Category: Secrecy

Assange Formally Granted Asylum by Ecuador

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This is not an unexpected development.

The British are saying that they are never going to allow his passage out of the country, and are continuing to imply that they will use a law passed in late 1980s to raid the Ecuadorean embassy.

The law in question was passed after someone shot a Bobby from inside the Iranian Lybian embassy, which is clearly a different circumstance from this.

The real issue here is that pretrial process, and extradition, in Sweden is opaque, and Assange has publicly stated that he would be willing to go to Sweden if they gave him guarantees that he would not be transferred to US custody.

This is about Obama, and people close to him, desperately wanting to get their hands on him so that they can make an example of him. (Even if there is not a successful prosecution, there will be torture, even if he does not get sent to Gitmo, look at what they did to Bradley Manning in pretrial detention.)

Rather unsurprisingly, all the news that’s fit to print, i.e. the NY Times reported this as a hit piece against Assange.

No Rule of Law for You!

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Well, we now have reports that
Ecuador intends to grant Julian Assange asylum, but it appears that the British are threatening to storm the embassy:

Ecuador has accused the UK of making a “threat” to enter its embassy in London to arrest Wikileaks’ Julian Assange.

Mr Assange took refuge at the embassy in June to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he faces questioning over assault and rape claims, which he denies.

Ecuador foreign minister Ricardo Patino also said a decision on the 41-year-old’s bid for political asylum had been made and would be announced later.

The Foreign Office said it could revoke the embassy’s diplomatic status.

………

At a news conference in Quito on Wednesday, Mr Patino said a letter from the UK government was delivered through a British embassy official.

“Today we received from the United Kingdom an express threat, in writing, that they might storm our Embassy in London if we don’t hand over Julian Assange,” he said.

“Ecuador rejects in the most emphatic terms the explicit threat of the British official communication.”

He said such a threat was “improper of a democratic, civilised and rule abiding country”.

“If the measure announced in the British official communication is enacted, it will be interpreted by Ecuador as an unacceptable, unfriendly and hostile act and as an attempt against our sovereignty. It would force us to respond,” he said.

“We are not a British colony”.

A Foreign Office spokesman said the UK remained “determined” to fulfill its obligation to extradite Mr Assange.

If you are old enough to remember the Iranian hostage crisis, it wasn’t the Iranian government that took the American embassy in Tehran, it was a bunch of kids with no “official” ties to the government.

Even Ayatollah Khomeini understood that the consequences of flaunting the sanctity required a fig leaf.

The British are not doing this for the Swedes. They are doing this because the US government, with the certain knowledge of, and likely active participation of Barack Obama personally, has demanded this.

Seriously, Obama’s war on whistle blowers makes Richard Nixon look like the Sunlight Foundation.

Jeebus

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Some of the provisions of the Trans-Pacific Partnership have been leaked, and this is absolutely awful:

  • limit how U.S. federal and state officials could regulate foreign firms operating within U.S. boundaries, with requirements to provide them greater rights than domestic firms;
  • extend the incentives for U.S. firms to offshore investment and jobs to lower-wage countries;
  • establish a two-track legal system that gives foreign firms new rights to skirt U.S. courts and laws, directly sue the U.S. government before foreign tribunals and demand compensation for financial, health, environmental, land use and other laws they claim undermine their TPP privileges; and
  • allow foreign firms to demand compensation for the costs of complying with U.S. financial or environmental regulations that apply equally to domestic and foreign firms.

Just in case you are wondering, there are proposal to make the agreement more people friendly, and less corporation friendly, but it appears that the Obama administration is opposing this at every level.

Note that this is not atypical of US foreign policy, though it it is in direct contravention of of what he promised during the 2008 campaign.

I guess that Austan Goolsbee was told the truth when he was said to representatives of the Canadian government that Obama’s populist statements regarding free trade agreements were lies.

We Look Like Scared, Fearful, Losers Because We Are Scared, Fearful, Losers.

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I cannot believe that I am quoting Iraq War booster Fareed Zakaria, but his take on the new invasive US state security apparatus:

While we will leave the battlefields of the greater Middle East, we are firmly committed to the war on terror at home. What do I mean by that? Well, look at the expansion of federal bureaucracies to tackle this war.

Since September 11, 2001, the U.S. government has created or reconfigured at least 263 organizations to tackle some aspect of the war on terror. Thirty-three new building complexes have been built for the intelligence bureaucracies alone, occupying 17 million square feet – the equivalent of 22 U.S. Capitols or three Pentagons. The largest bureaucracy after the Pentagon and the Department of Veterans Affairs is now the Department of Homeland Security, which has a workforce of 230,000 people.

The rise of this national security state has entailed a vast expansion in the government’s powers that now touch every aspect of American life, even when seemingly unrelated to terrorism. Some 30,000 people, for example, are now employed exclusively to listen in on phone conversations and other communications within the United States.

In the past, the U.S. government has built up for wars, assumed emergency authority and sometimes abused that power, yet always demobilized after the war. But this is, of course, a war without end.

………

We don’t look like people who have won a war. We look like scared, fearful, losers.

(emphasis mine)

Osama bin Laden did not win, he’s dead, but we lost, and we did it to ourselves.

Here is an American Hero

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Lt. Colonel Daniel Davis, a 17 year Army veteran who almost certainly won’t make it retirement, because he wrote a report saying that senior military officials are lying about Afghanistan:

Earlier this week, the New York Times’ Scott Shane published a bombshell piece about Lt. Colonel Daniel Davis, a 17-year Army veteran recently returned from a second tour in Afghanistan. According to the Times, the 48-year-old Davis had written an 84-page unclassified report, as well as a classified report, offering his assessment of the decade-long war. That assessment is essentially that the war has been a disaster and the military’s top brass has not leveled with the American public about just how badly it’s been going. “How many more men must die in support of a mission that is not succeeding?” Davis boldly asks in an article summarizing his views in The Armed Forces Journal.

Davis last month submitted the unclassified report –titled “Dereliction of Duty II: Senior Military Leader’s Loss of Integrity Wounds Afghan War Effort” – for an internal Army review. Such a report could then be released to the public. However, according to U.S. military officials familiar with the situation, the Pentagon is refusing to do so. Rolling Stone has now obtained a full copy of the 84-page unclassified version, which has been making the rounds within the U.S. government, including the White House. We’ve decided to publish it in full; it’s well worth reading for yourself. It is, in my estimation, one of the most significant documents published by an active-duty officer in the past ten years.

Here is the report’s damning opening lines: “Senior ranking U.S. military leaders have so distorted the truth when communicating with the U.S. Congress and American people in regards to conditions on the ground in Afghanistan that the truth has become unrecognizable. This deception has damaged America’s credibility among both our allies and enemies, severely limiting our ability to reach a political solution to the war in Afghanistan.” Davis goes on to explain that everything in the report is “open source” – i.e., unclassified – information. According to Davis, the classified report, which he legally submitted to Congress, is even more devastating. “If the public had access to these classified reports they would see the dramatic gulf between what is often said in public by our senior leaders and what is actually true behind the scenes,” Davis writes. “It would be illegal for me to discuss, use, or cite classified material in an open venue and thus I will not do so; I am no WikiLeaks guy Part II.”

According to the Times story, Davis briefed four members of Congress and a dozen staff members and sent his reports to the Defense Department’s inspector general, and of course spoke to a New York Times reporter; only after all that did he inform his chain of command what he’d been up to. Evidently Davis’s truth-telling campaign has rattled the Pentagon brass, prompting unnamed officials to retaliate by threatening a bogus investigation for “possible security violations,” according to NBC News.

They are going to go after him, and they won’t just try to kick him out, they will try to send him to Leavenworth.

The hyper-aggressive criminalization of whistle-blowing is one of the extra special innovations of the current administration.

The Pedophile Protectors Move the Goal Post

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You knew that the be satisfied with nothing but a right to enforce their religious beliefs on the rest of us:

Hours after calling the Obama administration’s contraceptives compromise a “first step,” the Catholic bishops said Friday night they have “two serious objections” to the new policy and will fight its enactment.

First, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops said the administration’s plan still includes a “nationwide mandate of insurance coverage of sterilization and contraception, including some abortifacients.”

“This is both unsupported in the law and remains a grave moral concern,” the bishops said in their statement. “We cannot fail to reiterate this, even as so many would focus exclusively on the question of religious liberty.

I am so not shocked by this.

This is why compromise is not an option.

There isn’t one. You either capitulate, or fight.

Obama’s War on Open Government Continues

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They are going after a CIA officer who revealed our chain of gulags and torture:

The Justice Department on Monday charged a former CIA officer with repeatedly leaking classified information, including the identities of agency operatives involved in the capture and interrogation of alleged terrorists.

The case against John Kiriakou, who also served as a senior Senate aide, extends the Obama administration’s crackdown on disclosures of national security secrets. Kiriakou, 47, is the sixth target of a leaks-related prosecution since President Obama took office, exceeding the total number of comparable prosecutions under all previous administrations combined, legal experts said.

Kiriakou, who was among the first to go public with details about the CIA’s use of waterboarding and other harsh interrogation measures, was charged with disclosing classified information to reporters and lying to the agency about the origin of other sensitive material he published in a book. He faces up to 30 years in prison if convicted.

Seriously, this sh%$ is just evil.

There have been more prosecutions of leakers in 3 years of the Obama administration than there had been over the prior two hundred and twenty years.

This is despicable.

Manning is Referred For Court Martial

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22 counts, including “aiding the enemy, which carries a potential death penalty, for leaking thousands of files to Wikileaks.

It appears that the “the enemy” is the American public.

It’s a f%$#ing kangaroo court, as evidenced by the convening authority refusing to allow the most of the defense’s witnesses, because the goal, of both the military and the Obama administration is to suborn perjury from Manning, so that they can manufacture a case with which to prosecute Julian Assange.

When Michael Hayden Says That You Over Classify…

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You have gone way beyond an even remotely sane assessment of the need for secrecy:

Ex-head of the National Security Agency and CIA and retired U.S. Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden said federal agencies need to open up to public and private industry to address cyber threats

As cyber security climbs its way up the priority list after 2011’s string of attacks against government and corporate systems, U.S. government agencies and companies struggle to find a happy medium between excessive secrecy and too much disclosure regarding the handling of such issues.

Going one way or the other can have severe repercussions. Excessive secrecy can stifle cyber defense, as too much focus could be placed on an issue that was already resolved elsewhere. If you keep it secret, someone who might know how to fix it cannot do so. Too much disclosure, on the other hand, gives hackers what they need to work around security systems.

This is kind of like Sweeney Todd saying that you are too rough when you give a shave.

Hoocoodanode? The Frogs, That’s Hoocoodanode

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Yes, Wikileaks, the gift that keeps on giving,™ has yet more beneath the rocks information on just how f%$#ed up Wall Street was.

It turns out that the French were desperately warning the US Treasury Department that a crash was inevitable, because of endemic fraud in our financial system:

In 2007 top US and France officials knew rampant fraud being committed by regulators, rating agencies and Wall Street Banks would soon cause a global financial collapse.

While investors and nations around the world were happily giving trillions of dollars away to crooked Wall Street bankers top officials in the United States and France knew the market would soon collapse and people would be robbed of millions.

While raising the issue that the role of government regulators and rating agencies needed to be reviewed in the wake of the upcoming crisis, US officials ignored calls from the French government to enact necessary regulation to stop the rampant fraud that would soon result in investors losing tens of trillions of dollars they had invested into the markets.

The cable reveals that while discussing the ability of the French banks to survive the crisis, French President Sarkozy was pushing the US to enact regulations to forestall the crisis. Instead, Henry Paulson responded by telling Sarkozy not to overreacted because the” it would take months, not weeks, for credit to be re-priced” telling France this is “not a major crisis.”

Paulson went on to warn that the major problem was with the German banks and which would require a bailout from the taxpayer while warning that the assets held by banks but covered up from investors by being held off-balance sheet presented systematic risk to banks and to sovereign wealth.

The cable clearly reveals that taxpayer bailouts would be needed. Paulson further up sticks up for the Wall Street hedge fund saying they were not to blame for the crisis while acknowledging there were major Wall Street transparency issues.

To summarize, the cable reveals that top government officials in France and the US knew Wall street banks were committing fraud in the origination and packaging of sub-prime mortgage and lying to investors about the resulting securities they were creating and selling. Officials knew banks were also lying about their own liabilities and hiding them from investors by keeping the assets off their balance sheets. The government also knew that both regulators and ratings agencies were participating in the scheme.

So our regulatory apparatus was aware of deep and systemic control fraud on the part of our largest financial institutions over a year before the house of cards collapsed, but decided to do nothing.

This was no Black Swan.  This was a blatant and systemic looting of the system, with implicit taxpayer backstop.

Where are the prosecutions?

As an aside, the most tightly held secrets held by our state security apparatus are not about protecting the nation and its citizens, but rather about protecting the most powerful amongst us from embarrassment and ridicule.

We really need to embed the Swedish concept of Offentlighetsprincipen (openness) into our constitution.

H/t DC on the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

And Now, a Public Service Announcement

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Now if only they could pivot to the banksters

It’s an advertisement for Wikileaks.

I wholeheartedly support and approve this message.

Unfortunately, you cannot use your credit, but there are other options listed on their support page.

I would offer a caveat about Bitcoin, which is that the virtual currency has experienced wild price swings, as a result of someone counterfeiting the digital currency, and I would anticipate this sort of thing to increase, because it has some real world value, which attracts criminals, and it is not traceable by the standard three letter acronym (TLA) organizations, which might lead them to attempt to debase the currency or exchanges in some manner.

I would suggest buying an international money order with cash, and mailing it to:

WikiLeaks (or any suitable name likely to avoid interception in your country)
BOX 4080
Australia Post Office – University of Melbourne Branch
Victoria 3052
Australia

Not only do I support, rhetorically at least, Wikileaks, but I would like to see the US Constitution mirror that of the Swedish Constitution, and enshrine the concept of Offentlighetsprincipen (openness) into our governmental structures.

I believe that the classification of documents in our society should require a strong and affirmative showing that doing so is essential.

Secrecy is most often used to protect those in power from those whom they ostensibly serve, not for protecting the public safety.

So, Anthony Weiner Has Resigned

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I guess the rule here, even if you are a Democrat, because they were the ones screaming for him to go, is that unlike Craig, Vitter, Coburn, Ensign, etc., is that it’s not OK if you aren’t a Republican.

The Democrats are such willing hostages to Republican political terrorism that Stockholm Syndrome should be renamed Beltway Democrat syndrome.

The only thing more pathetic is the behavior of the press, which sees fit to treat real scandals from Republicans with decorum, but turns into an (even bigger) freak show when a Democrat does something.

One final note, I would not call Anthony Weiner a dick, because a dick has a head.

At Least This Wasn’t the Obama Administration’s Coverup

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In this case, it’s big Ag (We’re Beatrice), who have been leaning on their running dog lackeys in state legislators to pass laws to make the taking of photographs, videos, and recordings of farms illegal:

So, proposed legislation in three states – Iowa, Minnesota and Florida – that would criminalize the filming, photography or audio recording of farms (the general assumption seems to be that the bills are meant to protect CAFOs – concentrated animal feeding operations, also referred to as factory farms – but could apply to any farm of any nature) raised a major red flag to me, and to others who follow and write about such issues. People you’d expect to raise a protest, like Humane Society’s Wayne Pacelle and Animal Welfare Approved director Andrew Guenther have done so, but mainstream media, especially the New York Times, has also done a great job, with this pointed op-ed and Mark Bittman’s excellent “Who Protects the Animals?” (in which he coins the phrase “ag-gag”).

I guess that I shouldn’t be surprised, considering the popularity of veggie libel laws, but the pure venality and hypocrisy here just boggles my mind.

I would hope that the courts declare this unconstitutional before the ink is dry, because it is banning the practice of journalism.

Jon Stewart Convinced Me………

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Release the f%$#ing photos

All the arguments about the bin Laden death photo are a part of the bigger picture, which is that essentially nothing resembling accurate and impartial photojournalism is ever allowed in our “war on terror”, and this is intentional.

A more accurate picture of the forever war we are involved in would inevitably result in a substantial erosion in the support for it, which would mean that Blackwater Xe would not be able to support John Ashcroft in the manner to which he is accustomed.

Ha Ha!

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Anonymous has apparently penetrated the US Chamber of Commerce, and now released a 1.2 Gigabyte file containing the documents.

It seems to contain files from the Chamber, the American Legal Exchange Council, and the the Mackinac Center.

The last two are right wing front groups.

The ALEC writes legislation to kill unions as well as the poor and the elderly, and the Mackinac Center is yet another of those right wing so-called “think” tanks.

There is a caveat here, one which has been posted at AnonNews:

On April 29th a person using the twitter account “@septscelles”  released a large file to Barrett Brown that purportedly contained secret US Chamber of Commerce documents. This file was later made available via File Dropper as a (strangely truecypted) torrent named “chambersecrets2”.  It is also reported to have been made available in an unencrypted form on the Pirate Bay.

Despite the promise of secrets and leaks, early research has thus far shown that this information is publicly available through a simple Google search. It’s very possible that “@septscelles” is just an attention seeking troll. Despite this, there is a more insidious possibility. We learned from the HB Gary emails that the Chamber of Commerce was advised to “feed the fuel between the feuding groups, [creating] disinformation.” Specific mention was made of “[creating] messages around actions to sabotage or discredit the opposing organization [and to] submit fake documents and then call out the error…”

The file is very large, and will therefore take some time to fully examine. Nevertheless, we would like to state that this information was provided by an unknown party and may be an attempt to discredit Anonymous through a campaign of misinformation. More information will be coming soon.

So obviously, breaking out the champagne is premature, though perhaps chilling it might not be a bad idea.

You can go through the documents by downloading this torrent.

H/t Hedgehog at the Stellarparthenon BBS.

A Win on Civil Rights

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The Second Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that a consortium of groups including the ACLU have legal standing to sue over the expansion in wiretapping powers passed in 2008.

The Circuit Court had ruled that unless a plaintiff could prove that they had been secretly wiretapped, they had no standing to sue, and the court has said that they do have standing.  It made no ruling on the merits:

A district judge in Manhattan had thrown out the lawsuit because he said that the plaintiffs failed to demonstrate they were actually spied upon and did not have legal standing to sue. But the Second Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed, allowing the lawsuit on Monday to move forward.

It found that the groups challenging the wiretapping law, including lawyers and journalists communicating with people overseas who might fall under terrorism investigations, had a reasonable fear that their international calls and e-mails would be monitored by the government.

The district court set up a lovely “Catch-22”. You could not challenge the law unless you had proof that you were wiretapped, but the wiretaps are secret, so you couldn’t sue, and so could not use the courts to prove that you were wiretapped.

I expect the Obama administration to use everything but the kitchen sink to stop this suit, but sovereign immunity will be their first bite at the apple.

So Give Bloombert Your Papers, Mr. Bernanke

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The Supreme Court has declined to hear the Federal Reserve’s appeal of the court order directing them to turn over data on its discount window lending program:

The Federal Reserve will disclose details of emergency loans it made to banks in 2008, after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected an industry appeal that aimed to shield the records from public view.

The justices today left intact a court order that gives the Fed five days to release the records, sought by Bloomberg News’s parent company, Bloomberg LP. The Clearing House Association LLC, a group of the nation’s largest commercial banks, had asked the Supreme Court to intervene.

“The board will fully comply with the court’s decision and is preparing to make the information available,” said David Skidmore, a spokesman for the Fed.

The order marks the first time a court has forced the Fed to reveal the names of banks that borrowed from its oldest lending program, the 98-year-old discount window. The disclosures, together with details of six bailout programs released by the central bank in December under a congressional mandate, would give taxpayers insight into the Fed’s unprecedented $3.5 trillion effort to stem the 2008 financial panic.

“I can’t recall that the Fed was ever sued and forced to release information” in its 98-year history, said Allan H. Meltzer, the author of three books on the U.S central bank and a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

Well, it’s about f%$#ing time for the Fed to be sued and forced to release information, Professor Meltzer.

I’m not sure that there will be much in the way of revelations in the documents, this has been proceeding for a well over a year, so by this point, the recipients are pretty well known, but this is an important precedent (or non-precedent, since the Supreme Court declined to rule).

My guess is that there is real law-breaking buried somewhere in these documents, both by the big banks and the Fed, but, we won’t see any prosecutions, because in Barack Obama’s Justice Department, prosecutions are just for whistle blowers.

Something Else Obama Lied About

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I honestly thought that P.J. had committed bureaucratic Seppuku when he gave an honest opinion about the torture detention conditions of alleged Wikileaks source Bradley Manning, so on one level, I am not at all surprised that Barack Obama fired him.

But Will Bunch, who was lied to by Obama during the campaign, Barack said that he would prosecute torturers and other administration and official law breakers, nails the dishonesty and hypocrisy involved:

“I don’t want to have people who just agree with me. I want people who are continually pushing me out of my comfort zone.”
— Barack Obama, June 18, 2008.

Barack Obama lied.

Again.

He lied because somebody — a good man, a decent man, and a respected spokesman for the U.S. State Department — pushed Obama out of his comfort zone this week. And so what happened? — the Obama administration forced him out of his job. Apparently Obama does just want to have people who agree with him. Imagine that.

I’m not surprised, but I am disgusted.

Now They are Charging Bradley Manning With a Capital Crime

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They have added, giving aid to the enemy, which carries the death penalty to the list of charges against the soldier accused of leaking diplomatic cables, and probably the “collateral murder” video, to Wikileaks.

What is going on here, with his pre-trial detention, with 23 hour a day solitary confinement, which is best described as torture, and now the threat of execution, is that they are clearly attempting to coerce perjured testimony, so that they can gin up some charges to engage in a political prosecution of Julian Assange.

Yet another truly repulsive embrace of Bushes Stalinesque embrace of the unlimited national security apparatus by Barack Obama and His Evil Minions™.

There’s his campaign slogan for 2012: Marginally less morally repugnant than whoever he is running against.