Category: Secrecy

Moron

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Notwithstanding the nobility, and moral necessity of his actions, the person who leaked the helecopter “collateral murder” video, the leaker is a f%$#ing moron.

You see, he revealed that he was the leaker to some random guy online, and now has been arrested:

Federal officials have arrested an Army intelligence analyst who boasted of giving classified U.S. combat video and hundreds of thousands of classified State Department records to whistleblower site Wikileaks, Wired.com has learned.

SPC Bradley Manning, 22, of Potomac, Maryland, was stationed at Forward Operating Base Hammer, 40 miles east of Baghdad, where he was arrested nearly two weeks ago by the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division. A family member says he’s being held in custody in Kuwait, and has not been formally charged.

Manning was turned in late last month by a former computer hacker with whom he spoke online. In the course of their chats, Manning took credit for leaking a headline-making video of a helicopter attack that Wikileaks posted online in April. The video showed a deadly 2007 U.S. helicopter air strike in Baghdad that claimed the lives of several innocent civilians.

Admitting to the leak to some random guy online, particularly given Obama’s, and his Department of Justice’s, jihad on leakers, is Palin-level stupid and arrogant.

It’s even stupider when you realize that he outed himself to Adrian Lamo.

I think that he did the right thing, because the coverups that the military engages in on such matters are simply not acceptable in a democracy, but in blithely telling someone that he did, and then doing something this mind-bogglingly stupid, and getting caught as a result, he dissuades future whistle-blowers, which is a blow to keeping our military, and our government honest.

He’s also completely screwed, because while he might be able to prevail on a civilian jury to see that the whistle-blowing served the public good, there is no way that a group of officers is going to show any mercy to an SPC (Specialiats) who does not even qualify as an NCO.

If there has been anything consistent about the progress of military justice since 911, whether it be torture at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib, the death, and subsequent cover-up of the details of Pat Tillman, etc. it is that the military will go to extremes to cover-up the truth, and if forced to prosecute, it will go after enlisted men, as a first step.

Wikileaks Founder Has Passport Confiscated in Australia

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Julian Assange had his passport confiscated briefly when he visited Australia, and Australian authorities told him that it would be canceled shortly because it was “worn”:

The Australian founder of the whistleblower website Wikileaks had his passport confiscated by police when he arrived in Melbourne last week.

Julian Assange, who does not have an official home base and travels every six weeks, told the Australian current affairs program Dateline that immigration officials had said his passport was going to be cancelled because it was looking worn.

However he then received a letter from the Australian Communication Minister Steven Conroy’s office stating that the recent disclosure on Wikileaks of a blacklist of websites the Australian government is preparing to ban had been referred to the Australian Federal Police (AFP).

So, apparently in Australia, letting people know that the authorities are censoring is grounds for official harassment.

Who do they Australians think that they are? The Obama White House?

If You Have Extra Cash…………

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You might want to give it to Wikileaks, which has suspended their operations because they have run out of cash:

Wikileaks, which has published anonymously contributed information that is both confidential and controversial, has one thing in common with many more-traditional media outlets: financial troubles.

The site has posted confidential 9/11 pager messages, tangled with banks and the Church of Scientology, revealed inner workings of the U.S. military base in Guantanamo, Cuba, and shared snippets of e-mail from vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

Now, though, Wikileaks has shut the site down at least temporarily.

“To concentrate on raising the funds necessary to keep us alive into 2010, we have reluctantly suspended all other operations, but will be back soon,” a note on the Wikileaks site said Monday. “We have raised just over $130,000 for this year but can not meaningfully continue operations until costs are covered. These amount to just under $200,000 PA [per annum]. If staff are paid, our yearly budget is $600,000.”

These guys do very good work, whether it’s uncovering things like money laundering, providing secret draft agreements on an “IP reign of terror” treaty, and torture manuals US military manuals for maltreating detainees.

Previous Wikileaks posts here, they have been a source for my scribblings not infrequently.

Damn.

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So, the House of Representatives by a vote of 307-114 has passed an amendment to the Freedom of Information Act which exempts torture, because, I guess, everyone in Washington wants them covered up, because with knowledge is the possibility of accountability, and accountability is an anathema to the Beltway Boyz.

What is most repulsive is that this is designed just to cover up Bushie malfeasance:

To follow up on my earlier post about Rep. Louis Slaughter (D-N.Y.) and her speech on her colleagues’ move to amend the Freedom of Information Act to prevent the release of photographs depicting abuse of detainees in U.S. custody, it’s worth looking at the conference report on the bill. The bill is called the “Protected National Security Documents Act of 2009,” but refers not to any “documents” per se, but only to any “photograph” taken between Sept. 11, 2001 and Jan. 22, 2009, that “relates to the treatment of individuals engaged, captured, or detained after September 11, 2001, by the Armed Forces of the United States in operations outside of the United States.”

(emphasis mine)

Big surprise, the guy supporting this the strongest is Joe Lieberman.

Elections Matter, White House Visitor Edition

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So the White House will now release its visitor logs:

The first names posted to the White House Web site included health industry executives who met with the Obama administration to discuss his plan to overhaul health care.

The visitors, whose names were released in July, included Jeffrey Kindler, chairman and chief executive officer of New York-based Pfizer Inc., the world’s biggest drugmaker; New Brunswick, New Jersey-based Johnson & Johnson’s chairman and CEO William Weldon; and Stephen Hemsley, CEO and president of Minnetonka, Minnesota-based UnitedHealth Group Inc., the largest U.S. insurer by sales.

Other visitors included former Representative Billy Tauzin, now president of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America; Rich Umbdenstock, president of the American Hospital Association; and Karen Ignagni, president and CEO of America’s Health Insurance Plans.

They are also releasing the Bush logs.

Gee, that was easy, why wasn’t this done 6 months ago? Why did they fight it until now?

It Would Be Nice if Obama Didn’t Try So Hard to Emulate the Worst Excesses of Bush and His Evil Minions&trade

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In this case, it’s his veto threat of the intelligence authorization bill, because the notification requirements have been strengthened in it.

As opposed to just notifying the gang of 8 (4 actually) who are not allowed to discuss the contents with anyone else, the whole intelligence committee would have to be notified.

It appears that Barack Obama wants to preserve the, “long tradition spanning decades of comity between the branches regarding intelligence matters,” which BTW, involves the CIA having, “affirmatively lied to” the panel, according to House Intelligence Chairman Silvestre Reyes.

The idea that a briefing be given in a closed room, with no notes taken, and so few people as to make verification of a felony impossible is somehow “comity,” is setting George Orwell spinning so rapidly in his grave that he could power all of Sussex.

It’s Like Dick Cheney in Drag

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Yep, the Obama administration, and they are refusing to release visitor logs to the press:

The Obama administration is fighting to block access to names of visitors to the White House, taking up the Bush administration argument that a president doesn’t have to reveal who comes calling to influence policy decisions.

Despite President Barack Obama’s pledge to introduce a new era of transparency to Washington, and despite two rulings by a federal judge that the records are public, the Secret Service has denied msnbc.com’s request for the names of all White House visitors from Jan. 20 to the present. It also denied a narrower request by the nonpartisan watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which sought logs of visits by executives of coal companies.

**sigh**

Defense Budget Finally Out

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So, the details are out, and we have a big, confusing, and sprawling story from a big confusing, and sprawling building, the Pentagon.

Here are some links, and some things that I find noteworthy.

Specific programs:

With $439 million budgeted, the USAF is definitely going full speed on the tanker replacement bidding.

The Next Generation Bomber and the F-136 alternate JSF engine are on the chopping block, and the Gerald Ford class aircraft carrier has been delayed a year to work out the bugs on its electric catapults.

Star Wars takes a hit, with both the multiple kill vehicle and the airborne laser being canceled.

UAV’s did very well, with the Raven (shown) getting over 700 orders.

Aviation:

The DEW Line has a rundown.

Classified:

The Pentagon classified budget is now, up above $50 billion, which, on its own, makes the black programs something like the 3rd largest military budget in the world.

US Army:
spending on Helos is up, as are both unmanned vehicles and the number of active duty soldiers.

Navy:

We already know the story, cancellation of the DDG-100, restart of the Brukes, and continued procurement of the LCS, more here, here, and here.

Short version, it’s a generally down, but the Navy has done OK.

USAF

Basically, talk to the deer.

The USAF did not fare well, with the end of the F-22 and C-17 production lines, underfunding of the Air Force One replacement, the Joint Dual-Role Air Dominance Missile (JDRADM), and the follow on to the Predator drone, and the cancellation of the TSAT satellite system.

Cost Guard:

Not the Pentagon, it’s technically in the Department of Commerce, but its budget is up by about 3%.

9th Circuit Deals Blow to Obama Secrecy Stance

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The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has just told the Obama administration that its assertion of a state secret privilege is full of crap.

Binyam Mohamed, a British national who was rendered, and tortured by the CIA, is to be allowed to pursue his lawsuit against Jeppesen, a private transportation company that flew him to their secret gulags:

The court said the government could ask judges to conduct a case-by-case review of whether the disclosure of specific documents would jeopardize national security. But allowing the executive branch to shut down an entire lawsuit whenever an official says its subject is classified would be a “concentration of unchecked power” and lead to abuses, it said.

“According to the government’s theory, the judiciary should effectively cordon off all secret government actions from judicial scrutiny, immunizing the C.I.A. and its partners from the demands and limits of the law,” wrote Judge Michael Daly Hawkins.

I would also note (again) that as a matter of fact, though not of law, that the precedent here, US v. Reynolds, is in fact based on a lie. There were no state secrets involved, the B-29 which crashed was not, as was claimed, on a secret mission or testing secret equipment, as the government implied, but that the the aircraft was in poor condition because of inadequate maintenance.

This is a good decision, and I rather hope that it won’t make it to the Supreme Court, because 4 of those justices will rubber stamp the Bush, and now Obama, policy.

Obama Embraces and Extends Bush Secrecy Fetish

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In a response to the EFF’s lawsuit over illegal NSA wiretapping, the Obama has now responded with a claim for executive privilege that is more expansive than that of Bush and His Evil Minions&trade.

Basically, the Obama DOJ, and this is their ruling, this is the first filing in the case, is saying that, “the Patriot Act bars all causes of action for any illegal surveillance in the absence of “willful disclosure.'”

As Glenn Greenwald says in this analysius, “This is the Obama DOJ’s work and only its work, and it is equal to, and in some senses surpasses, the radical secrecy and immunity claims of the Bush administration.”

Lovely.

Orwell Alive and Well in the Obama Whitehouse

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One of the things that concerns me the most is Obama’s comfort in continuing to support Bush’s assault on basic procedural civil rights because they serve to reinforce the power of what is now his office.

Case in point, the Pentagon’s “privilege review team”, which is now considering charges against a victim of the torture protocols created by the Bush Administration.

What they posted was a cover sheet naming the case, and quoting unclassified portions of a UK court ruling saying that it was up to the US to release it, followed by a version redacted by said privilege review team”, which blacked out everything but the title of their report, which is clearly stamped “unclassified”:

The privilege team argue that by releasing the redacted memo Reprieve has breached the rules that govern Guantánamo lawyers and have made a complaint to the court of “unprofessional conduct”.

Stafford Smith described their actions as intimidation, saying the complaint “doesn’t even specify the rule supposedly breached”.

So, according to someone at the Pentagon, by sending an unclassified document to the president of the United States of America, they are in violation of regulations, and could face as much as 6 months in jail.

What Have They Got To Hide

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In this case, it’s the Federal Aviation Administration, which has a proposed rule to block public access to raw bird strike data:

The FAA says requests for data from the public “have typically been for specific data fields, individual airports or detailed portions of the database” and that responses from the agency “have addressed each request individually and adequately”.

However, the agency cautions public analysis of bits and pieces of the data could lead to inaccurate portrayals of airports and airlines, which could have a negative impact on their participation in reporting bird strikes.

So, they are saying that think that ordinary people are too stupid to understand the data.

More likely, they are covering something up, like certain airports being having a lot more problems with bird strikes, and the FAA, which is tasked with both regulating and promoting aviation, finds this information inconvenient.

Is the US Navy Falling to Pieces?

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Because the service has just classified ship inspection reports, and the only reason that I can think of their doing so is to cover up either bad reports on newly constructed ships, or of maintenance shortcomings for the existing fleet:

InSurvs are circulated widely among commanders and technical authorities within the Navy, but seldom seen by civilians unless they’ve been specifically requested under freedom of information laws. Even then, Navy officials can redact the names of people; information about classified equipment; or trade secrets of shipbuilders or other venders.

Over the past year, InSurvs obtained by Navy Times have revealed severe problems aboard the cruiser Chosin, the destroyer Stout and the amphibious transport dock New Orleans.

(emphasis mine)

Maybe I’m just paranoid, but I think that there are a lot more “severe problems” out there.

Fire Robert Gates Today

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There is a fight brewing about whistleblowers in government service, and Robert Gates is fighting tooth and nail to stop meaningful whistleblower protections.

This is more than a fairness issue, this is a national security issue. The government, including defense and intelligence, simply do not work, and much of this comes from a lack of accountability, which has gotten worse over the past 8 years because of secrecy fetish of Bush and His Evil Minions™.

Excessive secrecy is a far greater threat to our national security than is excessive disclosure.

Maybe Because She Didn’t Want Someone Ratting Out Bath Iron Works

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It appears that one of the sticking points on the stimulus package was that Senator Susan Collins insisted on stripping whistleblower protections from contractors from the conference report.

Considering the history waste, fraud, and abuse at BIW, the largest private employer in the state, I could see how the distinguished gentlewoman from Maine might not favor transparency.

National Archives to Get Boxes of Poo from Dick Cheney

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Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly has ruled that Dick Cheney has the power to decide which of his papers are transferred to the national archives:

The Justice Department provided what U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly called “constantly shifting arguments” in the case, but, she said, “That confusion is not evidence” that would undermine the sworn deposition of Claire M. O’Donnell, a Cheney aide who handles record-keeping and other administrative tasks.

“The Court expects,” she said, that White House officials “will, in good faith, comply with the representations that their officials have made, by way of testimony, in this case.” As a result, she granted summary judgment on the White House’s behalf and lifted a five-month-old injunction mandating the preservation of Cheney’s records.

And I’m Jamie Lee Curtis.

One of the plaintiffs, Stanley I. Kutler, an emeritus professor of history and law at the University of Wisconsin Law School, said he remains worried that “when the Archives goes to open Cheney’s papers, they are going to find empty boxes.”

Nope, they want some weight there, and an empty box is not his style. My guess is that Cheney threw out his back squatting over his document boxes and taking a dump in them.

Because Cheney is not leaving without a hearty f#@k you to everyone.

The Question is, What are They Covering Up

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The Bloomberg News has filed suit in federal court to require the Federal Reserve to disclose the securities received in what I call it’s sh^%pile for cash program.

The Fed is claiming that it’s, “confidential commercial information,” which is (my guess) lawyer speak for worthless garbage.

The Bloomberg followup story notes that, “The Fed made the loans under terms of 11 programs, eight of them created in the past 15 months, in the midst of the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression,” which is a pretty damn good reason for some openness here.

You have to remember that these programs have created new and not fully understood markets, and that the programs in question are directing money toward entities whose business model is to use information asymmetries to generate profits.

A lack of transferency is not the fox running the hen house, it’s Colonel Sanders running the hen house.