Category: WikiLeaks

Relative Terrorisms

July 5, 2011: J. Rosencrantz

Gandhi, Assange, DeChristopher, Ruben, Mason, Alwan, Hammadi and Commander-in-Chief BushBomba

Over the weekend, the Frontline Club hosted a discusssion moderated by Amy Goodman of DemocracyNow! between Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek.

The discussion ranged over wide territory, but in this post I want to focus on one particular theme that emerged, namely the relativity and ideological function of the term “terrorism”.

After Goodman listed and quoted various North American politicos (Gingrich, Biden, etc.) who have accused Assange of “terrorism” (some even calling for his assassination), Žižek, in his characteristically provocative way, effectively suggested that Assange embrace the designation since it puts him in a category with Gandhi. Speaking to Assange, Žižek says:

Yes, you are a terrorist! In which sense? In the sense, as I like to repeat, Gandhi was a terrorist…. In what sense was Gandhi a terrorist? He effectively tried to stop — interrupt — the normal functioning of the British State in India. And of course you are trying to interrupt the normal (which is very oppressive) functioning of the information circulation and so on.

Of course, the “terrorism” of which Žižek accuses Assange can only be understood in relation to that other type of terrorism against which it is directed.  Žižek makes this point by way of a paraphrase of “that wonderful line” from Bertolt Brecht’s Beggar’s Opera, “What is robbing a bank compared to founding a new bank?”.  Žižek:

What is your “terrorism” compared to the terrorism which we simply accept, which has to go on day by day so that just things remain the way they are? That’s were ideology holds us. When we talk about “violence”, “terrorism” — we always think about acts which interrupt the normal run of things. But what about violence which has to be here in order for things to function the way they are? So I think if (and I am very skeptical about it) we should use (in my provocative spirit I’m tempted to) the term “terrorism”, its strictly a reaction to a much stronger terrorism which is here.  So, again, instead of engaging in this moralistic game — oh no, he is a good guy (like the Stalinists said about Lenin), you like small children, you play with cats, you wouldn’t (as Norman Bates says in Psycho) wouldn’t hurt even a fly. No! You are in this formal sense a terrorist.

But if you are a terrorist — my God! — what are then they who accuse you of terrorism?

Žižek’s point can be generalized to others who have been accused of “terrorism”.

Consider, for example, environmental activism:

What is the property damage of Marie Mason or Rebecca Rubin to the ecological destruction of the institutions they targeted?

Even symbolic gestures are at risk of being legally re-framed as terrorism. But what is Tim DeChristopher’s auction sabotage compared to the coming onslaught of climate change?

Consider, moreover, the various insurgencies against the U.S. military occupations of Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.

To take a specific example, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell refers to Waad Ramadan Alwan and Mohanad Shareef Hammadi as terrorists.  Their crime? Working with and supporting a domestic insurgency against a foreign army that has invaded and occupied their country.  Greenwald highlights the absurdity of labeling them terrorists:

One can have a range of views about the morality and justifiability of Iraqi nationals attacking U.S. troops in their country.  One could say that it is the right of Iraqis to attack a foreign army brutally invading and occupying their nation, just as Americans would presumably do against a foreign army invading their country (at least those who don’t share Mitch McConnell’s paralyzing fears and cowardice).  Or one could say that it is inherently wrong and evil to attack U.S. troops no matter what they’re doing or where they are in the world, even when waging war in a foreign country that is killing large numbers of innocent civilians.  Or one could say that the American war in Iraq in particular was such a noble effort to spread Freedom and Democracy that only an evil person would fight against it.  Or one could say that it’s always wrong for a non-state actor to engage in violence (a very convenient standard for the U.S., given that very few nations around the world could resist U.S. force without reliance on such unconventional means).  And one can recognize that most nations, not only the U.S., would apprehend those engaged in attacks against their troops.

But whatever one’s views are on those moral questions, in what conceivable sense can it be called “Terrorism” for a citizen of a country to fight against foreign invading troops by attacking purely military targets?

But even if it made sense to label insurgents against an occupying army “terrorists”, to return to the Brecht/Žižek question, what is arming an insurgency to a war of aggression?

War on Whistleblowers

May 23, 2011: J. Rosencrantz

The Espionage Act of 1917, initially employed to imprison socialist war critics and movie makers and poets during World War I, is now being used as a tool in the Obama Administration’s unprecedented assault on whistle blowers who seek to expose government crime and waste.

This crackdown on whistle blowers is in characteristic contrast to Obama’s campaign rhetoric about becoming “the most transparent administration in history”.

While  Candidate Obama promised to protect whistle blowers and even praised their “acts of courage and patriotism, which can sometimes save lives and save taxpayer dollars”, the President Obama, according to Jane Mayer’s report in the New Yorker, seeks to convict them under the Espionage Act as ‘Enemies of the State’:

When President Barack Obama took office, in 2009, he championed the cause of government transparency, and spoke admiringly of whistle-blowers, whom he described as “often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government.” But the Obama Administration has pursued leak prosecutions with a surprising relentlessness. Including the Drake case, it has been using the Espionage Act to press criminal charges in five alleged instances of national-security leaks—more such prosecutions than have occurred in all previous Administrations combined. The Drake case is one of two that Obama’s Justice Department has carried over from the Bush years.

In addition to these ongoing prosecutions, the Obama Administration has expressed interest in prosecuting Julian Assange under the Espionage Act as well, which if successful would set a dark precedent for press freedom generally.
Jane Mayer closes her expose with a telling quote from another whistle blower:

Mark Klein, the former A.T. & T. employee who exposed the telecom-company wiretaps, is also dismayed by the Drake case. “I think it’s outrageous,” he says. “The Bush people have been let off. The telecom companies got immunity. The only people Obama has prosecuted are the whistle-blowers.”

Glenn Greenwald adds:

And that’s to say nothing of the full-scale immunity also given thus far to Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Merrill, and the mortgage fraudsters who have essentially stolen people’s homes.

Juan Cole points out that the nature of NSA crimes being exposed by whistle blowers such as Drake gives the perpetrators powerful leverage over those from whom they might, in a functioning democracy, face accountability:

The thing that worries me most is that the government officials who break the law by engaging in illegal surveillance are the ones best able to blackmail judges and politicians and journalists. Part of the story of the gradual destruction of the Bill of Rights, i.e. the Constitution, probably lies hidden in those corrupt shadows.

Barack and Bradley

May 1, 2011: J. Rosencrantz

The case of Bradley Manning  has exposed much about the hypocrisy and incoherence of the Obama White house.

After Manning had spent the better part of a year in 23-hour-a-day solitary confinement, much of which time stripped naked and constantly surveilled — all without trail — Obama, the former Constitutional Law professor, assured the press that he had checked with the Pentagon, which assured him that everything being done to Manning was “appropriate”.

Meanwhile, over 250 U.S. legal scholars, including Obama’s former Constitutional Law professor at Harvard, denounced Manning’s detention as torture.

It is hard not to concur with IOZ’s assessment, who characterizes Obama’s response to Manning’s pre-trial torture as “the blithe indifference of a busy manager signing off on some subordinate’s expense report”, and as Obama himself as “an asshole of the worst order” who, though he doesn’t “delight in cruelty like his predecessor”, is nevertheless “grossly indifferent to it”.

Since then, the U.S. King Commander of Chief has publicly judged Manning to be guilty without trial, in the same breath as he maintained that the U.S. is a nation of laws. This is especially disturbing because even if Manning ever gets to have a trial, he will be judged by Obama’s subordinates. Greenwald asks: “How can Manning possibly expect to receive a fair hearing from military officers when their Commander-in-Chief has already decreed his guilt?”

Something about this situation reminds me of Prince Buster’s Judge Dread (as well as Megacity One’s Judge Dredd):

It is important to remember that, according to the chat logs obtained by Wired, Manning was motivated by a concern for transparency and the “public good”:

i want people to see the truth . . . regardless of who they are . . . because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public.

This weekend, Democratic partisans have been beaming that Obama was able to best birthers in a war of wits at the White House Correspondents’ dinner.  But after his war on whistle-blowers, and especially the pre-trial detention, torture and judgment of Manning, the funniest line might have been when the President praised the “daring men and women” who “risk their lives for the simple idea that no one should be silenced and everyone deserves to know the truth.”

Other notes:

Although Manning is now being transferred to medium security prison in Kansas, the Pentagon is planning on holding Manning in “pre-trial confinement” for the indefinite future.

The Obama White house has tried  to banish reporters from official print pools for merely reporting on a protest in support of Bradley Manning.

Here is the Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg discussing Obama and Manning.

Enough about Assange: What WikiLeaks has Revealed

December 29, 2010: J. Rosencrantz

By focusing on the personalities or philosophy behind Wikileaks, in addition to the Imperial and Corporate reactions to its successes thus far, it is easy to lose focus on the actual substance of the leaks themselves. So here is an incomplete list of significant revelations emerging from Wikileaks in 2010, summarized from a list of headlines compiled by G. Greewald:

UPDATE: Here is another round-up of what Wikileaks revelations, compiled by CBS news.

Journalism as “Terrorism”

December 23, 2010: J. Rosencrantz

Cenk Uyger asks Julian Assange if he considers himself a “journalist”,  and what he thinks about being called (by V.P. Biden and Senate Republican Leader McConnell) a “terrorist”:

And Greenwald asks: In terms of revealing state secrets, what distinguishes Wikileaks from the New York Times?

Rap News 6: Cablegate

December 19, 2010: J. Rosencrantz

Some source material links from The Juice Media:

Instruments of U.S. Foreign Policy

December 16, 2010: J. Rosencrantz

In the wake of the release of a small fraction of the diplomatic cables it has attained, Wikileaks has faced a barrage of challenges. In addition to threats and denunciations, as well as incoherent accusations of treason and even calls for the extrajudicial execution of Assange,  Amazon booted Wikileaks from it’s servers,  PayPal “permanently restricted” its account,  EveryDNS terminated its DNS services, and MasterCard and Visa stopped processing donations — all in the absence of official charges, let alone a trial or conviction for any wrongdoing.

In British custody for questioning about a (very convenient) Swedish sexual assault investigation, Julian Assange delivered the following message via his mother:

“We now know that Visa, MasterCard and PayPal are instruments of US foreign policy. It’s not something we knew before.”

At CounterPunch, Alexander Cockburn points out that this episode is a “wake-up call on the enormous vulnerability of our prime means of communication to swift government-instigated, summary shutdown”:

So here we have a public “commons”—the Internet—subject to arbitrary onslaught by the state and powerful commercial interests, and not even the shadow of constitutional protections.

Effectively defy the Imperial Will, and the global corporate institutions which sustain your activities — your communications and financial transactions — will evaporate.

Here is a discussion on Al-Jazeera questioning the right of companies like MasterCard and PayPal to deny service to Wikileaks.

Swedish Documentary about Wikileaks

December 15, 2010: J. Rosencrantz

Here is an informative Swedish documentary on Wikileaks:

View from Outside II

December 10, 2010: J. Rosencrantz

This vid from Taiwan summarizes recent wikileaks-related events quite nicely:

Cablegate

November 29, 2010: J. Rosencrantz

From Wikileaks:

Wikileaks began on Sunday November 28th publishing 251,287 leaked United States embassy cables, the largest set of confidential documents ever to be released into the public domain. The documents will give people around the world an unprecedented insight into US Government foreign activities.

The cables, which date from 1966 up until the end of February this year, contain confidential communications between 274 embassies in countries throughout the world and the State Department in Washington DC. 15,652 of the cables are classified Secret.

Just as was the case with the earlier leaks of nearly 100,000 Afghanistan and nearly 400,000 Iraq war logs, there is so much info here and it is difficult to summarize — these embassy cables will be the topic of discussion and analysis for decades.

For now, I’ll just link to the coverage provided by Wikileaks’ media partners: