JackRiddler wrote:Manning, Obama and U.S. moral leadership
Link to article:
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn ... index.html
(Thanks JackRiddler!)
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by crikkett » Mon Apr 11, 2011 1:20 pm
JackRiddler wrote:Manning, Obama and U.S. moral leadership
by JackRiddler » Mon Apr 11, 2011 1:25 pm
crikkett wrote:JackRiddler wrote:Manning, Obama and U.S. moral leadership
Link to article:
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn ... index.html
(Thanks JackRiddler!)
by JackRiddler » Fri Apr 29, 2011 6:09 pm
http://www.counterpunch.org/mccoy04262011.html
April 26, 2011
An Empire of Failed States
Washington on the Rocks
By ALFRED W. McCOY and BRETT REILLY
In one of history's lucky accidents, the juxtaposition of two extraordinary events has stripped the architecture of American global power bare for all to see. Last November, WikiLeaks splashed snippets from U.S. embassy cables, loaded with scurrilous comments about national leaders from Argentina to Zimbabwe, on the front pages of newspapers worldwide. Then just a few weeks later, the Middle East erupted in pro-democracy protests against the region's autocratic leaders, many of whom were close U.S. allies whose foibles had been so conveniently detailed in those same diplomatic cables.
Suddenly, it was possible to see the foundations of a U.S. world order that rested significantly on national leaders who serve Washington as loyal "subordinate elites" and who are, in reality, a motley collection of autocrats, aristocrats, and uniformed thugs. Visible as well was the larger logic of otherwise inexplicable U.S. foreign policy choices over the past half-century.
Why would the CIA risk controversy in 1965, at the height of the Cold War, by overthrowing an accepted leader like Sukarno in Indonesia or encouraging the assassination of the Catholic autocrat Ngo Dinh Diem in Saigon in 1963? The answer -- and thanks to WikiLeaks and the "Arab spring," this is now so much clearer -- is that both were Washington's chosen subordinates until each became insubordinate and expendable.
Why, half a century later, would Washington betray its stated democratic principles by backing Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak against millions of demonstrators and then, when he faltered, use its leverage to replace him, at least initially with his intelligence chief Omar Suleiman, a man best known for running Cairo's torture chambers (and lending them out to Washington)? The answer again: because both were reliable subordinates who had long served Washington's interests well in this key Arab state.
Across the Greater Middle East from Tunisia and Egypt to Bahrain and Yemen, democratic protests are threatening to sweep away subordinate elites crucial to the wielding of American power. Of course, all modern empires have relied on dependable surrogates to translate their global power into local control -- and for most of them, the moment when those elites began to stir, talk back, and set their own agendas was also the moment when it became clear that imperial collapse was in the cards.
If the "velvet revolutions" that swept Eastern Europe in 1989 tolled the death knell for the Soviet empire, then the "jasmine revolutions" now spreading across the Middle East may well mark the beginning of the end for American global power.
Putting the Military in Charge
To understand the importance of local elites, look back to the Cold War's early days when a desperate White House was searching for something, anything that could halt the seemingly unstoppable spread of what Washington saw as anti-American and pro-communist sentiment. In December 1954, the National Security Council (NSC) met in the White House to stake out a strategy that could tame the powerful nationalist forces of change then sweeping the globe.
Across Asia and Africa, a half-dozen European empires that had guaranteed global order for more than a century were giving way to 100 new nations, many -- as Washington saw it -- susceptible to "communist subversion." In Latin America, there were stirrings of leftist opposition to the region's growing urban poverty and rural landlessness.
After a review of the "threats" facing the U.S. in Latin America, influential Treasury Secretary George Humphrey informed his NSC colleagues that they should "stop talking so much about democracy" and instead "support dictatorships of the right if their policies are pro-American." At that moment with a flash of strategic insight, Dwight Eisenhower interrupted to observe that Humphrey was, in effect, saying, "They're OK if they're our s.o.b.'s."
It was a moment to remember, for the President of the United States had just articulated with crystalline clarity the system of global dominion that Washington would implement for the next 50 years -- setting aside democratic principles for a tough realpolitik policy of backing any reliable leader willing to support the U.S., thereby building a worldwide network of national (and often nationalist) leaders who would, in a pinch, put Washington's needs above local ones.
Throughout the Cold War, the U.S. would favor military autocrats in Latin America, aristocrats across the Middle East, and a mixture of democrats and dictators in Asia. In 1958, military coups in Thailand and Iraq suddenly put the spotlight on Third World militaries as forces to be reckoned with. It was then that the Eisenhower administration decided to bring foreign military leaders to the U.S. for further "training" to facilitate "the 'management' of the forces of change released by the development" of these emerging nations. Henceforth, Washington would pour military aid into the cultivation of the armed forces of allies and potential allies worldwide, while "training missions" would be used to create crucial ties between the U.S. military and the officer corps in country after country -- or where subordinate elites did not seem subordinate enough, help identify alternative leaders.
When civilian presidents proved insubordinate, the Central Intelligence Agency went to work, promoting coups that would install reliable military successors --replacing Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq, who tried to nationalize his country's oil, with General Fazlollah Zahedi (and then the young Shah) in 1953; President Sukarno with General Suharto in Indonesia during the next decade; and of course President Salvador Allende with General Augusto Pinochet in Chile in 1973, to name just three such moments.
In the first years of the twenty-first century, Washington's trust in the militaries of its client states would only grow. The U.S. was, for example, lavishing $1.3 billion in aid on Egypt's military annually, but investing only $250 million a year in the country's economic development. As a result, when demonstrations rocked the regime in Cairo last January, as the New York Times reported, "a 30-year investment paid off as American generals... and intelligence officers quietly called... friends they had trained with," successfully urging the army's support for a "peaceful transition" to, yes indeed, military rule.
Elsewhere in the Middle East, Washington has, since the 1950s, followed the British imperial preference for Arab aristocrats by cultivating allies that included a shah (Iran), sultans (Abu Dhabi, Oman), emirs (Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Dubai), and kings (Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Morocco). Across this vast, volatile region from Morocco to Iran, Washington courted these royalist regimes with military alliances, U.S. weapons systems, CIA support for local security, a safe American haven for their capital, and special favors for their elites, including access to educational institutions in the U.S. or Department of Defense overseas schools for their children.
In 2005, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice summed up this record thusly: "For 60 years, the United States pursued stability at the expense of democracy… in the Middle East, and we achieved neither."
How It Used to Work
America is by no means the first hegemon to build its global power on the gossamer threads of personal ties to local leaders. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Britain may have ruled the waves (as America would later rule the skies), but when it came to the ground, like empires past it needed local allies who could serve as intermediaries in controlling complex, volatile societies. Otherwise, how in 1900 could a small island nation of just 40 million with an army of only 99,000 men rule a global empire of some 400 million, nearly a quarter of all humanity?
From 1850 to 1950, Britain controlled its formal colonies through an extraordinary array of local allies -- from Fiji island chiefs and Malay sultans to Indian maharajas and African emirs. Simultaneously, through subordinate elites Britain reigned over an even larger "informal empire" that encompassed emperors (from Beijing to Istanbul), kings (from Bangkok to Cairo), and presidents (from Buenos Aires to Caracas). At its peak in 1880, Britain's informal empire in Latin America, the Middle East, and China was larger, in population, than its formal colonial holdings in India and Africa. Its entire global empire, encompassing nearly half of humanity, rested on these slender ties of cooperation to loyal local elites.
Following four centuries of relentless imperial expansion, however, Europe's five major overseas empires were suddenly erased from the globe in a quarter-century of decolonization. Between 1947 and 1974, the Belgian, British, Dutch, French, and Portuguese empires faded fast from Asia and Africa, giving way to a hundred new nations, more than half of today's sovereign states. In searching for an explanation for this sudden, sweeping change, most scholars agree with British imperial historian Ronald Robinson who famously argued that "when colonial rulers had run out of indigenous collaborators," their power began to fade.
During the Cold War that coincided with this era of rapid decolonization, the world's two superpowers turned to the same methods regularly using their espionage agencies to manipulate the leaders of newly independent states. The Soviet Union's KGB and its surrogates like the Stasi in East Germany and the Securitate in Romania enforced political conformity among the 14 Soviet satellite states in Eastern Europe and challenged the U.S. for loyal allies across the Third World. Simultaneously, the CIA monitored the loyalties of presidents, autocrats, and dictators on four continents, employing coups, bribery, and covert penetration to control and, when necessary, remove nettlesome leaders.
In an era of nationalist feeling, however, the loyalty of local elites proved a complex matter indeed. Many of them were driven by conflicting loyalties and often deep feelings of nationalism, which meant that they had to be monitored closely. So critical were these subordinate elites, and so troublesome were their insubordinate iterations, that the CIA repeatedly launched risky covert operations to bring them to heel, sparking some of the great crises of the Cold War.
Given the rise of its system of global control in a post-World War II age of independence, Washington had little choice but to work not simply with surrogates or puppets, but with allies who -- admittedly from weaker positions -- still sought to maximize what they saw as their nations' interests (as well as their own). Even at the height of American global power in the 1950s, when its dominance was relatively unquestioned, Washington was forced into hard bargaining with the likes of the Philippines' Raymond Magsaysay, South Korean autocrat Syngman Rhee, and South Vietnam's Ngo Dinh Diem.
In South Korea during the 1960s, for instance, General Park Chung Hee, then president, bartered troop deployments to Vietnam for billions of U.S. development dollars, which helped spark the country's economic "miracle." In the process, Washington paid up, but got what it most wanted: 50,000 of those tough Korean troops as guns-for-hire helpers in its unpopular war in Vietnam.
Post-Cold War World
After the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, ending the Cold War, Moscow quickly lost its satellite states from Estonia to Azerbaijan, as once-loyal Soviet surrogates were ousted or leapt off the sinking ship of empire. For Washington, the "victor" and soon to be the "sole superpower" on planet Earth, the same process would begin to happen, but at a far slower pace.
Over the next two decades, globalization fostered a multipolar system of rising powers in Beijing, New Delhi, Moscow, Ankara, and Brasilia, even as a denationalized system of corporate power reduced the dependency of developing economies on any single state, however imperial. With its capacity for controlling elites receding, Washington has faced ideological competition from Islamic fundamentalism, European regulatory regimes, Chinese state capitalism, and a rising tide of economic nationalism in Latin America.
As U.S. power and influence declined, Washington's attempts to control its subordinate elites began to fail, often spectacularly -- including its efforts to topple bête noire Hugo Chavez of Venezuela in a badly bungled 2002 coup, to detach ally Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia from Russia's orbit in 2008, and to oust nemesis Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the 2009 Iranian elections. Where a CIA coup or covert cash once sufficed to defeat an antagonist, the Bush administration needed a massive invasion to topple just one troublesome dictator, Saddam Hussein. Even then, it found its plans for subsequent regime change in Syria and Iran blocked when these states instead aided a devastating insurgency against U.S. forces inside Iraq.
Similarly, despite the infusions of billions of dollars in foreign aid, Washington has found it nearly impossible to control the Afghan president it installed in power, Hamid Karzai, who memorably summed up his fractious relationship with Washington to American envoys this way: "If you're looking for a stooge and calling a stooge a partner, no. If you're looking for a partner, yes."
Then, late in 2010, WikiLeaks began distributing those thousands of U.S. diplomatic cables that offer uncensored insights into Washington's weakening control over the system of surrogate power that it had built up for 50 years. In reading these documents, Israeli journalist Aluf Benn of Haaretz could see "the fall of the American empire, the decline of a superpower that ruled the world by the dint of its military and economic supremacy." No longer, he added, are "American ambassadors… received in world capitals as 'high commissioners'... [instead they are] tired bureaucrats [who] spend their days listening wearily to their hosts' talking points, never reminding them who is the superpower and who the client state."
Indeed, what the WikiLeaks documents show is a State Department struggling to manage an unruly global system of increasingly insubordinate elites by any means possible -- via intrigue to collect needed information and intelligence, friendly acts meant to coax compliance, threats to coerce cooperation, and billions of dollars in misspent aid to court influence. In early 2009, for instance, the State Department instructed its embassies worldwide to play imperial police by collecting comprehensive data on local leaders, including "email addresses, telephone and fax numbers, fingerprints, facial images, DNA, and iris scans." Showing its need, like some colonial governor, for incriminating information on the locals, the State Department also pressed its Bahrain embassy for sordid details, damaging in an Islamic society, about the kingdom's crown princes, asking: "Is there any derogatory information on either prince? Does either prince drink alcohol? Does either one use drugs?"
With the hauteur of latter-day imperial envoys, U.S. diplomats seemed to empower themselves for dominance by dismissing "the Turks neo-Ottoman posturing around the Middle East and Balkans," or by knowing the weaknesses of their subordinate elites, notably Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's "voluptuous blonde" nurse, Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari's morbid fear of military coups, or Afghan Vice President Ahmad Zia Massoud's $52 million in stolen funds.
As its influence declines, however, Washington is finding many of its chosen local allies either increasingly insubordinate or irrelevant, particularly in the strategic Middle East. In mid-2009, for instance, the U.S. ambassador to Tunisia reported that "President Ben Ali… and his regime have lost touch with the Tunisian people," relying "on the police for control," while "corruption in the inner circle is growing" and "the risks to the regime's long-term stability are increasing." Even so, the U.S. envoy could only recommend that Washington "dial back the public criticism" and instead rely only on "frequent high-level private candor" -- a policy that failed to produce any reforms before demonstrations toppled the regime just 18 months later.
Similarly, in late 2008 the American Embassy in Cairo feared that "Egyptian democracy and human rights efforts... are being suffocated." However, as the embassy admitted, "we would not like to contemplate complications for U.S. regional interests should the U.S.-Egyptian bond be seriously weakened." When Mubarak visited Washington a few months later, the Embassy urged the White House "to restore the sense of warmth that has traditionally characterized the U.S.-Egyptian partnership." And so in June 2009, just 18 months before the Egyptian president's downfall, President Obama hailed this useful dictator as "a stalwart ally... a force for stability and good in the region."
