations. I see that as a good thing.

Second, I think Julian Assange is probably a very arrogant, egotistical man who is very likely lacking in social skills. I base that on what I’ve read about his childhood as well as quotes from people who have known him. I won’t go into that in detail here–I’ll just stipulate that he is probably difficult for other people to get along with. He may even be a complete a$$hole, for all I know. But he has accomplished something that I consider valuable.

Third, from what I know of the two women who accused Assange, they appear to be strong, powerful women who are capable of standing up for themselves. I realize that rape is traumatic for anyone. I’m just saying that these women are not poverty-stricken, homeless sixteen-year-olds like the woman who was raped in Muncie. These two women have good attorneys and they have powerful supporters, including a Swedish government official. I think it is a shame that they have been bashed on the internet and reportedly threatened by anonymous people. Unfortunately, women who report sex crimes against famous people often get treated pretty badly by the public and the media. But I’ll be willing to bet these two women knew that before they even got involved with Assange. If these allegations are true, then I hope they will both get up in court and testify against Assange. At the same time, Assange has the right to defend himself against their allegations. That’s how it works.

Fourth, as I said at the beginning of this post, these events are playing into the hands of both the power elites. The arguments in the media and on the internet about sex crimes charges is overwhelming the information coming out of Wikileaks to the point that I have seen a number of people actually claiming that nothing of importance has been revealed!

Fifth, the bloggers who are arguing so vehemently that Assange is a vicious rapist and must return to Sweden are also playing into Assange’s hands. He himself claims that the publicity over these charges has only helped him and his organization.

Finally, I think Julian Assange is right to fight extradition to Sweden, and I hope he continues to do so. I think it is highly likely that if he does return to Sweden, the Swedish government will hand him over to the U.S. Officials in the U.S., including Vice President Biden, that have deliberately referred to Assange as a “terrorist.” A number of U.S. politicians have state publicly that Assange should be assassinated. The President of the U.S. claims the right to detain indefinitely and even assassinate anyone from any country whom he designates as a “terrorist.” Therefore, if I were Julian Assange, I would fight tooth and nail to stay out of the hands of the U.S. government.

Those are my initial reactions after spending much of my time for a few days reading everything I could about these issues. Let’s talk about it here at Sky Dancing. Maybe we can manage to look at more than one side of these issues and draw some reasonable conclusions.

Before we get started, please watch these two videos from Democracy Now. They consist of a debate between Naomi Wolf and Jaclyn Friedman, two self-described feminists with different points of view on Assange and the sex crime allegations.

Democracy Now interview with Naomi Wolf and Jaclyn Friedman, part 1

Democracy Now interview with Naomi Wolf and Jaclyn Friedman, part 2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prQvxh47ijQ

Have at it! What do you think?

Julian Assange Out of Jail

Posted: December 16, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: Diplomacy Nightmares, Foreign Affairs, Wikileaks | Tags: , , | 24 Comments

In the weirdest set of moves yet, the U.S. government is trying to build a legal case against Assange.  I’ve rightly heard this compared to jailing Carl Bernstein for “the Deep Throat” leaks. Carl Bernstein was at least an American.

Justice Department officials are trying to find out whether Mr. Assange encouraged or even helped the analyst, Pfc. Bradley Manning, to extract classified military and State Department files from a government computer system. If he did so, they believe they could charge him as a conspirator in the leak, not just as a passive recipient of the documents who then published them.

Among materials prosecutors are studying is an online chat log in which Private Manning is said to claim that he had been directly communicating with Mr. Assange using an encrypted Internet conferencing service as the soldier was downloading government files. Private Manning is also said to have claimed that Mr. Assange gave him access to a dedicated server for uploading some of them to WikiLeaks.

Adrian Lamo, an ex-hacker in whom Private Manning confided and who eventually turned him in, said Private Manning detailed those interactions in instant-message conversations with him.

For some reason, Eric Holder is taking a bigger interest in this than he did in our breaking the Geneva Convention agreements on torture and the West Wing’s orders to assassinate a U.S. citizen abroad.  What a warped sense of Justice we’ve developed in this country!

Every one from Sweden to the Crown Prosecution service have argued against bail for Assange.    Sweden was not allowed to make any arguments or offer any evidence as is custom in British Courts.

There was an early sign that the day would go in Assange’s favour when Ouseley said: “The history of the way it [the case] has been dealt with by the Swedish prosecutors would give Mr Assange some basis that he might be acquitted following a trial.”

American legal action could further complicate the situation. As you hear in the video above, Assange vowed to continue his work.   Here’s one interesting result from the leaks of some of the cables.  CNN reports that Zimbabwe’s first lady is suing because it was leaked she had dealings in illegal diamonds. You may recall the blood diamond issue from the movie with Leonardo DiCaprio.

The cables in question, from the U.S. Embassy in Harare, claimed that Zimbabwe’s first lady was among the senior Zanu-PF and government officials who were gaining huge profits from the smuggling of diamonds in the eastern part of Zimbabwe.

“The diamonds that are sold to regime members and elites are sold for freshly printed Zimbabwean notes issued by the RBZ (Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe),” the paper quoted a 2008 cable as saying.

“The cables suggested that (the head of the bank, Gideon) Gono kept the money printing press running to finance the purchase of diamonds and this could have accelerated hyperinflation, which eventually rendered the Zimbabwe dollar worthless,” the newspaper charged.

Grace Mugabe said in the suit that the report published Sunday by The Standard was “false, scandalous, malicious and bent on damaging (her) reputation.”

The documents said the newspaper wrongly suggested that Grace Mugabe had “used her position as the First Lady to access diamonds clandestinely, enriching herself in circumstances in which the country was facing serious foreign currency shortages, which amounts should have been channeled to the fiscus.

AlterNet has an interesting interview up with peace activist Daniel Ellsberg who leaked the Pentagon Papers to the NYT during the Nixon years.  Ellsberg believes the law that Holder is using to try to prosecute Assange is unconstitutional.

Yet, as CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin pointed out earlier this month, the law no more shields journalists than anybody else from prosecution for the dissemination of classified information. For instance, in the case decided by the Supreme Court regarding the New York Times’ decision to publish the Pentagon Papers leaked by Ellsberg, the court held only that the government did not have the right to keep the Times from publishing the papers, but the government still had the right to prosecute the Times after classified information from the papers was published in its pages. So, why try to make a distinction, however polemical?

“The law they’re using makes no distinction between journalists, the press — it applies to readers of the New York Times, just as well as to the publishers, the journalists and the leakers,” Ellsberg explained. “The language of that law makes no distinction. Now, that’s why they’ve been reluctant to use it — because it’s so broad, that it’s almost clearly unconstitutional.”

“They have tried to use the law — mostly unsuccessfully — but they’ve tried to use the law against leakers,” Ellsberg continued. “They’ve never tried to use it against a publisher. So this would be a first.”

In other words, if the Justice Department can successfully brand Assange as something other than a journalist or a publisher, it would not appear to be violating the perception of freedom of expression held by most Americans.

Exactly.  We’re talking freedom of the Press here. The Republicans continue to shake their fists and spew weird diatribes at Assange.  The weirdest to date was the P Woman accusing Assange of being “un-American” which is some weird word salad given Assange is an Aussie.  Fred Thompson has been twittering up a storm on Michael Moore’s contributions to Assange’s bail. Something about Democrats not understanding real patriotism.  Same old Republican jingoism!   It does seems odd to me that a Democratic Attorney General would be following their lead, but hey,  these appear to be strange times for Democrats in deed.  To quote John Lennon: “Most peculiar Mama!”

Update: Since more Republican memes about Assange appear to be showing up in unlikely places–Remember, what they tried to do to Daniel Ellsberg?– I’m putting up some of the honors Assange has earned from the International Community.

Assange founded the WikiLeaks website in 2006 and serves on its advisory board. He has been involved in publishing material about extrajudicial killings in Kenya, for which he won the 2009 Amnesty International Media Award. He has also published material about toxic waste dumping in Africa, Church of Scientology manuals, Guantanamo Bay procedures, and banks such as Kaupthing and Julius Baer.[11] In 2010, he published classified details about US involvement in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Then, on 28 November 2010, WikiLeaks and its five media partners began publishing secret US diplomatic cables.[12] The White House has called Assange’s release of the diplomatic cables “reckless and dangerous”.[13]

For his work with WikiLeaks, Assange received the 2008 Economist Freedom of Expression Award and the 2010 Sam Adams Award. Utne Reader named him as one of the “25 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World”. In 2010, New Statesman ranked Assange number 23 among the “The World’s 50 Most Influential Figures”.

Thursday Reads

Posted: December 16, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: morning reads | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , | 48 Comments

Good Morning!!

I’ll start out with a shocking story that, unfortunately, doesn’t surprise me. Bradley Manning, the young man who is suspected of giving information about U.S. war crimes to Wikileaks, is being exposed to conditions that decent people would call torture. I’ve been worried about the treatment Manning would receive in prison, and have repeatedly said I was afraid he’d be tortured.

Keep in mind that Manning has not been charged with any crime, but has been imprisoned for seven months–the first two months in Kuwait and the rest of the time in Quantico, VA. Glenn Greenwald writes that, although Manning has been a model prisoner, he has been living

under conditions that constitute cruel and inhumane treatment and, by the standards of many nations, even torture. Interviews with several people directly familiar with the conditions of Manning’s detention, ultimately including a Quantico brig official (Lt. Brian Villiard) who confirmed much of what they conveyed, establishes that the accused leaker is subjected to detention conditions likely to create long-term psychological injuries.

[….]

From the beginning of his detention, Manning has been held in intensive solitary confinement. For 23 out of 24 hours every day — for seven straight months and counting — he sits completely alone in his cell. Even inside his cell, his activities are heavily restricted; he’s barred even from exercising and is under constant surveillance to enforce those restrictions. For reasons that appear completely punitive, he’s being denied many of the most basic attributes of civilized imprisonment, including even a pillow or sheets for his bed (he is not and never has been on suicide watch). For the one hour per day when he is freed from this isolation, he is barred from accessing any news or current events programs. Lt. Villiard protested that the conditions are not “like jail movies where someone gets thrown into the hole,” but confirmed that he is in solitary confinement, entirely alone in his cell except for the one hour per day he is taken out.

In sum, Manning has been subjected for many months without pause to inhumane, personality-erasing, soul-destroying, insanity-inducing conditions of isolation similar to those perfected at America’s Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado: all without so much as having been convicted of anything. And as is true of many prisoners subjected to warped treatment of this sort, the brig’s medical personnel now administer regular doses of anti-depressants to Manning to prevent his brain from snapping from the effects of this isolation.

This is a disgrace. President Obama should be hanging his head in shame. But he probably can’t be bothered about little things like torture. He had a big important meeting today with the head honchos of the oligarchy.

Hoping to mend fences with business leaders and spur more hiring, President Obama spent more than four hours with chief executives of 20 major companies in a “working meeting” that both sides said paved the way for better cooperation.

Mend fences?! Obama has pretty much been down on his knees to these guys for years. The super-rich just never get enough, do they? But Obama will keep on endlessly cowering before them in hopes of one day pleasing them.

The session was another step in Obama’s move toward the political center after big Republican gains in last month’s mid-term elections. A year after referring to Wall Street executives as “fat-cat bankers,” Obama is taking a less confrontational approach.

Administration officials have chafed at being labeled anti-business and have been trying to dispel that criticism. They initiated business-friendly moves in recent weeks, such as completing a trade pact with South Korea and making a deal with congressional Republican leaders to extend the Bush-era tax cuts and other tax breaks helpful to U.S. companies.

If Obama moves and further to the “center,” he’s going to fall off the rightward edge of the political spectrum.

The President said he “made progress” in the meeting with the CEOs:

The business leaders, who included UBS AG Chairman for the Americas Robert Wolf and Honeywell International Inc. Chairman David Cote, met with Obama for more than four hours today for a discussion aimed at fostering cooperation and finding ways to spur U.S. economic growth.

“We focused on jobs and investment, and they feel optimistic that by working together we can get some of that cash off the sidelines,” Obama said as he left the session, referring to the almost $2 trillion that he said companies have amassed.

The meeting at Blair House, across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House, was convened by the president as part of an outreach to business to confer on issues such as education, exports, regulation and the budget deficit. It comes as his administration works to heal a strained relationship with the business community and to collaborate on ways to boost jobs, with the nation’s unemployment rate at 9.8 percent.

I just don’t get all this talk about a “strained relationship” with business. What a bunch of hooey!

The President must have made big promises to the oligarchs at this meeting, because he’s been spending the day making phone calls and whining to Congress critters about how his presidency will be over if they don’t pass his lousy tax-cuts-for-the-rich-bill.

Obama is telling members of Congress that failure to pass the tax-cut legislation could result in the end of his presidency, Rep. Peter DeFazio (Ore.) said.

“The White House is putting on tremendous pressure, making phone calls, the president is making phone calls saying this is the end of his presidency if he doesn’t get this bad deal,” he told CNN’s Eliot Spitzer.

The White House issued a denial after DeFazio’s appearance on CNN. But I believe DeFazio, because he’s not a proven liar like Obama is. What does DeFazio think about Obama’s chances of being reelected?

“…I think this is potentially the end of his possibility of being reelected if he gets this deal,” he said.

Glenn Ford has another must-read post up at Black Agenda Report. Of course you have to read the whole thing, but here’s a sample:

Now that self-proclaimed progressives have passed the point of disenchantment with Barack Obama and entered the stage of active anger at their once-imagined ally, they should quickly take the next step and acknowledge that he is what we at Black Agenda Report have been saying for six years: a right-wing Democrat who has long been aligned with the corporate Democratic Leadership Conference, and whose mission is to expand U.S. empire and put the American state at the service of Wall Street. He has been remarkably successful in both endeavors.

Of necessity, these strategic goals require Obama to wage war against the left hemisphere of his own Party, the main obstacle, in the absence of effective grassroots progressive movements, to forging a grand coalition with Republicans. The president, whom deluded Progressives for Obama hallucinated might become the kind of “transformative” leader that would galvanize Left constituencies into a ready-mix, shake-and-bake “movement,” also sees himself as a transformative figure, but of the opposite kind. He presented his candidacy as the antidote to what he described during the Nevada presidential primary as the “excesses” of the Sixties and Seventies. His reverence for Ronald Reagan is genuine. Indeed, if Obama were not Black, and if his supporters had not been busy getting drunk in a wishing-well, he would have been widely recognized as a stylistically updated Reagan Democrat.

Yup, Obama is transformative alright. He transformed the Democratic Party right out of existence.

Yesterday, The New York Times reported that two classified intelligence reports say that the Afghanistan debacle is getting even worse than anyone knew.

The reports, one on Afghanistan and one on Pakistan, say that although there have been gains for the United States and NATO in the war, the unwillingness of Pakistan to shut down militant sanctuaries in its lawless tribal region remains a serious obstacle. American military commanders say insurgents freely cross from Pakistan into Afghanistan to plant bombs and fight American troops and then return to Pakistan for rest and resupply.

The findings in the reports, called National Intelligence Estimates, represent the consensus view of the United States’ 16 intelligence agencies, as opposed to the military, and were provided last week to some members of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees. The findings were described by a number of American officials who read the reports’ executive summaries.

Robert Greenwald commented on this situation at FDL:

On Thursday, December 16, 2010, the White House will use its December review to try to spin the disastrous Afghanistan War plan by citing “progress” in the military campaign, but the available facts paint a picture of a war that’s not making us safer and that’s not worth the cost.

Let’s take a look at just the very broad strokes of the information. After more than nine years and a full year of a massive escalation policy:

– the insurgency continues to gain in size and strength,
– more U.S. troops are dying than ever,
– more civilians are dying than ever,
– violence in the country continues to spike,
– Pakistan is playing a double game with the U.S. and
– the military strategy lacks credible prospects for a turnaround.

And yet, we are told we can expect a report touting security gains and “progress,” and that there’s virtually zero chance of any significant policy change from this review. It sort of begs the question: just what level of catastrophe in Afghanistan would signal that we need a change in direction?

That’s a very good question. We need to get the hell out of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen ASAP.

According to The New York Times, the U.S. hopes to develop conspiracy charges against Wikileaks editor Julian Assange.

Justice Department officials are trying to find out whether Mr. Assange encouraged or even helped the analyst, Pfc. Bradley Manning, to extract classified military and State Department files from a government computer system. If he did so, they believe they could charge him as a conspirator in the leak, not just as a passive recipient of the documents who then published them.

Among materials prosecutors are studying is an online chat log in which Private Manning is said to claim that he had been directly communicating with Mr. Assange using an encrypted Internet conferencing service as the soldier was downloading government files. Private Manning is also said to have claimed that Mr. Assange gave him access to a dedicated server for uploading some of them to WikiLeaks.

I’m sure they’ll figure out some trumped up charges, since the U.S. no longer operates under the rule of law.

From Raw Story, some TSA news:

Adrienne Durso, a resident of California, was selected for an enhanced pat-down after walking through a metal detector at Albuquerque International Sunport airport, according to a lawsuit.

Durso, a recent breast cancer survivor, said the TSA security officer forcefully searched the area of her recent mastectomy, leaving her in pain and on the verge of crying.

[….]

When her son [age 17] confronted a security supervisor about the incident, asking why his mother had been selected for a pat-down but not him, the supervisor allegedly replied that the son was not selected because “you don’t have boobs.”

After her experience, Durso joined three other plaintiffs in a lawsuit against Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and TSA administrator John Pistole.

Nice, huh?

Finally, baseball fans will be saddened to learn that Hall of Fame pitcher Bob Feller has died. He was 92.

Bob Feller, who came off an Iowa farm with a dazzling fastball that made him a national celebrity at 17 and propelled him to the Hall of Fame as one of baseball’s greatest pitchers, died Wednesday at a hospice. He was 92.

[….]

Joining the Cleveland Indians in 1936, Feller became baseball’s biggest draw since Babe Ruth, throwing pitches that batters could barely see — fastballs approaching 100 miles an hour and curveballs and sinkers that fooled the sharpest eyes. He was Rapid Robert in the sports pages. As Yankees pitcher Lefty Gomez was said to have remarked after three Feller pitches blew by him, “That last one sounded a little low.”

A high-kicking right-hander, Feller was a major league phenomenon while still in high school in Van Meter, Iowa. His debut as an Indians starter, during his summer vacation, was spectacular: he struck out 15 batters.

Three weeks later he struck out 17, tying Dizzy Dean’s major league record. He pitched a no-hitter, the first of three in his 18-year career, when he was 21. (He went on to throw an astonishing 12 one-hitters.) He had more than 100 victories at age 22.

Feller was truly one of the greats.

Sooooo… what are you reading this morning?

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →