Prosecuting Assange for Espionage?
Dianne Feinstein has got to be kidding:
When WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange released his latest document trove—more than 250,000 secret State Department cables—he intentionally harmed the U.S. government. The release of these documents damages our national interests and puts innocent lives at risk. He should be vigorously prosecuted for espionage.
The law Mr. Assange continues to violate is the Espionage Act of 1917. That law makes it a felony for an unauthorized person to possess or transmit “information relating to the national defense which information the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation.”
The Espionage Act also makes it a felony to fail to return such materials to the U.S. government. Importantly, the courts have held that “information relating to the national defense” applies to both classified and unclassified material. Each violation is punishable by up to 10 years in prison.
Feinstein is bonkers if she thinks that publishing as a whistleblower is the same as espionage. Just plain bonkers. John Pilger argues:
WikiLeaks, says its founder Julian Assange, has “created a space that permits a form of journalism which lives up to the name that journalism has always tried to establish for itself”. This year, WikiLeaks has released tens of thousands of official documents that describe the casual, almost industrial killing of civilians, assassination squads, and attempts at cover-up.
Anyone watching the leaked cockpit video of an Apache helicopter gunning down cameramen and children in Baghdad will not forget the pilot’s reaction: “Nice.” Having witnessed the brutalising effects of war, I felt like cheering when this was exposed and I read that it was viewed 4.8 million times in one week. This is the new “space” for a truth-telling we need urgently, as great power promotes its “perpetual war” and strives for what it calls “information dominance”.
Let it be known here that if Feinstein gets her way I’ll fucking burn my American passport in front of her goddamn embassy. America was set up to find a better way than arbitrary tyranny – if she gets the chance to blow freedom of the press out of the water entirely (which make no mistake is what this would represent), the final route to dictatorship will be clear. No thanks. I’m in full agreement with someone who knows the position in which Assange finds himself better than anyone:
@DanielEllsberg RT @RepRonPaul: In a society where truth becomes treason, we are in big trouble.
Wikileaks: Whose Side Are You On?
Julian Assange and Wikileaks have changed the playing field entirely for journalism, whistleblowing and freedom of information. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have been laid bare; international diplomacy itself has been laid bare. They’ve also rapidly exposed the double standards in Western governments’ attitudes towards the internet and freedom of speech. Assange in response has been threatened with assassination and execution, even in some, largely high profile, American political circles, whilst he’s lauded as a hero in others.
Here’s Ed West in the Telegraph, who cautions about the consequences of the mass scale leaks:
As liberal commentator David Allen Green wrote in the New Statesman, WikiLeaks’ mission is not necessarily a good thing for freedom. Transparency is not liberal if it tramples over other liberal values such as accountability, legitimacy and privacy. And then there are the consequences.
When WikiLeaks was launched, Assange said: “To radically shift regime behaviour we must think clearly and boldly, for if we have learned anything it is that regimes do not want to be changed.” And yet he is almost certainly making regimes change for the worse.
As my colleague Guy Walters argues, the 265 million-words megaleak will only make governments more secretive, while aid worker Scott Gilmore wrote: “It will lead to a more closed world, where repressive governments will be more free to commit atrocities against their own people and the people who try to stop them will have even less information to help prevent this. Thankfully, for the Timorese at least, WikiLeaks did not exist in the 1990s.”
Investigative journalist John Pilger blames the extreme reaction to Wikileaks on the failures of mainstream journalism:
The WikiLeaks revelations shame the dominant section of journalism, devoted merely to taking down what cynical and malign power tells it. This is state stenography, not journalism. Look on the WikiLeaks site and read a Ministry of Defence document that describes the “threat” of real journalism. And so it should be a threat. Having skilfully published the WikiLeaks exposé of a fraudulent war, the Guardian should now give its most powerful and unreserved editorial support to the protection of Assange and his colleagues, whose truth-telling is as important as any in my lifetime.
Open Democracy argues a healthy democracy’s need for whistleblowers:
There is no doubt in my mind that a good number of the people screaming for Assange’s head would like the news media either to go away, or to function as a docile servant of the powers that be. Of course a society can exist without watchdog media, and many do. But those are generally awful places to live, except for the people who own them.
If the government has secrets, let it try to keep them. Any adult understands that running an organization may require its leaders to lie from time to time. But the job and duty of journalists is to expose those lies and their consequences. Julian Assange has shown that one does not need to be a journalist to help. That does not make him a spy.
Hounding Assange and criminalizing whistleblowers will do far more damage to democracy than a pack of scribes and hackers ever could. You don’t need to be a spy to guess that secret. The people screaming for Assange’s blood are the architects and allies of disastrous policies that are being rejected even within the government. They are trying to conceal their failure, and Wikileaks is the proof that they failed. It must not be silenced, and journalists should be the first to know it.
John Naughton argues Wikileaks’ action is all that’s left, given the failure of Western politics to hold any political leaders to account for their behaviour:
What WikiLeaks is really exposing is the extent to which the western democratic system has been hollowed out. In the last decade its political elites have been shown to be incompetent (Ireland, the US and UK in not regulating banks); corrupt (all governments in relation to the arms trade); or recklessly militaristic (the US and UK in Iraq). And yet nowhere have they been called to account in any effective way. Instead they have obfuscated, lied or blustered their way through. And when, finally, the veil of secrecy is lifted, their reflex reaction is to kill the messenger.
As Simon Jenkins put it recently in the Guardian, “Disclosure is messy and tests moral and legal boundaries. It is often irresponsible and usually embarrassing. But it is all that is left when regulation does nothing, politicians are cowed, lawyers fall silent and audit is polluted. Accountability can only default to disclosure.” What we are hearing from the enraged officialdom of our democracies is mostly the petulant screaming of emperors whose clothes have been shredded by the net.
Which brings us back to the larger significance of this controversy. The political elites of western democracies have discovered that the internet can be a thorn not just in the side of authoritarian regimes, but in their sides too. It has been comical watching them and their agencies stomp about the net like maddened, half-blind giants trying to whack a mole. It has been deeply worrying to watch terrified internet companies – with the exception of Twitter, so far – bending to their will.
But politicians now face an agonising dilemma. The old, mole-whacking approach won’t work. WikiLeaks does not depend only on web technology. Thousands of copies of those secret cables – and probably of much else besides – are out there, distributed by peer-to-peer technologies like BitTorrent. Our rulers have a choice to make: either they learn to live in a WikiLeakable world, with all that implies in terms of their future behaviour; or they shut down the internet.
The Wikileaks saga for me sits at the heart of the realities behind the pact John Kampfner writes about in ‘Freedom for Sale’ – political elites getting away (literally) with murder, because they succeed in effectively either bribing or terrifying the middle classes into allowing them to perpetuate themselves. Assange and his organisation have thrown that entirely up in the air – how can they hold their precious ‘pact’ together if it’s thoroughly exposed and unpacked? It’s hardly surprising that politicians and the elements in the media who cravenly leave them unchallenged should want to go for the jugular – this is the biggest attack on vested interests at the heart of the neoliberal, neoconservative project I’ve ever seen. Check out Joe Lieberman:
Some columnists like Christopher Hitchens have dismissed Assange as a nutcase with an agenda (which may well be true), but I would argue that’s irrelevant if he’s exposing criminality at the heart of government. If David Miliband was circumventing clusterbomb treaties I should know about this and be able to hold him to account, but of course that’s not the entire story. Much of the reason why this hasn’t exploded into the administration-shattering series of revelations it was no doubt intended to be is because of Kampfner’s ‘pact’ – a great swathe of every electorate, left- and right-leaning, responds to authoritarianism – they like being told what to do. Not only has Assange exposed the true inner mechanics of politics, he’s exposed the way in which people identify with the state too – it’s no wonder players other than the vested interests are closing ranks too. New Labour after all didn’t arise from nothing.
I think Richard Wilson makes about the best point I’ve seen so far about the lengths to which Assange’s freedom of speech in this matter should be limited:
if it did transpire (and I’m not aware of any direct evidence to date) that an innocent person had been injured or killed at the hands of someone who had identified them via a document published on Wikileaks, this would, in my view, be a serious moral indictment. But it would not necessarily mean that Wikileaks were at fault in seeking to publish the document in some form – only that they were negligent in failing to redact all identifiable personal details.
While the issue of “harm minimization” cannot simply be brushed aside, it is clearly not the only ethical issue at stake in the debate about Wikileaks. One of the most serious charges made against the UK and US governments in the light of the Afghan War Logs and the more recent “cablegate” revelations is that the political elites who determine policy – both the politicians and the bureaucrats who advise them – have systematically deceived their electorates about the realities of the war in Afghanistan.
The second Gulf War may have changed a lot – we are just left with the smug sureness of the people who took us to war, with no evidence to back it up at all, just the certainty of their convictions. But that simply isn’t enough in the internet age. People want to see the data for themselves. They want to know what ‘intelligence’ it is that led to the tragedy of so many wasted lives. Being told that we can’t handle the truth doesn’t wash any longer. That’s the culture into which Wikileaks has arrived, and why it is seen as such a sea change; it’s seen as the handing over of information from those who want to keep it secret to the citizens who want to know, often by passing the journalists in the middle altogether. You can see why the secret-keepers and the journalists alike might be startled by this.
Assange has now been arrested in the UK on an international extradition warrant from Sweden, on allegations of rape. They may of course be true but they’re unconnected to the greater issue surrounding Wikileaks. Multinational companies such as PayPal and Amazon are withdrawing services to Assange left, right and centre, suggesting strongly that he’s hit a nerve, and vested interests (like Lieberman) who don’t want us to know what we now do are out to get him. It’s also shown that his experience on the internet isn’t secure anywhere in the world, indeed his life may not be. The gap between us and China or Russia is wafer thin – if you piss off the ruling elites they’ll shut you down or kill you. Their hypocrisy is being noticed:
@acre56 Just saw huckabee call for execution of julian assange for revealing secrets.. Didnt remember him calling for same for scooter libby!
@blacflag @Re_Asylum gotta laugh at the ‘leak will lead to the murder of innocents’ comment, like 100,000s of innocents haven’t already died.
It puts even Richard Wilson’s comment into perspective, doesn’t it? Johann Hari puts it into even greater perspective:
Each of the wikileaks revelations has been carefully weighed to ensure there is a public interest in disclosing it. Of the more than 250,000 documents they hold, they have released fewer than 1000 – and each of those has had the names of informants, or any information that could place anyone at risk, removed. The information they have released covers areas where our governments are defying the will of their own citizens, and hiding the proof from them.
Assange himself yesterday added:
The powers of the Australian government appear to be fully at the disposal of the US as to whether to cancel my Australian passport, or to spy on or harass WikiLeaks supporters. The Australian Attorney-General is doing everything he can to help a US investigation clearly directed at framing Australian citizens and shipping them to the US.
Prime Minister Gillard and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have not had a word of criticism for the other media organisations. That is because The Guardian, The New York Times and Der Spiegel are old and large, while WikiLeaks is as yet young and small.
We are the underdogs. The Gillard government is trying to shoot the messenger because it doesn’t want the truth revealed, including information about its own diplomatic and political dealings.
I would argue that ultimately we need to see what Assange has actually done. Unintentionally he may have exposed how prepared ruling elites are in Western ‘democracies’ to abandon the very principles they accuse dictatorships like China of abusing, but Johann Hari details the rest:
Every one of us owes a debt to Julian Assange. Thanks to him, we now know that our governments are pursuing policies that place you and your family in considerably greater danger. Wikileaks has informed us they have secretly launched war on yet another Muslim country, sanctioned torture, kidnapped innocent people from the streets of free countries and intimidated the police into hushing it up, and covered up the killing of 15,000 civilians – five times the number killed on 9/11. Each one of these acts has increased the number of jihadis. We can only change these policies if we know about them – and Assange has given us the black-and-white proof.
I know whose side I’m on, but Assange has trodden on more than just political toes. Where this will end is anyone’s guess.
Take a Stand Against the Shock Doctrine
I couldn’t agree more with John Pilger. It’s happening a lot lately:
A deficit of 10 per cent is not remotely a crisis. When Britain was officially bankrupt at the end of the Second World War, the government built its greatest public institutions, such as the National Health Service and the arts edifices of London’s South Bank.
There is no economic rationale for the assault described cravenly by the BBC as a “public spending review”. The debt is exclusively the responsibility of those who incurred it, the super-rich and the gamblers. However, that’s beside the point. What is happening in Britain is the seizure of an opportunity to destroy the tenuous humanity of the modern state. It is a coup, a “shock doctrine” as applied to Pinochet’s Chile and Yeltsin’s Russia.
In Britain, there is no need for tanks in the streets. In its managerial indifference to the freedoms it is said to hold dear, bourgeois Britain has allowed parliament to create a surveillance state with 3,000 new criminal offences and laws: more than for the whole of the previous century. Powers of arrest and detention have never been greater. The police have the impunity to kill; and asylum-seekers can be “restrained” to death on commercial flights.
It’s an interesting point of view: the reason why the Naomi Klein-style disaster capitalism cuts aren’t going to be resisted by Britain is the ‘pact’ I’ve mentioned many times, identified by John Kampfner in the book ‘Freedom for Sale’. Under New Labour the middle classes tolerated the unprecedented growth of the surveillance state and uttered barely a murmur at an equally unprecedented rollback of civil liberties. It seems logical that the same middle classes (who won’t be disproportionately affected by these cuts, at least for now) would also fail to react to this equally abusive government action.
Liberalism, the vainest ideology, has hauled up its ladder. The chief opportunist, Nick Clegg, gave no electoral hint of his odious faction’s compliance with the dismantling of much of British postwar society. The theft of £83bn in jobs and services matches almost exactly the amount of tax legally avoided by piratical corporations. Without fanfare, the super-rich have been assured they can dodge up to £40bn in tax payments in the secrecy of Swiss banks. The day this was sewn up, Osborne attacked those who “cheat” the welfare system. He omitted the real amount lost, a minuscule £0.5bn, and that £10.5bn in benefit payments was not claimed at all. Labour is his silent partner.
The propaganda arm in the press and broadcasting dutifully presents this as unfortunate but necessary.
Much of this is repetition, as I said, from the New Labour era. True the mainstream media is failing to get into much of a huff about the cuts (students sure are), but they didn’t about 42 days, 90 days, ID cards, the ISA, control orders, you name it. I would wonder how long the pact under these conditions will hold however. It fell apart for Blair after he went to war in Iraq after an unprecedented protest warning him not to do just that. Middle class dissent seems content to threaten the Lib Dems right now (and their polling has now started freefalling – 9%?!), but I can’t help but wonder if Pilger will get his wish for widespread direct action if the cuts start to impact the interests of the middle class. Will education be the flashpoint? I’ll reflect again on this after they demonstrate next week!
Voting For War
(cross-posted from Stop the War)
by John Pilger
Staring at the vast military history section in the airport shop, I had a choice: the derring-do of psychopaths or scholarly tomes with their illicit devotion to the cult of organized killing. There was nothing I recognized from reporting war. Nothing on the spectacle of children’s limbs hanging in trees and nothing on the burden of shit in your trousers. War is a good read. War is fun. More war please.
The day before I flew out of Australia, 25 April, I sat in a bar beneath the great sails of the Sydney Opera House. It was Anzac Day, the 95th anniversary of the invasion of Ottoman Turkey by Australian and New Zealand troops at the behest of British imperialism. The landing was an incompetent stunt of blood sacrifice conjured by Winston Churchill; yet it is celebrated in Australia as an unofficial national day. The ABC evening news always comes live from the sacred shore at Gallipoli, in Turkey, where this year some 8000 flag-wrapped Antipodeans listened, dewy-eyed, to the Australian governor-general Quentin Bryce, who is the Queen’s viceroy, describe the point of pointless mass killing.
It was, she said, all about a “love of nation, of service, of family, the love we give and the love we receive and the love we allow ourselves to receive. [It is a love that] rejoices in the truth, it bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. And it never fails.”
Of all the attempts at justifying state murder I can recall, this drivel of DIY therapy, clearly aimed at the young, takes the blue riband. Not once did Bryce honor the fallen with the two words that the survivors of 1915 brought home with them: “Never again.” Not once did she refer to a truly heroic anti-conscription campaign, led by women, that stemmed the flow of Australian blood in the first world war, the product not of a gormlessness that “believes all things” but of anger in defense of life.
The next item on the TV news was an Australian government minister, John Faulkner, with the troops in Afghanistan. Bathed in the light of a perfect sunrise, he made the Anzac connection to the illegal invasion of Afghanistan in which, on 13 February last year, Australian soldiers killed five children. No mention was made of them. On cue, this was followed by an item that a war memorial in Sydney had been “defaced by men of Middle Eastern appearance.” More war please.
“Gooks”, “rag-heads”, “scum”
In the Opera House bar a young man wore campaign medals which were not his. That is the fashion now. Smashing his beer glass on the floor, he stepped over the mess which was cleaned up another young man whom the TV newsreader would say was of Middle Eastern appearance. Once again, war is a fashionable extremism for those suckered by the Edwardian notion that a man needs to prove himself “under fire” in a country whose people he derides as “gooks” or “rag-heads” or simply “scum.” (The current public inquiry in London into the torture and murder of an Iraqi hotel receptionist, Baha Mousa, by British troops has heard that “the attitude held” was that “all Iraqis were scum”).
There is a hitch. In the ninth year of the thoroughly Edwardian invasion of Afghanistan, more than two thirds of the home populations of the invaders want their troops to get out of where they have no right to be. This is true of Australia, the United States, Britain, Canada and Germany.
What this says is that, behind the media façade of politicized ritual – such as the parade of military coffins through the English town of Wootton Bassett — millions of people are trusting their own critical and moral intelligence and ignoring propaganda that has militarized contemporary history, journalism and parliamentary politics – Australia’s Labor prime minister, Kevin Rudd, for instance, describes the military as his country’s “highest calling.”
Here in Britain, the war criminal Tony Blair is anointed by the Guardian’s Polly Toynbee as “the perfect emblem for his people’s own contradictory whims.” No, he was the perfect emblem for a liberal intelligentsia prepared cynically to indulge his crime.
That is the unsaid of the British election campaign, along with the fact that 77 per cent of the British people want the troops home. In Iraq, duly forgotten, what has been done is a holocaust. More than a million people are dead and four million have been driven from their homes. Not a single mention has been made of them in the entire campaign. Rather, the news is that Blair is Labor’s “secret weapon.”
All three party leaders are warmongers. Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrats leader and darling of former Blair lovers, says that as prime minister he will “participate” in another invasion of a “failed state” provided there is “the right equipment, the right resources.” His one condition is the standard genuflection towards a military now scandalized by a colonial cruelty of which the Baha Mousa case is but one of many.
For Clegg, as for Gordon Brown and David Cameron, the horrific weapons used by British forces, such as clusters, depleted uranium and the Hellfire missile, which sucks the air out of its victims’ lungs, do not exist. The limbs of children in trees do not exist. This year alone Britain will spend £4 billion on the war in Afghanistan, and that is what Brown and Cameron almost certainly intend to cut from the National Health Service.
Edward S Herman explained this genteel extremism in his essay, The Banality of Evil. There is a strict division of labor’s, ranging from the scientists working in the laboratories of the weapons industry, to the intelligence and “national security” personnel who supply the paranoia and “strategies”, to the politicians who approve them. As for journalists, our task is to censor by omission and make the crime seem normal for you, the public. For it is your understanding and your awakening that are feared, above all.
Obama, Not Bush, Has Ushered in 1984
In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell described a superstate, Oceania, whose language of war inverted lies that “passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past’.”
Barack Obama is the leader of a contemporary Oceania. In two speeches at the close of the decade, the Nobel Peace Prize-winner affirmed that peace was no longer peace, but rather a permanent war that “extends well beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan” to “disorderly regions, failed states, diffuse enemies”. He called this “global security” and invited our gratitude. To the people of Afghanistan, which the US has invaded and occupied, he said wittily: “We have no interest in occupying your country.”
In Oceania, truth and lies are indivisible. According to Obama, the American attack on Afghanistan in 2001 was authorised by the United Nations Security Council. There was no UN authority. He said that “the world” supported the invasion in the wake of the 11 September 2001 attacks. In truth, all but three of 37 countries surveyed by Gallup expressed overwhelming opposition. He said that America invaded Afghanistan “only after the Taliban refused to turn over Osama Bin Laden”. In 2001, the Taliban tried three times to hand over Bin Laden for trial, Pakistan’s military regime reported, and they were ignored.
I think Pilger really should have been in that fantasy dinner party I was asked about on formspring.me last night. It’s a great argument, and one which supposed liberals should be paying close attention to. Was this really the ‘change’ you wanted to believe in? Whilst not remotely supporting the Taliban or their monstrously cruel regime, I remember very clearly that they offered Osama to Bush but were rebuffed. I would argue that rather than merely continuing the Bush neo-Conservative ideological agenda (but with a smiling face) Barack Obama is instead tapping into the current, global compact all electorates have made with their leaders. He gets to make savage attacks on liberty at home (just what is happening to Guantánamo Bay?) and abroad in exchange for keeping the electorate as wealthy as they’ve become accustomed to. It’s why he’s rebuilding the neoliberal economic system exactly as it was, because he depends on it as much as Jintao, Brown, Merkel, Berlusconi, Putin and the rest do; keep us rich enough and we’ll turn a blind eye to your strategic or natural resources wars. Obama doesn’t call for ‘regime change’ or ‘exporting democracy’ but as Pilger says presents war as peace, presents lies as truth, and most of us know exactly what he’s doing and don’t care.