As the crisis in Cairo's Tahrir Square unfolded, respected opposition leader Mohamed ElBaradei complained bitterly that Washington was pushing "the whole Arab world into radicalization with this inept policy of supporting repression." After 40 years of U.S. dominion, the Middle East was, he said, "a collection of failed states that add nothing to humanity or science" because "people were taught not to think or to act, and were consistently given an inferior education."
Absent a global war capable of simply sweeping away an empire, the decline of a great power is often a fitful, painful, drawn-out affair. In addition to the two American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan winding down to something not so far short of defeat, the nation's capital is now writhing in fiscal crisis, the coin of the realm is losing its creditworthiness, and longtime allies are forging economic and even military ties to rival China. To all of this, we must now add the possible loss of loyal surrogates across the Middle East.
For more than 50 years, Washington has been served well by a system of global power based on subordinate elites. That system once facilitated the extension of American influence worldwide with a surprising efficiency and (relatively speaking) an economy of force. Now, however, those loyal allies increasingly look like an empire of failed or insubordinate states. Make no mistake: the degradation of, or ending of, half a century of such ties is likely to leave Washington on the rocks.
Alfred W. McCoy is professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a TomDispatch regular, and author most recently of the award-winning book, Policing America's Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State. He has also convened the "Empires in Transition" project, a global working group of 140 historians from universities on four continents. The results of their first meetings were published as Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State, and the findings from their latest conference, at Barcelona last June, will appear next year as Endless Empires: Spain's Retreat, Europe's Eclipse, and America's Decline.
Brett Reilly is a graduate student in History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he is studying U.S. foreign policy in Asia.
This article was originally published by TomDispatch.
Copyright 2011 Alfred W. McCoy and Brett Reilly.
by vanlose kid » Fri Apr 29, 2011 8:42 pm
Exclusively in the New Print Issue of CounterPunch
The Sex Smears Against Julian Assange
What did Anna Ardin and Sofia Wilen really claim he did? Read Guy Rundle’s dissection of how the Guardian stitched up the man who gave them Wikileaks. PLUS Israel Shamir on Russia’s real political divisions, beyond the Putin/Medvedev burlesque peddled by the western press PLUS Larry Portis on the rise of Marine Le Pen. Is fascism looming in France?
by JackRiddler » Sat Apr 30, 2011 5:53 pm
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 ... 92972.html
INFORMATION AGE
APRIL 25, 2011
WikiLeaks and the Espionage Act
Why Julian Assange is different from the New York Times.
By L. GORDON CROVITZ
In San Francisco last week, some 20 supporters of Bradley Manning spent $100,000 to go to a fund-raiser for President Obama to sing a song protesting the incarceration of the Army private. The accused leaker of hundreds of thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks had just been transferred to Fort Leavenworth, Kan., from the more restrictive brig at Quantico, Va. Mr. Obama had to explain to his supporters why there's anything wrong with massive leaks of military reports and diplomatic cables.
Perhaps the Obama administration's dithering about what to do about WikiLeaks helps explain why anyone would defend Pfc. Manning. ...
http://ca.news.yahoo.com/wikileaks-assa ... 22188.html
WikiLeaks' Julian Assange is not a criminal: global poll
By Michelle Nichols | Reuters – Tue, 26 Apr, 2011 5:53 PM EDT
NEW YORK (Reuters) - A 24-country poll found that most people believe WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange is not a criminal and should not be charged by the U.S. government for releasing thousands of secret U.S. documents.
The poll by Ipsos found 79 percent of people were aware of WikiLeaks and two-thirds of those believed Assange should not be charged and three-quarters supported the group's bid to make public secret government or corporate documents.
U.S. respondents had a far more critical view, with 81 percent aware of WikiLeaks and 69 percent of those believing Assange should be charged and 61 percent opposing WikiLeaks' mission.
The countries found least likely to support legal action against Assange by the U.S. government were South Africa, Germany, Russia and Argentina, while the highest support was in the United States, South Korea, Britain, India and Indonesia.
WikiLeaks obtained more than 250,000 leaked U.S. cables and since late last year has released embarrassing disclosures that exposed U.S. intelligence and views and revealed confidential discussions with foreign governments.
On Sunday, The New York Times and several other news organizations reported on a cache of classified U.S. military documents provided to them by WikiLeaks that revealed intelligence assessments on nearly all the 779 people who have been detained at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba.
The U.S. military has charged a soldier, Bradley Manning, who is accused of leaking the sensitive documents to WikiLeaks, and U.S. prosecutors are looking at where charges can be brought against Assange.
Assange, an Australian computer expert, is fighting extradition from Britain to Sweden over alleged sex crimes.
Ipsos polled 18,829 adults online between March 2 and March 14 and had a margin of error of 3.1 percentage points.
The countries surveyed were Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Britain, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Poland, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Turkey and the United States.
(Reporting by Michelle Nichols; Editing by Mark Egan and Peter Cooney)
by JackRiddler » Sat Apr 30, 2011 5:59 pm
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/0 ... and-report
WikiLeaks Donations Topped $1.9 Million in 2010
By Kim Zetter April 26, 2011 | 5:31 pm | Categories: WikiLeaks
A German nonprofit that processes most of the donations submitted to the secret-spilling site WikiLeaks has finally made good on a nearly year-old promise to release a report detailing how those donations are spent — though the report remains silent on how much money was paid to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
The Berlin-based Wau Holland Foundation, which accepted donations for WikiLeaks via PayPal and bank account transfers, quietly released the report on its website (.pdf) April 16.
According to the report, the foundation received about $1.9 million on behalf of WikiLeaks in 2010. More than half of that amount, or $700,000, came in November and December, after WikiLeaks and several newspapers began publishing a trove of U.S. diplomatic cables allegedly received from Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning.
A $15,100 contribution WikiLeaks made to Manning’s defense in January of this year is not reflected in the report, which only covers expenses and contributions through December of 2010.
Of the total money received, the Wau Holland Foundation distributed about $585,000 to WikiLeaks to cover expenses. A little more than $200,000 of this went to WikiLeaks for the cost of processing submissions, such as “reviewing and editing incoming material, video authoring, analyzing and arranging a large number of documents … anonymisation and much more.” The sum also includes the “involvement of external experts like journalists.”
In 2010, WikiLeaks sent two Swedish journalists to Iraq to locate and interview two children who were injured in an Army Apache attack, a battle that featured in the now-famous Iraq “Collateral Murder” video that WikiLeaks published in April of last year.
According to the Wau Holland report, an additional $152,000 was paid to “a few heads of project and activists,” for services invoiced. This appears to reference salaries paid to staffers, though the report doesn’t specify how that expense differs from the expenses attributed to processing submissions.
The report also doesn’t say how much Assange personally received from the funds, though The Wall Street Journal reported last year that he received about $88,000 in back pay for work performed in 2010.
Wau Holland paid about $87,000 to cover WikiLeaks’ infrastructure expenses, such as servers and other hardware; another $91,000 went for travel costs to conferences, meetings and lectures. This money covered airfare, usually economy-class tickets, but generally not hotel stays “because activists often are lodged in private,” according to the report. It’s commonly known that WikiLeaks founder Assange relies on the kindness of supporters for free hospitality in countries where he travels.
Additionally, Wau Holland paid out $48,000 in legal fees. This was defined as costs for project campaigns, “not for individual-related legal advice or legal representation in court proceedings.” The latter likely refers to the personal legal expenses that have been racked up over the last year by Assange, who is facing sex-crimes allegations in Sweden and has been fighting an extradition battle in London.
About $930,000 of the 2010 donations Wau Holland received came through a PayPal account, while the remainder came through bank transfers. PayPal closed the account in December, though donations to WikiLeaks via bank account transfers have continued.
Of all the money raised, the largest amount, 35 percent, came from the United States, while 14 percent came from Germany and 12 percent from Britain. About 6 percent came from Australia and Canada, followed by smaller amounts from other countries.
Wau Holland began accepting donations on WikiLeaks’ behalf in October 2009 and had received only about $6,000 in donations before WikiLeaks’ website went down late December that year. Donations began pouring in once people saw in January that the site needed help, foundation vice president Hendrik Fulda told Threat Level previously. WikiLeaks’ plea for donations indicated the site needed to raise at least $200,000 to cover a year’s worth of operating expenses, increased to at least $600,000 if its volunteers were to be paid.
The foundation began facing pressure last year from the public and from German authorities to provide an accounting of how donations were being spent. The foundation missed its own deadlines for publishing the report repeatedly over the last eight months.
by JackRiddler » Sat Apr 30, 2011 6:01 pm
http://www.truth-out.org/print/1527
Published on Truthout (http://www.truth-out.org)
Free Bradley Manning
Tuesday 26 April 2011
by: William Rivers Pitt, Truthout
It is dangerous to be right in matters on which established authorities are wrong.
- Voltaire
I have a confession to make: I have been on the fence about Bradley Manning as the drama of his detention and the Wikileaks documents have unfolded. While I believe deeply that those who leak classified materials are acting out of conscience and for the good of the people, I also believe criminal acts - even ones of conscience - must be met with punishment as required in any society that wishes to live by the rule of law. Arrest and detention are part of any illegal act of civil disobedience, and are to be expected as the natural consequence of such an act.
Chain yourself to a fence, and expect to be arrested for trespassing. Pour blood on the nose cone of a nuclear missile, and expect to be arrested for destruction of property. The threat of arrest, detention and possible conviction is part of the package that is civil disobedience, and those who take part in it must accept the consequences as part of their act of conscience. Indeed, it is the acceptance of punishment that lies at the heart of that conscience: they are breaking a law to highlight a wrong, are willing to be punished to underscore that wrong, and in doing so, demonstrate how far they are personally willing to go in order to end that wrong and inspire others in the process.
That's where I've been with Bradley Manning - his was an act of conscience that broke the law, and the consequences of that act must be accepted - until now.
How wrong I was.
This situation goes far beyond such a simplistic cut-and-dried viewpoint. It cuts to the core of what we are as a nation, what we wish to be, and what must be done to honor the values we pay so much lip service to, even as we fail time and again to practice what we preach. What Manning has been charged with goes far beyond an act of conscience; they were, in fact, an attempt to save the very soul of these United States.
It is widely considered facile and weak to make Nazi comparisons in any argument, but unfortunately for every citizen of this country, the comparison here is all too apt. During the Nuremberg trials in the aftermath of World War II, accused war criminals were often heard to claim, "I was only following orders," as a means of justifying their savage and barbaric activities. The excuse was rejected out of hand, further enshrining the idea that soldiers and officers are more than mere automatons who are expected only to do as they are told. Criminal acts, even in a military situation, are not to be condoned, coddled or tolerated. Men were hanged by the judges at Nuremberg to emphasize the point.
And here is Bradley Manning, who like every enlisted American soldier, swore an oath to support, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States against enemies both foreign and domestic, and to bear true faith and allegiance to the same. That same oath requires the oath-taker to follow the orders of the president and superior officers, but if those hanged men at Nuremberg prove anything, it is that unlawful orders are by definition void, and should not be followed if the oath sworn to the Constitution is to mean anything at all.
Make no mistake: the documents Bradley Manning has been accused of leaking are prima facie evidence of illegal orders being given and executed all along the chain of command. This has been made even more abundantly clear with the recent revelation of some 700 pages of documents detailing the ongoing travesty that is America's detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. According to various reports [4]:
The files depict a system often focused less on containing dangerous terrorists or enemy fighters, than on extracting intelligence. Among inmates who proved harmless were an 89-year-old Afghan villager, suffering from senile dementia, and a 14-year-old boy who had been an innocent kidnap victim.
A number of British nationals and residents were held for years even though US authorities knew they were not Taliban or al-Qaida members. One Briton, Jamal al-Harith, was rendered to Guantánamo simply because he had been held in a Taliban prison and was thought to have knowledge of their interrogation techniques. The US military tried to hang on to another Briton, Binyam Mohamed, even after charges had been dropped and evidence emerged he had been tortured.
The files also detail how many innocents or marginal figures swept up by the Guantánamo dragnet because US forces thought they might be of some intelligence value.
One man was transferred to the facility "because he was a mullah, who led prayers at Manu mosque in Kandahar province, Afghanistan ... which placed him in a position to have special knowledge of the Taliban". US authorities eventually released him after more than a year's captivity, deciding he had no intelligence value.
Another prisoner was shipped to the base "because of his general knowledge of activities in the areas of Khowst and Kabul based as a result of his frequent travels through the region as a taxi driver".
The files also reveal that an al-Jazeera journalist was held at Guantánamo for six years, partly in order to be interrogated about the Arabic news network.
(Emphasis added)
Also illuminated in these leaked documents is the shameful use of torture, described through the cruel euphemism of "enhanced interrogation," that was rampant at Guantanamo Bay. Thanks to such disgraceful practices, the prisoners currently detained there now find themselves in a ridiculous legal limbo; they may be innocent or guilty, but because they were tortured, they cannot be brought to trial because evidence obtained against them was gathered illegally. The Obama administration, like the Bush administration before, refuses to let the legal process do its work, nor are they willing to release these prisoners, so there they sit.
In a filthy irony, Bradley Manning was exposed to a number of grotesquely similar "stress tactics" used against Guantanamo prisoners while detained at Quantico. He was deprived of sleep, humiliated and berated by his captors, isolated, exposed to cold, and made to stand naked for extended periods of time. Such acts are straight out of the War on Terror handbook, and like the prisoners at Guantanamo, were used against a man who has yet to be convicted of anything. The mistreatment tactics against prisoners that Manning allegedly exposed have been used against him, one more crime in a symphony of crimes.
Bradley Manning sits today in Leavenworth prison awaiting a hearing to determine whether or not he will face a court martial. The case against him seems as disorganized and specious as the cases against many of the prisoners at Guantanamo, but let us accept for the moment that he did, in fact, release those classified documents. If so, he should be thanked for his actions. As Glenn Greenwald so eloquently argued [5], "WikiLeaks is responsible for more newsworthy scoops over the last year than all media outlets combined: it's not even a close call. And if Bradley Manning is the leaker, he has done more than any other human being in our lifetime to bring about transparency and shine a light on what military and government power is doing."
Moreover, if there is actually justice to be found in this morally crippled nation, Bradley Manning should be cleared of all charges and released. His was not some casual act of disobedience, nor was it an attack against his country. Bradley Manning was fulfilling the oath he swore to protect and defend the Constitution. He exposed serial criminal acts perpetrated by his superiors, which is a moral necessity for anyone who has taken such an oath.
We know the truth of the acts made by both the Bush and Obama administrations in Guantanamo, and they are illegal on their face. We are a better nation today because we know this, and we have Bradley Manning to thank for it. By exposing war crimes, he has been labeled a criminal even before any hearings have been held. He has been mistreated in a way you would not treat a dog. He showed us the war crimes committed in our name, and has been crushed for it.
Justice demands his release. Furthermore, justice demands a wide inquiry into the criminal acts of both the Bush and Obama administrations as pertaining to the prisoners of Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere. Justice demands prosecution for those acts against the real criminals responsible for them. They have driven our nation into the gutter, and to punish Bradley Manning for attempting to haul us back from that abyss is to admit, in broad daylight and with no shame, that justice has no meaning anymore.
[6]
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by JackRiddler » Sat Apr 30, 2011 7:03 pm
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/27/world ... nted=print
April 26, 2011
In WikiLeaks’ Growth, Some Control Is Lost
By BRIAN STELTER and NOAM COHEN
WikiLeaks, the Web site responsible for publicizing millions of state secrets in the last year, has tried to pick its media partners carefully. But the site has become such a large player in journalism that some of its secrets are no longer its own to control.
WikiLeaks’ latest release — files related to the detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba — took place Sunday in partnership with eight news organizations in the United States and other countries, including The Washington Post and the McClatchy newspapers and The Telegraph of London. The “official” release was sped up when WikiLeaks learned that two news organizations that were collaborators with WikiLeaks in the past but were explicitly shut out this time — The New York Times and The Guardian — were preparing their own Guantánamo stories anyway, having obtained the information independently.
This resulted in a mad scramble to be first online with secrets that would never have leaked so quickly if WikiLeaks had not possessed the documents to begin with. For journalism, it was a recalibration of the traditional relationships among competitors and sources. And for WikiLeaks, it was a lesson in how hard it is to steer news coverage rather than be buffeted by it.
In its first prominent collaboration with newspapers, last July, WikiLeaks gave exclusive access to a secret archive of Afghan war logs to The Times, The Guardian in Britain, and Der Spiegel in Germany. Now, as it gradually releases 250,000 United States diplomatic cables, WikiLeaks says it has more than 50 local partners, most of them newspapers, from the Daily Taraf in Turkey to Expresso in Portugal to The Hindu in India. Some of those newspapers describe the relationship with WikiLeaks as a contract.
WikiLeaks’ intent has always been to maximize its impact, but its media strategy has changed significantly since it began in 2007, with the idea that if it posted important documents to its site — come one, come all — journalists would eagerly report the news there. Since then, it has learned the value of an “exclusive” to journalists, creating partnerships with publishers that impose a collective embargo on when the material can be published in return for privileged access to the material.
On its Twitter page, WikiLeaks suggested that it did not mind that it had lost control of its cache of secrets, saying it was pleased that its former partner publications had “added their weight to increasing our impact.”
Yochai Benkler, the co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, said he thought that WikiLeaks’ anti-secrecy quest was “enhanced, not undermined, by the intensification of competition to cover the documents.” The Guantánamo files, he said, confirmed what the earlier releases already suggested: that “the future of the networked Fourth Estate will involve a mixture of traditional and online models, cooperating and competing on a global scale in a productive but difficult relationship.”
In an essay this month in the British magazine New Statesman, the founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, explained his reasoning. While he described WikiLeaks as “firmly in the tradition of those radical publishers who tried to lay ‘all the mysteries and secrets of government’ before the public,” he added that “for reasons of realpolitik, we have worked with some of the largest media groups.”
While the exclusive-access strategy has had obvious advantages in getting the news out, WikiLeaks faced criticism for allowing only a few news organizations to have access to the cables, said Greg Mitchell, a blogger for The Nation who published “The Age of WikiLeaks.” “Now,” he said, “it’s busting loose and other people are getting them.”
That owes partly to the falling out between Mr. Assange and The Times and The Guardian.
Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times, said Mr. Assange seemed to sour on the newspaper after he read both a front-page profile of himself and an article about the Army intelligence analyst suspected of leaking information to WikiLeaks. The profile he deemed unflattering and the other article inadequate. He also complained to Mr. Keller that the newspaper’s Web site had not linked to the WikiLeaks site. “Where’s the respect?” he asked Mr. Keller.
Mr. Keller said Monday, “It’s been a long time since I’ve had any communication with Julian Assange.”
In essays and interviews Mr. Assange has complained that The Times had worked too closely with the United States government before publishing its material and had a “hostile attitude” toward WikiLeaks.
Similarly, Mr. Assange’s relationship with The Guardian started to fray “right at the beginning,” said David Leigh, the newspaper’s investigations editor. In late July, two days before The Guardian was to publish articles about the Afghan war logs, it learned that WikiLeaks had also shared the material with another British organization, Channel 4.
“Julian had gone behind our backs because he knew that it would upset us,” Mr. Leigh said in an interview this week.
In November, WikiLeaks chose to share the diplomatic cables database with The Guardian but not The Times. When The Times and The Guardian decided to collaborate nonetheless, Mr. Leigh said Mr. Assange “burst into our editors’ office, accompanied by a lawyer, threatening that he was going to sue us.”
He did not sue, but the dissatisfaction cut both ways. Mr. Leigh said he was particularly troubled in December when Mr. Assange tried to suppress the newspaper’s coverage of the sexual assault charges against him.
By then, a competing newspaper, The Telegraph, had started holding meetings with WikiLeaks. It wanted to replace The Guardian as the group’s go-to outlet in Britain. “We were willing to ensure that their material got a worldwide hearing,” said Tony Gallagher, the editor of The Telegraph.
The Telegraph was looped in on the Guantánamo Bay file release, but The Guardian was not. Mr. Leigh called WikiLeaks’ attitude “spiteful and petty.”
WikiLeaks’ other new media partners, including The Post and McClatchy, received the Guantánamo files several weeks before WikiLeaks lifted its embargo. Unknown, at first, to the WikiLeaks partners, The Times had independently obtained the files from a source Mr. Keller would not name, and shared them with both The Guardian and NPR.
WikiLeaks itself showed some old-fashioned competitive instinct. Responding to accounts that said its partners had not been first to publish, the organization wrote: “Enough. Our first partner, The Telegraph, published the Gitmo Files 1am GMT, long before NYT or Guardian.”
Mr. Benkler, a critic of the Guantánamo Bay prison, concluded that even the “scoop the scoop” aspect of the coverage had been productive. What it amounted to, he said, were “more sources providing greater attention to what is basically continued indefensible behavior on the part of the U.S. government.”
by The Consul » Sun May 01, 2011 1:07 am
by JackRiddler » Sun May 08, 2011 9:06 am
8bitagent wrote:Why was it all this wikileaks bin Laden stuff was coming out days before his supposed death from the raid? Is wikileaks really sticking it to the man...or is something else going on here?
by JackRiddler » Sun May 08, 2011 10:41 am
8bitagent wrote:So it's possible, if perhaps likely that "wikileaks" has been coopted? And the USG and Pentagon can push to the news media "wikileaks: ---insert propaganda here---" reports?
Correct me if I'm not reading you correctly.
I'm surprised there isn't more news about wikileaks exposing the courier angle, upsetting the official narrative.
by 8bitagent » Mon May 09, 2011 7:16 am
by JackRiddler » Wed May 11, 2011 11:55 pm
http://m.npr.org/news/front/136173262?singlePage=true
Case Against WikiLeaks Part Of Broader Campaign
A federal grand jury is scheduled to hear testimony Wednesday in the government's criminal investigation into WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
Published: May 11, 2011
by Carrie Johnson
A federal grand jury in Virginia is scheduled to hear testimony Wednesday from witnesses in one of the government's biggest criminal investigations of a national security leak.
Prosecutors are trying to build a case against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, whose website has embarrassed the U.S. government by disclosing sensitive diplomatic and military information.
The WikiLeaks case is part of a much broader campaign by the Obama administration to crack down on leakers.
A Worrisome Development
National security experts say they can't remember a time when the Justice Department has pursued so many criminal cases based on leaks of government secrets.
Steve Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists has been following five separate prosecutions, part of what he calls a tremendous surge by the Obama administration.
"For people who are concerned about freedom of the press, access to national security information, it's a worrisome development," says Aftergood, who writes for the blog Secrecy News.
Aftergood says some of the most important disclosures of the past decade, including abuses by the U.S. military at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, came out because people concerned about overreach blew the whistle on the government.
"Leaks serve a very valuable function as a kind of safety valve," he adds. "They help us to get out the information that otherwise would be stuck."
The Obama Justice Department doesn't agree.
Other Cases
With the investigation into disclosures by WikiLeaks, a federal grand jury in Virginia is exploring possible charges including conspiracy to transmit national defense information; knowingly accessing a computer without authorization; and stealing from a federal agency, according to a subpoena and related documents first made public by Salon.com. The documents say the latest grand jury session is scheduled for Wednesday.
Aside from the ongoing WikiLeaks investigation, federal prosecutors have brought criminal charges against four other people, including former State Department employee Stephen Kim; former CIA operative Jeffrey Sterling; one-time National Security Agency analyst Thomas Drake, who is going to trial next month in Baltimore; and former FBI translator Shamai Leibowitz, who pleaded guilty and was sentenced to almost two years in prison.
More Action Sought By Congress
Aftergood says despite the burst of activity within the Justice Department, there are still calls for more action against leakers.
"As aggressive as the Obama administration has been in pursuing and prosecuting leakers, the signal that the administration is getting from Congress is, why aren't you doing more?" he says.
At a pair of oversight hearings last week, Republicans blasted the Justice Department for deciding not to prosecute Thomas Tamm, a former government lawyer who admitted to telling the New York Times about a secret electronic surveillance program.
Iowa Republican Sen. Charles Grassley says the case raises questions about whether prosecutors went soft on leaks.
"I am concerned that the decision not to prosecute anyone related to this specific leak may indicate a reluctance to enforce the law. Leaks of classified information threaten the lives of our agents and allies in the field," Grassley says.
The House and Senate intelligence committees have proposed directing the intelligence community to create new computer systems to detect leaks and give government officials the power to yank away the pensions of suspected leakers.
Low-Hanging Fruit
Abbe Lowell is a Washington defense attorney at the Chadbourne & Parke law firm. He's defending Kim, the former State Department employee, in an ongoing leak prosecution.
"Going after leakers of classified information, if you will, is low-hanging fruit to show that you're tough in national security issues," Lowell says. "Other than the media, who are willing recipients of this material, there's not a constituency out there who basically is outraged when you go after a leaker."
Lowell outlines some of the defense arguments that he has been making in court: first, that government employees have First Amendment rights to share information or talk to people as part of their job.
Lowell adds that many federal employees shake their heads at double standards, where bosses can leak information to favorite reporters with no punishment, but federal workers face a crackdown if they do it.
"It is so arbitrary and capricious for the prosecutors to decide that some leaks are criminal and other leaks are what we actually want to have happen," Lowell says.
Advocates for open information say the government should use less severe tools, such as financial penalties or removing a worker's security clearance, before pulling out all the stops and bringing an indictment.
Laura Sweeney, a spokeswoman for the Justice Department, says federal workers can't take the law into their own hands.
"There are specific, authorized ways for a government employee to report possible concerns about classified programs, which include notifying inspectors general, specific congressional committees and other specified entities," Sweeney said in a written statement. "It is never appropriate, however, for government employees who are trusted with the nation's most valuable and sensitive information to mishandle classified information in any manner that puts the nation's security at risk." [Copyright 2011 National Public Radio]
TRANSCRIPT:
STEVE INSKEEP, host:
Also today, a federal grand jury is expected to hear testimony in the investigation of a national security leak. Prosecutors are examining Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks.
NPR's Carrie Johnson has the story.
CARRIE JOHNSON: National security experts say they can't remember a time when the Justice Department has had so many criminal cases based on leaks of government secrets.
Steve Aftergood has been following five separate prosecutions, part of what he calls a tremendous surge by the Obama administration.
Mr. STEVE AFTERGOOD (Project on Government Secrecy): For people who are concerned about freedom of the press, access to national security information, it's a worrisome development.
JOHNSON: Aftergood says some of the most important disclosures of the past decade, including abuses by the U.S. military at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, came out because people concerned about overreach blew the whistle on the government.
Mr. AFTERGOOD: Leaks serve a very valuable function as a kind of safety valve. They help us to get out the information that otherwise would be stuck.
JOHNSON: The Obama Justice Department doesn't agree.
Aside from the ongoing WikiLeaks investigation, federal prosecutors have brought criminal charges against four other people: a former State Department employee; an operative who used to work at the CIA; a one-time National Security Agency analyst going to trial next month in Baltimore; and a former FBI translator who pleaded guilty and was sentenced to almost two years in prison.
Again, Steve Aftergood.
Mr. AFTERGOOD: As aggressive as the Obama administration has been in pursuing and prosecuting leakers, the signal that the administration is getting from Congress is, why aren't you doing more?
JOHNSON: Exhibit A: a pair of oversight hearings last week, where Republicans blasted the Justice Department for deciding not to prosecute Thomas Tamm. Tamm's a former government lawyer who admitted to telling the New York Times about a secret electronic surveillance program.
Iowa Republican Senator Charles Grassley said the case raises questions about whether prosecutors had gone soft on leaks.
Senator CHARLES GRASSLEY (Republican, Iowa): I am concerned that the decision not to prosecute anyone related to this specific leak may indicate a reluctance to enforce the law. Leaks of classified information threaten the lives of our agents and allies in the field.
JOHNSON: The House and Senate Intelligence Committees have gone even further. They want the intelligence community to create new computer systems to detect leaks and to give government officials the power to yank away the pensions of suspected leakers.
Mr. ABBE LOWELL (Attorney): Going after leakers of classified information, if you will, is low-hanging fruit to show that you're tough in national security issues.
JOHNSON: That's Abbe Lowell. He's an attorney in Washington. He's defended two people accused of leaking sensitive information.
Mr. LOWELL: Other than the media, who are willing recipients of this material, there's not a constituency out there that basically is outraged when you go after a leaker.
JOHNSON: Lowell says that being a government employee doesn't mean you forfeit your First Amendment rights to share information or talk to people as part of your job. And he says many federal employees shake their heads at double standards. Bosses can leak information to favorite reporters with no punishment, but federal workers face a crackdown if they do it.
Mr. LOWELL: It is so arbitrary and capricious for the prosecutors to decide that some leaks are criminal and other leaks are what we actually want to have happen.
JOHNSON: Advocates for open information say the government should use less severe tools, such as financial penalties or removing a worker's security clearance, before pulling out all the stops and bringing an indictment.
Carrie Johnson, NPR News, Washington. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright National Public Radio.
Copyright © 2011 NPR
by JackRiddler » Fri May 13, 2011 11:52 pm
http://m.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/ ... pe=article
14.05.11
World news
Amnesty International hails WikiLeaks and Guardian as Arab spring 'catalysts'
The human rights group predicts a serious fightback from the forces of repression as it releases its annual report
Peter Walker
The Guardian, Fri 13 May 2011 00.01 BST
The world faces a watershed moment in human rights with tyrants and despots coming under increasing pressure from the internet, social networking sites and the activities of WikiLeaks, Amnesty International says in its annual roundup.
The rights group singles out WikiLeaks and the newspapers that pored over its previously confidential government files, among them the Guardian, as a catalyst in a series of uprisings against repressive regimes, notably the overthrow of Tunisia's long-serving president, Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali.
"The year 2010 may well be remembered as a watershed year when activists and journalists used new technology to speak truth to power and, in so doing, pushed for greater respect for human rights," Amnesty's secretary general, Salil Shetty, says in an introduction to the document. "It is also the year when repressive governments faced the real possibility that their days were numbered."
But, Shetty adds, the situation in the Middle East and North Africa, and elsewhere, remains unpredictable: "There is a serious fightback from the forces of repression. The international community must seize the opportunity for change and ensure that 2011 is not a false dawn for human rights."
The 432-page report reviews 156 countries and territories, of which at least 89 were found to restrict free speech, 98 carried out torture or other ill-treatment and 48 had documented prisoners of conscience.
The report covers only to the end of 2010, and thus only the very beginnings of the so-called Arab spring – Ben Ali was not deposed until mid-January. However, subsequent uprisings in Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen and Bahrain, many spread via mobile phones and social networking, reinforce Amnesty's message about the importance of technology and communication.
A key element had been the work of WikiLeaks in first publishing information about the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, and then a massive trove of US diplomatic papers, disclosures carried out with newspapers worldwide.
"It took old-fashioned newspaper reporters and political analysts to trawl through the raw data, analyse it, and identify evidence of crimes and violations contained in those documents," Shetty said.
"Leveraging this information, political activists used other new communications tools now easily available on mobile phones and on social networking sites to bring people to the streets to demand accountability."
One example highlighted by Shetty was Tunisia, where WikiLeaks revelations about Ben Ali's corrupt regime combined with rapidly-spreading news of the self-immolation of a disillusioned young man, Mohamed Bouazizi, to spark major protests.
The report also highlights the importance of new technology elsewhere, for example China, where "My father is Li Gang" – the cry of a senior policeman's son after he killed a young woman while drunk driving – became a euphemism on China's tightly controlled internet space for rife nepotism. Similarly, "empty chair" took the place of Liu Xiaobo's name on Chinese web forums after such a chair took the place of the jailed rights activist at the Nobel peace prize ceremony.
Shetty said: "Not since the end of the Cold War have so many repressive governments faced such a challenge to their stranglehold on power. The demand for political and economic rights spreading across the Middle East and North Africa is dramatic proof that all rights are equally important and a universal demand.
"In the 50 years since Amnesty International was born to protect the rights of people detained for their peaceful opinions, there has been a human rights revolution. The call for justice, freedom and dignity has evolved into a global demand that grows stronger every day. The genie is out of the bottle and the forces of repression cannot put it back."
by JackRiddler » Sat May 21, 2011 5:52 pm
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/ ... print.html
Activist who supports soldier in WikiLeaks case sues U.S. over seizure of laptop
By Ellen Nakashima, Published: May 13
The co-founder of a group advocating for an Army private accused of leaking classified material to the antisecrecy Web site WikiLeaks is suing the U.S. government for unlawfully seizing his computer and copying its contents to aid a criminal investigation of the site.
Computer scientist David House’s laptop was taken in November at an international airport by two Department of Homeland Security agents without a hint that it contained evidence of wrongdoing, but rather because House was a vocal supporter of Pfc. Bradley Manning, the accused leaker, the American Civil Liberties Union alleged in a complaint to be filed Friday in U.S. District Court in Boston.
The case, the civil liberties advocates contend, is a troubling instance of how the government’s more aggressive border search policies in the post-Sept. 11 era are being used not to enforce customs or immigration laws, but to advance government investigations of third parties and to collect information about people’s political activities.
The seizure of House’s laptop was unconstitutional, they argue, because it contained such a vast amount of personal material — including private membership lists — that reviewing it would be akin to probing House’s thoughts. They say that the government should have a suspicion of a crime and a “border-related” justification to conduct such searches.
A Justice Department spokesperson declined to comment. But a former senior DHS policy official said the plaintiff has a difficult case because the courts have traditionally placed few limits on the government’s border search authority.
Ordinarily, a search warrant based on probable cause of a crime would be needed to examine a person’s laptop, but when a traveler is entering the country, the government’s position is that it does not need a warrant — or even reasonable suspicion. In this case, House was stopped at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport on a return trip from Mexico.
As a general rule, the U.S. Supreme Court has held that as long as a search is routine or reasonable, the intent of the search does not matter. But the Supreme Court has not ruled on the specific issue of whether searching a laptop with troves of personal data is reasonable without at least some suspicion of a crime.
The government held House’s laptop for 49 days. On it were several years’ worth of e-mails with family, friends and co-workers; passwords to his bank account and workplace computer; confidential messages of the Bradley Manning Support Network about strategy and fund-raising; and lists of potential donors and notes on donor meetings.
“The computer is like an extension of my mind,” House said in an interview. “It is my notes, my writing, locations I’ve been.”
What concerns him, he said, is that the government appeared to be targeting him because of his advocacy work and may now start targeting others he associates with. “All these people working for the Manning Support Network, all of a sudden their names are in the open, and that is most worrisome,” he said.
Manning, who has been detained by the military since last May, faces 22 criminal charges for allegedly leaking material. Separately, a federal grand jury in Northern Virginia has been exploring possible criminal charges related to WikiLeaks’ publishing of sensitive material, including diplomatic cables and reports on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Manning Support Network, House said, is not affiliated with WikiLeaks.
House, who lives in Cambridge, Mass., said he thinks the government seized the laptop in a “fishing expedition” to further its investigation of WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange.
News of the seizure last fall caused potential donors to back away — a chilling, House said, of his First Amendment right of association. The publicity also led to calls last year for his dismissal as a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he said. (House eventually left to become a freelancer.)
David Cole, a law professor at George Washington University, said that if the government seized House’s laptop not for “valid customs law enforcement purposes, but rather to get intelligence about protected political associations or as a way of avoiding the requirements of criminal law searches, then it seems to me they’re abusing the border search exception for purposes it was never designed to serve.”
Paul Rosenzweig, a former senior DHS policy official, noted that the Supreme Court has ruled that “searches made at the border . . . are reasonable simply by virtue of the fact that they occur at the border.”
He said that the only court-imposed limit has been for body-cavity searches, which require reasonable suspicion.
“It’s absolutely clear that if you were carrying around your Rolodex in your briefcase across the border, the government can take it, photocopy it and give it back to you without probable cause or a reasonable suspicion,” he said.
The George W. Bush and Obama administrations have taken the position that searching a laptop is no different than examining a suitcase, and that such a search requires no suspicion. An appeals court in California has upheld that view in a case involving a traveler suspected of having child pornography on his laptop.
The appeals court erred, the ACLU contends. Moreover, the group said, House’s computer contained membership lists, not child porn.
Since last September, House has reentered the countr y seven times, and each time he was stopped and questioned. This has led him to think that his name is on a watchlist — not because he is suspected of terrorism or any crime, but because of his advocacy work.
In three encounters, including when his laptop was taken, he was asked about the Manning support group and whether he was affiliated with WikiLeaks. He was asked no questions relating to terrorism or customs laws, and at no point did agents suggest that he had broken the law or that his computer contained illegal material, he said.
© The Washington Post Company
http://m.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/05/wikileaks-aclu
Wired
ACLU Counts 4 More Secret Records Demands in WikiLeaks Probe
By Kevin Poulsen
May 20, 2011 | 3:19 pm |
An examination of case numbers of entirely sealed dockets in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Virginia, suggests to the ACLU that there were four Justice Department records demands issued in the same manner as a December 2010 demand sent to Twitter, which seeks information on three current and former WikiLeaks associates.
On Thursday, the ACLU, in conjunction with the EFF, asked a federal judge to open those dockets to the public.
“[T]here is still no publicly available docket with individual docket entries that gives the public notice that any applications or orders granting or denying those applications, or any challenges to such applications or orders, have been filed under seal,” the ACLU wrote in an appeal Thursday. “Regardless of whether it is appropriate to maintain certain documents under seal, the absence of a public docket–somewhere–containing docket entries identifying any other applications, orders, motions, or other documents is simply not permissible.”
The Justice Department has been seeking transaction records on the Twitter accounts since December under 18 USC 2703(d), a 1994 amendment to the Stored Communications Act that allows law enforcement access to non-content internet records, such as transaction information, without demonstrating the “probable cause” needed for a full-blown search warrant.
A 2703(d) order is issued when prosecutors provide a judge with “specific and articulable facts” that show the information they seek is relevant and material to a criminal investigation. The people targeted in the records demand don’t themselves have to be suspected of criminal wrongdoing.
The targets of the Twitter-records demand are WikiLeaks’ official Twitter account, and the accounts of three people connected to the group: Seattle coder and activist Jacob Appelbaum; Birgitta Jonsdottir, a member of Iceland’s parliament; and Dutch businessman Rop Gonggrijp. Jonsdottir and Gonggrijp helped WikiLeaks prepare the release of a classified U.S. Army video published last year as “Collateral Murder,” and Appelbaum is the group’s U.S. representative.
The records demand started as part of an ongoing grand jury investigation probing WikiLeaks for its high-profile leaks of classified U.S. material. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange hasn’t challenged the demand for records pertaining to the organization’s feed, but the other three have been fighting the case with the help of the ACLU and the EFF. A decision on the Twitter-records demand is pending.
Prosecutors are looking for records showing when the accounts sent direct messages to one another, and from what internet IP addresses. They are not seeking the content of the messages, nor information on other Twitter users who follow the accounts.
While some have speculated that other companies have received 2703(d) orders besides Twitter, no other companies have gone public with such a demand.
The Twitter-records demand was initially issued with the case number of the WikiLeaks grand jury probe, 1:10-GJ-03793. But when the Justice Department agreed to unseal the demand, it was moved to a public docket. The ACLU argues that procedural move illustrates that the demands are not protected by the federal rules governing grand jury secrecy.
The Thursday filing appeals a second shuffling of the Twitter court filings to yet another case number, ordered by a U.S. magistrate judge on May 4. A hearing on Thursday’s appeal is set for June 24 before U.S. District Court Judge Liam O’Grady.
Secret WikiLeaks Dockets
Kevin Poulsen is a senior editor at Wired.com, editor of the award-winning Threat Level blog, and author of Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground (Crown, 2011).
Follow @kpoulsen on Twitter.
[a couple of comments...]
0dBmW
It is truly scary that there are people who are prepared to both support the most repressive measures of the government and to attack any criticism of these measures as support for some foreign bogeyman.
curio007
Why doesn't the ACLU just declare its ALLIANCE with China and get it over with!
electric_worry
We just had a bill that is being introduced that is aiming to censor sites deemed bad (at the moment: counterfeit good sites and file sharing sites). We just had a recent ruling that essentially makes it okay for cops to break down a door under exigent circumstances (which they themselves can create and use as reason for entering a premises without a warrant). We had a recent article about a man who has had no trial and was shipped off to be tortured in another country (because if we can't do it ourselves we outsource it to someone who'll do it on our behalf). Etc. etc. etc. And you want to compare the ACLU to China? If anything our government is looking more like an ally of the Chinese than the ACLU. Slowly taking away our rights. People rolling over and just accepting that. Etc. etc. etc.
Your p.o.v. has been made clear but don't you ever pause and actually think about what it is you're supporting? And who you feel can do no wrong?
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