A British court has ruled that Julian Assange should be extradited to Sweden.
He says that he will appeal, but my guess is that he’s going to Sweden in the end.
This is a very bizarre case, about an even more bizarre man, but make no mistake, Wikileaks is providing a service of very real value to the world.
I’m not sure how it happened, but the Republicans in the house failed to pass an extension of some of the more contemptible parts of the Patriot Act:
Too clever by half, the House GOP leadership allowed only 40 minutes of debate on the extension of the PATRIOT Act today, and brought the bill up for a vote under a rule allowing no amendments and requiring two-thirds of the body to vote YES.
Well, that didn’t happen. Apparently, the Tea Party Congresscritters discovered their love for the constitution, Amendments One and Four inclusive, while taking the opportunity to stand up to their leadership’s lackadaisical attitude toward the Act’s extension.
I believe that the Republican House leadership may have a much deeper appreciation of just the deeper meaning of the exclamation that Dan Castellaneta created as the voice of Homer Simpson.
Heh.
Good for him. He is is clearly using his position as a Representative to shine light on what is clearly an attempt to torture the alleged Wikileaks source into fingering Julian Assange:
Ohio congressman Dennis Kucinich has asked the Defense Secretary Robert Gates for a visit with an Army private suspected of giving classified material to WikiLeaks.
Kucinich, a Democrat who is a member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, sent a letter Friday to Gates asking for a visit with Pfc. Bradley Manning.
Manning is being held in a Marine Corps brig in Quantico, Va.
Kucinich says he is concerned about reports of Manning’s treatment while in custody. Manning’s lawyer has filed a complaint with the Quantico commander about the conditions Manning is being held under.
I’m not a particularly big fan of the distinguished gentleman from Ohio, but he’s right here.
The worst thing about this is that it is only his name on this letter.
Where are the other 434 people who have sworn to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution” in Congress?
Alleged Wikileaks source Bradley Manning has only one civilian non-lawyer visitor, David House, and he and Jane “Firedog Lake” Hamsher, who is generally his ride to the brig in Quantico, were detained, and her car was towed.
According to House’s and Hamsher’s reports, the guards said that the orders came from the top, and they were made to stand outside for an extended period in sub-freezing weather.
Seriously, one can assume, based on his background, that Barack “The worst constitutional law professor ever” Obama should know better, but it appears that he just does not care.
If you are an American citizen, you are more at risk of indefinite non-judicial detention or assassination then you ever were under George W. Bush.
Sorry for the mental image, but Dick Cheney is now saying that he likes Obama’s policies on war, illegal wiretaps, and torture:
In the early months of Obama’s presidency, the American Right did to him what they do to every Democratic politician: they accused him of being soft on defense (specifically “soft on Terror”) and leaving the nation weak and vulnerable to attack. But that tactic quickly became untenable as everyone (other than his hardest-core followers) was forced to acknowledge that Obama was embracing and even expanding — rather than reversing — the core Bush/Cheney approach to Terrorism. As a result, leading right-wing figures began lavishing Obama with praise — and claiming vindication — based on Obama’s switch from harsh critic of those policies (as a candidate) to their leading advocate (once in power).
So the overbearing security state, in which the President or his designees, can detain you forever without trial and torture you, while tapping all of our phones, is now the new normal, and Cheney and his ilk are ecstatic, because they now know that there will be no prosecutions.
Thanks a lot, Barry. You must have been the worst constitutional law professor ever.
Glenn Greenwald details just how ridiculous the ongoing feud between The Guardian and Julian Assange has become, with the paper the paper accusing Assange of endangering lives because of cables that were released by The Guardian itself:
Last week, on January 3, The Guardian published a scathing Op-Ed by James Richardson blaming WikiLeaks for endangering the life of Morgan Tsvangirai, the leader of the democratic opposition in Zimbabwe. Richardson — a GOP operative, contributor to RedState.com, and a for-hire corporate spokesman — pointed to a cable published by WikiLeaks in which American diplomats revealed that Tsvangirai, while publicly opposing American sanctions on his country, had privately urged their continuation as a means of weakening the Mugabe regime: an act likely to be deemed to be treasonous in that country, for obvious reasons. By publishing this cable, “WikiLeaks may have committed its own collateral murder,” Richardson wrote. He added: “WikiLeaks ought to leave international relations to those who understand it – at least to those who understand the value of a life.”
This accusation against WikiLeaks was repeated far and wide. In The Wall Street Journal, Jamie Kirchick — the long-time assistant of The New Republic‘s Marty Peretz — wrote under this headline: “Julian Assange’s reckless behavior could cost Zimbabwe’s leading democrat his life.” Kirchick explained that “the crusading ‘anti-secrecy’ website released a diplomatic cable from the U.S. Embassy in Harare” which exposed Tsvangirai’s support for sanctions. As “a result of the WikiLeaks revelations,” Kirchick wrote, the reform leader would likely be charged with treason, and “Mr. Tsvangirai will have someone additional to blame: Julian Assange of WikiLeaks.” The Atlantic‘s Chris Albon, in his piece entitled “How WikiLeaks Just Set Back Democracy in Zimbabwe,” echoed the same accusation, claiming “WikiLeaks released [this cable] to the world” and that Assange has thus “provided a tyrant with the ammunition to wound, and perhaps kill, any chance for multiparty democracy.” Numerous other outlets predictably mimicked these claims.
There was just one small problem with all of this: it was totally false. It wasn’t WikiLeaks which chose that cable to be placed into the public domain, nor was it WikiLeaks which first published it. It was The Guardian that did that. In early December, that newspaper — not WikiLeaks — selected and then published the cable in question. This fact led The Guardian — more than a full week after they published Richardson’s accusatory column — to sheepishly add this obscured though extremely embarrassing “clarification” at the end of his column:
• This article was amended on 11 January 2011 to clarify the fact that the 2009 cable referred to in this article was placed in the public domain by the Guardian, and not as originally implied by WikiLeaks. The photo caption was also amended to reflect this fact.
(emphasis original)
While I find The Guardian to be a top flight paper, this is inexcusable.
I get the impression that Assange is a bit of a jerk, and hard to deal with, but that does not excuse this crap.
*According to the Wiki, The Guardian, formerly the Manchester Guardian in the UK. It’s nicknamed the Grauniad because of its penchant for typographical errors, “The nickname The Grauniad for the paper originated with the satirical magazine Private Eye. It came about because of its reputation for frequent and sometimes unintentionally amusing typographical errors, hence the popular myth that the paper once misspelled its own name on the page one masthead as The Gaurdian, though many recall the more inventive The Grauniad.”
Yes, someone at the CIA has a sense of humor.
They have assigned a group to look at the fallout from Wikileaks cable releases, and they are calling it the Wikileaks Task Force, generally abbreviated as WTF:
The CIA has launched a taskforce to assess the impact of 250,000 leaked US diplomatic cables. Its name? WikiLeaks Task Force, or WTF for short.
The group will scour the released documents to survey damage caused by the disclosures. One of the most embarrassing revelations was that the US state department had drawn up a list of information it would like on key UN figures – it later emerged the CIA had asked for the information.
“Officially, the panel is called the WikiLeaks Task Force. But at CIA headquarters, it’s mainly known by its all-too-apt acronym: WTF.”
Heh.
Basically, the terms of his bail amount to house arrest:
Britain’s high court today granted bail to Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder who is wanted in Sweden for questioning over allegations of rape.
Mr Justice Duncan Ouseley agreed with a decision by City of Westminister magistrates court earlier in the week to release Assange on strict conditions: £200,000 cash deposit, with a further £40,000 guaranteed in two sureties of £20,000, and strict conditions on his movement.
This is good news, but we are hearing more reports of the US looking for ways to indict him, this time by ginning up a conspiracy case:
Federal prosecutors, seeking to build a case against the WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange for his role in a huge dissemination of classified government documents, are looking for evidence of any collusion in his early contacts with an Army intelligence analyst suspected of leaking the information.
Justice Department officials are trying to find out whether Mr. Assange encouraged or even helped the analyst, Pfc. Bradley Manning, to extract classified military and State Department files from a government computer system. If he did so, they believe they could charge him as a conspirator in the leak, not just as a passive recipient of the documents who then published them.
Among materials prosecutors are studying is an online chat log in which Private Manning is said to claim that he had been directly communicating with Mr. Assange using an encrypted Internet conferencing service as the soldier was downloading government files. Private Manning is also said to have claimed that Mr. Assange gave him access to a dedicated server for uploading some of them to WikiLeaks.
It should be noted that these activities, cultivating and providing a source a way to get his information to you, are staples in the diet of investigative journalism.
Any prosecution under these circumstances would be an full frontal assault on freedom of the press, which is profoundly disturbing to anyone who cares at all about the Constitution.
Unfortunately, I think that this sort of assault on the press, and by extension leaking, appears to be something that Barack Obama, who must have been the worst professor of Constitutional law ever, really would like to do.
His administration is more vociferously hostile toward leaks and leakers than Bush/Cheney ever was.
Of course, this is why this administration is allowing the leaker, PFC Bradley Manning to be tortured pre-trial, because they want to coerce an accusation against Assange.
Specifically PFC Bradley Manning, who is accused of leaking documents to Wikileaks:
Bradley Manning, the 22-year-old U.S. Army Private accused of leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks, has never been convicted of that crime, nor of any other crime. Despite that, he has been detained at the U.S. Marine brig in Quantico, Virginia for five months — and for two months before that in a military jail in Kuwait — under conditions that constitute cruel and inhumane treatment and, by the standards of many nations, even torture. Interviews with several people directly familiar with the conditions of Manning’s detention, ultimately including a Quantico brig official (Lt. Brian Villiard) who confirmed much of what they conveyed, establishes that the accused leaker is subjected to detention conditions likely to create long-term psychological injuries.
Since his arrest in May, Manning has been a model detainee, without any episodes of violence or disciplinary problems. He nonetheless was declared from the start to be a “Maximum Custody Detainee,” the highest and most repressive level of military detention, which then became the basis for the series of inhumane measures imposed on him.
From the beginning of his detention, Manning has been held in intensive solitary confinement. For 23 out of 24 hours every day — for seven straight months and counting — he sits completely alone in his cell. Even inside his cell, his activities are heavily restricted; he’s barred even from exercising and is under constant surveillance to enforce those restrictions. For reasons that appear completely punitive, he’s being denied many of the most basic attributes of civilized imprisonment, including even a pillow or sheets for his bed (he is not and never has been on suicide watch). For the one hour per day when he is freed from this isolation, he is barred from accessing any news or current events programs. Lt. Villiard protested that the conditions are not “like jail movies where someone gets thrown into the hole,” but confirmed that he is in solitary confinement, entirely alone in his cell except for the one hour per day he is taken out.
It should be noted that this sort of treatment produces profound long term damage to mind that is akin to traumatic brain injury.
This is deliberate punitive torture, and its purpose is two fold:
Welcome to Barack Obama’s America, which is a lot like George W. Bush Dick Cheney’s America, only less respect for due process and transparency.
You can donate to PFC Manning’s defense fund here.
Blah, blah, blah!The US Air Force is now blocking the New York Times, The Guardian and a number of other news outlets because they are reporting on the contents of the cables.
You know, I think that the fact that US authorities have gone completely batsh%$ insane over this might be doing a lot more damage to our credibility worldwide than anything in those damn cables.
We are all Julian AssangeBut the Swedish prosecutors promptly appealed the decision, meaning that he spends at least another 48 hours in custody, which in his case means rather harsh isolation.
On the other hand, it appears that reports of a grand jury investigating an indictment under the 1917 espionage act may be baseless.
Truth be told, a good prosecutor can find an sitting already sitting grand jury, and Mr. Assange from a legal perspective is certainly a ham sandwich.
Were I a prosecutor, I would not begin any process until Assange were in Sweden, where extraditions appears to be more likely than in the UK.
Of course, while this is going on, the internet is still being roiled by attacks on both sides of the issue, with Anonymous emerging from 4chan to hit the financial and IT companies that cut Wikileaks off, and other hackers going after Wikileaks, in a game of dueling DDOS attacks.
Hanging over all this is Assange’s poison pill file, which has been distributed to tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people, waiting for the decryption key that will be distributed if anything happens to him or Wikileaks by a dozen or so of his colleagues.
And then there is the absurdity that Amazon, after tossing Wikileaks from their servers, is now selling copies of the cables for the Kindles.
In the mean time, here are the crucial government secrets that we now know as a result of the cables:
Of course there is some truly sensitive and shocking information out there, specifically that, the DPRK (North Korea) was willing to take significant steps to reassure the US and the ROK (South Korea) in exchange for an Eric Clapton concert in Pyongyang.
Merciful heavens, we can’t let the citizenry know about that.
The final word on this is Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg’s, “EVERY attack now made on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange was made against me and the release of the Pentagon Papers at the time.“
But once again, I agree with Ron Paul, organizations like Wikileaks are a necessary, and beneficial, force for openness and transparency.
He draws the proper parallels between Wikileaks and the Pentagon Papers, and notes that these sorts of operations are essential in uncovering official wrongdoing.
Not sure which genius came up with this, but it is floating around the innerwebs.
Note that he has not been charged, and the warrant is for an interview, a British magistrate has ordered Julian Assange held without bail after he turned himself in voluntarily.
Tell me that the fix is not in here.
Of course, the fact that hundreds, perhaps thousands of people, have his ITEOD* file, and some number probably greater than 10 people have the code to decrypt those unredacted files has got to give the people pursuing him cause to pause.
*In The Event Of Death.
H/t MP at the the by invitation only Stellar Parthenon BBS.
On the other hand, he would be worried about finding Polonium in his coffee, courtesy of the Russian FSB:
Yesterday, The Daily Beast reported that the National Security Agency is aware that the FSB — the post-Soviet KGB — is closely monitoring Wikileaks, though the U.S. has no “direct evidence” that the Russians are behind the days-long denial-of-service attacks that have brought down the Wikileaks website over and over again.
But why would the Russians care that much? In part, because Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has said that between the leaked cables and other information he got separately, high-level corrupt Russian officials should be worried. And some observers think that Assange’s efforts to expose corruption in Russia could be more harmful to his site and himself than exposing America’s secrets have been. One law enforcement source told The Daily Beast, “The Russians play by different rules,” adding that they would be “ruthless” in their attempts to stop him.
(emphasis mine)
Russian leaders don’t get worried, they get proactive, as in the subject of their concern ends up mailed to his family in a dozen parcel post packages, or they die mysteriously.
People are talking about potential damage from the recent release by Wikileaks of thousands of State Department Cables, and I think that they are missing the big picture here.
For all the chest pounding about how this is damaging, the reports this far are either not news (What, you mean Berlusconi parties and spends lots of money?), or more embarrassing than damaging (What, you mean that the Arabs hate the Iranians, as they hated the Persians for the past 3000 years).
The real issue here is that this is a natural consequence of over-classification.
Basically, since everything gets classified, and in the interests of communications between organizations, tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people get access, and they that most, if not all, of the data that passes in front of them is stuff that is either already public knowledge, or absolutely innocuous.
It makes people casual about restricted data, so they are more likely to mishandle it, or, as in the case with Wikileaks, they feel compelled to share it with 3rd parties because they feel that it should be public data.
The solution to this problem, and it will be one that the US state security apparatus will almost certainly eschew, is to classify less data, because tightening down on data more just makes the problem worse.
The Federal Reserve has decided not to appeal the decision of the Federal Courts to turn over information on its sh%$pile for cash loans to Bloomberg News:
The Federal Reserve won’t join a group of the largest commercial banks in asking the U.S. Supreme Court to let the government withhold details of emergency loans made to financial firms in 2008.
The central bank’s decision not to appeal makes it less likely the high court will hear the case, said Tom Goldstein, a Washington lawyer who has argued 22 cases before the high court since 1999 and whose Scotusblog website tracks the panel.
The Clearing House Association LLC, a group of the biggest commercial banks, filed the appeal today. Under federal rules for appeals, a lower court’s order requiring disclosure remains on hold until the Supreme Court acts. Kit Wheatley, an attorney for the Fed, confirmed that the central bank won’t join the appeal. David Skidmore, a spokesman for the central bank, did not immediately respond to requests for additional comment.
The bank group is appealing a federal judge’s August 2009 ruling requiring the Fed to disclose records of its emergency lending. Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News, sued for the release of the documents under the Freedom of Information Act.
Obviously, the Supreme Court could still decide to hear the case, but the Fed pulling out indicates that they no longer see this sort of disclosure as a systemic threat, which in turn makes it less likely that SCOTUS will take up the case.
I think that it is now a question of “when” not “if” the data gets released, and I think that it should prove to be very interesting.
Background here.
This time, it was not that the wedding party that they bombed was a terrorist base camp. This time, we get the updated report, and it is determined that the DoD found no compromise of its intelligence capabilities from the Wikileaks documents dump:
The unauthorized release of tens of thousands of classified U.S. military records from the war in Afghanistan last July on the Wikileaks website did not result in the disclosure of sensitive intelligence sources, according to a mid-August assessment by the Department of Defense that has just been made public.
“The review to date has not revealed any sensitive intelligence sources and methods compromised by this disclosure,” wrote Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates in an August 16 letter (pdf) to Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin.
We get lied into a war. We get lied to during the war. We have a war on whistle blowers who reveal the lies.
Without accurate information, the public can never weigh in in the policies of its government, and this is a very bad thing.
As much as I rag on the Washington Post, there is some reporting of real value amongst the dross, including Dana Priest, who, along with William M. Arkin, have published an extensive investigative report on the burgeoning world of the American security-industrial complex:
These are some of the findings of a two-year investigation by The Washington Post that discovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight. After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.
Basically it points to a picture of a state security apparatus run amuck, where there are so many players, generating so much analysis, from so many sources, that it is impossible to separate the wheat from the chaff, or as Glenn Greenwald notes:
So it isn’t that we keep sacrificing our privacy to an always-growing National Security State in exchange for greater security. The opposite is true: we keep sacrificing our privacy to the always-growing National Security State in exchange for less security.
(emphasis original)
More than ever, we need to ensrhine into the constitution something analogous to the the Swedish concept of Offentlighetsprincipen (openness), because right now all that our paranoia is generating is a massive trail of profiteers/contractors without generating much in the way of security.
It should be noted that reigning in this will not be easy. You can be sure that when the budgets are in jeopardy, the various wings of the state security apparatus will come up with scary stories to subvert any effort at real reform, and the current administration is terrified of being labeled, “soft on fillintheblank,” so they do not have the inclination to even bend the curve.
I’ll be going through the story, and the supporting material, to see if I have anything to add.