DailyGlobeReview

last vestige of east european sensible socialism...wikileaks connection

2011-01-09T07:07:00.000-08:00

The Minsk Election in a Wikileaks Mirror

By ISRAEL SHAMIR

Wikileaks once again has provided the proof positive to unlock a mystery. It’s not the stuff of attention-grabbing headlines and retweets, but it does illustrate how the US State Department can orchestrate riots in a quiet Eastern European country. As an international observer of the December 2010 elections in Belarus, I was witness to both the orderly vote and the shocking riot. This is the story of Belarus and how dollars were used to subvert and embarrass this peaceful constitutional republic.

The Setting

Belarus in December is the ultimate winter land; a fair Nordic forest nymph dressed in a thick, luxurious lilywhite cloak - for it is much too cold to go naked. Outside the city, an endless white expanse meets the eye, broken only by a few sturdy houses and a church. The lonely roads are enlivened by white hares that leap from icy roadsides and flocks of wild geese that transverse the cloudy welkin. All is white in this country, as if in order to justify its name, for Belarus means the White Rus. The Rus were the Viking states established in the Slav hinterland a millennium ago, and so Belarus is forever connected to the Great Rus of Russia.

The people of Belarus are not very different from their Russian neighbors but they do have their own character, just as the Northerners of Yorkshire differ from the Southerners of Somerset. They are fair and calm, peaceful and orderly, obedient and enduring. The sparsely populated Belarusian borderland was a battleground between East and West for centuries; the last war cost them one third of their population, the highest loss suffered by any country in WWII. The capital of Minsk was completely destroyed, Fallujah-style, by the Luftwaffe. Once upon a time, its forests and marshes trapped crack divisions of the German SS; now they sit again in peace, healed by many snowfalls.

After all this incessant white wilderness, Minsk is surprisingly civilised and human-sized; it was rebuilt in the comfortable 1950’s and refurbished fairly recently. The streets are neat and fit for pedestrians, small cafés are made cosy with glowing fireplaces, and there are English newspapers on every table. A large and festive Christmas tree marks the main square, which has been turned into an ice rink for the holidays, and pretty young girls in white skirts and red scarves skate the day through with smartly dressed boys. The rink is open and free for all, just as in Scandinavia. Indeed, Belarus is the East European counterpart of the Scandinavian socialist states of yesteryear; but while the Swedes and the Danes are busy dismantling their social systems, Belarus has so far resisted the drive toward privatization.

It will take you a long time before you spot your first policeman, usually a simple traffic cop. There is no sign of a police state here: no mysterious black cars, no furtive stillness, no Soviet-style drabness, no post-Soviet garishness. The youngsters are stylish, friendly and open. The streets are crowded, paved and clean. The President of Belarus, the man the US State Department calls the last dictator of Europe, walks freely among his people.

But what is a dictator these days? The epithets aimed at world leaders are surprisingly consistent, but the words themselves have been redefined. To earn the title of ‘dictator’, it seems that a leader need only spurn the advice of the IMF. If a leader chooses not play along with NATO, he may well qualify for the title of ‘bloody dictator’. We have been told that Castro is a ‘dictator’. We have been told that Chavez is a ‘dictator’. We are now being told that Ahmadinejad is a ‘bloody dictator’. Long-time thorns in the flanks of US imperial might are eventually upgraded to ‘monster’ status, as were Stalin and Mao. Belarus itself has one of these State Department titles: it is to be called a ‘rebel state’. When the USSR was broken down into digestible chunks, it was tiny Belarus that chose to keep the Soviet flag, the Soviet arms, and the socialist ethos. Belarus was not as quick as other countries to cast off what was stable and good within the Soviet system. While other countries suffered under IMF-imposed privatization, Belarus took the slow and steady path to intelligently upgrade and restore their industries and cities. End result: Belarus is as up-to-date as any country in the East.

December 19, 2010

I was in Belarus to observe the Presidential election, and to tell the truth I was expecting some sort of staged little event to mar the day. The outcome of the election was in little doubt. The people were happy, fully employed, and satisfied with their government. They were well aware of what had happened when neighboring countries had embraced the IMF, and they felt no ideological need to tread that same dark road. Some people, however, are more motivated by dollars than patriotism, and these are the people I was expecting. The pro-Western ‘Gucci’ crowd can always be counted on to protest the choices of the majority. They actually overturned the vote in nearby Ukraine in 2005, and the orange gangs succeeded in stealing the presidency for five long years. If they cannot convince the people with Western dollars, then they simply riot and try to take it by force.

All day long I watched the people of Belarus queuing at their election booths. I spoke to many of them. Their President Lukashenko is an East European Chavez, who stubbornly sticks to the socialist way. A friend of Hugo Chavez and the Castro regime, he gets his oil in Venezuela and Russia, does business with the Chinese, and tries to maintain good relations with his neighbours. The people know him, and know what to expect from him. Hardly anybody knew the opposition candidates by name. There were official election posters hanging in every election centre, and these posters carried the name and photo of each candidate, but these strangers and their feel-good slogans could not touch the national spirit.

The voting was as clean as any other European election, and was attended by hundreds of international observers; no one noticed any irregularities. Each person’s vote was secret, and they cast their ballots without fear. Even most pro-Western analysts, like Alexander Rahr of Germany, concurred: Lukashenko carried the elections with an astounding 80 per cent of the popular vote. Exit polls showed similar results. Like it or not: he won.

It was only after the news began to report the exit poll results that the opposition forces in Minsk – perhaps some five thousand strong - began to march from the main square towards the government offices. They walked peaceably, and so did not attract much police presence. There were certainly much fewer police on hand than what a similar march would draw in London or Moscow. The government expected a rally at the square. They did not expect these well-dressed people to begin storming the building where the votes were counted! This mob of educated and well to do urbanites smashed the windows and broke the doors in an effort to break into the building. It was clear to all bystanders that this riot was anything but spontaneous and that this was a determined attempt to destroy the ballots and invalidate the election.

The live broadcast of rioters forcing their way into the building shocked the republic. The people of Belarus expect and demand an orderly, law-abiding society. This is always the moment of truth for authority: challenges from outside the law must be met with immediate and lawful force. The police waded into the violence and detained the rioters. But Belarus is not China, and this was not Tiananmen Square. It was not even Seattle or Gothenburg. There were no casualties; the whole event was comparable to the kind of riot raised by Manchester United, or say Luton fans after their defeat by York. Certainly the thing was disgraceful; yet suddenly, as if on cue, my colleagues, my fellow journalists in the press centre, began to send hysterical cables extolling the dreadful bloodshed caused by the last dictator’s secret police. Thank God, the Belarusians are too orderly for such excesses. Even the opposition Communist party approved of sending in the riot police. A threat to an orderly election is a threat to everyone; it is a threat to the basis of any democracy.

My cynical friend, the professor of local university and no sympathiser of Lukashenko (the President is a boorish moron in his eyes) said this to me: the opposition had to make a good show to justify all the grants and subsidies. The dollars pour in from the State Department, the NED, from Soros and the CIA in an effort to undermine the last socialist regime in Europe. All this money keeps the opposition leaders in the style they are accustomed to, but once in a while they are expected to show their mettle.

Wikileaks has now revealed how this undeclared cash flows from US coffers to the Belarus “opposition”. In the confidential cable VILNIUS 000732, dated June 12, 2005, an American diplomat informs the State Department that Lithuanian customs detained a Belarusian employee of a USAID contractor on charges of money smuggling. The courier was arrested as she attempted to leave Lithuania for Belarus with US$25,000. In addition, she admitted that had moved a total of US$50,000 out of Lithuania on two prior trips.

In case it’s not obvious by now, these dollars are just the tip of the iceberg of cash that flows from US taxpayers to fund the Belarus opposition. A Lithuanian official boasted that the Government of Lithuania “uses a variety of individuals and routes to send money to groups in Belarus, including its diplomats”. Lukashenko has always maintained that the US has spent millions of dollars to dismantle the government of tiny Belarus. Western officials automatically denied it. The Western press ridiculed it: BLOODY DICTATOR BLAMES OPPOSITION ON YANKEE MEDDLING. The proof is written in a confidential cable from a US Embassy to the US State Department. It is undeniable.

The Allure of Lukashenko

Why does the US need to pay people to oppose Lukashenko? What is the secret behind Lukashenko’s charm? He was democratically elected in 1994 just as the USSR was disintegrating. In a way, he was able to transform a chaotic collapse into a graceful denouement. He stopped privatization, he ensured full employment for everybody, he fought and defeated organized crime; in short, he preserved order and maintained the existing social network intact. For a visiting Westerner, Belarus is a rather neat and well-functioning minor East European state, not very different from its Baltic neighbors. But for an arrival from Russia or Ukraine, their immediate neighbors, it is the Shangri-la of the post-Soviet development they could have had. They, like Belarus, could have had clean streets, full employment, shops selling local products, police that do not extort bribes, pensions for old people, and economic equality.

Lukashenko stopped the kind of IMF privatization schemes that had ruined Belarus’ neighbors. In Russia, a few cronies of then-President Yeltsin (like the now-imprisoned billionaire Khodorkovsky) walked away with whole industries, iron mines and oil basins. Much of it they sold to the Western companies who raided the East in a rapacity unprecedented since Cortez’ visit to America. While ordinary Russians lost their jobs, their homes, and their social services, the super-rich oligarchs began shopping for real estate in Belgravia and the Cote d’Azur, for big yachts and football teams. It was President Putin who put a stop to this IMF-organized fire sale of assets and saved Russia, but no one will ever forget the nightmare of the “awful Nineties”.

Organized crime is a big problem in the post-Soviet space. Just last month Russian citizens read about a gang that had forced its rule upon the prosperous Kuban district of Russia, raping and murdering at will for years, the gangsters and the cops sharing alike in the crimes and the spoils. But in Belarus, there is no organized crime, no Mafia-like secret structures. “The gangsters ran away in the Nineties,” I was told by the natives. Policemen take no bribes in Belarus, a feat still beyond the reach of any other ex-Soviet state. Lukashenko achieved this police compliance by granting retired policemen decent pensions, well above average, and by mercilessly ridding the service of corrupt cops.

In Belarus, there are no oligarchs. Socialism is limited to major employers; private property and private businesses are absolutely respected. The local businessmen told me that there is little corruption, and much less than in neighboring countries. There are plenty of prosperous people but no super-rich; there are many nice cars on the streets of Minsk, but much fewer and much fancier are the cars in Moscow, where it might be said you are in a Bentley or on foot. The vast majority of cars in Minsk are modern European and Japanese economy vehicles. The old Soviet cars are practically gone.

Belarus has no national, ethnic or religious strife. Catholic and Orthodox churches share the same square; the many mosques and synagogues were built centuries before multiculturalism appeared. The East was always multicultural: Orthodox peasants, Catholic nobility, Jewish traders and Tatar horsemen lived together in Belarus long before the 15th century when this land was a part of the Great Duchy of Lithuania, then the greatest state of Europe. The old Belarusian language was the language of the Duchy, and Belarusian warriors – together with Polish and Russian soldiers – defeated the crusaders on the fields of Grunwald 500 years ago.

The opponents of Lukashenko tried to play the ethnic card that was so efficient in Ukraine and Lithuania at alienating traditional allies. They promoted Belarus nationalism and the old Belarus language, but both turned out to be non-starters. The opposition’s beatific vision of a Belarusian ethnic revival is very poetic, like the revival of Welsh, but this practical people is not willing to fight over it.

Lukashenko’s Soviet-style economy preserved the sources of local production, and alongside the ubiquitous imports you will find that the core staples are provided locally. Belarusian cheese, milk, bread and vegetables are all organic and Russian visitors always buy and carry home as much as they can carry of the delicious, healthy and inexpensive stuff. Their industry also remained intact, even as the IMF shepherded their neighbors into third world status with a speedy process of de-industrialization. Belarus still produces everything from TV sets to tractors, from giant lorries to Ives Saint Lauren-designed fashions.

Belarus has no political parties. This is not a case of one big political party like in Russia, nor is it the good-guy/bad-guy dual party system as in the US. No political parties at all. The parties are not forbidden, but they just have not developed. This was one of the great ideas of Simone Weil, the profoundly radical French philosopher, though she would have them banned altogether.

Belarus represents an interestingly successful model of economic development. It has reminded the world that a wise ruler can save a country. This lesson is an especially timely one since the IMF has littered the globe with bankrupt and insolvent countries. The world is now looking at the IMF and other international investors with caution. Monetarism is bankrupt. Military aggression, on which Bush relied, has failed. We live in the post-crisis era. A search for other ways of development is now underway. Now people are starting to think: isn’t there a better way? Belarus may lead the way.

One of Belarus’ major achievements is that it was able to fend off the large international companies. During the 20 years of western raids around the world, tiny Belarus was able to preserve its assets. This is a very important lesson for many countries. Belarus may not have produced a single Abramovitch, but the country is home to millions of rather content ordinary citizens.

The vast majority of the Belarusian people are content with their lives. Their salaries are modest, on a par with neighboring Russia, but they have no unemployment and they do not worry that their place of work will get shut down. Their cities are clean, their food is inexpensive, the heating and rent are heavily subsidized, and transport is well organized. They are not subservient to the Wall Street, Goldman Sachs, the Pentagon, nor to the Masters of Discourse. They are the cause of soul-searching for their neighbors, a living proof that the Soviet Union did not have to be destroyed, that socialism can work, and that it often works better than financial capitalism.

It is exactly for this reason that the bad guys wish to destroy Belarus.

The country is isolated from the West: it is very difficult for a Belarusian to go and visit his cousin in neighboring Poland or Lithuania because the EC will not give them visas. Poland is especially hostile: previously colonial masters of Belarus, the Poles view themselves as enforcers of the West’s will in the East. The visas are extremely expensive by local standards. The only international airport is practically empty; there are very few flights in or out.

Relations with Russia are far from perfect. The Russian oligarchs have struggled to squeeze loose Belarusian assets, industries and pipelines. Lukashenko resisted the raiders from New York and Berlin and has no intention of giving up the national jewels to raiders from Moscow. The result is tension. While there is much to be said for a close alliance to Russia, Belarus is well aware that the oligarchs lie somewhere behind the Russian smile. The more Russia can muzzle the voracity of the oligarchs, the less suspicion there will be to poison their natural affinities and mutual support.

For now, Lukashenko prefers to play a complicated game with the EC, even discussing the possible entry of Belarus to the united Europe. It is not impossible: economically Belarus is in much better shape than the majority of East European states who are EC members.

Belarus has friendly relations with Venezuela and Cuba, with China and Vietnam. It is a socialist country, but the socialism is soft, with plenty of room for private enterprise and personal freedoms. Belarus has found new life in preserving and developing the elements of socialism which in the early 1990s were most discredited. In the wake of IMF despair, socialism suddenly pops back up with a confident gait, in new clothes and carrying with it a new hope. It is wonderful that Belarus has managed walk this tightrope between freedom and responsibility in the midst of a disintegrating union and foreign interference. The Russian political analyst Sergey Kara Murza has said that the Belarusian system could serve as the pattern for the resurrection of the socialist state. The lesson for neighboring Russians is especially valid, and even poignant.

Edited by Paul Bennett

Sad News from Mexico

2010-12-29T19:25:00.000-08:00

In Mexican Border Town, Last Police Officer Disappears

The last remaining police officer in the Mexican border town of Guadalupe is missing, the AP reports. Twenty-eight-year-old police officer Ericka Gandara of the border town of Guadalupe, Chihuahua, Mexico has been missing since December 23. She is suspected to have been kidnapped by drug cartels, which are fighting the police in "bloody battles for control of the Juarez Valley where Guadalupe is located."

ed. Our prayers go out to her and her family and to all the Mexicans fighting for a real government in the midst of a narco-revolution.

Assange aticle by the new yorker - execellent as usual [by the ny'er]

2010-12-27T09:47:00.000-08:00

here is the whole thing - why not?

what an education!?!?! A real one of a kind, tolkien also had such.
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A Reporter at Large

No Secrets

Julian Assange’s mission for total transparency.

by Raffi Khatchadourian June 7, 2010

Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, oversees a populist intelligence network. Digitally altered photograph by Phillip Toledano.

Related Links: Video: Raffi Khatchadourian discusses the WikiLeaks video of a killing in Baghdad.; News Desk: The latest on WikiLeaks.

Keywords: WikiLeaks;; Julian Paul Assange;; Internet;; Iraq War;; Video;; Confidential Documents;; Intelligence

The house on Grettisgata Street, in Reykjavik, is a century old, small and white, situated just a few streets from the North Atlantic. The shifting northerly winds can suddenly bring ice and snow to the city, even in springtime, and when they do a certain kind of silence sets in. This was the case on the morning of March 30th, when a tall Australian man named Julian Paul Assange, with gray eyes and a mop of silver-white hair, arrived to rent the place. Assange was dressed in a gray full-body snowsuit, and he had with him a small entourage. “We are journalists,” he told the owner of the house. Eyjafjallajökull had recently begun erupting, and he said, “We’re here to write about the volcano.” After the owner left, Assange quickly closed the drapes, and he made sure that they stayed closed, day and night. The house, as far as he was concerned, would now serve as a war room; people called it the Bunker. Half a dozen computers were set up in a starkly decorated, white-walled living space. Icelandic activists arrived, and they began to work, more or less at Assange’s direction, around the clock. Their focus was Project B—Assange’s code name for a thirty-eight-minute video taken from the cockpit of an Apache military helicopter in Iraq in 2007. The video depicted American soldiers killing at least eighteen people, including two Reuters journalists; it later became the subject of widespread controversy, but at this early stage it was still a closely guarded military secret.

Assange is an international trafficker, of sorts. He and his colleagues collect documents and imagery that governments and other institutions regard as confidential and publish them on a Web site called WikiLeaks.org. Since it went online, three and a half years ago, the site has published an extensive catalogue of secret material, ranging from the Standard Operating Procedures at Camp Delta, in Guantánamo Bay, and the “Climategate” e-mails from the University of East Anglia, in England, to the contents of Sarah Palin’s private Yahoo account. The catalogue is especially remarkable because WikiLeaks is not quite an organization; it is better described as a media insurgency. It has no paid staff, no copiers, no desks, no office. Assange does not even have a home. He travels from country to country, staying with supporters, or friends of friends—as he once put it to me, “I’m living in airports these days.” He is the operation’s prime mover, and it is fair to say that WikiLeaks exists wherever he does. At the same time, hundreds of volunteers from around the world help maintain the Web site’s complicated infrastructure; many participate in small ways, and between three and five people dedicate themselves to it full time. Key members are known only by initials—M, for instance—even deep within WikiLeaks, where communications are conducted by encrypted online chat services. The secretiveness stems from the belief that a populist intelligence operation with virtually no resources, designed to publicize information that powerful institutions do not want public, will have serious adversaries.

Iceland was a natural place to develop Project B. In the past year, Assange has collaborated with politicians and activists there to draft a free-speech law of unprecedented strength, and a number of these same people had agreed to help him work on the video in total secrecy. The video was a striking artifact—an unmediated representation of the ambiguities and cruelties of modern warfare—and he hoped that its release would touch off a worldwide debate about the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was planning to unveil the footage before a group of reporters at the National Press Club, in Washington, on April 5th, the morning after Easter, presumably a slow news day. To accomplish this, he and the other members of the WikiLeaks community would have to analyze the raw video and edit it into a short film, build a stand-alone Web site to display it, launch a media campaign, and prepare documentation for the footage—all in less than a week’s time.

Assange also wanted to insure that, once the video was posted online, it would be impossible to remove. He told me that WikiLeaks maintains its content on more than twenty servers around the world and on hundreds of domain names. (Expenses are paid by donations, and a few independent well-wishers also run “mirror sites” in support.) Assange calls the site “an uncensorable system for untraceable mass document leaking and public analysis,” and a government or company that wanted to remove content from WikiLeaks would have to practically dismantle the Internet itself. So far, even though the site has received more than a hundred legal threats, almost no one has filed suit. Lawyers working for the British bank Northern Rock threatened court action after the site published an embarrassing memo, but they were practically reduced to begging. A Kenyan politician also vowed to sue after Assange published a confidential report alleging that President Daniel arap Moi and his allies had siphoned billions of dollars out of the country. The site’s work in Kenya earned it an award from Amnesty International.

Assange typically tells would-be litigants to go to hell. In 2008, WikiLeaks posted secret Scientology manuals, and lawyers representing the church demanded that they be removed. Assange’s response was to publish more of the Scientologists’ internal material, and to announce, “WikiLeaks will not comply with legally abusive requests from Scientology any more than WikiLeaks has complied with similar demands from Swiss banks, Russian offshore stem-cell centers, former African kleptocrats, or the Pentagon.”

In his writing online, especially on Twitter, Assange is quick to lash out at perceived enemies. By contrast, on television, where he has been appearing more frequently, he acts with uncanny sang-froid. Under the studio lights, he can seem—with his spectral white hair, pallid skin, cool eyes, and expansive forehead—like a rail-thin being who has rocketed to Earth to deliver humanity some hidden truth. This impression is magnified by his rigid demeanor and his baritone voice, which he deploys slowly, at low volume.

In private, however, Assange is often bemused and energetic. He can concentrate intensely, in binges, but he is also the kind of person who will forget to reserve a plane ticket, or reserve a plane ticket and forget to pay for it, or pay for the ticket and forget to go to the airport. People around him seem to want to care for him; they make sure that he is where he needs to be, and that he has not left all his clothes in the dryer before moving on. At such times, he can seem innocent of the considerable influence that he has acquired.

Sitting at a small wooden table in the Bunker, Assange looked exhausted. His lanky frame was arched over two computers—one of them online, and the other disconnected from the Internet, because it was full of classified military documents. (In the tradecraft of espionage, this is known as maintaining an “air gap.”) He has a cyber-security analyst’s concern about computer vulnerability, and habitually takes precautions to frustrate eavesdroppers. A low-grade fever of paranoia runs through the WikiLeaks community. Assange says that he has chased away strangers who have tried to take his picture for surveillance purposes. In March, he published a classified military report, created by the Army Counterintelligence Center in 2008, that argued that the site was a potential threat to the Army and briefly speculated on ways to deter government employees from leaking documents to it. Assange regarded the report as a declaration of war, and posted it with the title “U.S. Intelligence Planned to Destroy WikiLeaks.” During a trip to a conference before he came to the Bunker, he thought he was being followed, and his fear began to infect others. “I went to Sweden and stayed with a girl who is a foreign editor of a newspaper there, and she became so paranoid that the C.I.A. was trying to get me she left the house and abandoned me,” he said.

Assange was sitting opposite Rop Gonggrijp, a Dutch activist, hacker, and businessman. Gonggrijp—thin and balding, with a soft voice—has known Assange well for several years. He had noticed Assange’s panicky communiqués about being watched and decided that his help was needed. “Julian can deal with incredibly little sleep, and a hell of a lot of chaos, but even he has his limits, and I could see that he was stretching himself,” Gonggrijp told me. “I decided to come out and make things sane again.” Gonggrijp became the unofficial manager and treasurer of Project B, advancing about ten thousand euros to WikiLeaks to finance it. He kept everyone on schedule, and made sure that the kitchen was stocked with food and that the Bunker was orderly.

At around three in the afternoon, an Icelandic parliamentarian named Birgitta Jonsdottir walked in. Jonsdottir, who is in her forties, with long brown hair and bangs, was wearing a short black skirt and a black T-shirt with skulls printed on it. She took a WikiLeaks T-shirt from her bag and tossed it at Assange.

“That’s for you,” she said. “You need to change.” He put the T-shirt on a chair next to him, and continued working.

Jonsdottir has been in parliament for about a year, but considers herself a poet, artist, writer, and activist. Her political views are mostly anarchist. “I was actually unemployed before I got this job,” she explained. “When we first got to parliament, the staff was so nervous: here are people who were protesting parliament, who were for revolution, and now we are inside. None of us had aspirations to be politicians. We have a checklist, and, once we’re done, we are out.”

As she unpacked her computer, she asked Assange how he was planning to delegate the work on Project B. More Icelandic activists were due to arrive; half a dozen ultimately contributed time to the video, and about as many WikiLeaks volunteers from other countries were participating. Assange suggested that someone make contact with Google to insure that YouTube would host the footage.

“To make sure it is not taken down under pressure?” she asked.

“They have a rule that mentions gratuitous violence,” Assange said. “The violence is not gratuitous in this case, but nonetheless they have taken things down. It is too important to be interfered with.”

“What can we ask M to do?” Jonsdottir asked. Assange, engrossed in what he was doing, didn’t reply.

His concerns about surveillance had not entirely receded. On March 26th, he had written a blast e-mail, titled “Something Is Rotten in the State of Iceland,” in which he described a teen-age Icelandic WikiLeaks volunteer’s story of being detained by local police for more than twenty hours. The volunteer was arrested for trying to break into the factory where his father worked—“the reasons he was trying to get in are not totally justified,” Assange told me—and said that while in custody he was interrogated about Project B. Assange claimed that the volunteer was “shown covert photos of me outside the Reykjavik restaurant Icelandic Fish & Chips,” where a WikiLeaks production meeting had taken place in a private back room.

The police were denying key parts of the volunteer’s story, and Assange was trying to learn more. He received a call, and after a few minutes hung up. “Our young friend talked to one of the cops,” he said. “I was about to get more details, but my battery died.” He smiled and looked suspiciously at his phone.

“We are all paranoid schizophrenics,” Jonsdottir said. She gestured at Assange, who was still wearing his snowsuit. “Just look at how he dresses.”

Gonggrijp got up, walked to the window, and parted the drapes to peer out.

“Someone?” Jonsdottir asked.

“Just the camera van,” he deadpanned. “The brain-manipulation van.”

At around six in the evening, Assange got up from his spot at the table. He was holding a hard drive containing Project B. The video—excerpts of running footage captured by a camera mounted on the Apache—depicts soldiers conducting an operation in eastern Baghdad, not long after the surge began. Using the Freedom of Information Act, Reuters has sought for three years to obtain the video from the Army, without success. Assange would not identify his source, saying only that the person was unhappy about the attack. The video was digitally encrypted, and it took WikiLeaks three months to crack. Assange, a cryptographer of exceptional skill, told me that unlocking the file was “moderately difficult.”

People gathered in front of a computer to watch. In grainy black-and-white, we join the crew of the Apache, from the Eighth Cavalry Regiment, as it hovers above Baghdad with another helicopter. A wide-angle shot frames a mosque’s dome in crosshairs. We see a jumble of buildings and palm trees and abandoned streets. We hear bursts of static, radio blips, and the clipped banter of tactical communication. Two soldiers are in mid-conversation; the first recorded words are “O.K., I got it.” Assange hit the pause button, and said, “In this video, you will see a number of people killed.” The footage, he explained, had three broad phases. “In the first phase, you will see an attack that is based upon a mistake, but certainly a very careless mistake. In the second part, the attack is clearly murder, according to the definition of the average man. And in the third part you will see the killing of innocent civilians in the course of soldiers going after a legitimate target.”

The first phase was chilling, in part because the banter of the soldiers was so far beyond the boundaries of civilian discourse. “Just fuckin’, once you get on ’em, just open ’em up,” one of them said. The crew members of the Apache came upon about a dozen men ambling down a street, a block or so from American troops, and reported that five or six of the men were armed with AK-47s; as the Apache maneuvered into position to fire at them, the crew saw one of the Reuters journalists, who were mixed in among the other men, and mistook a long-lensed camera for an RPG. The Apaches fired on the men for twenty-five seconds, killing nearly all of them instantly.

Phase two began shortly afterward. As the helicopter hovered over the carnage, the crew noticed a wounded survivor struggling on the ground. The man appeared to be unarmed. “All you gotta do is pick up a weapon,” a soldier in the Apache said. Suddenly, a van drove into view, and three unarmed men rushed to help the wounded person. “We have individuals going to the scene, looks like possibly, uh, picking up bodies and weapons,” the Apache reported, even though the men were helping a survivor, and were not collecting weapons. The Apache fired, killing the men and the person they were trying to save, and wounding two young children in the van’s front seat.

In phase three, the helicopter crew radioed a commander to say that at least six armed men had entered a partially constructed building in a dense urban area. Some of the armed men may have walked over from a skirmish with American troops; it is unclear. The crew asked for permission to attack the structure, which they said appeared abandoned. “We can put a missile in it,” a soldier in the Apache suggested, and the go-ahead was quickly given. Moments later, two unarmed people entered the building. Though the soldiers acknowledged them, the attack proceeded: three Hellfire missiles destroyed the building. Passersby were engulfed by clouds of debris.

Assange saw these events in sharply delineated moral terms, yet the footage did not offer easy legal judgments. In the month before the video was shot, members of the battalion on the ground, from the Sixteenth Infantry Regiment, had suffered more than a hundred and fifty attacks and roadside bombings, nineteen injuries, and four deaths; early that morning, the unit had been attacked by small-arms fire. The soldiers in the Apache were matter-of-fact about killing and spoke callously about their victims, but the first attack could be judged as a tragic misunderstanding. The attack on the van was questionable—the use of force seemed neither thoughtful nor measured—but soldiers are permitted to shoot combatants, even when they are assisting the wounded, and one could argue that the Apache’s crew, in the heat of the moment, reasonably judged the men in the van to be assisting the enemy. Phase three may have been unlawful, perhaps negligent homicide or worse. Firing missiles into a building, in daytime, to kill six people who do not appear to be of strategic importance is an excessive use of force. This attack was conducted with scant deliberation, and it is unclear why the Army did not investigate it.

Assange had obtained internal Army records of the operation, which stated that everyone killed, except for the Reuters journalists, was an insurgent. And the day after the incident an Army spokesperson said, “There is no question that Coalition Forces were clearly engaged in combat operations against a hostile force.” Assange was hoping that Project B would undermine the Army’s official narrative. “This video shows what modern warfare has become, and, I think, after seeing it, whenever people hear about a certain number of casualties that resulted during fighting with close air support, they will understand what is going on,” he said in the Bunker. “The video also makes clear that civilians are listed as insurgents automatically, unless they are children, and that bystanders who are killed are not even mentioned.”

WikiLeaks receives about thirty submissions a day, and typically posts the ones it deems credible in their raw, unedited state, with commentary alongside. Assange told me, “I want to set up a new standard: ‘scientific journalism.’ If you publish a paper on DNA, you are required, by all the good biological journals, to submit the data that has informed your research—the idea being that people will replicate it, check it, verify it. So this is something that needs to be done for journalism as well. There is an immediate power imbalance, in that readers are unable to verify what they are being told, and that leads to abuse.” Because Assange publishes his source material, he believes that WikiLeaks is free to offer its analysis, no matter how speculative. In the case of Project B, Assange wanted to edit the raw footage into a short film as a vehicle for commentary. For a while, he thought about calling the film “Permission to Engage,” but ultimately decided on something more forceful: “Collateral Murder.” He told Gonggrijp, “We want to knock out this ‘collateral damage’ euphemism, and so when anyone uses it they will think ‘collateral murder.’ ”

The video, in its original form, was a puzzle—a fragment of evidence divorced from context. Assange and the others in the Bunker spent much of their time trying to piece together details: the units involved, their command structure, the rules of engagement, the jargon soldiers used on the radio, and, most important, whether and how the Iraqis on the ground were armed.

“One of them has a weapon,” Assange said, peering at blurry footage of the men walking down the street. “See all those people standing out there.”

“And there is a guy with an RPG over his arm,” Gonggrijp said.

“I’m not sure.” Assange said. “It does look a little bit like an RPG.” He played the footage again. “I’ll tell you what is very strange,” he said. “If it is an RPG, then there is just one RPG. Where are all the other weapons? All those guys. It is pretty weird.”

The forensic work was made more difficult because Assange had declined to discuss the matter with military officials. “I thought it would be more harmful than helpful,” he told me. “I have approached them before, and, as soon as they hear it is WikiLeaks, they are not terribly coöperative.” Assange was running Project B as a surprise attack. He had encouraged a rumor that the video was shot in Afghanistan in 2009, in the hope that the Defense Department would be caught unprepared. Assange does not believe that the military acts in good faith with the media. He said to me, “What right does this institution have to know the story before the public?”

This adversarial mind-set permeated the Bunker. Late one night, an activist asked if Assange might be detained upon his arrival in the United States.

“If there is ever a time it was safe for me to go, it is now,” Assange assured him.

“They say that Gitmo is nice this time of year,” Gonggrijp said.

Assange was the sole decision-maker, and it was possible to leave the house at night and come back after sunrise and see him in the same place, working. (“I spent two months in one room in Paris once without leaving,” he said. “People were handing me food.”) He spoke to the team in shorthand—“I need the conversion stuff,” or “Make sure that credit-card donations are acceptable”—all the while resolving flareups with the overworked volunteers. To keep track of who was doing what, Gonggrijp and another activist maintained a workflow chart with yellow Post-Its on the kitchen cabinets. Elsewhere, people were translating the video’s subtitles into various languages, or making sure that servers wouldn’t crash from the traffic that was expected after the video was posted. Assange wanted the families of the Iraqis who had died in the attack to be contacted, to prepare them for the inevitable media attention, and to gather additional information. In conjunction with Iceland’s national broadcasting service, RUV, he sent two Icelandic journalists to Baghdad to find them.

By the end of the week, a frame-by-frame examination of the footage was nearly complete, revealing minute details—evidence of a body on the ground, for instance—that were not visible by casual viewing. (“I am about twelve thousand frames in,” the activist who reviewed it told me. “It’s been a morbid day, going through these people’s last moments.”) Assange had decided to exclude the Hellfire incident from the film; the attack lacked the obvious human dimension of the others, and he thought that viewers might be overloaded with information.

The edited film, which was eighteen minutes long, began with a quote from George Orwell that Assange and M had selected: “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind.” It then presented information about the journalists who had been killed, and about the official response to the attack. For the audio of this section, one of the film’s Icelandic editors had layered in fragments of radio banter from the soldiers. As Assange reviewed the cut, an activist named Gudmundur Gudmundsson spoke up to say that the banter allowed viewers to “make an emotional bond” with the soldiers. Assange argued that it was mostly fragmentary and garbled, but Gudmundsson insisted: “It is just used all the time for triggering emotions.”

“At the same time, we are displaying them as monsters,” the editor said.

“But emotions always rule,” Gudmundsson said. “By the way, I worked on the sound recording for a film, ‘Children of Nature,’ that was nominated for an Oscar, so I am speaking from experience.”

“Well, what is your alternative?” Assange asked.

“Basically, bursts of sounds, interrupting the quiet,” he said.

The editor made the change, stripping the voices of the soldiers from the opening, but keeping blips and whirs of radio distortion. Assange gave the edit his final approval.

Late Saturday night, shortly before all the work had to be finished, the journalists who had gone to Baghdad sent Assange an e-mail: they had found the two children in the van. The children had lived a block from the location of the attack, and were being driven to school by their father that morning. “They remember the bombardment, felt great pain, they said, and lost consciousness,” one of the journalists wrote. The journalists also found the owner of the building that had been attacked by the Hellfires, who said that families had been living in the structure, and that seven residents had died. The owner, a retired English teacher, had lost his wife and daughter. An intense discussion arose about what to do with this news: Was it worth using at the National Press Club, or was it a better tactic to hold on to it? If the military justified the Hellfire attacks by claiming that there were no civilian casualties, WikiLeaks could respond by releasing the information, in a kind of ambush. Jonsdottir turned to Gonggrijp, whose eyes had welled up.

“Are you crying?” she asked.

“I am,” he said. “O.K., O.K., it is just the kids. It hurts.” Gonggrijp gathered himself. “Fuck!” he said. Resuming the conversation about ambushing the Army, he said, “Anyway, let them walk into this knife—”

“That is a wonderful thing to do,” one of the activists said.

“Let them walk into this, and they will,” Gonggrijp said. “It is a logical response.”

Jonsdottir was now in tears, too, and wiping her nose.

“Now I want to reëdit the thing,” Assange said. “I want to put in the missile attack. There were three families living in the bottom, so it wasn’t abandoned.” But it was impossible to reëdit the film. The activists were working at capacity, and in several hours it would be Easter.

At half past ten in the morning, Gonggrijp pulled open the drapes, and the Bunker was filled with sunlight. He was wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt and black pants, freshly washed and ironed, and he was struggling to keep everyone on schedule. Last-minute concerns—among them finding a criminal-defense lawyer in the United States—were being addressed. Assange was at a computer, his posture upright as he steadily typed.

“How are we on time?” he asked no one in particular.

“We have three hours,” Gonggrijp said.

Assange wrinkled his brow and turned his attention back to the screen. He was looking at a copy of classified rules of engagement in Iraq from 2006, one of several secret American military documents that he was planning to post with the video. WikiLeaks scrubs such documents to insure that no digital traces embedded in them can identify their source. Assange was purging these traces as fast as he could.

Reykjavik’s streets were empty, and the bells of a cathedral began to toll. “Remember, remember the fifth of November,” Assange said, repeating a line from the English folk poem celebrating Guy Fawkes. He smiled, as Gonggrijp dismantled the workflow chart, removing Post-Its from the cabinets and flushing them down the toilet. Shortly before noon, there was a desperate push to clear away the remaining vestiges of Project B and to get to the airport. Assange was unpacked and unshaven, and his hair was a mess. He was typing up a press release. Jonsdottir came by to help, and he asked her, “Can’t you cut my hair while I’m doing this?”

“No, I am not going to cut your hair while you are working,” she said.

Jonsdottir walked over to the sink and made tea. Assange kept on typing, and after a few minutes she reluctantly began to trim his hair. At one point, she stopped and asked, “If you get arrested, will you get in touch with me?” Assange nodded. Gonggrijp, meanwhile, shoved some of Assange’s things into a bag. He settled the bill with the owner. Dishes were washed. Furniture was put back in place. People piled into a small car, and in an instant the house was empty and still.

The name Assange is thought to derive from Ah Sang, or Mr. Sang, a Chinese émigré who settled on Thursday Island, off the coast of Australia, in the early eighteen-hundreds, and whose descendants later moved to the continent. Assange’s maternal ancestors came to Australia in the mid-nineteenth century, from Scotland and Ireland, in search of farmland, and Assange suspects, only half in jest, that his proclivity for wandering is genetic. His phone numbers and e-mail address are ever-changing, and he can drive the people around him crazy with his elusiveness and his propensity to mask details about his life.

Assange was born in 1971, in the city of Townsville, on Australia’s northeastern coast, but it is probably more accurate to say that he was born into a blur of domestic locomotion. Shortly after his first birthday, his mother—I will call her Claire—married a theatre director, and the two collaborated on small productions. They moved often, living near Byron Bay, a beachfront community in New South Wales, and on Magnetic Island, a tiny pile of rock that Captain Cook believed had magnetic properties that distorted his compass readings. They were tough-minded nonconformists. (At seventeen, Claire had burned her schoolbooks and left home on a motorcycle.) Their house on Magnetic Island burned to the ground, and rifle cartridges that Claire had kept for shooting snakes exploded like fireworks. “Most of this period of my childhood was pretty Tom Sawyer,” Assange told me. “I had my own horse. I built my own raft. I went fishing. I was going down mine shafts and tunnels.”

Assange’s mother believed that formal education would inculcate an unhealthy respect for authority in her children and dampen their will to learn. “I didn’t want their spirits broken,” she told me. In any event, the family had moved thirty-seven times by the time Assange was fourteen, making consistent education impossible. He was homeschooled, sometimes, and he took correspondence classes and studied informally with university professors. But mostly he read on his own, voraciously. He was drawn to science. “I spent a lot of time in libraries going from one thing to another, looking closely at the books I found in citations, and followed that trail,” he recalled. He absorbed a large vocabulary, but only later did he learn how to pronounce all the words that he learned.

When Assange was eight, Claire left her husband and began seeing a musician, with whom she had another child, a boy. The relationship was tempestuous; the musician became abusive, she says, and they separated. A fight ensued over the custody of Assange’s half brother, and Claire felt threatened, fearing that the musician would take away her son. Assange recalled her saying, “Now we need to disappear,” and he lived on the run with her from the age of eleven to sixteen. When I asked him about the experience, he told me that there was evidence that the man belonged to a powerful cult called the Family—its motto was “Unseen, Unknown, and Unheard.” Some members were doctors who persuaded mothers to give up their newborn children to the cult’s leader, Anne Hamilton-Byrne. The cult had moles in government, Assange suspected, who provided the musician with leads on Claire’s whereabouts. In fact, Claire often told friends where she had gone, or hid in places where she had lived before.

While on the run, Claire rented a house across the street from an electronics shop. Assange would go there to write programs on a Commodore 64, until Claire bought it for him, moving to a cheaper place to raise the money. He was soon able to crack into well-known programs, where he found hidden messages left by their creators. “The austerity of one’s interaction with a computer is something that appealed to me,” he said. “It is like chess—chess is very austere, in that you don’t have many rules, there is no randomness, and the problem is very hard.” Assange embraced life as an outsider. He later wrote of himself and a teen-age friend, “We were bright sensitive kids who didn’t fit into the dominant subculture and fiercely castigated those who did as irredeemable boneheads.”

When Assange turned sixteen, he got a modem, and his computer was transformed into a portal. Web sites did not exist yet—this was 1987—but computer networks and telecom systems were sufficiently linked to form a hidden electronic landscape that teen-agers with the requisite technical savvy could traverse. Assange called himself Mendax—from Horace’s splendide mendax, or “nobly untruthful”—and he established a reputation as a sophisticated programmer who could break into the most secure networks. He joined with two hackers to form a group that became known as the International Subversives, and they broke into computer systems in Europe and North America, including networks belonging to the U.S. Department of Defense and to the Los Alamos National Laboratory. In a book called “Underground,” which he collaborated on with a writer named Suelette Dreyfus, he outlined the hacker subculture’s early Golden Rules: “Don’t damage computer systems you break into (including crashing them); don’t change the information in those systems (except for altering logs to cover your tracks); and share information.”

Around this time, Assange fell in love with a sixteen-year-old girl, and he briefly moved out of his mother’s home to stay with her. “A couple of days later, police turned up, and they carted off all my computer stuff,” he recalled. The raid, he said, was carried out by the state police, and “it involved some dodgy character who was alleging that we had stolen five hundred thousand dollars from Citibank.” Assange wasn’t charged, and his equipment was returned. “At that point, I decided that it might be wise to be a bit more discreet,” he said. Assange and the girl joined a squatters’ union in Melbourne, until they learned she was pregnant, and moved to be near Claire. When Assange was eighteen, the two got married in an unofficial ceremony, and soon afterward they had a son.

Hacking remained a constant in his life, and the thrill of digital exploration was amplified by the growing knowledge, among the International Subversives, that the authorities were interested in their activities. The Australian Federal Police had set up an investigation into the group, called Operation Weather, which the hackers strove to monitor.

In September, 1991, when Assange was twenty, he hacked into the master terminal that Nortel, the Canadian telecom company, maintained in Melbourne, and began to poke around. The International Subversives had been visiting the master terminal frequently. Normally, Assange hacked into computer systems at night, when they were semi-dormant, but this time a Nortel administrator was signed on. Sensing that he might be caught, Assange approached him with humor. “I have taken control,” he wrote, without giving his name. “For years, I have been struggling in this grayness. But now I have finally seen the light.” The administrator did not reply, and Assange sent another message: “It’s been nice playing with your system. We didn’t do any damage and we even improved a few things. Please don’t call the Australian Federal Police.”

The International Subversives’ incursions into Nortel turned out to be a critical development for Operation Weather. Federal investigators tapped phone lines to see which ones the hackers were using. “Julian was the most knowledgeable and the most secretive of the lot,” Ken Day, the lead investigator, told me. “He had some altruistic motive. I think he acted on the belief that everyone should have access to everything.”

“Underground” describes Assange’s growing fear of arrest: “Mendax dreamed of police raids all the time. He dreamed of footsteps crunching on the driveway gravel, of shadows in the pre-dawn darkness, of a gun-toting police squad bursting through his backdoor at 5 am.” Assange could relax only when he hid his disks in an apiary that he kept. By October, he was in a terrible state. His wife had left him, taking with her their infant son. His home was a mess. He barely ate or slept. On the night the police came, the twenty-ninth, he wired his phone through his stereo and listened to the busy signal until eleven-thirty, when Ken Day knocked on his door, and told him, “I think you’ve been expecting me.”

Assange was charged with thirty-one counts of hacking and related crimes. While awaiting trial, he fell into a depression, and briefly checked himself into a hospital. He tried to stay with his mother, but after a few days he took to sleeping in nearby parks. He lived and hiked among dense eucalyptus forests in the Dandenong Ranges National Park, which were thick with mosquitoes whose bites scarred his face. “Your inner voice quiets down,” he told me. “Internal dialogue is stimulated by a preparatory desire to speak, but it is not actually useful if there are no other people around.” He added, “I don’t want to sound too Buddhist. But your vision of yourself disappears.”

It took more than three years for the authorities to bring the case against Assange and the other International Subversives to court. Day told me, “We had just formed the computer-crimes team, and the government said, ‘Your charter is to establish a deterrent.’ Well, to get a deterrent you have to prosecute people, and we achieved that with Julian and his group.” A computer-security team working for Nortel in Canada drafted an incident report alleging that the hacking had caused damage that would cost more than a hundred thousand dollars to repair. The chief prosecutor, describing Assange’s near-limitless access, told the court, “It was God Almighty walking around doing what you like.”

Assange, facing a potential sentence of ten years in prison, found the state’s reaction confounding. He bought Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “The First Circle,” a novel about scientists and technicians forced into the Gulag, and read it three times. (“How close the parallels to my own adventures!” he later wrote.) He was convinced that “look/see” hacking was a victimless crime, and intended to fight the charges. But the other members of the group decided to coöperate. “When a judge says, ‘The prisoner shall now rise,’ and no one else in the room stands—that is a test of character,” he told me. Ultimately, he pleaded guilty to twenty-five charges and six were dropped. But at his final sentencing the judge said, “There is just no evidence that there was anything other than sort of intelligent inquisitiveness and the pleasure of being able to—what’s the expression—surf through these various computers.” Assange’s only penalty was to pay the Australian state a small sum in damages.

As the criminal case was unfolding, Assange and his mother were also waging a campaign to gain full custody of Assange’s son—a legal fight that was, in many ways, far more wrenching than his criminal defense. They were convinced that the boy’s mother and her new boyfriend posed a danger to the child, and they sought to restrict her rights. The state’s child-protection agency, Health and Community Services, disagreed. The specifics of the allegations are unclear; family-court records in Australia are kept anonymous. But in 1995 a parliamentary committee found that the agency maintained an “underlying philosophy of deflecting as many cases away from itself as possible.” When the agency decided that a child was living in a safe household, there was no way to immediately appeal its decision.

The custody battle evolved into a bitter fight with the state. “What we saw was a great bureaucracy that was squashing people,” Claire told me. She and Assange, along with another activist, formed an organization called Parent Inquiry Into Child Protection. “We used full-on activist methods,” Claire recalled. In meetings with Health and Community Services, “we would go in and tape-record them secretly.” The organization used the Australian Freedom of Information Act to obtain documents from Health and Community Services, and they distributed flyers to child-protection workers, encouraging them to come forward with inside information, for a “central databank” that they were creating. “You may remain anonymous if you wish,” one flyer stated. One protection worker leaked to the group an important internal manual. Assange told me, “We had moles who were inside dissidents.”

In 1999, after nearly three dozen legal hearings and appeals, Assange worked out a custody agreement with his wife. Claire told me, “We had experienced very high levels of adrenaline, and I think that after it all finished I ended up with P.T.S.D. It was like coming back from a war. You just can’t interact with normal people to the same degree, and I am sure that Jules has some P.T.S.D. that is untreated.” Not long after the court cases, she said, Assange’s hair, which had been dark brown, became drained of all color.

Assange was burned out. He motorcycled across Vietnam. He held various jobs, and even earned money as a computer-security consultant, supporting his son to the extent that he was able. He studied physics at the University of Melbourne. He thought that trying to decrypt the secret laws governing the universe would provide the intellectual stimulation and rush of hacking. It did not. In 2006, on a blog he had started, he wrote about a conference organized by the Australian Institute of Physics, “with 900 career physicists, the body of which were sniveling fearful conformists of woefully, woefully inferior character.”

He had come to understand the defining human struggle not as left versus right, or faith versus reason, but as individual versus institution. As a student of Kafka, Koestler, and Solzhenitsyn, he believed that truth, creativity, love, and compassion are corrupted by institutional hierarchies, and by “patronage networks”—one of his favorite expressions—that contort the human spirit. He sketched out a manifesto of sorts, titled “Conspiracy as Governance,” which sought to apply graph theory to politics. Assange wrote that illegitimate governance was by definition conspiratorial—the product of functionaries in “collaborative secrecy, working to the detriment of a population.” He argued that, when a regime’s lines of internal communication are disrupted, the information flow among conspirators must dwindle, and that, as the flow approaches zero, the conspiracy dissolves. Leaks were an instrument of information warfare.

These ideas soon evolved into WikiLeaks. In 2006, Assange barricaded himself in a house near the university and began to work. In fits of creativity, he would write out flow diagrams for the system on the walls and doors, so as not to forget them. There was a bed in the kitchen, and he invited backpackers passing through campus to stay with him, in exchange for help building the site. “He wouldn’t sleep at all,” a person who was living in the house told me. “He wouldn’t eat.”

As it now functions, the Web site is primarily hosted on a Swedish Internet service provider called PRQ.se, which was created to withstand both legal pressure and cyber attacks, and which fiercely preserves the anonymity of its clients. Submissions are routed first through PRQ, then to a WikiLeaks server in Belgium, and then on to “another country that has some beneficial laws,” Assange told me, where they are removed at “end-point machines” and stored elsewhere. These machines are maintained by exceptionally secretive engineers, the high priesthood of WikiLeaks. One of them, who would speak only by encrypted chat, told me that Assange and the other public members of WikiLeaks “do not have access to certain parts of the system as a measure to protect them and us.” The entire pipeline, along with the submissions moving through it, is encrypted, and the traffic is kept anonymous by means of a modified version of the Tor network, which sends Internet traffic through “virtual tunnels” that are extremely private. Moreover, at any given time WikiLeaks computers are feeding hundreds of thousands of fake submissions through these tunnels, obscuring the real documents. Assange told me that there are still vulnerabilities, but “this is vastly more secure than any banking network.”

Before launching the site, Assange needed to show potential contributors that it was viable. One of the WikiLeaks activists owned a server that was being used as a node for the Tor network. Millions of secret transmissions passed through it. The activist noticed that hackers from China were using the network to gather foreign governments’ information, and began to record this traffic. Only a small fraction has ever been posted on WikiLeaks, but the initial tranche served as the site’s foundation, and Assange was able to say, “We have received over one million documents from thirteen countries.”

In December, 2006, WikiLeaks posted its first document: a “secret decision,” signed by Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, a Somali rebel leader for the Islamic Courts Union, that had been culled from traffic passing through the Tor network to China. The document called for the execution of government officials by hiring “criminals” as hit men. Assange and the others were uncertain of its authenticity, but they thought that readers, using Wikipedia-like features of the site, would help analyze it. They published the decision with a lengthy commentary, which asked, “Is it a bold manifesto by a flamboyant Islamic militant with links to Bin Laden? Or is it a clever smear by US intelligence, designed to discredit the Union, fracture Somali alliances and manipulate China?”

The document’s authenticity was never determined, and news about WikiLeaks quickly superseded the leak itself. Several weeks later, Assange flew to Kenya for the World Social Forum, an anti-capitalist convention, to make a presentation about the Web site. “He packed in the funniest way I have ever seen,” the person who had been living in the house recalled. “Someone came to pick him up, and he was asked, ‘Where is your luggage?’ And he ran back into the house. He had a sailor’s sack, and he grabbed a whole bunch of stuff and threw it in there, mostly socks.”

Assange ended up staying in Kenya for several months. He would check in with friends by phone and through the Internet from time to time, but was never precise about his movements. One friend told me, “It would always be, ‘Where is Julian?’ It was always difficult to know where he was. It was almost like he was trying to hide.”

It took about an hour on Easter morning to get from the house on Grettisgata Street to Iceland’s international airport, which is situated on a lava field by the sea. Assange, in the terminal, carried a threadbare blue backpack that contained hard drives, phone cards, and multiple cell phones. Gonggrijp had agreed to go to Washington to help with the press conference. He checked in, and the ticketing agent turned to Assange.

“I am sorry,” she said to him. “I cannot find your name.”

“Interesting,” Assange said to Gonggrijp. “Have fun at the press conference.”

“No,” Gonggrijp told the attendant. “We have a booking I.D. number.”

“It’s been confirmed,” Assange insisted.

The attendant looked perplexed. “I know,” she said. “But my booking information has it ‘cancelled.’ ”

The two men exchanged a look: was a government agency tampering with their plans? Assange waited anxiously, but it turned out that he had bought the ticket and neglected to confirm the purchase. He quickly bought another ticket, and the two men flew to New York and then rushed to catch the Acela to Washington. It was nearly two in the morning when they arrived. They got into a taxi, and Assange, who didn’t want to reveal the location of his hotel, told the driver to go to a nearby cross street.

“Here we are in the lion’s den,” Gonggrijp said as the taxi raced down Massachusetts Avenue, passing rows of nondescript office buildings. Assange said, “Not looking too lionish.”

A few hours after sunrise, Assange was standing at a lectern inside the National Press Club, ready to present “Collateral Murder” to the forty or so journalists who had come. He was dressed in a brown blazer, a black shirt, and a red tie. He played the film for the audience, pausing it to discuss various details. After the film ended, he ran footage of the Hellfire attack—a woman in the audience gasped as the first missile hit the building—and read from the e-mail sent by the Icelandic journalists who had gone to Iraq. The leak, he told the reporters, “sends a message that some people within the military don’t like what is going on.”

The video, in both raw and edited forms, was released on the site that WikiLeaks had built for it, and also on YouTube and a number of other Web sites. Within minutes after the press conference, Assange was invited to Al Jazeera’s Washington headquarters, where he spent half the day giving interviews, and that evening MSNBC ran a long segment about the footage. The video was covered in the Times, in multiple stories, and in every other major paper. On YouTube alone, more than seven million viewers have watched “Collateral Murder.”

Defense Secretary Robert Gates was asked about the footage, and said, clearly irritated, “These people can put anything out they want and are never held accountable for it.” The video was like looking at war “through a soda straw,” he said. “There is no before and there is no after.” Army spokespeople insisted that there was no violation of the rules of engagement. At first, the media’s response hewed to Assange’s interpretation, but, in the ensuing days, as more commentators weighed in and the military offered its view, Assange grew frustrated. Much of the coverage focussed not on the Hellfire attack or the van but on the killing of the journalists and on how a soldier might reasonably mistake a camera for an RPG. On Twitter, Assange accused Gates of being “a liar,” and beseeched members of the media to “stop spinning.”

In some respects, Assange appeared to be most annoyed by the journalistic process itself—“a craven sucking up to official sources to imbue the eventual story with some kind of official basis,” as he once put it. WikiLeaks has long maintained a complicated relationship with conventional journalism. When, in 2008, the site was sued after publishing confidential documents from a Swiss bank, the Los Angeles Times, the Associated Press, and ten other news organizations filed amicus briefs in support. (The bank later withdrew its suit.) But, in the Bunker one evening, Gonggrijp told me, “We are not the press.” He considers WikiLeaks an advocacy group for sources; within the framework of the Web site, he said, “the source is no longer dependent on finding a journalist who may or may not do something good with his document.”

Assange, despite his claims to scientific journalism, emphasized to me that his mission is to expose injustice, not to provide an even-handed record of events. In an invitation to potential collaborators in 2006, he wrote, “Our primary targets are those highly oppressive regimes in China, Russia and Central Eurasia, but we also expect to be of assistance to those in the West who wish to reveal illegal or immoral behavior in their own governments and corporations.” He has argued that a “social movement” to expose secrets could “bring down many administrations that rely on concealing reality—including the US administration.”

Assange does not recognize the limits that traditional publishers do. Recently, he posted military documents that included the Social Security numbers of soldiers, and in the Bunker I asked him if WikiLeaks’ mission would have been compromised if he had redacted these small bits. He said that some leaks risked harming innocent people—“collateral damage, if you will”—but that he could not weigh the importance of every detail in every document. Perhaps the Social Security numbers would one day be important to researchers investigating wrongdoing, he said; by releasing the information he would allow judgment to occur in the open.

A year and a half ago, WikiLeaks published the results of an Army test, conducted in 2004, of electromagnetic devices designed to prevent IEDs from being triggered. The document revealed key aspects of how the devices functioned and also showed that they interfered with communication systems used by soldiers—information that an insurgent could exploit. By the time WikiLeaks published the study, the Army had begun to deploy newer technology, but some soldiers were still using the devices. I asked Assange if he would refrain from releasing information that he knew might get someone killed. He said that he had instituted a “harm-minimization policy,” whereby people named in certain documents were contacted before publication, to warn them, but that there were also instances where the members of WikiLeaks might get “blood on our hands.”

One member told me that Assange’s editorial policy initially made her uncomfortable, but that she has come around to his position, because she believes that no one has been unjustly harmed. Of course, such harm is not always easy to measure. When Assange was looking for board members, he contacted Steven Aftergood, who runs an e-mail newsletter for the Federation of American Scientists, and who publishes sensitive documents. Aftergood declined to participate. “When a technical record is both sensitive and remote from a current subject of controversy, my editorial inclination is to err on the side of caution,” he said. “I miss that kind of questioning on their part.”

At the same time, Aftergood told me, the overclassification of information is a problem of increasing scale—one that harms not only citizens, who should be able to have access to government records, but the system of classification itself. When too many secrets are kept, it becomes difficult to know which ones are important. Had the military released the video from the Apache to Reuters under FOIA, it would probably not have become a film titled “Collateral Murder,” and a public-relations nightmare.

Lieutenant Colonel Lee Packnett, the spokesperson for intelligence matters for the Army, was deeply agitated when I called him. “We’re not going to give validity to WikiLeaks,” he said. “You’re not doing anything for the Army by putting us in a conversation about WikiLeaks. You can talk to someone else. It’s not an Army issue.” As he saw it, once “Collateral Murder” had passed through the news cycle, the broader counter-intelligence problem that WikiLeaks poses to the military had disappeared as well. “It went away,” he said.

With the release of “Collateral Murder,” WikiLeaks received more than two hundred thousand dollars in donations, and on April 7th Assange wrote on Twitter, “New funding model for journalism: try doing it for a change.” Just this winter, he had put the site into a state of semi-dormancy because there was not enough money to run it, and because its technical engineering needed adjusting. Assange has far more material than he can process, and he is seeking specialists who can sift through the chaotic WikiLeaks library and assign documents to volunteers for analysis. The donations meant that WikiLeaks would now be able to pay some volunteers, and in late May its full archive went back online. Still, the site remains a project in early development. Assange has been searching for the right way not only to manage it but also to get readers interested in the more arcane material there.

In 2007, he published thousands of pages of secret military information detailing a vast number of Army procurements in Iraq and Afghanistan. He and a volunteer spent weeks building a searchable database, studying the Army’s purchasing codes, and adding up the cost of the procurements—billions of dollars in all. The database catalogued matériel that every unit had ordered: machine guns, Humvees, cash-counting machines, satellite phones. Assange hoped that journalists would pore through it, but barely any did. “I am so angry,” he said. “This was such a fucking fantastic leak: the Army’s force structure of Afghanistan and Iraq, down to the last chair, and nothing.”

WikiLeaks is a finalist for a Knight Foundation grant of more than half a million dollars. The intended project would set up a way for sources to pass documents to newspaper reporters securely; WikiLeaks would serve as a kind of numbered Swiss bank account, where information could be anonymously exchanged. (The system would allow the source to impose a deadline on the reporter, after which the document would automatically appear on WikiLeaks.) Assange has been experimenting with other ideas, too. On the principle that people won’t regard something as valuable unless they pay for it, he has tried selling documents at auction to news organizations; in 2008, he attempted this with seven thousand internal e-mails from the account of a former speechwriter for Hugo Chávez. The auction failed. He is thinking about setting up a subscription service, where high-paying members would have early access to leaks.

But experimenting with the site’s presentation and its technical operations will not answer a deeper question that WikiLeaks must address: What is it about? The Web site’s strengths—its near-total imperviousness to lawsuits and government harassment—make it an instrument for good in societies where the laws are unjust. But, unlike authoritarian regimes, democratic governments hold secrets largely because citizens agree that they should, in order to protect legitimate policy. In liberal societies, the site’s strengths are its weaknesses. Lawsuits, if they are fair, are a form of deterrence against abuse. Soon enough, Assange must confront the paradox of his creation: the thing that he seems to detest most—power without accountability—is encoded in the site’s DNA, and will only become more pronounced as WikiLeaks evolves into a real institution.

After the press conference in Washington, I met Assange in New York, in Bryant Park. He had brought his luggage with him, because he was moving between the apartments of friends of friends. We sat near the fountain, and drank coffee. That week, Assange was scheduled to fly to Berkeley, and then to Italy, but back in Iceland the volcano was erupting again, and his flight to Europe was likely to change. He looked a bit shell-shocked. “It was surprising to me that we were seen as such an impartial arbiter of the truth, which may speak well to what we have done,” he told me. But he also said, “To be completely impartial is to be an idiot. This would mean that we would have to treat the dust in the street the same as the lives of people who have been killed.”

A number of commentators had wondered whether the video’s title was manipulative. “In hindsight, should we have called it ‘Permission to Engage’ rather than ‘Collateral Murder’?” he said. “I’m still not sure.” He was annoyed by Gates’s comment on the film: “He says, ‘There is no before and no after.’ Well, at least there is now a middle, which is a vast improvement.” Then Assange leaned forward and, in a whisper, began to talk about a leak, code-named Project G, that he is developing in another secret location. He promised that it would be news, and I saw in him the same mixture of seriousness and amusement, devilishness and intensity that he had displayed in the Bunker. “If it feels a little bit like we’re amateurs, it is because we are,” he said. “Everyone is an amateur in this business.” And then, his coffee finished, he made his way out of the park and into Times Square, disappearing among the masses of people moving this way and that. ♦

tortured logic

2010-12-22T15:18:00.000-08:00

Tortured Logic: It's Clear Where the Secrecy-Obsessed Obama Administration is Headed in Its Pursuit of WikiLeaks

Mon, 12/20/2010 - 00:38 — Anonymous

by:

Dave Lindorff

With word that Pvt. Bradley Manning, the soldier suspected of being the source of most of the WikiLeaks documents on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the State Department cables, has been held in intensive solitary confinement at the Marine Base brig in Quantico, VA for five months, under conditions that most of the world considers torture, it seems increasingly clear what the Obama administration's strategy in going after WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange is going to be.

Assange's lawyers have said they have learned that the Obama Justice (sic) Department has impaneled a secret federal Grand Jury in Virginia to develop charges against Assange, most likely under the hoary and antiquated 1917 Espionage Act.

Because that act has never been used against a journalist or news organization, and because it would be fairly easy for the defense to make the argument that Assange and WikiLeaks are performing a journalistic function protected by the First Amendment, legal experts say the government, to make any kind of a case, would have to prove that Assange had induced Manning to illegally turn over government documents to WikiLeaks.

Portrait of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange by artist Arjen van Lith

Both Assange, in public statements, and Manning, in transcripts published by the magazine Wired, have stated was no such relationship. Manning has said that he volunteered the documents out of a heartfelt whistleblower's desire to make public evidence of what he felt were war crimes by US forces, in the case of the Iraq and Afghanistan materials. There is no reason to think that his motive and methods would have been any different with respect to the State Department cables. There was no mention of his having been sought out or encouraged in his alleged activity by WikiLeaks, which only provided the vehicle for making any leaks public.

But with Manning having been held in solitary confinement now for more than seven months--first in a brig in Kuwait and now at Quantico--under conditions that are reminiscent of those that were used against alleged "dirty bomb" wannabe Jose Padilla, which drove him certifiably insane--it seems obvious what the government is up to.

Convicting Pvt. Manning on a charge of disclosing government secrets, stealing government documents, or even of treason, would be child's play in a court martial setting, where the jury would be composed of uniformed officers. Furthermore, it would not be much of a big deal, convicting a private of stealing and revealing government documents. But taking down WikiLeaks, and convicting Assange, who has been embarrassing the US and other secretive governments by doing what a real news media should have been doing? Ah, that would be a very big deal--one which would make a compliant US media even more compliant.

And to accomplish that feat, in the face of the First Amendment which guarantees Freedom of the Press, all the government would need to do is "prove" that Assange induced, or perhaps even paid Pvt. Manning to provide those documents.

Hence the torture.

In an article in Salon magazine, Glenn Greenwald reports that Manning is being kept in his cell, completely alone, for 23 hours a day. He is denied the right to exercise, has been denied a pillow or sheets for his bed, and is being administered anti-depressant "medication" involuntarily. He is barred from most outside contact, but one friend, David House, a 23-year-old MIT researcher who is a friend, according to Greenwald has said he has observed "palpable changes in Manning's physical appearance and behavior just over the course of the several months that he's been visiting him."

I suspect the goal in all this is to soften-up Manning, and to eventually "turn" him into a witness against Assange and WikiLeaks, on the promise of some kind of reduced or dropped charges.

Again, in an American court--especially in a politically conservative state like Virginia, with its heavy military and Pentagon employee presence--a case of Manning's word against Assange's word would be pretty open-and-shut. A Virginia jury might be expected to show little concern about any defense evidence showing that Manning had been tortured in captivity before being brought in to testify.

It is urgent that Americans who care about the Constitutional right to a fair trial, who care about the preservation of the First Amendment's freedom of the press, and who care about basic human rights and the need to outlaw torture here, in accordance with the United Nations Charter, demand that Pvt. Manning be released from his inhumane solitary confinement. He is an accused person, not a convicted criminal, and has by all accounts been a model prisoner. If the government thinks it has a case against him, it should bring him to trial with appropriate dispatch, and not try to pressure him into providing false witness against Assange. If the government doesn't have a case, it should release Manning immediately!

Instead of trying to prosecute Manning, Commander in Chief Obama should be holding him up as a role model for standing up and reporting the war crimes of the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan, when his earlier efforts to report them up the chain of command were met with the same kind of stonewalling that covered up the torture at Abu Ghraib and Bagram Airbase.

Free Private Bradley Manning!
No Prosecution of Julian Assange!

ha aretz article on Israel's lack of realistic miltary options

2010-12-21T11:46:00.000-08:00

Published 01:39 12.12.10

Israel may have no military option against Iran

Israeli leaders should understand that the attack option isn't really an option - a thousand new fire trucks and even the Iron Dome missile defense system will not provide protection.

By Gideon Levy Tags: Israel news Iran Israel fire Gideon Levy

Every cloud has a silver lining: Maybe lessons will be learned from the fire. Not only fire extinguishers, fire trucks and new planes, but also new thinking, and fire retardants that douse the really big fire.

The home front's weakness should teach us that Israel apparently has no military option. This is a much more fateful lesson than all the fire's other lessons, and it should be dealt with. The apocalyptic descriptions of a missile attack on the home front if Israel attacks Iran or Lebanon appear even more apocalyptic in light of Israel's conduct when handling a medium-sized forest fire. Discussions on our future, therefore, should move to the arena that Israelis favor: the security arena.

Leave aside human rights and the occupation, don't worry about morality and justice, forget about peace as a leftist delusion and ignore the Palestinian problem. The issue is Israel's security interests, perhaps even existential interests.

The next wars will be home-front wars. This time the Israeli home front will be hit in a way we have never experienced. The first Gulf war and the Second Lebanon War were only the movie trailer for what could happen. An attack of thousands of missiles, as predicted by experts, will create a reality Israel will find hard to withstand. It isn't equipped for it, as we saw on the Carmel, and it isn't prepared for it, as we saw in the Lebanon war.

Any Israeli leader, even an adventurist and a former commando, should understand that the attack option is not really an option. It's true that we succeeded in a few bombings in the past, but nothing lasts forever and the Scuds against us won't always be hollow. A thousand new fire trucks and even the Iron Dome missile defense system will not provide protection. You can't build a fortress for every citizen. This leads to the second, unavoidable conclusion, which should penetrate very deeply, not only among diplomats and commanders, but also among the many warmongers among us: the only existential option is integrating into the region (a term coined decades ago by Uri Avnery ).

Let the nationalists, settlers, rejectionists, militarists, security advocates, annexation backers, hawks, rightists, patriots, rabble-rousers and messianics look at what happened on the Carmel and tell us where they want to go with that. Let them explain what options Israel has when it says no to any chance for peace and its home front is so vulnerable. What hope does it have if it continues to live only by its sword, which was once strong and threatening, and is now rusting?

It was the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin who once acknowledged in a private conversation that the main consideration that got him to the Oslo process was the realization of the limits of Israeli power. We've weakened since then, not only because of the threats to the home front, but because of our international standing. If we recognize this and understand that the military option has become unrealistic, except as a deterrent or an act of desperation, we will understand that there is only the diplomatic option, no other, and it is still open to us.

Israel will not be destroyed. Its heavy armaments will be decisive in the next round as well, but apparently with thousands of Israeli dead, tens of thousands on the other side and a resolute global front that will impose a solution on us. The trauma of the Yom Kippur War will look like a midsummer night's dream, even if our complacent society again pretends that it was surprised. Then all Israelis will know that the diplomatic solution - which most Israelis said yes to in every poll before they went on watching "Big Brother" - was for years at their doorstep and the destruction was a destruction of choice.

Let any rightist politician and anyone who criminally wastes diplomatic time know the weight of the fateful responsibility he bears. For decades Israel persevered because of its strength. Now this power has critical limits. Last week a hint of them was sent from the Carmel. It should echo in every living room and ministry.

WikiLeaks Conjures Litvinenko’s Ghost [from anti-war.com]

2010-12-17T14:31:00.000-08:00

Fascinating article on the many secrets hidden in even the more mundane seeming cables, great insight on why the MSM is being so tepid in it's defense of Wikileaks.

WikiLeaks Conjures Litvinenko’s Ghost

Leaked cable raises new questions about Litvinenko's 'assassination'

by Justin Raimondo, December 14, 2010

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We keep hearing there’s nothing in the WikiLeaks cables we didn’t already know – this from people who, more often than not, are frothing at the mouth about Julian Assange’s alleged “treason” and “anti-American” villainy. Of course, if these cables are no big deal, then the charge of having done great harm to the American empire rings hollow.

These folks are not interested in making an honest argument: they merely want Assange’s head. As Glenn Greenwald has noted, with great disgust, many of these people are journalists, of one sort or another, who have put themselves in the position of defending the keepers of official secrets: the idea that the public has a right to know anything except what our rulers want them to know is utterly alien to them.

Their hostility to Wikileaks, I’m convinced, isn’t due exclusively to any ideological or political considerations, although that factor also comes into play; a major motive behind their dogged defense of the epistemological status quo is, in my view, pure laziness. After all, we’re talking about over 250,000 diplomatic cables, some of which are written in the most insufferable bureaucratese, and all of them studded with nearly-indecipherable acronyms that take a bit of research to translate into plain language. The mere prospect of having to plough through all this gives these slackers (of all ages) the vapors. Much easier to transcribe the current version of the conventional wisdom as expressed by their favored contacts in officialdom, who are more than happy to hand down the party line from on high.

That’s what “real” journalism is, at least according to them: anything less (or, rather, more) is just blogging. Well, be that as it may, in my case I’d find such a methodology incredibly boring, producing far more ennui than I could possibly endure. It’s true that a great deal of the material in the cables is not exactly the stuff of which scoops are made: a missive from Hillary Clinton to the US Embassy in Brazil expressing her “Kudos for Political Reporting” is not exactly a page-turner. However, you have to keep digging, and eventually resisting the temptation to nod off pays off, as in the case of a Dec. 26, 2006 cable emanating from the US Embassy in Paris detailing “an amicable December 7 [2006] dinner meeting with Ambassador-at-Large Henry Crumpton [and] Russian Special Presidential Representative Anatoly Safonov.”

Crumpton is a former CIA station chief of some renown, who came “in from the cold” to become the Bush administration’s special envoy on terrorism-related matters: Safonov is a former KGB (now FSB) top official who serves the same function in the ~~Putin~~ Medvedev regime. In the midst of a rather affable conversation about the many ways in which the two nations could bring themselves to cooperate in catching the Bad Guys, Safonov dropped this bombshell:

“In the course of their exchange, Safonov made the following passing statements: Safonov claimed that Russian authorities in London had known about and followed individuals moving radioactive substances into the city but were told by the British that they were under control before the poisoning took place.”

This is a reference to the infamous Litvinenko incident, in which former Russian intelligence officer Alexander Litvinenko, a close associate of the Russian oligarch-in-exile Boris Beresovsky, was supposedly poisoned with radioactive material alleged to have come from Russia via their intelligence services. For months the British tabloids screamed bloody murder about a supposed KGB/FSB plot, just as they had during the docu-drama over the alleged poisoning of Ukraine’s Viktor Yushchenko when he was campaigning for the Ukrainian presidency and leading the so-called Orange Revolution against the pro-Russian regime.

Longtime readers will recall my extreme skepticism of both these rather fanciful scenarios,which resemble a grade-B movie plot rather than a real life “conspiracy”: the Litvinenko scenario just didn’t add up for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the science of it. The idea that the Russians would leave a radioactive trail leading straight back to the Kremlin is just the sort of improbable narrative Fleet Street thrives on, no matter how fact-free, but the propaganda campaign has to be judged a great success: to this day, the Litvinenko case is cited by Russophobes as “proof” that the Russkies are a horrifically malevolent force in the world.

Yet now we have a genuine Russian spook in the middle of a private, frank, and seemingly friendly conversation with his American equivalent, casually referring to the Russian surveillance of the operation, and indicating some degree of British foreknowledge. It looks like the Russians informed the Brits the minute they caught wind of the plot, and the Brits, in effect, told the Russians not to worry, they’d take care of it. Except they didn’t – or perhaps they did, but not in the way the Russians imagined they would.

There is no record of Crumpton’s reaction, which in itself is telling. Surely if the two had disputed the matter to any great degree, the conversation would hardly have been characterized as “amiable.” Yet there’s nothing in the cable to indicate even a raised eyebrow: no dissent from Crumpton’s side was noted. This is an indication of either Crumpton’s remarkable capacity for restraint, or else it is a fair measure of Safonov’s credibility in the veteran spook’s eyes:

Well then, if the Russians weren’t behind the nuclear poisoning of Litvinenko, then who was – and why did they do it? The Russians, it seems, have a fair indication of the answer to this question, as do the British, but for the moment we are left in the dark. Going over this cable with a fine-toothed comb,we look for some hint, however subtle, some sliver of evidence, however fine, and early on in the Safonov-Crumpton dialogue, we dig up the only other mention of the Litvinenko affair:

“Safonov opened the meeting by expressing his appreciation for U.S./Russian cooperative efforts thus far. He cited the recent events in London – specifically the murder of a former Russian spy by exposure to radioactive agents – as evidence of how great the threat remained and how much more there was to do on the cooperative front. (Comment: The implication was that the FOR was not involved, although Safonov did not offer any further explanation.) Safonov noted the daunting number of countries that posed particular terrorism threats, mentioning North Korea, Pakistan, South Africa, Libya, Iran, India, and Israel (sic?). He described a range of dangers, stressing the more immediate threats posed by nuclear and biological terrorism, but also acknowledging the risks of chemical terrorism.”

The “[sic?]” notation is presumably the work of the cable’s author, Karl Hofmann, former member of the National Security Council staff under the Clinton administration, career diplomat for 23 years, and at that time Deputy Chief of Mission at the Paris embassy. Hofmann’s bewilderment is understandable: after all, the cable was written before the assassination of an alleged Hamas commander in Dubai by the Mossad – and he no doubt missed these Fox News reports on Israeli covert activities in America.

In any case, it could be that in dropping what seems like an incongruous suggestion of Israeli involvement in terrorist activities Safonov was trying to set the stage for the bombshell he was about to set off – and hinting at the Russian view of who the real perpetrators might be.

Safonov has every reason to dissemble: his bias is a given. Yet by claiming the British warned the Russians off the trail of Litvinenko’s killers, he is also implicitly asking – daring – the Americans to examine their own intelligence – signals intercepts, or humint – for confirmation. It’s conceivable the Russians have the evidence in their possession.

Whatever the truth may be, it’s interesting that the Russophobes have gone on the counterattack by citing yet another cable, also coming from the Paris embassy, in which US diplomat Daniel Fried gave vent to the semi-official narrative pinning the blame on the Russians. Fried went so far as to say Russian President Vladimir Putin – a well-known micro-manager – must have known about the operation. Pure speculation, and not on the same level as Safonov’s assertion of a previously unknown fact, but that doesn’t stop Litvinenko’s widow, Marina, from claiming:

“There is some satisfaction in seeing what we have all known to be true documented so officially, and I would add brutally by being so matter of fact in its description. It brings me a little closer to achieving truth and justice for my late husband.

“For years we have been trying to get the authorities in the west to view my husband’s murder as a state-sponsored crime. Now it appears they knew it all along.”

There seems little doubt it was a state-sponsored crime: it isn’t easy to get one’s hands on Polonium-210, unless you’re a state actor. The question, however, is: which state? Naturally, Marina Litvinenko is blaming her husband’s former employer, but, as we have seen, no definitive evidence tying the Kremlin to the poisoning has emerged – and there are other possibilities.

It’s too much to expect the “mainstream” media will take up these possibilities with any degree of seriousness: so far, news stories on this subject have merely reported the bare facts, as related in the cable, without drawing any conclusions, or, indeed, even asking any questions. That’s why Newsweek was recently sold for a dollar, and the rest of the legacy media is headed down the same road. That’s also why Wikileaks is the wave of the future – if, indeed, there is to be a future for journalism in a free society.

NOTES IN THE MARGIN

Due to their ridiculous and unprincipled accusations directed at WikiLeaks, I am no longer associated with the Bradley Manning Support Network. To be hounding WikiLeaks for money, of all things, at this particular moment in time – when their leader is jailed, their bank accounts are frozen, and they’re being pursued relentlessly by the US government and its allies worldwide – is not only crazy, it is downright destructive. I have resigned from their “Advisory Board” in protest, and cannot be responsible for the contents of their web site or other public pronouncements.

I want to make clear, though, that I wholeheartedly support the goal of freeing Manning: what he did wasn’t a crime, it was a patriotic act in defense of peoples’ right to know what crimes are being committed in their name and with their tax dollars.

I note, with some amusement, a similar pattern emerging on another front: the effort by a former WikiLeaks staff member and prominent smearer of Assange, to start his own “leaker” web site. It is called “Open Leaks,” but, as it turns out, it isn’t really going to be all that “open.” As one blogger put it:

“Even though the name of the new organization is called ‘Open’ Leaks, they will be far from as ‘open’ as WikiLeaks ever was. The plan is to allow for leaked documents to be submitted. However, these documents will not be published to the public. Instead they will be distributed to other news agencies and outlets for them to decide what is appropriate, legal, and constitutional to publish.”

This is an effort to salvage the gate-keeper role of the legacy media, but it’s a futile rearguard action that will flop spectacularly, as it deserves to: the whole idea of the internet, the sheer beauty of it, is that we don’t need gate-keepers anymore. Technology has rendered these witch doctors obsolescent, which is one good reason for them to hate WikiLeaks with such abandon. Assange is threatening to revoke their meal ticket, and they’re fighting back tooth and nail.

It’s only natural that a government-directed campaign to discredit – and supplant – WikiLeaks, and split its supporters, should enlist those poor doomed creatures we call “journalists.” The seemingly curious spectacle of the media leading an open attack on the First Amendment gives new meaning to the journalistic axiom that one must always protect one’s sources.

A lot of good it will do them. Like King Canute, they command the tides to recede, and still it rises.

the trans-partisan alliance

2010-12-15T18:18:00.000-08:00

A good friend has been involved in this up in the NW, and I am looking into it actively.

So for everyone who HAS been looking for a way to unite politically on our common ground first, then explore the differences, here is a stab.

Exactly the kind of article I am happy to link to. more to follow in comments

2010-12-15T09:51:00.000-08:00

Vision: Can Human Beings Drop Their Divisive, Reactionary Thinking and Move to a Higher Level?

A new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels. The good news is that the human brain is more flexible than we assume.

December 13, 2010 |

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Why does so much of our political and social discourse devolve into extreme positions with little or no ability for each side to hear the other? Why are we continually reacting to conflict in the same unproductive or destructive ways? Given the multitude of challenges facing us and our planet, it’s time to break this reactive and futile cycle. As Albert Einstein so eloquently observed, “A new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels.” The urgency of finding that “new type of thinking” cannot be overstated.

As a psychotherapist and a human rights activist working for over twenty-five years with thousands of people on four continents, I witness these patterns of reactive behavior everywhere; and I have become intimately aware of their underlying causes. Gratefully, I have also seen our great capacity to break through these destructive patterns when provided with the necessary knowledge and tools. We can move past divisive obstructions when we become mindful of what is blocking us, and step up to the next level of our evolution – awareness.

Recently, neuroscientists have shed more light on our physiological mechanisms and have helped to explain why our conflicts can become so intractable. Advancements in brain scanning technology have revealed that many of our adult emotions, thoughts and actions arise from neural pathways that were created and deeply ingrained in us when we were young children.

Ninety percent of human-brain growth occurs in the first five years of life. During this critical developmental period, life experiences determine how the millions of neurons in the human brain connect. These connections form the structure of our brains, which in turn create our minds. Hence, our early life experiences shape our minds and define our individual beliefs and values — who we are. While genetics plays a significant role, our experiences are responsible for how the genes are expressed, because our experiences actually shape our brain structure.

As we continue to grow, our tendency is to filter new information and experiences through our initial sets of beliefs and values. We develop patterns in our brains that determine how we perceive and respond to our world. These patterns are relatively fixed and will tend to stay that way unless and until repeated new experiences restructure the brain, and thereby change the mind. For example, if a child is raised by racist parents, his brain structure becomes wired to think and feel racism. The child’s view can change, however, if he is actively exposed to tolerance.

By adulthood, our worldview is so fixed that most people don’t even know that there is another way to be. We become emotionally attached to our points of view, since they represent and order our reality. Our egos may perceive any challenge as life threatening. When in conflict, our defense mechanisms trigger, and negate or deflect opposing points of view in order to maintain our own reality. For example, many dismiss those who hold creationist beliefs as uneducated or irrational, while Creationists, in turn, label Evolutionists as heretics. Few among either group engage in objective inquiry to understand the other. In fact, our differences are due to the fixed nature of our brains. This set pattern is the primary source of our divisive conflicts.

To further complicate matters, these unconscious tendencies to feel threatened leave many people open to manipulation by the demagogues of the day. The results of the recent elections are a perfect example. Driven by irrational fear, millions of citizens were led to vote against their own interests, prompting confused, frustrated and angry reactions from the other side.

Excellent Mark LeVine editorial from Al Jezzera

2010-12-14T08:11:00.000-08:00

WikiLeaks: Call of Duty

Leaks have made it harder for Western governments to dupe their citizens into accepting potential future wars.

Mark LeVine Last Modified: 09 Dec 2010 15:40 GMT

Ice Cube, just another sad example of how, with too few exceptions, hiphop has gone from being the "CNN of the streets" to the "ho" of the corporations [EPA]

For professional historians the publication of the vast trove of diplomatic cables is a bittersweet affair.

No one outside of the Washington establishment and the myriad foreign leaders shamed by revelations of their penchant for hatred, hubris and pedestrian peccadillos can seriously argue that the release of these classified documents has done anything but good for the cause of peace and political transparency.

Whether about Iraq, Afghanistan, or the minuate of American diplomacy, they have shed crucial light on some of the most important issues of the day and will make it much harder for Western or Middle Eastern governments to lie to their people about so many aspects of the various wars on/of terror in the future.

Indeed, if there's anyone who deserves the next Nobel Peace Prize more than the courageous American soldier, Bradley Manning, who is alleged to have given the documents to Wikileaks in the first place, I'd like to know.

At the very least, given what a mockery President Obama has made of the principles for which the prize is supposed to stand - evidence of which, like pressuring Spain to drop criminal investigations into Bush administration torture, have only come to light thanks to the latest WikiLeaks release - the Nobel Committee should demand his medal back and give it to Manning or whoever the leaker is.

A new approach to diplomacy-honesty and transparency

Already, thanks to WikiLeaks, citizens in the West and Middle East know more than they were ever supposed to about how corrupt, misguided, incompetent and mendacious, are their leaders and the policies pursued in their name.

As each new revelation comes to light, I can't help thinking, why was this secret in the first place? Wouldn't it be better if American and other diplomats shared their concerns openly rather than hiding them from the public?

How about everyone telling the truth for once and letting the people decide? Aren't Italians better off knowing that the American Ambassador thinks Berlusconi is too old to party like a rock star and too corrupt to be trusted with his country's leadership? Shouldn't Americans know that the Saudis continue to funnel huge sums of money to militants and that Pakistanis are refusing to hand over nuclear fuel they long ago promised to give up?

Wouldn't Mexicans be better off knowing just what the US thinks of their anti-drug efforts, and Americans better off knowing just how badly the drug war is proceeding? And certainly the news that Saudi Arabia, at least, supports attacking Iran has already led Iran to tone down its rhetoric and seek to reassure its neighbors of its peaceable intentions.

As far as I can see, the best development that could come out of Wikigate would be that diplomats around the world begin tweeting their previously secret observations on a daily basis, so that everyone knows where everyone else stands and governments can no longer hide behind diplomatic courtesy to continue with the all-too-often reprehensible "business as usual". The world has never needed honesty more than it does today.

Looking for shelter in an increasingly dangerous world

If there's anyone who doesn't think the world - and particularly the United States - desperately needs WikiLeaks, I offer you "Exhibit A" of why this is the case: the star-studded official trailer for the "Call of Duty: Black Ops" first person shooter video game. Regular readers of this column might recall my November 16 article, "Nowhere Left to Run," where I discussed the cultural implications of "Black Ops" after spotting a poster for the game in a Berlin subway around the time of its release.

Since then I have seen the trailer, whose slogan is "There's a soldier in all of us" and features both ordinary people - a secretary, fry cook, hotel concierge, and the like - along with celebrities like Los Angeles Lakers guard Kobe Bryant, and late night American talk show host Jimmy Kimmel.

After watching the trailer I was so exasperated I emailed a colleague at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies here at Lund and asked him, "Where is Ice Cube when you need him?" His reply stunned me: "LoL you don't know where Ice Cube is? He's doing the voice of Bowman in 'Black Ops'..."

In case you're not a hiphop fan, once upon a time Ice Cube was the terror of law abiding white citizens across America as a member of the highly political gangsta rap group NWA. In fact, their song "F*** Da Police" almost got them into as much trouble with the US government as is Julian Assange today.

But those days are long forgotten. Today Mr. Cube spends his time, when not playing secret service agents in movies, providing the voice for one of the lead characters in "Black Ops."

But it's not just hiphop that's prostituted itself to violence and big corporations. The rock n' roll establishment has equally shamed itself, as none other than the Rolling Stones allowed their song "Gimme Shelter," one of the most important anti-war songs of the Vietnam era, to be used as the soundtrack for the trailer, which shows Kobe Bryant smiling widely as he and innumerable other "ordinary" people blast away an unseen enemy in a clearly Middle Eastern landscape (not surprisingly, digital sales of the song and other Stones hits spiked in the wake of the trailer's release).

A chilling view of american culture and values

The "Black Ops" trailer makes for chilling viewing, as it tells viewers - successfully, apparently, given the record - breaking sales of the game - that they can derive great pleasure from taking a break from life to pretend to kills people half way around the world.

Perhaps most troubling, the colours and landscape of the trailer are eerily reminiscent of the infamous killing of a dozen Iraqis by a US helicopter crew, some of whom are laughing as they fire missiles at their targets. Not surprisingly, the only reason we know of this event is because WikiLeaks put the classified video, dubbed "collateral murder," into the public domain last April, in one of the releases that first made the organisation (in)famous.

Apparently Bryant, Kimmel, Cube, the Stones and the designers of "Black Ops" are all either ignorant of, or more likely unmoved, by the reality that ordinary Americans - fry cooks, secretaries, concierges and other working class people - have been forced to answer the "call of duty" for extended tours in Iraq and now Afghanistan during the last decade, where many have been forced into precisely the life and death situations of extreme violence that Bryant and his famous friends were no doubt paid handsomely to pretend so thoroughly to enjoy.

This is the mindset, at all levels of American society, against which the truths revealed by the hundreds of thousands of WikiLeak documents must stand. And the potential for changing peoples' minds is clearly disturbing enough to the US government that it has begun, when not calling for Assange's arrest and worse to warn students at elite institutions like Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs that they risk never being hired by the State Department if they even mention the WikiLeaks documents on any social media sites in which they participate.

Like the corrupt law firm that hired innocent newbie attorney Tom Cruise in the movie "The Firm," the last thing the Government wants is for prospective employees to understand what it's really up to until they're sucked in too deep to change it.

Truths that must Be learned-the sooner the better

Chances are, if your government is telling you not to read something, you should be reading it twice as closely.

The detailing of all the problems the Bush and Obama administrations have had in executing policies in the Muslim world have done an invaluable service to any citizen who wants to understand whether the government's claims as well as aims in the war on terror are both reasonable and feasible on the ground (sadly, it seems more often than not, the answer is they are not).

Certainly, I will urge my own students to read the various WikiLeak documents and compare them with documents we have from wars past, to gain greater insight into the continuities and changes in war-making, diplomacy, and the motivations behind both over the course of modern history.

But if the release of over countless classified documents has given the world a "banquet of secrets" to feast upon (as Timothy Garton Ash put it in The Guardian), historians might be tempted to wonder what scraps we will be left to scrounge over when it comes time to write histories of the events covered by the various WikiLeaks documents with the nuance and perspective that only comes from a certain amount of historical distance from the events in question.

And it's not merely professional jealousy by people used to having largely exclusive access to the historical record-- after all, who but historians is willing to sit in dusty archives for years searching through hundreds of thousands of documents for a few gems that can advance the state of knowledge on a topic? With easily searchable data bases, now - Heaven forbid! - anyone can be an historian, rendering judgment on events and motivations that members of the previously closed historians' guild normally have to wait decades to get access to.

Or can they?

Despite the huge volume of cables and documents released by WikiLeaks, they only offer a very partial account of the realities they discussed. The often unguarded and even eloquent language of the writers of the dispatches does not change the fact that they were written by US government employees (whether soldiers or diplomats) for their superiors, addressing issues from an American perspective and a set of interests that can't be assumed to match those of the myriad other actors in the dramas these documents reflect.

History's lesson: multiple perspectives provide the best view

No matter how much we think we can learn about the realities of the Afpak, Iraqi or larger Middle Eastern conflicts from WikiLeaks, the limited perspective of the documents WikiLeaks has been able to obtain reveals that there is still an incredible amount to learn before we come close to having the full picture of the history-making events of the last decade.

And unless there are British, French, Iraqi, Afghan and other soldiers with a similar access to classified documents and a reckless disregard for their own future, it is likely that the full accounting of the "Wikiwars" will likely wait until the historians of tomorrow are finally allowed to peruse the far larger volume of documents that governments will work even harder than before to keep out of the public domain.

Mark LeVine is a professor of history at UC Irvine and senior visiting researcher at the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies at Lund University in Sweden. His most recent books are Heavy Metal Islam (Random House) and Impossible Peace: Israel/Palestine Since 1989 (Zed Books).

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

Source:

Al Jazeera

Assange freed on Bail [from an article in 'the hindu'

2010-12-14T08:01:00.000-08:00

Good news - unless of course it is a set up for black-bagging him - from england.

Julian Assange freed on bail

AP A court artist’s impression of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's appearance at the Westminster Magistrates Court in London on December 7, 2010. Assange was freed on Tuesday after securing conditional bail.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was on Tuesday freed on bail by a court in London after a week in custody pending extradition proceedings to Sweden, a judge ruled.

A number of human rights campaigners and celebrities put up a cash sum of £200,000 ($315,000) to secure bail for the 39-year-old Australian.

Mr. Assange was arrested in London a week ago after British police received a European Arrest Warrant (EWA) in which Sweden demanded his extradition on allegations of rape and molestation.

Supporters were jubilant at the decision to free Mr. Assange outside the City of Westminster Magistrates’ Court on Tuesday.

However, there was still a possibility for Sweden to appeal against the bail decision.

Mr. Assange will continue to fight his extradition to Sweden, his lawyers said.

Earlier Tuesday, Mr. Assange issued a defiant message from prison in London, saying the Swedish allegations would not make him abandon his “ideals.”

Keywords: WikiLeaks, cablegate, Assange extradition

Virginia Court calls mandatory Health Insurance UNCONSTITUTIONAL

2010-12-13T11:30:00.000-08:00

And we agree! Of course we will have to get our corporation loving SCOTUS to uphold this, but at least this travesty of a healthcare program is starting out kneecapped from the gate.

------------------------from huff po / AP------------------------

(LARRY O'DELL / AP) RICHMOND, Va. -- A federal judge declared the Obama administration's health care law unconstitutional Monday, siding with Virginia's attorney general in a dispute that both sides agree will ultimately be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.

U.S. District Judge Henry E. Hudson is the first federal judge to strike down the law, which has been upheld by two others in Virginia and Michigan. Several other lawsuits have been dismissed and others are pending, including one filed by 20 other states in Florida.

Virginia Republican Attorney General Kenneth Cuccinelli filed a separate lawsuit in defense of a new state law that prohibits the government from forcing state residents to buy health insurance. However, the key issue was his claim that the federal law's requirement that citizens buy health insurance or pay a penalty is unconstitutional.

Hudson, a Republican who was appointed by President George W. Bush, sounded sympathetic to the state's case when he heard oral arguments in October, and the White House expected to lose this round.

WATCH: White House reacts to ruling (LIVE VIDEO, CLICK TO PLAY)

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Administration officials told reporters last week that a negative ruling would have virtually no impact on the law's implementation, noting that its two major provisions - the coverage mandate and the creation of new insurance markets - don't take effect until 2014.

guardian article on wikileaks Cyberwar : authenticity of swedish investigations : general updatew/ a few comments

2010-12-11T19:01:00.001-08:00

WikiLeaks backlash: The first global cyber war has begun, claim hackers

As Julian Assange is held in solitary confinement at Wandsworth prison, the anonymous community of hacktivists takes to the cyber battlefields

Mark Townsend, Paul Harris in New York, Alex Duval Smith in Johannesburg, Dan Sabbagh, Josh Halliday
guardian.co.uk, Saturday 11 December 2010 21.30 GMT
Article history

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Photograph: Lennart Preiss/AP

He is one of the newest recruits to Operation Payback. In a London bedroom, the 24-year-old computer hacker is preparing his weaponry for this week's battles in an evolving cyberwar. He is a self-styled defender of free speech, his weapon a laptop and his enemy the US corporations responsible for attacking the website WikiLeaks.

He had seen the flyers that began springing up on the web in mid-September. In chatrooms, on discussion boards and inboxes from Manchester to New York to Sydney the grinning face of a Guy Fawkes mask had appeared with a call to arms. Across the world a battalion of hackers was being summoned.

"Greetings, fellow anons," it said beneath the headline Operation Payback. Alongside were a series of software programs dubbed "our weapons of choice" and a stark message: people needed to show their "hatred".

Like most international conflicts, last week's internet war began over a relatively modest squabble, escalating in days into a global fight.

Before WikiLeaks, Operation Payback's initial target was America's recording industry, chosen for its prosecutions of music file downloaders. From those humble origins, Payback's anti-censorship, anti-copyright, freedom of speech manifesto would go viral, last week pitting an amorphous army of online hackers against the US government and some of the biggest corporations in the world.

Charles Dodd, a consultant to US government agencies on internet security, said: "[The hackers] attack from the shadows and they have no fear of retaliation. There are no rules of engagement in this kind of emerging warfare."

The battle now centres on Washington's fierce attempts to close down WikiLeaks and shut off the supply of confidential US government cables. By Thursday, the hacktivists were routinely attacking those who had targeted WikiLeaks, among them icons of the corporate world, credit card firms and some of the largest online companies. It seemed to be the first sustained clash between the established order and the organic, grassroots culture of the net.

But the clash has cast the spotlight wider, on the net's power to act as a thorn not only in the side of authoritarian regimes but western democracies, on our right to information and the responsibility of holding secrets. It has also asked profound questions over the role of the net itself. One blogger dubbed it the "first world information war".

At the heart of the conflict is the WikiLeaks founder, the enigmatic figure of Julian Assange – lionised by some as the Ned Kelly of the digital age for his continued defiance of a superpower, condemned by his US detractors as a threat to national security.

Calls for Assange to be extradited to the US to face charges of espionage will return this week. The counteroffensive by Operation Payback is likely to escalate.

The targets include the world's biggest online retailer, Amazon – already assaulted once for its decision to stop hosting WikiLeaks-related material – Washington, Scotland Yard and the websites of senior US politicians. There is talk of infecting Facebook, which last week removed a page used by pro-WikiLeaks hackers, with a virus that spreads from profile to profile causing it to crash. No one seems certain where the febrile cyber conflict will lead, only that it has just begun.

London

At 9.15am last Tuesday a thin, white-haired figure left the Frontline Club, the west London establishment dedicated to preserving freedom of speech, and voluntarily surrendered to police. After two weeks of newspaper revelations concerning countries from Korea to Nigeria, and figures such as Silvio Berlusconi and Prince Andrew, a warrant for Assange's arrest had just been received by British police. It was from Swedish prosecutors eager to question him on unrelated allegations of rape.

The response to WikiLeaks' cable release had been savage, particularly in the US. Mike Huckabee, a former Arkansas governor, said those who passed the secrets to Assange should be executed. Sarah Palin demanded Assange be hunted in the same way an al-Qaida operative would be pursued. The US attorney general Eric Holder ordered his officials to begin a criminal investigation into Assange with the intention of putting him on trial in the US. News of his arrest, even on unrelated charges, pleased the US authorities. "That sounds like good news to me," said Robert Gates, US secretary of defence.

Yet even as Assange prepared to appear in a London court last week, an unlikely alliance of defenders had begun plotting to turn on the forces circling WikiLeaks. They were beginning to attack Amazon, which had been persuaded to sever links with WikiLeaks by Joe Lieberman, who heads the US Senate's homeland security committee; they also hit every domain name system (DNS) that broke WikiLeaks.org's domain name: Mastercard, Visa and Paypal, which stopped facilitating donations to the site, and the Swiss post office which froze WikiLeaks' bank account.

Operation Payback was hitting back alongside a fledgling offshoot, Operation Avenge Assange, both operating under the Anonymous umbrella. These are a loose alliance of hackers united by a near-obsessive desire for information libertarianism who congregate on the website 4Chan.org.

The cyberwar did not only involve obvious symbols of authority, though. For days, from their darkened chatrooms, the Anonymous ones had been watching a hacker called the Jester who seemed to be co-ordinating a series of attacks on internet service providers hosting WikiLeaks. They had noticed the Jester's pro-censorship credentials, deducing he must be receiving help. Speculation mounted that the Jester was a shadowy conduit working at the behest of the US authorities. "We wondered who was really behind his anti-WikiLeaks agenda," said a source.

Attempts to railroad WikiLeaks off the net quickly failed. Removing its hosting servers has increased WikiLeaks' ability to stay online. More than 1,300 volunteer "mirror" sites, including the French newspaper Libération, have already surfaced to store the classified cables. Within days the WikiLeaks web content had spread across so many enclaves of the internet it was immune to attack by any single legal authority.

In some respects, WikiLeaks has never been safer or as aggressively defended. As Assange was remanded in custody and taken to Wandsworth jail, Anonymous vowed to "punish" the institutions that had axed links with the website under pressure from the US authorities. The websites of Visa, Mastercard and PayPal were brought down; so too the Swedish government's.

One Anonymous hacker said: "I've rambled on and on about the 'oncoming internet war' for years. I'm not saying I know how to win. But I am saying the war is on."

Stockholm

Unsurprisingly, the timing of Assange's arrest and aspects of Sweden's initial handling of the sexual allegations prompted his lawyer Mark Stephens to denounce the moves as politically motivated. A computer hacker himself, Assange, 39, achieved both instant notoriety and adulation when WikiLeaks published batches of damaging US files relating to the Afghan war in July. This fame led him to Stockholm a month later to deliver a lecture entitled: "Truth is the first casualty of war." It was a sellout. One leftwing commentator likened it to "having Mick Jagger in town".

That night – 14 August – Assange stayed with the conference organiser at her flat in Södermalm, a former working class area of the city centre that has become Stockholm's equivalent of London's Islington. Three days later, in keeping with his habit of regularly changing addresses, Assange stayed in Enköping, a town 100 miles from Stockholm, with another woman who had also attended his lecture on the importance of truth in a war zone.

Assange left Sweden on 18 August and the women went together to the police the next day. According to Claes Borgström, their lawyer, the women did not know each other before going to the police. Initially, he said, the women wanted some advice, but the police officer concluded a crime had been committed and contacted the duty public prosecutor.

In court last week Assange was alleged to have had sex with unlawful coercion with a woman who was asleep and to have sexually molested the other by having sex without a condom.

In Sweden, among the country's community of hackers and left-leaning political activists, the timing is viewed as coincidental rather than conspiratorial.

"The Americans are very lucky indeed that Assange screwed around in Sweden, a society which takes rape allegations very seriously,'' said Åsa Linderborg, culture editor of the leftwing Aftonbladet tabloid. Film-maker Bosse Lindquist, whose WikiLeaks investigation will be broadcast on Swedish TV tonight, and who has spent many hours with Assange over the past few months, said Assange's attitude to women did not seem in any way striking.

"If you look at the two prosecutors involved in investigating the rape allegations, they are not types you would imagine bowing to any kind of pressure from, say, the Swedish government or the United States.''

A senior civil servant, who requested anonymity, also dismissed allegations of political plotting against Assange, arguing that Swedish culture is often misunderstood. "Swedes do not have an iconoclastic tradition in which you build people up then demolish their reputations. Even when people are celebrities, we accept that they may have questionable private lives. Swedes are capable of seeing the advantages of WikiLeaks while conceding that Assange may have unsavoury morals between the sheets.''

Linderborg, though, says there is a widespread sense in Sweden that Assange's rise to fame fuelled his libido and ego.

"Plenty of women are attracted by his underdog status and the supposed danger of spending time with him. He has several women on the go at once. One person told me he screws more often than he eats,'' Linderborg said.

Of course, given the nature of the web, the allegations have triggered a series of attacks on both women's characters with lurid claims of "women who cry rape" and "bitches trying to send an innocent man to prison".

Operation Payback

Those monitoring the chatrooms used by Operation Payback say its hackers have set aside the sexual allegations, instead concentrating their efforts on amassing greater potency for the next phase of the WikLeaks fightback. The weapons deployed last week were "denial of service" attacks in which online computers are harnessed to jam target sites with mountains of requests for data, knocking them out of commission.

The initial attacks against the Swiss PostFinance required about 200 computers, according to one Anonymous source. Yet within a day hackers were able to recruit thousands more pro-WikiLeaks footsoldiers. By the time the Visa and Mastercard websites were disrupted last Wednesday, close to 3,000 computers were involved.

Anonymous leaders began distributing software tools to allow anyone with a computer to join Payback. So far more than 9,000 users in the US have downloaded the software; in second place is the UK with 3,000. Germany, the Netherlands, Canada, France, Spain, Poland, Russia and Australia follow with more than 1,000. The 11th country embroiled in the attacks is Sweden, where WikiLeaks's massive underground servers are housed, with 75 downloads.

Sean-Paul Correll, a cyber threat analyst at Panda Security, who has monitored Operation Payback since its conception, said it was impossible to "profile" those involved. "They are anonymous and they are everywhere," he said. "They have day jobs. They are adults and kids. It is just a bunch of people." Middle-class professional members working alongside self-styled anarchists.

Ostensibly, Anonymous is a 24-hour democracy run by whoever happens to be logged on; leaders emerge and disappear depending on the target that is being attacked and the whims of members. Correll said: "This group does not exist with some sort of hierarchy. It exists with a few organisers but these can change at any time. That gives the group great power in that it is impossible to trace and define. At the same time it is also a source of weakness as its actions can be unfocused."

Ideas are floated on internet bulletin boards, whose location moves daily to evade detection. Ultimately a proposal hits a democratic "tipping point" and action is taken.

A major test of Payback's mounting firepower will be Amazon, given the size of its servers. The attempt to attack the site last Thursday was half-hearted, but nevertheless audacious. Now sources estimate they would need between 30,000 and 40,000 computers to hurt Amazon and there is a growing feeling among hacktivists that it could happen. If it does, the retailer could lose millions of dollars during the Christmas season.

So far, though, most of the attacks have been principally designed to register protest rather than destabilise companies financially, opting for their public websites rather than their underlying infrastructure.

Two of the internet's most important social networking sites – Twitter and Facebook – are also becoming targets of elements within Anonymous.

Twitter upset hackers last week by removing the Anonymous account – which had 22,000 followers – amid speculation that it was preventing the term #wikileaks appearing on its trending topics. The Anonymous page on Facebook was removed for violating its conditions, a move that has similarly annoyed a cohort of hackers. Both Facebook and Twitter have won praise in recent years as outlets for free speech, yet both also harbour corporate aspirations that hinge on their ability to serve as advertising platforms for other companies.

Their use by Anonymous to direct people planning attacks has, according to many analysts, placed both in a difficult position. Facebook, which still has sites eulogising murderer Raoul Moat and Holocaust deniers, said it drew the line on groups that attack others, a bold move considering the site's WikiLeaks page boasts more than 1.3 million supporters. Any evidence that both sites yielded to US pressure and the gloves would be off. So too for any organisation that yields to American demands over WikiLeaks.

Evgeny Morozov, author of The Net Delusion, a book which argues the internet has failed to democraticise the world successfully, believes the attacks are already viewed by Washington "as striking at the very heart of the global economy".

Another emerging target in the weeks ahead is the US government itself. For a brief time last Tuesday, senate.gov – the website of every US senator – went down. Cyberguerillas claim it is a possible sign of things to come.

The future

The trajectory of the WikiLeaks controversy is almost impossible to predict. On Tuesday Assange will attend his next bail hearing. Although supporters have stumped up £180,000, it is expected bail will be refused, pending a full hearing of Sweden's extradition request. However his lawyer may also reveal fresh claims of US interference in the saga.

Regardless of the fate of its founder, WikiLeaks will continue releasing declassified cables. At the moment only several hundred of 250,000 cables have been publicised.

Analysts now describe the organisation's structure as a "networked enterprise", a phrase that has been used in the past in relation to al-Qaida.

For all the US attempts, it is clear the attacks on WikiLeaks have made minimal impact and are unlikely to affect the availability of the information that WikiLeaks has already leaked.

Meanwhile, Senator Lieberman has indicated that the New York Times and other news organisations using the WikiLeaks cables may be investigated for breaking US espionage laws. At present, who will win the "world's first information war" remains unclear.

Morozov said: "There will be many more people from the CIA and NSA [National Security Agency] hanging out around them."

But the conflict increasingly seems likely to target the real profits of US corporations. Today a 24-year-old from London will ready his weapons for the battle ahead.

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junglederry
11 December 2010 9:36PM

Global false flag has begun.........
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-11977524
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stanbowles
11 December 2010 9:38PM

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snix
11 December 2010 9:41PM

Changes are coming ,there is no use trying to cling to the shore when thr rivrt flows faster.
Everything has to be framed as a war even truth supression
Free Assange ,politicians should start acting like world leaders rather than the morally and spiritually corrupt posers they are
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Chairoplane
11 December 2010 9:42PM

This article was not actually written by a Guardian journalist, but a hacker.
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BOVXEL
11 December 2010 9:44PM

wow - cyber jingoism!

saber-twattering?
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herpaderp
11 December 2010 9:48PM

Although these DDoS attacks were said to have been carried out by Anonymous, they weren't.
Anonymous wouldn't waste its time with something like this.
What happened was that a couple of idiots within Anonymous, but who don't really belong to Anonymous because they don't understand what Anonymous is, got a few thousand people on board to cause a bit of trouble.
There were no lulz to be had here. To be honest the Habbo raids were funnier.
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simonforsey
11 December 2010 9:48PM

Explosions in Sweeden, will our government take note and do whats right. Julian Assange is a hero of our times and needs to be protected form the fat lies, fat american terrorists that are reaking havoc in this world. Soon we will see who really are making this an unstable world.
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MartinAlexander
11 December 2010 9:48PM

Really interesting article, but please, Grauniad, less of the foot-soldiers and - I couldn't believe it - 'darkened chatrooms'. Goodness. Now I know why I have never been able to find one.
And this -
Unsurprisingly, the timing of Assange's arrest and aspects of Sweden's initial handling of the sexual allegations prompted his lawyer Mark Stephens to denounce the moves as politically motivated
Is this journalism or editorial? I should have thought that Stephens was prompted by Assange's innocence, and that the timing and handling were secondary.
Speaking of the handling - there are serious doubts about the handling of this in Sweden, particularly in relation to the prosecutors and their jurisdictions, and these haven't been mentioned in the article. I'll look up the link, before anyone slams me for unsubstantiated assertions!
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Burntfaceman
11 December 2010 9:50PM

Hmm...let's see, if they (for example) break the banking system it would be impressive, but then the elite would simply use them as blame to pull the drawbridge up even tighter...
More interested in any big revelations Wiki may have: 911, Aghan, false flags, how the CIA invented Bin Laden, money laundering by Cheney/Bush, how past UK prime ministers cash in on leaving office, what and who the shadow elite NWO global elitists (such as the Bilderbergers) control; Gideon Osborne and Cameron not withstanding..?
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FrancisBrawne
11 December 2010 9:50PM

Incredible really - UK refuses to extradite Pinochet even though he's committed crimes against humanity; Assange however ...
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NessaB
11 December 2010 9:50PM

Brilliant article!
Informative and very, very interesting.
If only I knew ANYTHING about computers...
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Chris86
11 December 2010 9:50PM

Denial-of-service attacks are not "hacking", please correct the article - the information is false.
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Alyss
11 December 2010 9:50PM

A cat is fine to desu desu desu~
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Fozter
11 December 2010 9:51PM

Lennon said it best
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlzrNKN3rZI
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ceeyewenti
11 December 2010 9:52PM

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MartinAlexander
11 December 2010 9:52PM

See my last paragraph above...
Mr Stephens told the BBC's Andrew Marr that the entire case against Mr Assange had been dropped by Sweden's chief prosecutor in September.
He said it was only "after the intervention of a Swedish politician" that a new prosecutor in Gothenburg - not Stockholm, where his client and two women had been - began a new case.
From the BBC.
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BigNowitzki
11 December 2010 9:52PM

Hackers promising to smash the system from their mother's bedrooms.
This is f***ing funny.
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FizzyVimto
11 December 2010 9:52PM

How difficult is it for journalists to understand that DDoS attacks have precisely NOTHING to do with hacking?

Wikileaks vs. the Empire

2010-12-08T18:52:00.000-08:00

from counterpunch:

Julian Quixote

By ERIC WALBERG

It was United States president Woodrow Wilson who called for "open diplomacy" — number one of his fourteen points in 1918 — so that "diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view." He would surely approve of Wikileaks' efforts at open diplomacy, though current US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has called them "an attack on America's foreign-policy interests" and indeed on "the international community", though she failed to specify which particular community members were the victims, or what they were the victims of.

On 7 December, the bane of US empire voluntarily gave himself up to Scotland Yard and will face trial and extradition to Sweden possibly by the end of the year, accused of "rape, unlawful coercion and two counts of sexual molestation", alleged to have been committed in August 2010. The trumped-up cases involve consensual relations, one an obvious "honey trap" by a CIA plant and the other a spurned Lewinsky-like groupie.

Assange is nothing short of a legend after a year of leaks, especially an April video taken from a US helicopter in Iraq in 2007 showing GIs shooting at least 12 innocent Iraqis like rabbits. Starting in July, he issued 500,000 US military documents on the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The straw for the imperial camel was a batch of 250,000 US diplomatic notes (1966-2009) in November, revealing a US diplomatic world increasingly acting as a branch of the CIA, and the cynicism of both Western and Arab regimes anxious to destroy Iran.

The leaks have been hailed as a blow to US criminal activity by people around the world, including staunchly American US Congressman Ron Paul, and condemned by lovers of US empire such as former US vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, who called for Assange to be "pursued with the same urgency we pursue Al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders". Former UK Foreign Secretary Sir Malcolm Rifkind said WikiLeaks' actions were "active assistance to terrorist organisations", neglecting to reflect on the UK's own long history of worldwide terrorist activities.

The 39-year-old Assange is an Australian citizen, though his Prime Minister Julia Gillard has threatened to cancel his passport. He is described by colleagues as charismatic, driven and highly intelligent, with an exceptional ability to crack computer codes. To his critics, he is just a publicity-seeker and womaniser.

In 1995 he was accused with a friend of dozens of hacking activities and fined, promising to be a good boy. He quietly co-authored Underground with Suelette Dreyfus, dealing with the subversive side of the Internet. Dreyfus described Assange as "quite interested in the concept of ethics, concepts of justice, what governments should and shouldn't do".

He began Wikileaks in 2006 as a "dead-letterbox" for would-be leakers — the real heroes of this saga, the unknown soldiers disgusted with their role as hired killers. His collective developed a Robin Hood guerrilla lifestyle, moving communications and people from country to country to make use of laws protecting freedom of speech. Co-founder Daniel Schmitt describes Assange as "one of the few people who really care about positive reform in this world to a level where you're willing to do something radical".

Wikileaks was forced this year to switch to a Swiss host server after several US Internet service providers shut him down, claiming he was endangering lives, though he made clear he was careful to vet the military cables from Afghanistan and Iraq precisely to avoid this. His site also came under cyber attack and PayPal cut off his ability to raise funds.

There is no doubt that Gillard, the Swedish prosecutor, PayPal, etc are all being pressured by the US government to help snuff out this ray of light exposing its many crimes. Only French Internet service provider OVH said it had no plans to end the service it provides to Wikileaks, and a judge threw out Industry Minister Eric Besson's case to force it to.

Hackivist admirers of Mr Quixote have set up mirror sites faster than traditional servers can shut Wikileaks down and are launching denial-of-service attacks targetting its Internet enemies. Coldblood, a member of the computer group Anonymous, told BBC, "Websites that are bowing down to government pressure have become targets. We feel that Wikileaks has become more than just about leaking of documents, it has become a war ground, the people vs the government."

The Man of La Mancha fought off more than "100 legal attacks" before his arrest, including one by Swiss banks whose illicit offshore activities were exposed. That case too was dismissed and left the bankers to scramble to protect their ill-gotten gains.

The show goes on. Wikileaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson said Assange's arrest was an attack on media freedom but assured, "Wikileaks is operational. We are continuing on the same track as laid out before." Assange — or his colleagues still at large — hopes to set up a number of "independent chapters around the world" as well as to act as a middle-man between sources and newspapers.

Strangely, he has been attacked on the left as a stooge of the CIA or Israel, though the former makes no sense at all. True, the latter comes off relatively clean amidst the diplomatic cesspool. But what the few tight-lipped US diplo leaks relating to Israel really show is the fear that US diplomats have of saying anything negative about Israel. Perhaps they fear they will be passed over for their "anti-Semitism" or perhaps they fear that all their missives are read by Mossad as a matter of course.

A terse cable from the US embassy in Baku, Azerbaijan compares Israeli-Azeri relations ominously to an "iceberg with nine-tenths unseen". Another polite one from Tel Aviv reveals that several "OT" (organised crime) figures applied for visas to attend a "security conference" in Los Vegas but thankfully didn't come back when asked for their prison records in Russia.

An interesting comparison is between Assange and another exposer of US military secrets, Jonathan Pollard, the (only) US-Israel spy serving a life sentence he received in 1987 for revealing US military secrets. The big difference, of course, is Pollard did not apply the "open diplomacy" principle. If he had blacked out the sensitive names, and exposed the secrets to broad daylight, like Assange, he could have had a beneficial influence on world politics. Instead he sold the secrets to Israel, and uncounted CIA agents lost their lives in the Soviet Union as a result.

Another worthy comparison is with the legendary Daniel Ellsberg, leaker of the Pentagon Papers in 1971, who like Assange, gave himself up and faced the music, which turned out to be sweet. The judge dismissed all charges against him in 1973 and the New York Times pompously applauded him in 1996, saying that the papers demonstrated "that the Johnson Administration had systematically lied" about "a subject of transcendent national interest and significance."

Ellsberg and Assange, following the advice of Woodrow Wilson, are heroes. Pollard, truly a villain, is worshipped today in Israel, where his 9000th day in prison last year was commemorated with a light show on the walls of the old city of Jerusalem. Last month 39 Congressmen petitioned US President Barack Obama to pardon him. Last summer, Netanyahu had the gall to offer to hold off a few more months on settlements if Obama freed him.

Will Assange suffer the fate of Pollard or Ellsberg? The US military machine was in disarray in 1971 and Ellsberg gave it a brave shove and helped bring the troops home. But this is 2010. The open calls to free Pollard are treated as a matter of course. While the Hillaries and Sarahs are calling to assassinate Assange for doing something noble, their like are calling to free a traitor who was responsible for betraying his country and causing untold deaths of US officials.

The sides are lining up, much like Bush predicted in 2001 with his "You are with us or against us." A brave Aussie, a principled French judge, an American libertarian congressman, a youthful computer nerd — the enemies of empire come in all shapes and sizes.

Eric Walberg writes for Al-Ahram Weekly. You can reach him at www.geocities.com/walberg2002/

comment below

Hacktivists strike back at illegal U.S. Government hacking and spineless corporations

2010-12-08T18:27:00.000-08:00

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Hackers hit Mastercard and Visa over Wikileaks rowMastercard and Visa both say their customers' accounts are not at risk

Wikileaks Revelations

Hackers have attacked the websites of credit card giants Mastercard and Visa.

The attacks came after the Anonymous group of hackers pledged to pursue firms that have withdrawn services from Wikileaks.

Mastercard payments were disrupted but the firm said there was "no impact" on people's ability to use their cards.

Visa's website also experienced problems. The attacks came after both companies stopped processing payments to the whistle-blowing site.

Entries on the Twitter page of Operation Payback, the Anonymous campaign, said the Visa site had been taken down.

Visa's website was later restored and spokesman Ted Carr said its processing network, which handles cardholder transactions, was working normally.

But in a day of fast-moving developments, the Anonymous Twitter page then went down, replaced by a message from Twitter saying the account had been suspended.

Twitter say they do not comment on "the actions we take on specific user accounts". However, a source told the BBC that the last tweet sent out by Anonymous included a link to a file containing consumer credit card information.

Paul Mutton at the security firm Netcraft, who is monitoring the attacks, said Visa is considered a more difficult target and the attack on it required a much larger number of "hacktivist" - politically motivated hackers - 2,000 compared with 400 for Mastercard.

Earlier the BBC was contacted by a payment firm linked to Mastercard that said its customers had "a complete loss of service".

In particular, it said that an authentication service for online payments known as Mastercard's SecureCode, had been disrupted.

Click to play

PayPal's Osama Bedier: "Our policy group had to make the decision of suspending the account"

Other readers have also said that they have had problems with online payments. The scale of the problems is still unclear.

Mastercard acknowledged there had been "a service disruption" involving its SecureCode system, but it added: "Our core processing capabilities have not been compromised and cardholder account data has not been placed at risk.

"While we have seen limited interruption in some web-based services, cardholders can continue to use their cards for secure transactions globally."

False account

Anonymous, which claimed to have carried out the attack, is a loose-knit group of hacktivists, with links to the notorious message board 4chan.

It said that it has hit several targets, including the website of the prosecutors who are acting in a legal case against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.

"Websites that are bowing down to government pressure have become targets” - Coldblood Anonymous

An Anonymous member told AFP news agency the group would extend their campaign to anyone with "an anti-Wikileaks agenda".

PayPal, which has stopped processing donations to Wikileaks, has also been targeted.

The firm said Wikileaks' account had violated its terms of services.

"On 27 November the State Department, the US government, basically wrote a letter [to Wikileaks] saying that [its] activities were deemed illegal in the United States," PayPal's Osama Bedier told the Le Web conference in France.

"And as a result our policy group had to make the decision of suspending their account.

"It's honestly, just pretty straightforward from our perspective and there's not much more to it than that," he said.

Other firms that have distanced themselves from the site have also been hit in the recent spate of attacks including the Swiss bank, PostFinance, which closed the account of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.

The bank said Mr Assange had provided false information when opening his account.

Swamp site

Security experts said the sites had been targeted by a so-called distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS), which swamp a site with so many page requests that it becomes overwhelmed and drops offline.

Click to play

Kristin Hrafnsson, from Wikileaks, condemned companies such as Mastercard for cutting ties with the website.

Noa Bar Yosef, a senior analyst at Imperva said the attacks were "very focused".

"It is recruiting people from within their own network. They are actually asking supporters to download a piece of code, the DDoSing malware, and upon a wake-up call the computer engages in the denial of service," he said.

Before the Mastercard attack, a member of Anonymous, who calls himself Coldblood, told the BBC that "multiple things" were being done to target companies that had stopped working with Wikileaks or which were perceived to have attacked the site.

"Websites that are bowing down to government pressure have become targets," he said.

"As an organisation we have always taken a strong stance on censorship and freedom of expression on the internet and come out against those who seek to destroy it by any means."

"We feel that Wikileaks has become more than just about leaking of documents, it has become a war ground, the people vs. the government," he said.

Some of the early DDoS hits failed to take sites offline, although that was not the point of the attacks, according to Coldblood.

"The idea is not to wipe them off but to give the companies a wake-up call," he said. "Companies will notice the increase in traffic and an increase in traffic means increase in costs associated with running a website."

DDoS attacks are illegal in many countries, including the UK.

Coldblood admitted that such attacks "may hurt people trying to get to these sites" but said it was "the only effective way to tell these companies that us, the people, are displeased".

Anonymous is also helping to create hundreds of mirror sites for Wikileaks, after its US domain name provider withdrew its services.

Coldblood said that the group was beginning to wind down the DDoS attacks so that it could concentrate on using "other methods which are more focused on supporting Wikileaks and making sure the Internet stays a free and open place".

wikileak roundup

2010-12-07T16:04:00.000-08:00

Is assange the worlds most wanted man? newsweek

the middle east reads wikileaks

ellsberg [leaker of the pentagon papers] on wikileaks

pure authoriatarianism [glen greenwald/ assange
on Democracy NOW!]

poison pill

9 weirdest things

Consider this a counter-revolution brainstorm #1.1 : california ballot initiative to recognizing the incorrigible illegality of the federal government

2010-12-07T08:46:00.000-08:00

As a Californian, I am forced to also be an American, even though to the more than casual observer of American politics, it may occur that we have had a coup. Corporations have bought, fooled, cajoled or for all we know blackmailed our elected federal government andseemingly the current leadership of congress and the white house. And we might as well include the supreme court, with it's 'united' pro-corporate ruling.

Somehow, bit by bit, we have lost our country to the leaders of the democrats and republicans: to whom only lying about consensual sex is worthy of impeachment not lying us into illegal wars, not colluding to bury invsetigations of WH authorized torture [add link]. Since Clinton and even more so under Bush and now Obama, every President has been clearly in need of war crimes [or related criminal miltiary-industrial crimes] investigation.

Both Democratic and Repulbican Congresses have been unwilling to investigate the crimes we all read about. The Supreme Court has given unconstitutional political election rights to not private citizens but instead corporations, allowing them to donate without disclosure[?] or limit!!!

There may be only one way to wipe the blood from our hands, that of our own soldiers to fight wars that are not ours; that of each tax-paying citizen forced to fund wars founded on lies that are not in our countries interest,

[add links for each]

Clinton with the bombing of civilian water facilities and yugo factories and state dept buildings in Yugoslavia.
Bush with his lying the country into war with Iraq, fully revealed by our closest allies Downing St. memos
and testified to by Bush Cabinet members [o'neil and ?],
and now with Obama colluding with republicans to sweep under the very stuffed rug, any prosecution of Bush's unconstitutional and anti-geneva convention torture policies,
with illegally spying on, secret detention of,
and now Obama's order of extra-judicial assasinations of american citiizen's.

Anyone can be declared a terrorist and killed, american or not, without a trial or even judicial review. This is no longer recognizably America, as each day passes and billions of middle class and working poor's dollars and transferred by illegal wall st. schemes to their retirement funds, bonuses and dividends. Made in America is becoming a rare curioso for the wealthiest to afford.

There are many more charges [link to kucinich's articles of impeachment], essentially factually incontravertable, widely disseminated outside of the mainstream corporate controlled media but nonetheless, ignored completely by our various branches of the federal government charged with oversight.

All this coupled with cleptocratic monetary policy, sham wall street reform, corporate boondoggle mandatory health-care 'reform'. Dubious elections in 2000 and moredisturbingly Ohio 2004 where lawsuits are in process over the diebold machines involved. All of these things spell to many that our federal government has been stolen. A coup, a nearly silent revolution.

If approved we the people of California direct our Governor and Congress and Courts to declare California a free state until such time as a law-abiding, clean election holding federal government can be re-formed, without the incorrigibly corrupt influence of corporate financed elections, a sclerotic, ossified corrupt, electorally unresponsive congress made up almost exclusively of campaign cash beholden Cleptocrats, and those to weak to weak or scared to oppose them. IF this fails to happen within 4 years: we the people authorize a special election to choose a constitutional assembly of 1 rep. per county [to be elected via a public financed equal access election] to attend a new constitutional convention either within the state or with other states that have suspended their particiption in a dysfunctional, criminal, Federal government.

Only the most serious and egregious entrenched law-breaking by virtually parties concerned, could impel patriotic Americans to seize back the people's power. The America of the founding fathers and our revolution, has been stolen in all but name and shape.

President Eisenhower warned us as he left office of a possible coup of our very democracy by the Military Industrial Complex. It has come. This is clear to many and even most americans. This

_+_+_+_+_+_+-discussion begins below-=-=-=-=-=-==-=-

please forgive the typos, working draft

Wikileaks mirror sites

2010-12-07T08:41:00.000-08:00

While I can't say I see any sense in the release of the sensitive sites document. really julian and co. none whatsoever, that pales in my mind to the many blatant illegalities being enacted around the world to stop or hinder wikileaks, even before the release of the one document that could actually qualify as 'pro-terrorist'.

Regardless though, to anyone monitoring closely wikileaks is battling against the vast machine. and it is a machine that wants to eat everything that dares stand in it's way, as the complete loss of political and information civil rights continues on unabated, masquerading as democracy.

for my own thoughts as to how to harness the wikileakage and move it towards restoring a true democracy see my next post.

dec 4 Assange interview

2010-12-05T16:00:00.000-08:00

Saturday the 4th of december. 6.41 pm. Julian Assange seats in front of his computer for a chat interview with EL PAÍS. Interpol is looking for him. His webite is under constant attacks. The 39 year old Australian, and Wikileaks founder, says he has a terrible headache. The last 24 hours were tough.

"Habrá un antes y un después del 'Cablegate"

La noticia en otros webs

Q. I read you are taking steps to protect yourselves (you and other people from Wikileaks) after receiving many death threats ¿Where are those death threats coming from?

A. We have hundreds of specific death threats from US military militants. That is not unusual, and we have become practiced from past experiences at ignoring such threats from Islamic extremists, African kleptocrats and so on. Recently the situation has changed with these threats now extending out our lawyers and my children. However it is the specific calls from the elites of US society for our assassination, kidnapping and execution that is more concerning. These range from a US senate bill by John Ensign which seeks to declare us a "transnational threat" to assassination calls from former Bush speech writers such as Marc Thessian in The Washington Post and Bill o'reilly of Fox news.

Q. Your children? How were they threatened?

A. I believe it is better to not encourage these ideas too much by talking about them. However some rightwing sites also called for attacking me via my children. I predicted this might happen since April, so since that time I have had to stay away from my family. Wait a moment. I get you some evidence.

Assange sends a document with a list of all the threats the organization has endured these days. http://filebin.ca/jzzfz/ListPeople_AssangeCriminalized.pdf. There are more. That is some one of our lawyers found.

Q. I guess this one must have been one of the toughest weeks for Wikileaks. How is the organization doing, how many people are helping you with the DDos (electronic attacks)? Do you feel well surrounded to keep strong?

A. The organisation is strong. We have a lot of support, however we also have many attacks of different forms. From ongoing mass DDOS attacks to smears and the legal issues.

Q. How many people help you deal with the DDOS attacks?

A. We have dozens helping and setting up mirror sites but it takes a lot of time for us to manage the process. We are automating that process and will soon have hundreds. If there is a battle between the US military and the preservation of History, we have insured, History will win.

Q. Is this the biggest leak ever? Or the most relevant? Or was it Ellsberg?s with the Pentagon papers?

A. This is the biggest, at over 265 million words and the most relevant - it covers every serious issue in every country-. It is more significant than the Pentagon Papers.

Q. What will be the consequences of this megaleak?

A. It is too early to say yet. The ripples are just starting to flow throughout the world. But I believe geopolitics will be separated into pre and post cablegate phases. Two more questions. I have to go soon I'm afraid...

Q. Speaking to Time magazine you said that Clinton should resign if it can be shown that she was responsible for ordering US diplomatic figures to engage in espionage in the United Nations. Should that be the case, shouldn?t it be Obama the one who should resingn?

A. The whole chain of command who was aware of this order, and approved it, must resign if the US is to be seen to be a credible nation that obeys the rule of law. The order is so serious it may well have been put to the president for approval.

Q. So, should Obama resign, then? And please, allow just five minutes for a couple of questions, if you can, please.

A. Obama must answer what he knew about this illegal order and when. If he refuses to answer or there is evidence he approved of these actions, he must resign.

Q. Is it right that Scotland Yard knows where you are and that you have made yourself available to speak with Swedish authorities, including the prosecutor handling the case?

A...

Q. Hello? Still there?

A. ...

Q. ¿Is it over?

A. Sorry. Internet disconnected momentarily

Q. Will I be able to ask just two extra questions?

A. Ok. make them quick :)

Q. Well, first, the one I asked ¿Is it right that you made yourself available to speak with Swedish authorities? What are you going to do about the case after the Sweedish Supreme court' s denial of your appeal?

A. We will fight them and expose them, naturally. That there is something "wrong" with this case is now obvious to everyone.

Q. Do you plan to stay in a hidden place or are you willing to have your say with the Swedish Justice?

A. Ok. I have to go now.

Q. Please, answer if you intend to stay in a hidden place, if you can.

[The chat is over. Julian?s assistant writes: He?gone. Sorry!]

US government tells future employees DO NOT SHARE WIKILEAKS on facebook and twitter...

2010-12-05T15:24:00.000-08:00

Well here it is in black and white. Do not communicate truth to your friends about the US government. Your ability to be hired by sociopathic liars will be compromised.

from huffpo journalist Rob Fishman.

Talking about WikiLeaks on Facebook or Twitter could endanger your job prospects, a State Department official warned students at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs this week.

An email from SIPA's Office of Career Services went out Tuesday afternoon with a caution from the official, an alumnus of the school. Students who will be applying for jobs in the federal government could jeopardize their prospects by posting links to WikiLeaks online, or even by discussing the leaked documents on social networking sites, the official was quoted as saying.

"[The alumnus] recommends that you DO NOT post links to these documents nor make comments on social media sites such as Facebook or through Twitter," the Office of Career Services advised students. "Engaging in these activities would call into question your ability to deal with confidential information, which is part of most positions with the federal government."

While the massive disclosure of once-classified documents detailing some of the nation's most tightly-guarded secrets has inflamed allies and enemies alike, the move by the State Department represents a new front in the administration's campaign against unauthorized leaks.

Philip J. Crowley, spokesman for the State Department, denied in an email message any federal involvement:

This is not true. We have instructed State Department employees not to access the WikiLeaks site and download posted documents using an unclassified network since these documents are still classified. We condemn what Mr. Assange is doing, but have given no advice to anyone beyond the State Department to my knowledge.

When asked why Columbia — which confirmed to the New York Times earlier today that an email had been sent from its offices — would have sent the message, Crowley said, "If an employee of the State Department sent such an email, it does not represent a formal policy position."

Earlier this week, companies like Amazon and PayPal shut off the services they provided to WikiLeaks, threatening the site's survival and impeding further dissemination of its treasure trove of classified documents.

Story continues below

Now, however, it appears the federal government has moved beyond staunching the flow of leaked information, to suppressing even the very mention of WikiLeaks online by prospective employees.

While republishing the leaked documents could indeed raise legal issues for students, it was the admonition against social media chatter that riled some at Columbia.

"They seem to be unable to make the distinction between having an opinion and having a contractual obligation to keep a secret," said Hugh Sansom, a masters student from New York.

Students were taken aback by the email, said Sansom, who described his non-American classmates -- nearly half of this year's incoming class at Columbia speaks a native language other than English -- as "amused and surprised."

By late in the week, word of the email had reached the blogosphere.

"Seems the ambitious young things studying IR and considering a foreign service careers are being warned not to touch Cablegate," wrote Issandr El Amrani at The Arabist. A comment posted to that story said that Georgetown University had been similarly put on notice.

Stephen D. Biddle, a professor at the school, said that the email amounted to counseling on the university's part.

"It strikes me as entirely plausible that some government officials would take a dim view of people appearing to use WikiLeaks material for professional gain," Biddle said.

But as for commenting on the leaked information on Facebook or Twitter, Biddle acknowledged, "once it's out, it's out."

The email, obtained by The Huffington Post, is published in full:

From: Office of Career Services
Date: Tue, Nov 30, 2010 at 3:26 PM
Subject: Wikileaks - Advice from an alum
To: "Office of Career Services (OCS)"

Hi students,

We received a call today from a SIPA alumnus who is working at the State Department. He asked us to pass along the following information to anyone who will be applying for jobs in the federal government, since all would require a background investigation and in some instances a security clearance.

The documents released during the past few months through Wikileaks are still considered classified documents. He recommends that you DO NOT post links to these documents nor make comments on social media sites such as Facebook or through Twitter. Engaging in these activities would call into question your ability to deal with confidential information, which is part of most positions with the federal government.

Regards,
Office of Career Services

How the US media is dumping on WikiLeaks - and censoring the cable disclosures

2010-12-05T15:19:00.000-08:00

How the US media is dumping on WikiLeaks - and censoring the cable disclosures

In a hard-hitting piece in defence of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange - now officially named as a fugitive - Alexander Cockburn contends that American newspapers have colluded with the US government to conceal some of the leaked embassy cables.

He cites research by Gareth Porter, who identified a cable released by WikiLeaks that provides a detailed account of how Russian specialists countered official US claims that Iran had missiles capable of reaching Europe, or that Iran intended to develop such a capability. Porter wrote:

"Readers of the two leading US newspapers never learned those key facts about the document. The New York Times and the Washington Post reported only that the United States believed Iran had acquired such missiles... from North Korea.
Neither newspaper reported the detailed Russian refutation of the US view on the issue or the lack of hard evidence...
The Times, which had obtained the diplomatic cables not from WikiLeaks but from The Guardian... did not publish the text of the cable.
The Times story said the newspaper had made the decision not to publish 'at the request of the Obama administration'. That meant that its readers could not compare the highly distorted account of the document in the Times story against the original document without searching the WikiLeaks website."

Aside from this self-censorship, Cockburn also remarks on the distaste among the "official" US press for WikiLeaks after its previous releases of documents about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He writes:

"The New York Times managed the ungainly feat of publishing some of the leaks while simultaneously affecting to hold its nose, and while publishing a mean-spirited hatchet job on Assange by its reporter John F Burns, a man with a well burnished record in touting the various agendas of the US government."

As for TV coverage, he cites Glenn Greenwald, writing on the Salon.com:

"On CNN, Wolf Blitzer was beside himself with rage over the fact that the US government had failed to keep all these things secret from him...
Then - like the Good Journalist he is - Blitzer demanded assurances that the government has taken the necessary steps to prevent him, the media generally and the citizenry from finding out any more secrets...
The central concern of Blitzer - one of our nation's most honoured 'journalists' - is making sure that nobody learns what the US government is up to."

Some of that Blitzer rant (no longer available on the CNN site) deserves quoting. Here's a sample:

"Are they doing anything at all to make sure if some 23-year-old guy, allegedly, starts downloading hundreds of thousands of cables, hundreds of thousands of copies of sensitive information, that no one pays attention to that, no one in the security system of the United States government bothers to see someone is downloading all these millions - literally millions of documents?...
It's amazing to me that the US government security system is so lax that someone could allegedly do this kind of damage just by simply pretending to be listening to a Lady Gaga CD and at the same time downloading all these kinds of documents...
Do we know yet if they've [done] that fix? In other words, somebody right now who has top secret or secret security clearance can no longer download information onto a CD or a thumb drive? Has that been fixed already?"

Journalists who oppose WikiLeaks are opposed to journalism. Here's Jack Shafer offering some sense:

"Information conduits like Julian Assange shock us out of that complacency. Oh, sure, he's a pompous egomaniac sporting a series of bad haircuts and grandiose tendencies.
And he often acts without completely thinking through every repercussion of his actions.
But if you want to dismiss him just because he's a seething jerk, there are about 2,000 journalists I'd like you to meet."

Quite so. Too many "seething jerks" who also deny the point of their own trade - disclosure!

Sources: The First Post/CounterPunch/Salon.com/
worldnewsmania/Slate.com

You destroy the conspiracy, in other words, by making it so paranoid of itself that it can no longer conspire

2010-12-04T08:04:00.000-08:00

Great article exploring Assange's serious thinking and the likely, hopeful and possible effects of wikileaks.

Commenting requires no reg. at this point.

Julian Assange and the Computer Conspiracy; “To destroy this invisible government”

Posted by zunguzungu on November 29, 2010

(en Español)

(auf Deutsch)

“To radically shift regime behavior we must think clearly and boldly for if we have learned anything, it is that regimes do not want to be changed. We must think beyond those who have gone before us, and discover technological changes that embolden us with ways to act in which our forebears could not. Firstly we must understand what aspect of government or neocorporatist behavior we wish to change or remove. Secondly we must develop a way of thinking about this behavior that is strong enough carry us through the mire of politically distorted language, and into a position of clarity. Finally must use these insights to inspire within us and others a course of ennobling, and effective action.”

Julian Assange, “State and Terrorist Conspiracies”

The piece of writing (via) which that quote introduces is intellectually substantial, but not all that difficult to read, so you might as well take a look at it yourself. Most of the news media seems to be losing their minds over Wikileaks without actually reading these essays, even though he describes the function and aims of an organization like Wikileaks in pretty straightforward terms. But, to summarize, he begins by describing a state like the US as essentially an authoritarian conspiracy, and then reasons that the practical strategy for combating that conspiracy is to degrade its ability to conspire, to hinder its ability to “think” as a conspiratorial mind. The metaphor of a computing network is mostly implicit, but utterly crucial: he seeks to oppose the power of the state by treating it like a computer and tossing sand in its diodes.

He begins by positing that conspiracy and authoritarianism go hand in hand, arguing that since authoritarianism produces resistance to itself — to the extent that its authoritarianism becomes generally known — it can only continue to exist and function by preventing its intentions (the authorship of its authority?) from being generally known. It inevitably becomes, he argues, a conspiracy:

Authoritarian regimes give rise to forces which oppose them by pushing against the individual and collective will to freedom, truth and self realization. Plans which assist authoritarian rule, once discovered, induce resistance. Hence these plans are concealed by successful authoritarian powers. This is enough to define their behavior as conspiratorial.

The problem this creates for the government conspiracy then becomes the organizational problem it must solve: if the conspiracy must operate in secrecy, how is it to communicate, plan, make decisions, discipline itself, and transform itself to meet new challenges? The answer is: by controlling information flows. After all, if the organization has goals that can be articulated, articulating them openly exposes them to resistance. But at the same time, failing to articulate those goals to itself deprives the organization of its ability to process and advance them. Somewhere in the middle, for the authoritarian conspiracy, is the right balance of authority and conspiracy.

His model for imagining the conspiracy, then, is not at all the cliché that people mean when they sneer at someone for being a “conspiracy theorist.” After all, most the “conspiracies” we’re familiar with are pure fantasies, and because the “Elders of Zion” or James Bond’s SPECTRE have never existed, their nonexistence becomes a cudgel for beating on people that would ever use the term or the concept. For Assange, by contrast, a conspiracy is something fairly banal, simply any network of associates who act in concert by hiding their concerted association from outsiders, an authority that proceeds by preventing its activities from being visible enough to provoke counter-reaction. It might be something as dramatic as a loose coalition of conspirators working to start a war with Iraq/n, or it might simply be the banal, everyday deceptions and conspiracies of normal diplomatic procedure.

He illustrates this theoretical model by the analogy of a board with nails hammered into it and then tied together with twine:

First take some nails (“conspirators”) and hammer them into a board at random. Then take twine (“communication”) and loop it from nail to nail without breaking. Call the twine connecting two nails a link. Unbroken twine means it is possible to travel from any nail to any other nail via twine and intermediary nails…Information flows from conspirator to conspirator. Not every conspirator trusts or knows every other conspirator even though all are connected. Some are on the fringe of the conspiracy, others are central and communicate with many conspirators and others still may know only two conspirators but be a bridge between important sections or groupings of the conspiracy…

Conspirators are often discerning, for some trust and depend each other, while others say little. Important information flows frequently through some links, trivial information through others. So we expand our simple connected graph model to include not only links, but their “importance.”

Return to our board-and-nails analogy. Imagine a thick heavy cord between some nails and fine light thread between others. Call the importance, thickness or heaviness of a link its weight. Between conspirators that never communicate the weight is zero. The “importance” of communication passing through a link is difficult to evaluate apriori, since its true value depends on the outcome of the conspiracy. We simply say that the “importance” of communication contributes to the weight of a link in the most obvious way; the weight of a link is proportional to the amount of important communication flowing across it. Questions about conspiracies in general won’t require us to know the weight of any link, since that changes from conspiracy to conspiracy.

Such a network will not be organized by a flow chart, nor would it ever produce a single coherent map of itself (without thereby hastening its own collapse). It is probably fairly acephalous, as a matter of course: if it had a single head (or a singular organizing mind which could survey and map the entirety), then every conspirator would be one step from the boss and a short two steps away from every other member of the conspiracy. A certain amount of centralization is necessary, in other words (otherwise there is no conspiracy), but too much centralization makes the system vulnerable.

To use The Wire as a ready-to-hand example, imagine if Avon Barksdale was communicating directly with Bodie. All you would ever have to do is turn one person — any person — and you would be one step away from the boss, whose direct connection to everyone else in the conspiracy would allow you to sweep them all up at once. Obviously, no effective conspiracy would ever function this way. Remember Stringer Bell’s “is you taking notes on a criminal fucking conspiracy?” To function effectively, the primary authority has to be disassociated from all other members of the conspiracy, layers of mediation which have to be as opaque as possible to everyone concerned (which a paper trail unhelpfully clarifies). But while the complexity of these linkages shield the directing authority from exposure, they also limit Avon Barksdale’s ability to control what’s going on around him. Businesses run on their paperwork! And the more walls you build around him, the less he might be able to trust his lieutenants, and the less they’ll require (or tolerate) him.

This, Assange reasons, is a way to turn a feature into a bug. And his underlying insight is simple and, I think, compelling: while an organization structured by direct and open lines of communication will be much more vulnerable to outside penetration, the more opaque it becomes to itself (as a defense against the outside gaze), the less able it will be to “think” as a system, to communicate with itself. The more conspiratorial it becomes, in a certain sense, the less effective it will be as a conspiracy. The more closed the network is to outside intrusion, the less able it is to engage with that which is outside itself (true hacker theorizing).

His thinking is not quite as abstract as all that, of course; as he quite explicitly notes, he is also understanding the functioning of the US state by analogy with successful terrorist organizations. If you’ve seen The Battle of Algiers, for example, think of how the French counter-terrorist people work to produce an organizational flow chart of the Algerian resistance movement: since they had overwhelming military superiority, their inability to crush the FLN resided in their inability to find it, an inability which the FLN strategically works to impede by decentralizing itself. Cutting off one leg of the octopus, the FLN realized, wouldn’t degrade the system as a whole if the legs all operated independently. The links between the units were the vulnerable spots for the system as a whole, so those were most closely and carefully guarded and most hotly pursued by the French. And while the French won the battle of Algiers, they lost the war, because they adopted the tactics Assange briefly mentions only to put aside:

How can we reduce the ability of a conspiracy to act?…We can split the conspiracy, reduce or eliminating important communication between a few high weight links or many low weight links. Traditional attacks on conspiratorial power groupings, such as assassination, have cut high weight links by killing, kidnapping, blackmailing or otherwise marginalizing or isolating some of the conspirators they were connected to.

This is the US’s counterterrorism strategy — find the men in charge and get ’em — but it’s not what Assange wants to do: such a program would isolate a specific version of the conspiracy and attempt to destroy the form of it that already exists, which he argues will have two important limitations. For one thing, by the time such a conspiracy has a form which can be targeted, its ability to function will be quite advanced. As he notes:

“A man in chains knows he should have acted sooner for his ability to influence the actions of the state is near its end. To deal with powerful conspiratorial actions we must think ahead and attack the process that leads to them since the actions themselves can not be dealt with.”

By the time a cancer has metastasized, in other words, antioxidents are no longer effective, and even violent chemotherapy is difficult. It’s better, then, to think about how conspiracies come into existence so as to prevent them from forming in the first place (whereas if you isolate the carcinogen early enough, you don’t need to remove the tumor after the fact). Instead, he wants to address the aggregative process itself, by impeding the principle of its reproduction: rather than trying to expose and cut particular links between particular conspirators (which does little to prevent new links from forming and may not disturb the actual functioning of the system as a whole), he wants to attack the “total conspiratorial power” of the entire system by figuring out how to reduce its total ability to share and exchange information among itself, in effect, to slow down its processing power. As he puts it:

Conspiracies are cognitive devices. They are able to outthink the same group of individuals acting alone Conspiracies take information about the world in which they operate (the conspiratorial environment), pass through the conspirators and then act on the result. We can see conspiracies as a type of device that has inputs (information about the environment), a computational network (the conspirators and their links to each other) and outputs (actions intending to change or maintain the environment).

Because he thinks of the conspiracy as a computational network, he notes in an aside that one way to weaken its cognitive ability would be to degrade the quality of its information:

Since a conspiracy is a type of cognitive device that acts on information acquired from its environment, distorting or restricting these inputs means acts based on them are likely to be misplaced. Programmers call this effect garbage in, garbage out. Usually the effect runs the other way; it is conspiracy that is the agent of deception and information restriction. In the US, the programmer’s aphorism is sometimes called “the Fox News effect”.

I’m not sure this is what he means, but it’s worth reflecting that the conspiracy’s ability to deceive others through propaganda can also be the conspiracy’s tendency to deceive itself by its own propaganda. So many people genuinely drink the Kool-Aid, after all. Would our super-spies in Afghanistan ever have been so taken in by the imposter Taliban guy if they didn’t, basically, believe their own line of propaganda, if they didn’t convince themselves — even provisionally — that we actually are winning the war against Talibothra? The same is true of WMD; while no one in possession of the facts could rationally conclude that Saddam Hussein then (or Iran now) are actually, positively in pursuit of WMD’s, this doesn’t mean that the people talking about ticking time bombs don’t actually believe that they are. It just means they are operating with bad information about the environment. Sometimes this works in their favor, but sometimes it does not: if Obama thinks Afghanistan is winnable, it may sink his presidency, for example, while the belief of his advisors that the economy would recover if the government rescued only the banks almost certainly lost the midterm elections for the Democrats (and was the death-knell for so many of the Blue Dogs who were driving that particular policy choice). Whether this actually hurts the conspiracy is unclear; those Blue Dogs might have lost their seats, but most of them will retire from public service to cushy jobs supported by the sectors they supported while they were in public service. And lots of successful politicians do nothing but fail.

This is however, not where Assange’s reasoning leads him. He decides, instead, that the most effective way to attack this kind of organization would be to make “leaks” a fundamental part of the conspiracy’s information environment. Which is why the point is not that particular leaks are specifically effective. Wikileaks does not leak something like the “Collateral Murder” video as a way of putting an end to that particular military tactic; that would be to target a specific leg of the hydra even as it grows two more. Instead, the idea is that increasing the porousness of the conspiracy’s information system will impede its functioning, that the conspiracy will turn against itself in self-defense, clamping down on its own information flows in ways that will then impede its own cognitive function. You destroy the conspiracy, in other words, by making it so paranoid of itself that it can no longer conspire:

The more secretive or unjust an organization is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in its leadership and planning coterie. This must result in minimization of efficient internal communications mechanisms (an increase in cognitive “secrecy tax”) and consequent system-wide cognitive decline resulting in decreased ability to hold onto power as the environment demands adaption. Hence in a world where leaking is easy, secretive or unjust systems are nonlinearly hit relative to open, just systems. Since unjust systems, by their nature induce opponents, and in many places barely have the upper hand, mass leaking leaves them exquisitely vulnerable to those who seek to replace them with more open forms of governance.

The leak, in other words, is only the catalyst for the desired counter-overreaction; Wikileaks wants to provoke the conspiracy into turning off its own brain in response to the threat. As it tries to plug its own holes and find the leakers, he reasons, its component elements will de-synchronize from and turn against each other, de-link from the central processing network, and come undone. Even if all the elements of the conspiracy still exist, in this sense, depriving themselves of a vigorous flow of information to connect them all together as a conspiracy prevents them from acting as a conspiracy. As he puts it:

If total conspiratorial power is zero, then clearly there is no information flow between the conspirators and hence no conspiracy. A substantial increase or decrease in total conspiratorial power almost always means what we expect it to mean; an increase or decrease in the ability of the conspiracy to think, act and adapt…An authoritarian conspiracy that cannot think is powerless to preserve itself against the opponents it induces.

In this sense, most of the media commentary on the latest round of leaks has totally missed the point. After all, why are diplomatic cables being leaked? These leaks are not specifically about the war(s) at all, and most seem to simply be a broad swath of the everyday normal secrets that a security state keeps from all but its most trusted hundreds of thousands of people who have the right clearance. Which is the point: Assange is completely right that our government has conspiratorial functions. What else would you call the fact that a small percentage of our governing class governs and acts in our name according to information which is freely shared amongst them but which cannot be shared amongst their constituency? And we all probably knew that this was more or less the case; anyone who was surprised that our embassies are doing dirty, secretive, and disingenuous political work as a matter of course is naïve. But Assange is not trying to produce a journalistic scandal which will then provoke red-faced government reforms or something, precisely because no one is all that scandalized by such things any more. Instead, he is trying to strangle the links that make the conspiracy possible, to expose the necessary porousness of the American state’s conspiratorial network in hopes that the security state will then try to shrink its computational network in response, thereby making itself dumber and slower and smaller.

Early responses seem to indicate that Wikileaks is well on its way to accomplishing some of its goals. As Simon Jenkins put it (in a great piece in its own right) “The leaks have blown a hole in the framework by which states guard their secrets.” And if the diplomats quoted by Le Monde are right that, “we will never again be able to practice diplomacy like before,” this is exactly what Wikileaks was trying to do. It’s sort of pathetic hearing diplomats and government shills lament that the normal work of “diplomacy” will now be impossible, like complaining that that the guy boxing you out is making it hard to get rebounds. Poor dears. If Assange is right to point out that his organization has accomplished more state scrutiny than the entire rest of the journalistic apparatus combined, he’s right but he’s also deflecting the issue: if Wikileaks does some of the things that journalists do, it also does some very different things. Assange, as his introductory remarks indicate quite clearly, is in the business of “radically shift[ing] regime behavior.”

If Wikileaks is a different kind of organization than anything we’ve ever seen before, it’s interesting to see him put himself in line with more conventional progressivism. Assange isn’t off base, after all, when he quotes Theodore Roosevelt’s words from his 1912 Progressive party presidential platform as the epigraph to the first essay; Roosevelt realized a hundred years ago that “Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people,” and it was true, then too, that “To destroy this invisible government, to befoul this unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of statesmanship.” Assange is trying to shit all over this unholy alliance in ways that the later and more radical Roosevelt would likely have commended.

It’s worth closing, then, by recalling that Roosevelt also coined the term “muckraker,” and that he did so as a term of disparagement. Quoting from Pilgrim’s Progress, he cited the example of the “Muck-Raker” who could only look down, whose perspective was so totally limited to the “muck” that it was his job to rake, he had lost all ability to see anything higher. Roosevelt, as always, is worth quoting:

In Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress you may recall the description of the Man with the Muck-rake, the man who could look no way but downward, with the muckrake in his hand; who was offered a celestial crown for his muck-rake, but who would neither look up nor regard the crown he was offered, but continued to rake to himself the filth of the floor…the Man with the Muck-rake is set forth as the example of him whose vision is fixed on carnal instead of on spiritual things. Yet he also typifies the man who in this life consistently refuses to see aught that is lofty, and fixes his eyes with solemn intentness only on that which is vile and debasing. Now, it is very necessary that we should not flinch from seeing what is s vile and debasing. There is filth on the floor, and it must be scraped up with the muck-rake; and there are times and places where this service is the most needed of all the services that can be performed. But the man who never does anything else, who never thinks or speaks or writes save of his feats with the muck-rake, speedily becomes, not a help to society, not an incitement to good, but one of the most potent forces for evil. There are, in the body politic, economic, and social, many and grave evils, and there is urgent necessity for the sternest war upon them. There should be relentless exposure of and attack upon every evil man, whether politician or business man, every evil practice, whether in politics, in business, or in social life. I hail as a benefactor every writer or speaker, every man who, on the platform, or in book, magazine, or newspaper, with merciless severity makes such attack, provided always that he in his turn remembers that the attack is of use only if it is absolutely truthful…

Roosevelt was many things when he uttered those words, but he was not wrong. There is a certain vicious amorality about the Mark Zuckerberg-ian philosophy that all transparency is always and everywhere a good thing, particularly when it’s uttered by the guy who’s busily monetizing your radical transparency. And the way most journalists “expose” secrets as a professional practice — to the extent that they do — is just as narrowly selfish: because they publicize privacy only when there is profit to be made in doing so, they keep their eyes on the valuable muck they are raking, and learn to pledge their future professional existence on a continuing and steady flow of it. In muck they trust.

According to his essay, Julian Assange is trying to do something else. Because we all basically know that the US state — like all states — is basically doing a lot of basically shady things basically all the time, simply revealing the specific ways they are doing these shady things will not be, in and of itself, a necessarily good thing. In some cases, it may be a bad thing, and in many cases, the provisional good it may do will be limited in scope. The question for an ethical human being — and Assange always emphasizes his ethics — has to be the question of what exposing secrets will actually accomplish, what good it will do, what better state of affairs it will bring about. And whether you buy his argument or not, Assange has a clearly articulated vision for how Wikileaks’ activities will “carry us through the mire of politically distorted language, and into a position of clarity,” a strategy for how exposing secrets will ultimately impede the production of future secrets. The point of Wikileaks — as Assange argues — is simply to make Wikileaks unnecessary.

This entry was posted on November 29, 2010 at 9:05 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

america is waiting [ no longer ! ]

2010-12-03T07:25:00.000-08:00

Well - I think the radio show host might well think Wiki-leaks is what America was waiting for.

Wikileaks : the historical insurance policy file

2010-12-03T06:38:00.000-08:00

Well folks,

the Daily Globe Review is back after a long hiatus.

Why? well simply this Julian Asssange has kicked me in the ass hard enough that I will do my best to be a little disciplined with my time and attentions on the net.

If I see something imortant - to important to be ignored as much as it probably is...well then Daily Globe Review has a home for it.

I am also looking for associate editors, camera folk and fellow truth/transparency/real democracy to widen our coverge.

cheers,

the angry indy

a different slant on the civil war than what I recall from Godwin!

2007-10-17T05:32:00.000-07:00

dd

A Jeffersonian View of the Civil War

by Donald W. Miller, Jr.

In the schoolbook account of the American Civil War, Abraham Lincoln rose to the Presidency and took the steps needed to end slavery. He led the country in a great Civil War against the slaveholding states that seceded, restored these states to the Union, and ended slavery. Accordingly, historians rate Abraham Lincoln as one of our greatest presidents.

People in the South, like my great-great-grandfather Louis Thomas Hicks, had a different view of the war. Louis Hicks fought in the Battle of Gettysburg in the Army of Northern Virginia, commanding the 20th North Carolina Regiment (in Iverson’s Brigade of Rodes Division in Ewell’s Second Corps). He led his regiment into action on the first day of the battle and was forced to surrender after losing eighty percent of his men (238 out of 300) in two-and-a-half hours of fighting. In his personal account of the battle, he wrote, "[As a prisoner] I lied awake, thinking of my comrades and the great cause for which we were willing to shed our last drop of blood." His daughter, Mary Lyde Williams, echoed similar sentiments in her Presentation Address given at the Unveiling of the North Carolina Memorial on the Battlefield of Gettysburg on July 3, 1929. She began her address with the words, "They wrote a constitution in which each state should be free." Four children, including her granddaughter, my mother, who was then 10 years old, removed the veil that covered the statue.

Today American children are taught in the nation’s schools, both in the North and South, that it was wrong for people to support the Confederacy and to fight and die for it. Well-intentioned, "right thinking" people equate anyone today who thinks that the South did the right thing by seceding from the Union as secretly approving of slavery. Indeed, such thinking has now reached the point where groups from both sides of the political spectrum, notably the NAACP and Southern Poverty Law Center on the left and the Cato Institute on the right, want to have the Confederate Battle Flag eradicated from public spaces. These people argue that the Confederate flag is offensive to African-Americans because it commemorates slavery.

In the standard account, the Civil War was an outcome of our Founding Fathers failure to address the institution of slavery in a republic that proclaimed in its Declaration of Independence that "all men are created equal." But was it really necessary to wage a four-year war to abolish slavery in the United States, one that ravaged half of the country and destroyed a generation of American men? Only the United States and Haiti freed their slaves by war. Every other country in the New World that had slaves, such as Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela, freed them in the 19th century peacefully.

The war did enable Lincoln to "save" the Union, but only in a geographic sense. The country ceased being a Union, as it was originally conceived, of separate and sovereign states. Instead, America became a "nation" with a powerful federal government. Although the war freed four million slaves into poverty, it did not bring about a new birth of freedom, as Lincoln and historians such as James McPherson and Henry Jaffa say. For the nation as a whole the war did just the opposite: It initiated a process of centralization of government that has substantially restricted liberty and freedom in America, as historians Charles Adams and Jeffrey Rogers Hummel have argued – Adams in his book, When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern Secession (published in 2000); and Hummel in his book, Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men (1996).

The term Civil War is a misnomer. The South did not instigate a rebellion. Thirteen southern states in 1860-61 simply chose to secede from the Union and go their own way, like the thirteen colonies did when they seceded from Britain. A more accurate name for the war that took place between the northern and southern American states is the War for Southern Independence. Mainstream historiography presents the victors’ view, an account that focuses on the issue of slavery and downplays other considerations.

Up until the 19th century slavery in human societies was considered to be a normal state of affairs. The Old Testament of the Bible affirms that slaves are a form of property and that the children of a slave couple are the property of the slaves’ owner (Exodus 21:4). Abraham and Jacob kept slaves, and the New Testament says nothing against slavery. Slaves built the pyramids of Egypt, the Acropolis of Athens, and the coliseums in the Roman Empire. Africans exported 11,000,000 Black slaves to the New World – 4,000,000 to Brazil, 3,600,000 to the British and French West Indies, and 2,500,000 to Spanish possessions in Central and South America. About 500,000 slaves, 5 per cent of the total number shipped to the New World, came to America. Today slavery still exists in some parts of Africa, notably in Sudan and Mauritania.

Britain heralded the end of slavery, in the Western world at least, with its Bill of Abolition, passed in 1807. This Bill made the African slave trade (but not slaveholding) illegal. Later that year the United States adopted a similar bill, called the Act to Prohibit the Importation of Slaves, which prohibited bringing slaves into any port in the country, including into the southern slaveholding states. Congress strengthened this prohibition in 1819 when it decreed the slave trade to be a form of piracy, punishable by death. In 1833, Britain enacted an Emancipation Law, ending slavery throughout the British Empire, and Parliament allocated twenty million pounds to buy slaves’ freedom from their owners. The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer rightly described this action as one of the greatest acts of collective compassion in the history of humankind. This happened peacefully and without any serious slave uprisings or attacks on their former owners, even in Jamaica where a population of 30,000 whites owned 250,000 slaves.

The Constitution of the Confederate States of America prohibited the importation of slaves (Article I, Section 9). With no fugitive slave laws in neighboring states that would return fugitive slaves to their owners, the value of slaves as property drops owing to increased costs incurred to guard against their escape. With slaves having a place to escape to in the North and with the supply of new slaves restricted by its Constitution, slavery in the Confederate states would have ended without war. A slave’s decreasing property value, alone, would have soon made the institution unsustainable, irrespective of more moral and humanitarian considerations.

The rallying call in the North at the beginning of the war was "preserve the Union," not "free the slaves." Although certainly a contentious political issue and detested by abolitionists, in 1861 slavery nevertheless was not a major public issue. Protestant Americans in the North were more concerned about the growing number of Catholic immigrants than they were about slavery. In his First Inaugural Address, given five weeks before the war began, Lincoln reassured slaveholders that he would continue to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act.

After 17 months of war things were not going well for the North, especially in its closely watched Eastern Theater. In the five great battles fought there from July 1861 through September 17, 1862, the changing cast of Union generals failed to win a single victory. The Confederate army won three: First Bull Run (or First Manassas) on July 21,1861; Seven Days – six major battles fought from June 25-July 1, 1862 during the Union army’s Peninsular Campaign that, in sum, amounted to a strategic Confederate victory when McClellan withdrew his army from the peninsula; and Second Bull Run (or Second Manassas) on August 29-30, 1862. Two battles were indecisive: Seven Pines (or Fair Oaks) on May 31-June 1, 1862, and Antietam (or Sharpsburg) on September 17, 1862. In the West, Grant took Fort Donelson on February 14, 1862 and captured 14,000 Confederate soldiers. But then he was caught by surprise in the battle of Shiloh (or Pittsburg Landing) on April 6-7, 1862 and lost 13,000 out of a total of 51,000 men that fought in this two-day battle. Sickened by the carnage, people in the North did not appreciate at the time that this battle was a strategic victory for the North. Then came Antietam on September 17, the bloodiest day in the entire war; the Union army lost more than 12,000 of its 60,000 troops engaged in the battle.

Did saving the Union justify the slaughter of such a large number of young men? The Confederates posed no military threat to the North. Perhaps it would be better to let the southern states go, along with their 4 million slaves. If it was going to win, the North needed a more compelling reason to continue the war than to preserve the Union. The North needed a cause for continuing the war, as Lincoln put the matter in his Second Inaugural Address, that was willed by God, where "the judgments of the Lord" determined the losses sustained and its outcome.

Five days after the Battle of Antietam, on September 22, 1862, Abraham Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation.

The Emancipation Proclamation was a "war measure," as Lincoln put it. Foreign correspondents covering the war recognized it as a brilliant propaganda coup. Emancipation would take place only in rebel states not under Union control, their state sovereignty in the matter of slavery arguably forfeited as a result of their having seceded from the Union. The president could not abolish slavery; if not done at the state level, abolition would require a constitutional amendment. Slaveholders and their slaves in Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware, Tennessee, and parts of Virginia and Louisiana occupied by Union troops were exempt from the edict. Slaves in the Confederacy would be "forever free" on January 1, 1863 – one hundred days after the Proclamation was issued – but only if a state remained in "rebellion" after that date. Rebel states that rejoined the Union and sent elected representatives to Congress before January 1, 1863 could keep their slaves. Such states would no longer be considered in rebellion and so their sovereignty regarding the peculiar institution would be restored. As the London Spectator put it, in its October 11, 1862 issue: "The principle [of the Proclamation] is not that a human being cannot justly own another, but that he cannot own him unless he is loyal to the United States."

Regarding slaves in states loyal to the government or occupied by Union troops, Lincoln proposed three constitutional amendments in his December 1862 State of the Union message to Congress. The first was that slaves not freed by the Emancipation Proclamation be freed gradually over a 37-year period, to be completed by January 1, 1900. The second provided compensation to owners for the loss of their slave property. The third was that the government transport freed Blacks, at government expense, out of the country and relocate them in Latin America and Africa. Lincoln wrote that freed blacks need "new homes [to] be found for them, in congenial climes, and with people of their own blood and race." For Lincoln, emancipation and deportation were inseparably connected. Secretary of the Navy Gideon Wells wrote in his diary that Lincoln "thought it essential to provide an asylum for a race which he had emancipated, but which could never be recognized or admitted to be our equals." As historian Leone Bennett Jr. puts it in his book Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream (2000), "It was an article of faith to him [Lincoln] that emancipation and deportation went together like firecrackers and July Fourth, and that you couldn’t have one without the other."

Congress refused to consider Lincoln’s proposals, which Horace Greeley in the New York Tribune labeled whales’ tubs of "gradualism, compensation, [and] exportation." None of the Confederate States took the opportunity to rejoin the Union in the 100-day window offered and the war continued for another two years and four months. Eight months later the 13th Amendment was ratified, and slavery ended everywhere in the United States (without gradualism, compensation, or exportation).

Black and White Americans sustained racial and political wounds from the war and the subsequent Reconstruction that proved deep and long lasting. Northern abolitionists wanted southern Black slaves to be freed, but certainly did not want them to move north and live alongside them. Indiana and Illinois, in particular, had laws that barred African-Americans from settling. The military occupation and "Reconstruction" the South was forced to endure after the war also slowed healing of the wounds. At a gathering of ex-confederate soldiers shortly before he died in 1870, Robert E. Lee said,

If I had foreseen the use those people [Yankees] designed to make of their victory, there would have been no surrender at Appomattox Courthouse; no sir, not by me. Had I foreseen these results of subjugation, I would have preferred to die at Appomattox with my brave men, my sword in my right hand.

Why were business and political leaders in the North so intent on keeping the southern states in the Union? It was, to paraphrase Charles Dickens, solely a fiscal matter. The principal source of tax revenue for the federal government before the Civil War was a tariff on imports. There was no income tax, except for one declared unconstitutional after its enactment during the Civil War. Tariffs imposed by the federal government not only accounted for most of the federal budget, they also raised the price of imported goods to a level where the less-efficient manufacturers of the northeast could be competitive. The former Vice-President John C. Calhoun put it this way:

"The North had adopted a system of revenue and disbursements in which an undue proportion of the burden of taxation has been imposed upon the South, and an undue proportion of its proceeds appropriated to the North… the South, as the great exporting portion of the Union, has in reality paid vastly more than her due proportion of the revenue."

In March 1861, the New York Evening Post editorialized on this point:

That either the revenue from duties must be collected in the ports of the rebel states, or the port must be closed to importations from abroad, is generally admitted. If neither of these things be done, our revenue laws are substantially repealed; the sources which supply our treasury will be dried up; we shall have no money to carry on the government; the nation will become bankrupt before the next crop of corn is ripe. There will be nothing to furnish means of subsistence to the army; nothing to keep our navy afloat; nothing to pay the salaries of public officers; the present order of things must come to a dead stop.

Given the serious financial difficulties the Union would face if the Southern states were a separate republic on its border engaging in duty-free trade with Britain, the Post urged the Union to hold on to its custom houses in the Southern ports and have them continue to collect duty. The Post goes on to say that incoming ships to the "rebel states" that try to evade the North’s custom houses should be considered as carrying contraband and be intercepted.

Observers in Britain looked beyond the rhetoric of "preserve the Union" and saw what was really at stake. Charles Dickens views on the subject were typical:

Union means so many millions a year lost to the South; secession means the loss of the same millions to the North. The love of money is the root of this, as of many other evils. The quarrel between the North and South is, as it stands, solely a fiscal quarrel.

Karl Marx seconded this view:

The war between the North and the South is a tariff war. The war is further, not for any principle, does not touch the question of slavery, and in fact turns on the Northern lust for sovereignty.

The South fought the war for essentially the same reason that the American colonies fought the Revolutionary War. The central grievance of the American colonies in the 18th century was the taxes imposed on them by Britain. Colonists particularly objected to the Stamp Act, which required them to purchase an official British stamp and place it on all documents in order for them to be valid. The colonists also objected to the import tariff that Britain placed on sugar and other goods (the Sugar Act).

After the enactment of what was called the "Tariff of Abomination" in 1828, promoted by Henry Clay, the tax on imports ranged between 20-30%. It rose further in March 1861 when Lincoln, at the start of his presidency, signed the Morrill Tariff into law. This tax was far more onerous than the one forced on the American colonies by Britain in the 18th century.

Lincoln coerced the South to fire the first shots when, against the initial advice of most of his cabinet, he dispatched ships carrying troops and munitions to resupply Fort Sumter, site of the customs house at Charleston. Charleston militia took the bait and bombarded the fort on April 12, 1861. After those first shots were fired the pro-Union press branded Southern secession an "armed rebellion" and called for Lincoln to suppress it.

Congress was adjourned at the time and for the next three months, ignoring his constitutional duty to call this legislative branch of government back in session during a time of emergency, Lincoln assumed dictatorial powers and did things, like raise an army, that only Congress is supposed to do. He shut down newspapers that disagreed with his war policy, more than 300 of them. He ordered his military officers to lock up political opponents, thousands of them. Although the exact number is not known, Lincoln may well have arrested and imprisoned more than 20,000 political opponents, southern sympathizers, and people suspected of being disloyal to the Union, creating what one researcher has termed a 19th century "American gulag," a forerunner of the 20th century’s political prison and labor camps in the former Soviet Union. Lincoln denied these nonviolent dissenters their right of free speech and suspended the privilege of Habeas Corpus, something only Congress in a time of war has the power to do. Lincoln’s soldiers arrested civilians, often arbitrarily, without any charges being filed; and, if held at all, military commissions conducted trials. He permitted Union troops to arrest the Mayor of Baltimore (then the third largest city in the Union), its Chief of Police and a Maryland congressman, along with 31 state legislators. When Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney wrote an opinion that said these actions were unlawful and violated the Constitution, Lincoln ignored the ruling.

Lincoln called up an army of 75,000 men to invade the seven southern states that had seceded and force them back into the Union. By unilaterally recruiting troops to invade these states, without first calling Congress into session to consider the matter and give its consent, Lincoln made an error in judgment that cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans. At the time, only seven states had seceded. But when Lincoln announced his intention to bring these states back into the Union by force, four additional states – Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas – seceded and joined the Confederacy. Slavery was not the issue. The issue was the very nature of the American union. If the President of the United States intended to hold the Union together by force, they wanted out. When these four states seceded and joined the Confederacy rather than send troops to support Lincoln’s unconstitutional actions, the Confederacy became much more viable and the war much more horrible.

From the time Lincoln entered politics as a candidate for state legislature in 1832, he championed a political agenda known as the "American System." First advocated by his idol and mentor, Henry Clay, it was a three-part program of protective tariffs, internal improvements, and centralized banking. This program "tied economic development to strong centralized national authority," as Robert Johannsen puts it in Lincoln, the South, And Slavery. Lincoln believed that import tariffs were necessary, at the expense of consumers. He believed that American industries needed to be shielded from foreign competition and cheap imported goods. The "internal improvements" he advocated were simply subsidies for industry, i.e., corporate welfare. Abraham Lincoln was the first president to give us centralized banking, with paper money not backed by gold.

The Constitution of the Confederate States of America forbid protectionist tariffs, outlawed government subsidies to private businesses, and made congressional appropriations subject to approval by a two-thirds majority vote. It enjoined Congress from initiating constitutional amendments, leaving that power to the constituent states; and limited its president to a single six-year term. When the South lost, instead of a Jeffersonian republic of free trade and limited constitutional government, the stage was set for the United States to become an American Empire ruled by a central authority. In starting his war against the Confederate States, Lincoln was not seeking the "preservation of the Union" in its traditional sense. He sought the preservation of the Northern economy by means of transforming the federal government into a centralized welfare-warfare-police state.

The failure of the South to win the War for Southern Independence was a blow to liberty. The Confederate lyrics to the song "Battle Cry of Freedom" read:

Down with the eagle
And up with the cross!
We’ll rally ‘round the bonny flag
We’ll rally once again
Shout, shout the battle cry of freedom

Paroled from the prison camp at Johnson’s Island, Ohio shortly before the end of the war, my grandparent Louis Hicks walked, barefoot, back to North Carolina to his home named "Liberty Hall" in the town of Faison. But instead of enjoying a new birth of freedom, he and his family, along with other people in the South, had to endure a twelve-year military occupation and an oppressive Reconstruction instituted by radical republicans.

Reflecting on the War for Southern Independence let us hope that the Confederate Battle Flag that Louis Thomas Hicks’ North Carolina regiment carried with it into battle at Gettysburg, with the cross of Scotland’s patron saint emblazoned on it, will come to be viewed in the 21st century, not as an badge of slavery, which it is not, but as a symbol of opposition to centralized government power and tyranny.

Notes

The Confederate Battle Flag has 13 white stars superimposed on a blue Cross of St. Andrew, centered on a red backdrop. Each star represents a state that seceded from the Union, which includes Kentucky and Missouri, the last two states to be admitted into the Confederacy in late 1861. Throughout the war, however, they remained largely under Union control. St. Andrew was the younger brother of St. Peter and is the patron saint of Scotland.

The population of the United States in 1860 was 31,101,000, of which 21,244,000 lived in the North and 10,957,000 in the Confederacy. In the Confederate states 5,447,000 of these people were white, 133,000 free black, and 3,951,000 were slaves. There were 320,000 deaths in Union forces, 3.2 percent of the total male population; and 300,000 deaths in the Confederate forces, 9.7 percent of the (white) male population. This death rate, with the current population of the United States 284,050,000, would be equivalent to 6.5 million men being killed today. Most of those killed were teenagers and men in their 20s.

In his First Inaugural Address, for United States Lincoln uses the term Union. In his Gettysburg Address, however, instead of Union he uses the word nation, which implies a closer association of states under centralized control, as opposed to a looser association connoted by the word Union, of separate and sovereign states. Likewise, in his Second Inaugural Address Lincoln only uses the word Union when referring to the country as it was when he gave his First Inaugural Address four years earlier, before the war began; he uses the word nation for the country it had become in 1865. In these two later speeches he says that the war was fought to preserve the "nation," that the "nation" shall have a new birth of freedom, and that we must bind up the "nation’s wounds."

In a civil war the warring sides battle for control of the central government. The term "civil war" was coined in England in the 17th century to identify the war fought between supporters of Charles I and the Parliamentarians led by Oliver Cromwell for control of the government. The South had no designs on the federal government of the North, headquartered in Washington, D. C. It did not want to run that government. The breakaway Southern States asserted their independence, like the American colonies did from Britain eighty-five years before, formed their own Confederate States of America and placed their seat of government in Richmond, Virginia.

The American Republic was founded on the concept that all men are created equal, with inalienable rights to life, liberty and property. Black slaves, being sentient human beings, should therefore be as equally free and independent, with equality under the law, as White human beings; but, as slaves, they were also someone’s property and subject to the due process of law in that regard. Federalist Paper No. 54 addresses the problem of counting slaves in the population with regard to legislative representation, concluding that slaves are divested as "two-fifths of the MAN" and three-fifths as capital, or property.

After the war Robert E. Lee also wrote, "The best men in the South have long desired to do away with the institution [of slavery], and were quite willing to see it abolished. But with them in relation to this subject is a serious question today. Unless some humane course, based on wisdom and Christian principles, is adopted, you do them great injustice in setting them free." (Thomas Nelson Page, Robert E. Lee: Man and Soldier [New York, 1911], page 38.) Lee did not own slaves (he freed his in the 1850s), nor did a number of his most trusted lieutenants, including generals A. P. Hill, Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson, J. E. Johnston, and J. E. B. Stuart.

The source references for these quotes can be found in Charles Adams’ book When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern Secession.

Colonists also objected to the search and seizure of their property without a specific warrant, and to being denied the right of trial by jury, which the British instituted to help them more easily catch and imprison smugglers who avoided paying taxes on imported goods.

Suggested Reading

Books

Charles Adams, When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern Secession (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000)

In this book Charles Adams does to our understanding of the Civil War what Copernicus did to our ancestors’ understanding of the solar system. The sun does not rotate around the Earth and slavery did not cause the Civil War. Adams presents a compelling case for the true, financial cause of the war. A must read.
Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men: A History of the American Civil War (Chicago: Open Court, 1996)

With extensive documentation and in an erudite fashion, the author shows how the Civil War was, indeed, a disaster for liberty. The bibliographic essays at the end of each chapter all alone are worth the price of the book.
Francis W. Springer, War for What? (Nashville: Bill Coats Ltd., 1990)

A little known but very insightful view of the Civil War published a year before the author died at the age of 92. He puts the African slave trade, import tariffs, the South’s two-crop economy, Lincoln, and the true nature of the war into clear focus, anticipating Adams’ groundbreaking work by a decade.
David Gordon (Editor), Secession, State & Liberty (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1998)

Eleven articles on secession based on papers presented at a conference on this subject by the Ludwig von Mises Institute in 1995. Those by Donald Livingson, Steven Yates, Murray N. Rothbard, Thomas DiLorenzo, and James Ostrowski are particularly important.
Lerone Bennett, Jr., Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream (Chicago: Johnson, 2000)
Bennett debunks the standard view of Lincoln as "the great emancipator." He shows that Lincoln believed Blacks to be an inferior race. Consequently, they could never have equal "political" rights with White people and be given the full prerogatives of citizenship. The author presents irrefutable evidence that Lincoln wanted to have freed Blacks transported, at government expense, out of the country and relocated somewhere else.

Articles

By Thomas J. DiLorenzo:

* "The Great Centralizer: Abraham Lincoln and the War Between the States" (Fall 1998)
* "Lincoln’s Economic Legacy" (February 9, 2001)
* "Trade and the Rise of Freedom" (January 31, 2000)
* "Henry Clay: National Socialist" (The Free Market, March 1998)
* "Libertarians and the Confederate Battle Flag"
* "Birth of an Empire" (The Free Market, July 1997)

By Joe Sobran

* "Slavery in Perspective" (May 31, 2001)
* "McCarthyism and Lincolnism" (April 26, 2001)
* "The Ultimate Lincoln" (April 5, 2001)
* "Lincoln with Fangs" (February 8, 2001)
* "Slavery, No; Secession, Yes" (January 16, 2001)
* "How Tyranny Came to America"

woody wilco and bragg and dylan - just in case you missed the mermaid avenue volumes

2007-10-17T04:55:00.000-07:00

Robert Christgau: Dean of American Rock Critics

Folksinger, Wordslinger, Start Me a Song

It's a credit to the mythmakers of the Woody Guthrie revival that they've never claimed their hero was the proletarian everyman he sold himself as. Not that they had much choice--by the time Guthrie was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988, Joe Klein's thorough and brilliant Woody Guthrie: A Life had fondly but firmly debunked the thank-God-I'm-a-country boy aw-shucksism the folksinger had put forth as an image-conscious man of the people. The son of a small-time Oklahoma real estate man whose luck ran out long before the Depression, Guthrie fit a downwardly mobile mold that turns out misfits like child abuse. He had the gift of optimism, but he knew more spiritual darkness than he let on, and he never resolved his internal conflict between principled collectivism and ragged individualism. He drank too much, he was always chasing skirt, he hit the road at the drop of a hint, and he was possessed by a creative drive so feverish that he left what Dave Marsh estimates as 750,000 unpublished words, including hundreds of lyrics--mostly from the '40s, when his second wife Marjorie was tracking his outpourings, with many more gone. But for all their eagerness to promulgate Guthrie's political vision, the likes of Marsh and Billy Bragg--the driving force behind the most miraculous of the Guthrie revivals, Mermaid Avenue, now into an improbably spirited second volume of new music fitted to old words--are decent and aware enough to understand that there's no future for a politics that ignores unseemly complexities.

Still, canonization invites exaggeration. So it's significant that the biggest overstatements in the uncommonly consistent Hard Travelin': The Life and Legacy of Woody Guthrie, a book based on a 1996 symposium at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, involve music--the Hall of Fame guy stuck with specifying Woody's impact on rock and roll (John Lennon? Bob Marley? please), the Smithsonian guy who can't resist ranking him with Armstrong, Dylan, and Presley (what about James Brown and Dr. Dre?). It's even more significant that although the 13 contributors chip in two excellent essays on his leftism and a sharply sympathetic survey of his 600 surviving drawings, none devotes more than a few passing references to Woody's music per se--not even ace compiler Jeff Place, who details Guthrie's recording history while barely mentioning his singing or playing. Nor does his life story feature that signal moment when the hero obtains his first guitar and isn't seen again for three months, so obsessed is he with learning chords. For Guthrie, music was one interest among many. He was deeper into art, supporting himself as a sign painter. And when he performed around town with his Corncob Trio he was a comedian first. The adolescent author of a lost psychology treatise who somehow managed to turn out daily columns for the Communist press while pursuing his musical career in L.A. and New York, Woody Guthrie loved language above all else.

"I ain't a writer. I want that understood. I'm just a little one-cylinder guitar picker," Woody once wrote, but note that this was a man who signed his letters "True as the average" and was about to churn out the less-true-than-average autobiography Bound for Glory. For sure he warn't much of a musician. His singing was famously unassertive, he never claimed to pick on two cylinders, his recordings benefited inordinately when his negligible sidekick Cisco Houston pitched in, and although Guthrie liked to argue that the simple old tunes were best because they were the ones folks wanted to hear, he showed small ability to concoct a simple new tune out of them, as has always been folk and pop practice. This is why there's no equating him with Dylan, who's taken his ideas so much further--it's like equating King Oliver with Louis Armstrong because Armstrong comes out of Oliver. By all means invest in Smithsonian Folkways' The Asch Recordings, which collects all four of Place's meticulous reissues in one box. The first volume's much the most listenable, but throughout it's a fascinating and well-conceived overview of an American artist who surpasses, say, his mutual appreciator John Steinbeck. Just don't imagine it's this year's Anthology of American Folk Music.

Sure Guthrie was influenced by Jimmie Rodgers and Blind Lemon Jefferson and all the songs his crazy doomed mama knew. And when he hit the road, damn right he took his guitar. But I say we see him clearer when we look beyond music for an immediate forebear: fellow Okie Will Rogers. This deeply affable part-Cherokee, who like Guthrie was a newspaper columnist as well as a performer, became a superstar saying things like "I never met a man I didn't like," "This country is here on account of the real common sense of the Big Normal Majority," and "Don't gamble. Take all your savings and buy some good stock and hold it till it goes up, then sell it. If it don't go up, don't buy it." Guthrie loved him, as he loved Charlie Chaplin, whose impishness he also absorbed; the goofy hayseed he played on the L.A. radio shows where he first made his name was based on Rogers's shtick. And though many other '30s entertainers--including Bing Crosby, chief among the "sissy-voiced" jukebox lotharios Guthrie railed against--also drew on Rogers, none of them told friends that the men they most admired were Jesus and Will Rogers, much less named their firstborn sons Will Rogers Guthrie.

In part because Guthrie carried that guitar, he was never circumscribed by Rogers's model, and he obviously outgrew it. Rogers was no conservative, but his folksy humanism was pretty soft--Guthrie met plenty of men he didn't like, most of them moneyed. Soon the trouble he saw--and suffered--on his escapes from the Dust Bowl had planted in him a radicalism brought to fruition by the analysis and community of the Communist Party's Popular Front. And that wasn't all the CP provided. It also gave Guthrie an outlet and an audience for language the way he wanted to use it, language that honored the actually existing plainspeak of the folks whose voices he knew so much better than such perceived rivals as Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg, touched unpredictably with a fanciful wordplay so extreme at times that it seems to prefigure the dementia of the disease that soon destroyed his mind and body. But--like Whitman and Sandburg, like Joe Hill and Robert Frost too, but also like all the matinee idols and pop stars he considered enemies of the people--Guthrie chose to project those words through a cunningly fabricated public persona.

No one understood this more profoundly than Bob Dylan, which is why that shape-shifting fame-gamer was as moved by Bound for Glory as by any of Guthrie's recordings. It's probably fair to say that without Dylan, Guthrie would have had no impact on rock and roll, and that as it stands he's had plenty. Although some of his ideas would have lived on because they weren't exclusive to him--the recycled folk melody above all, and also the vocal deadpan, what Wilfred Mellers called his "monody of deprivation," which has lots of relatives in folk and country--it was Dylan who proved once and for all how musical logocentrism could be. Guthrie was a page writer of distinction--Pastures of Plenty: A Self-Portrait, which Marsh and Harold Leventhal constructed from the file drawers circa 1990, has the same unvarnished magic he cultivated in Bound for Glory. But it was in song--in rhymed doggerel shot through with the ordinary, often literally tuneless yet touched by the natural rhythms and casual eloquence that will rise to the surface of people's speech for as long as they talk to each other--that he found his artistic inspiration and his artistic calling. And it was Dylan who took that calling to the next level, convincing rock and roll that popular song's immemorial tradition of ambitious dreamers scribbling verses could go anywhere it wanted. It was Dylan who opened the floodgates to species of poetry good and bad that had more precedents in Guthrie's wilder flights than in the well-honed bon mots of Broadway's highest brows.

So please don't suspect me of disrespect aforethought when I get better message from Bruce Springsteen's revved-up "Riding in My Car" and Ramblin' Jack Elliott's wobbly "1913 Massacre" on the new Righteous Babe tribute 'Til We Outnumber 'Em than from Guthrie's originals, or when I point out that James Talley's calm, faithful Woody Guthrie and Songs of My Oklahoma Home has a warm spiritual clarity Guthrie lacks. And please don't think I'm being mean when I declare the two Mermaid Avenues the finest Guthrie albums there are. The new one's rougher and more garage, with none of the debut's instant grace, but it's far more than the outtakes you may first hear. The rancor Jeff Tweedy works up on "Feed of Man" packs a sharper political jolt than anything on the first volume, or anything I can recall from the Smithsonian box either; the long love ballad "Remember the Mountain Bed" is simply gorgeous; for grace there's Corey Harris and Natalie Merchant; and on it goes. Really, folks--the gawky Bragg and the aimless Wilco, outdoing themselves yet again. Is it Guthrie's myth that turns them into something like great artists? Or is it simply his words, within which is concealed the secret of a music he himself rarely unlocked? Volume three should be all union songs. We could use a bunch of good ones.

Village Voice, June 6, 2000

want to know the future of Iraq? Follow the Oil

2007-09-14T17:35:00.000-07:00

After our longest break yet, DGR is back recycling essential stories you might otherwise miss.

This one was a particularly fascinating glimpse into the the plutocratic world of the extended bush crime syndicate:

A Surge, and Then a Stab
By Paul Krugman
The New York Times

Friday 14 September 2007

To understand what's really happening in Iraq, follow the oil money, which already knows that the surge has failed.

Back in January, announcing his plan to send more troops to Iraq, President Bush declared that "America will hold the Iraqi government to the benchmarks it has announced."

Near the top of his list was the promise that "to give every Iraqi citizen a stake in the country's economy, Iraq will pass legislation to share oil revenues among all Iraqis."

There was a reason he placed such importance on oil: oil is pretty much the only thing Iraq has going for it. Two-thirds of Iraq's G.D.P. and almost all its government revenue come from the oil sector. Without an agreed system for sharing oil revenues, there is no Iraq, just a collection of armed gangs fighting for control of resources.

Well, the legislation Mr. Bush promised never materialized, and on Wednesday attempts to arrive at a compromise oil law collapsed.

What's particularly revealing is the cause of the breakdown. Last month the provincial government in Kurdistan, defying the central government, passed its own oil law; last week a Kurdish Web site announced that the provincial government had signed a production-sharing deal with the Hunt Oil Company of Dallas, and that seems to have been the last straw.

Now here's the thing: Ray L. Hunt, the chief executive and president of Hunt Oil, is a close political ally of Mr. Bush. More than that, Mr. Hunt is a member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, a key oversight body.

Some commentators have expressed surprise at the fact that a businessman with very close ties to the White House is undermining U.S. policy. But that isn't all that surprising, given this administration's history. Remember, Halliburton was still signing business deals with Iran years after Mr. Bush declared Iran a member of the "axis of evil."

No, what's interesting about this deal is the fact that Mr. Hunt, thanks to his policy position, is presumably as well-informed about the actual state of affairs in Iraq as anyone in the business world can be. By putting his money into a deal with the Kurds, despite Baghdad's disapproval, he's essentially betting that the Iraqi government - which hasn't met a single one of the major benchmarks Mr. Bush laid out in January - won't get its act together. Indeed, he's effectively betting against the survival of Iraq as a nation in any meaningful sense of the term.

The smart money, then, knows that the surge has failed, that the war is lost, and that Iraq is going the way of Yugoslavia. And I suspect that most people in the Bush administration - maybe even Mr. Bush himself - know this, too.

After all, if the administration had any real hope of retrieving the situation in Iraq, officials would be making an all-out effort to get the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki to start delivering on some of those benchmarks, perhaps using the threat that Congress would cut off funds otherwise. Instead, the Bushies are making excuses, minimizing Iraqi failures, moving goal posts and, in general, giving the Maliki government no incentive to do anything differently.

And for that matter, if the administration had any real intention of turning public opinion around, as opposed to merely shoring up the base enough to keep Republican members of Congress on board, it would have sent Gen. David Petraeus, the top military commander in Iraq, to as many news media outlets as possible - not granted an exclusive appearance to Fox News on Monday night.

All in all, Mr. Bush's actions have not been those of a leader seriously trying to win a war. They have, however, been what you'd expect from a man whose plan is to keep up appearances for the next 16 months, never mind the cost in lives and money, then shift the blame for failure onto his successor.

In fact, that's my interpretation of something that startled many people: Mr. Bush's decision last month, after spending years denying that the Iraq war had anything in common with Vietnam, to suddenly embrace the parallel.

Here's how I see it: At this point, Mr. Bush is looking forward to replaying the political aftermath of Vietnam, in which the right wing eventually achieved a rewriting of history that would have made George Orwell proud, convincing millions of Americans that our soldiers had victory in their grasp but were stabbed in the back by the peaceniks back home.

What all this means is that the next president, even as he or she tries to extricate us from Iraq - and prevent the country's breakup from turning into a regional war - will have to deal with constant sniping from the people who lied us into an unnecessary war, then lost the war they started, but will never, ever, take responsibility for their failures.

A patient discovers real medicine after a decade of 'the best medicine in the world' i.e. Western Med.

2007-08-14T18:35:00.000-07:00

This is a great intro article to Homeopathy and how it saved the health and sanity of one smart and attentive fellow. Enjoy.
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A Painful Road to Homeopathic Cure

by K.J.
I HAD ALWAYS felt that I understood disease. If you came down with an illness, you called up your doctor who prescribed an antibiotic; within 48 hours, it cured you. Feel bad, take pill, feel better.

But by the time I had my first meeting with my homeopath, David Kramer, my belief in the infallibility of the medical system had crashed. I was in pain, I was angry and extremely depressed. Nine years of chronic joint pain, degenerative disc disease, torn cartilage, and a host of other physical problems were severely limiting how I used my body. I couldn't even throw a ball around with my son in our backyard, or make a simple repair around the house without suffering debilitating neck, back, and shoulder pain for days.

I felt as if I was going into a deep physical decline. I no longer worried whether I could take care of my family after the age of 60; I was worried about taking care of them after the age of 40. As I described to David, I felt as if something was "eating me from the inside out."

The Progression of Physical Woes

My physical symptoms could be traced back to 1985, when I first started feeling an odd tingling around the right side of my abdomen. My brother years ago had suffered a debilitating case of shingles, and I instinctively knew that this was one of the first symptoms. I called my doctor who had me in the next day, pronounced my diagnosis correct, and put me on massive doses of Zovirax. It never progressed beyond minor irritation.

About a year later, while in the gym bench-pressing on my lunch hour, I felt as if a fuse blew in my back. By the time I returned to my office, not only did I have a sore neck, but I was having trouble using my hands.

I went to an orthopedist who, after X-rays and CAT scans, told me I had herniated two disks in my cervical spine. He passed me on to a surgeon who thankfully declined to operate, told me my weight-lifting days were over, and sent me on to physical therapy. Unfortunately my neck pain became chronic, and I began having what would be many years of muscle spasm and pain along my upper back.

Then one morning in 1988, while taking a shower, I seemed to be getting soap in my right eye no matter how hard I squeezed it shut. Ignoring it, I got out of the shower, toweled off, and started to brush my teeth. But toothpaste and water just came bubbling out of the right side of my mouth. I looked in the mirror and saw a slight droop in my right eye and on the right side of my mouth. I had developed symptoms of Bell's Palsy.

Over the next few days, I was treated with decreasing doses of Prednisone and went back to the doctor for follow-up. I was passed along to a physical therapist, who prescribed a hand-held electrical stimulation gun that, like a cattle prod, I was to use to stimulate the affected side of my face with short, electrical shocks. But muscular function did not begin to return until about a month later and, up to now, only about 80 percent of the function has returned.

My bouts with neck pain continued and I tried returning to the gym. But using weights badly aggravated my back and neck. I was beginning to get frustrated, because my feeling of well-being was deeply tied into my sense of physical strength and appearance. Along with the disfigurement of the Bell's, I began to feel a little depressed.

Because I needed some kind of hard exercise (not only was I competitive, I loved to sweat!), I picked up the game of racquetball. But after only a few months, in April 1991, while reaching for a ball, I felt as if my whole right shoulder had popped in and out, complete with sound effects. I excused myself, changed, and headed home.

The next morning, I had trouble moving my right shoulder and arm, and I was in intense pain. I was recommended to a local orthopedic surgeon, who offered me either surgery, where they would scrape away part of my offending acromioclavicular joint, or physical therapy to strengthen the area. I opted for physical therapy.

Now along with chronic neck pain, I had a shoulder that felt weakened and prone to further injury. Where once physically I felt invulnerable, I suddenly started to feel as if I was beginning to break down.

If I had any doubts that there was something deeply wrong, the point was made again the following month, May 1991, when upon standing up from a kneeling position, I heard the rip of cartilage in my left knee. After X-rays and MRIs, the marvel of technology where you are slipped into a claustrophobia-inducing tube for up to 45 minutes while huge magnets give the atoms of your body their marching orders, the doctor again offered me either surgery or physical therapy. I had already done my homework, was convinced that torn cartilage left alone would lead to early arthritis, and opted for surgery. Following the surgery, I went into physical therapy. I got back the use of the knee, a little stiffer and a little older.

Then, two months later, July 1991, I had my first major lower back episode. Walking back home one Sunday morning with the newspapers under my arm, I felt a dull pain beginning in my lower back. By the time I reached home, I felt as if someone was digging a fist into my back and I was sent sprawling onto the floor. Diagnosis: lumbar disc herniation; recommendation: two days of bed rest, anti-inflammatory medications, and physical therapy. Although the pain would eventually subside, it always reminded me it was there.

Then, in December 1991, I had a major flare-up of neck pain along with tingling in my hands. Back into physical therapy.

One month later, January 1992, the cartilage in my right knee tore. Again, first X-rays, then MRI, then surgery. But this time the knee didn't heal. So, exactly one year later, in December 1992, after telling my tale of woe to another surgeon, the right knee was operated on again, fresh tears were found, and more cartilage was removed.

About seven months later, in August 1993, I herniated a thoracic disc. Pain around my right side sent me back to my doctor, who sent me back to the neurologist for tests then back into physical therapy. "There must be something really wrong here," I remember telling him. "Are all of these injuries just coincidental?"

Then in November 1993, I had a major flare-up of neck pain with hand numbness and tingling. Again more tests, more MRIs. Again more physical therapy. My depression was growing and I was becoming obsessed not only with the pain, but in doing everything I could to avoid it.

By June of 1994, since I could no longer work out in a gym, I took up cycling. I could at least work up a sweat and burn off some of the weight I had gained from lengthening periods of inactivity because of injury. But chronic pain had turned me into an Advil junkie. I began taking them habitually in the morning, afternoon, and evening. Then, when the Advil didn't seem to work anymore, I started taking huge doses of aspirin, which seemed to help.

Then one Saturday evening, my right toe started to hurt as if I had stubbed it on a wall. I thought maybe I had tightened my cycling shoes too much, shrugged it off, and went to dinner with my wife and friends. The next morning, the toe started to swell and pain began in the joint. I called the doctor's office and my call was returned the next morning. By then the swelling started to involve the entire right foot and the joint in my big toe began to feel as if it was filled with sand.

The doctor told me I had gout, prescribed an anti-inflammatory and told me to stay off the foot. By that evening I couldn't take the pain anymore. The whole foot was now involved and I felt I was going to lose my mind over the pain. I called a doctor friend of ours, who after hearing the symptoms immediately put me on Colchicine. The next morning, he confirmed the diagnosis, put me on a vegetarian diet, and told me I had to wait it out.

The next day the pain started to subside. But that evening, I awoke in the middle of the night with a slicing pain back to front, around my right side along my rib cage. I got out of bed, now drenched in sweat and in enough pain that I was debating whether I should go to the emergency room. I instead opted for an ice pack, which seemed to help, and called the orthopedic surgeon the next morning. He told me it sounded like I had herniated another thoracic disk. Injury after injury had become more frightening to me. "Why is this happening to me?" I asked him. He looked at me and said, "I guess it's just bad luck."

Prior to going back into physical therapy for my back, I returned to my neurologist for further testing, including a second EMG and blood tests. I had given him my history and told him there must be something deeply wrong. To me, this growing string of injuries and chronic pain was a warning. But after additional blood testing for diabetes, there were no systemic causes to be found. There was something wrong that nobody was seeing. I felt as if I was dying, part by part, at an ever-accelerating rate.

And I also felt as if nobody was really listening to me.

Finding Homeopathy

About a month later, at a birthday party, I met a woman who seemed acutely aware of the pain I was in. I walked in a contorted position, could not sit still for any length of time, felt completely isolated and depressed, and was barely joining in any conversations. She was studying homeopathy and asked me if I knew anything about it. I said no, but basically gave her a rundown of everything modern medicine had done to me.

She told me to go down to my local health food store and search out three remedies, Arnica montana, Ruta graveolens, and Rhus toxicodenron. She also gave me the name of a homeopath she respected, David Kramer.

Before I went to see him, he had let me know that we would spend at least two hours together. We actually spent close to three. After listening to my physical complaints, he started asking me more penetrating questions, about my likes and dislikes, and "where" was I and "who" was I when I first started having these medical problems. Who was surrounding me, friends, family, job situation? He asked me about pressures in my life and specifically about my feelings about things. He asked me about losses and their significance to me (I had recently lost a close childhood friend to kidney cancer).

Someone was asking me how I felt and was actually listening!

As I talked to David, I felt that I was finally giving someone the entire picture of a deep sadness that I had been carrying around for many years. There were times when just the passing thought of my friend and the years that we shared would cause me to cry, something that I was not accustomed to doing. He was a touchstone for me, and even though as time went on we went down our separate paths, we had talked every day on the phone. This was something I missed terribly.

This also brought up other losses for me, particularly the loss of my father whom I understood only as I approached the age at which he died. The loss had even greater meaning when I would sit with my children and show them pictures of their grandfather. I would point to him and say, "This is my father like I am your father." To them it was only a picture. To me, it was someone's hand that I would never hold again.

I went further and deeper with David. The session seemed to pick up speed as we talked about friends and family. I felt I had no choice. David was a stranger, but I also considered him a last hope.

After close to three hours, I was pretty much spent. There was nothing left to say. I had given him everything that I could see at that time. David put his pen down and considered me for a few moments, asking a few questions about some of the things I said. Then he began to explain a bit about how homeopathy affects the patient. Not about the laws of similars, but because he saw how deeply I was hurting, he began to explain about the cure taking place on all levels, physically, emotionally, and spiritually.

My Introduction to the Remedy

David used the analogy of a train moving down a track. At some point, the train became sidetracked onto a diseased pathway. The job that we faced was to stop the train. Then, as he explained, we have to get the train to reverse itself to the spot where it became mis-routed and then get it back on the right track.

David explained that throughout the cure, since we were backtracking over old ground, I might begin to experience old injuries and emotional upsets as I moved back through them again. I might have recurrences and shouldn't be upset by them. He explained how the disease moves through the body, from the inside out, and said I might experience this as skin problems. Rather than try to treat them topically, I was to call him with any changes that I noticed.

He did another curious thing. He chose a bottle out of a case, held it in his hand and looked at me. He then stopped, considered for a moment, and said, "No, let's try something that's a little more aggressive." I asked him what he meant and he explained that ordinarily he might give just a single dose of the remedy in the office. But he was going to approach this differently.

He took out another vial and had me stand up in front of him. "Hold the vial in your fist," he said, "and then raise your arm stiffly to your side."

I took the vial in my hand, closed my hand, made a fist and then raised my arm up. David came up to me and then, as if playing an old schoolyard trick, he tried to push my arm down as though it were a pump handle. But my arm stayed where it was.

"Oh, come on," I thought. "I've just spilled my heart out to someone who's behaving like a storefront tarot-card reader."

"David," I said, "how do I know that this wouldn't happen with any remedy in that box?" David grinned and brought his case over to me. "Pick any vial," he said. I chose one and he again told me to make a fist and hold my arm out. He easily pushed my arm down to my side. "Do it again," I said and deliberately tried to hold my arm up. But once again, my arm gave way and he easily pushed it down to my side. "Let me hold the first vial again" I said. He gave me the vial, I made a fist and raised my arm. David couldn't push my arm down. "OK," I said, "what's in this stuff?"

He explained that it was a remedy called Carcinosin and that it would help to cure me. He gave me explicit, written instructions on how to handle it and on what to avoid, for example, caffeine, mint, and so forth.

The Journey to Cure

That afternoon, I prepared my first bottle of Carcinosin, in an LM/1 potency. Since I was already feeling better, having tried some Rhus tox, I looked forward to even more improvement.

But the next morning, I woke up, got out of bed, and suddenly felt like the Tin Man. My whole body momentarily stiffened. For some reason, I wasn't frightened and gradually, within a half hour, I began to loosen up.

Over the next few weeks, I gradually began to feel better. The pain in my neck and back continued to subside, and my energy level actually started to increase. More interesting were the emotional changes that began taking place. My depression began to lift and I didn't feel burdened anymore. Where I once had an explosive temper at work, I became much more reasonable and focused. My sense of humor began to return and I was no longer snapping at everyone around me.

Over the next few months, my dreams became more vivid. Old experiences, things I hadn't thought about in years began coming back to me. I let them reveal themselves to me, watched in wonder as they literally unfolded in front of me in movie fashion. Then, they evaporated, as dreams do, leaving me with a sense of calm and what I can only describe as revelation.

There seemed to be so many things that I had lost touch with, so many memories and people that I had buried down deep over the years. Now they were coming back to visit, old friends that I had missed, memories that I should never have tried to forget. I realized that any experience was important, any event, any person. To deny them was to deny what you are made of. To forget them was to diminish yourself.

As I began feeling better, I started to take more responsibility for my cure. I began to read what I could about homeopathy, but didn't limit myself to just one alternative path. Since I was still having muscular spasms across my neck and back, I began investigating massage and came across a book by Bonnie Prudden on trigger point therapy. It also gave me some background in muscular structure and mechanics.

As the homeopathy worked on me at deeper levels, I began working more at the surogram of stretching and strengthening to help with my back pain. I invested in something called a Thera-Cane, a self massage tool that helped me get to those trigger points in my back to release the muscle spasms.

The more control I took, the more self-success I encountered, and the more encouraged I was to continue on an alternate path. I began looking more deeply into homeopathy. What interested me most was not necessarily the physical cure, but the deeper emotional and spiritual relief it seemed to offer. I gained a greater understanding of "disease" and how the disease cannot be separated from the patient. It is this lack of individuality, this lack of looking at the whole person, that allopathic medicine is most guilty of. What my previous doctors seemed to miss, and what I now understand, is that my disease had affected me not only physically, but also emotionally and spiritually. I had been declining on all levels. But they insisted on treating only those things that they could X-ray or scan or grow in petri dishes. They were missing "me."

Although I didn't experience any typical aggravations on the remedy, I did go through a healing crisis in March of 1995. A sudden high temperature sent me home from work. I had left a message for David that I was heading home feeling really sick, although fever seemed to be the main problem.

I got back home and immediately went to bed and slept for the next few hours. During that period, David had called and told my wife that the best thing was to let me sleep. He also asked her to pick up a bottle of Echinacea and gave her directions on how I should take it.

I remember one other significant thing: Along with the fever, my lower back started to hurt and began "bunching up." It had been months since I had experienced lower back pain. But in the middle of one night, I woke up suddenly to feel my lower back "release," as if two hands that had been tightly intertwined were now loosening up and sliding past each other. Within 24 hours of coming down with the high fever (103 degrees), it was gone. To this day, my lower back no longer hurts the way it once did.

It's been about a year and a half now since I began my journey into alternative cure. Back in September, about a year after I had started it, I told David I wanted to try to go off of the remedy. He said I should go with my instincts, that although he felt it might be too early, I should at least try.

Unfortunately, I had a precipitous drop in energy almost immediately. All I wanted to do was sleep and I was catching naps wherever I could. I began to lose motivation. After about a month of this, I called David and told him what was happening. He told me not to restart the remedy but to come in to talk. He felt that we should reconsider the remedy and possibly add another or switch completely.

After some analysis, David felt I was still on the right path with Carcinosin, but he thought I should cut the dosage to once a day. The deciding factor was that although my energy level was down, he felt I was still clearly focused and stable and had come a long way. The drop in energy he felt was just my system beginning to devote all its resources towards cure.

I am back on Carcinosin, once a day, at an LM/15 potency right now. David feels that by this summer, I should be able to dispense with the remedy and I tend to believe him.

So many things have come back to me now. I'm writing again, involved with my family, and much more focused at work. Where I was once highly confrontational, physically and emotionally, I'm now a much better listener. I've begun to see how rich life is and how important people are to me.

Most important, I've begun to understand the meaning of taking responsibility for your cure and not leaving it up to modern technology to tell you whether you are healthy or sick. The one thing that the "modern" medical industry seems to have done is to have taken away "hope." The lack of hope has become, for so many people with chronic illness, a part of their disease. Once that has happened, there is nothing much left.

I hope to begin formal study of homeopathy this fall with David at his recently founded Hudson Valley School of Classical Homeopathy. I look forward to the time when I can begin bringing to other people what has been returned to me: hope.

Pelosi or Sheehan - there is no choice

2007-08-13T16:38:00.000-07:00

It's About More Than Getting into Congress
A Vision for Cindy Sheehan's Campaign

By DANIEL ELLSBERG

I don't speak for Cindy Sheehan—whom I admire unreservedly—or for her campaign. When I say "we" in what follows, I'm really just giving my own perspective on this campaign, as one of her supporters.

I see this campaign as aiming much higher than putting Cindy Sheehan in Congress in 2009. Well before that time, we aim to help restore our Constitution, to end a war and avert starting a new one, and to remove from power two officials—George W. Bush and Richard Cheney--who block those objectives before they can do more harm in their remaining months in office.

That's an ambitious project; but there's a clear path to achieving it. We will work to change public awareness and, as a result, Nancy Pelosi's policies as Speaker of the House well before the election, by revealing to the public real alternatives to the courses she and the Democrats have followed so far, and demonstrating the breadth and strength of public support for those alternatives.

The truth is that Democrats, and even Republicans, can do much better than they have been doing, under Pelosi's leadership in the House, to protect our freedoms and our security. In this campaign we will publicize specifics of what can and should be done, and let the public tell the politicians which approach they want.

One essential demand is for Pelosi to encourage, rather than to block, Congressional investigations of past and ongoing administration deception, unwisdom, illegality and unconstitutionality in pursuing an aggressive war and in curtailing our rights. Such investigations, calling forth testimony under oath of current and former officials many of whom are eager to tell the truth at last, as well as demonstrating continued administration stonewalling, will almost surely lead to what does not yet exist: irresistible pressure from a belatedly-informed public for the impeachment and removal of Bush and Cheney.

Further, we need Pelosi's leadership in rescinding the unconstitutional parts—which will not leave much—of the Patriot Acts, the Military Commisions Act and the recent, outrageous legislation purporting to legalize warrantless wiretaps and data mining. And—absolutely essential to ending our war in Iraq, ever—public pressure is needed to demand that Congress defund our indefinite occupation, providing funds only for the orderly, safe withdrawal of all our troops, contractors and bases on an announced time-table.

If this campaign can help bring about even the first of these, it will also, almost incidentally, put Cindy Sheehan within reach of success in the election. This is, in fact, a historic campaign opportunity, exploiting an opening unique in American politics. At this moment, Cindy appears to face insuperable odds, opposing without party support a powerful, heavily-funded incumbent. But we aim to change that. All we are asking is for Nancy Pelosi to do what she should: to uphold her oath of office, which is not to obey a Commander-in-Chief or to enlarge a Democratic majority but to uphold and defend the Constitution.

If we can induce her to do that, then a year from now Cindy Sheehan should be running for an open seat, or against a brand-new incumbent appointed by our Republican governor. Nancy Pelosi, third in line for succession when Bush and Cheney are impeached and removed, will be in the White House. That will, as it happens, leave an open field for Cindy.

So you see, it's nothing personal for us. After all, as representatives of big business go, Nancy Pelosi is better than most. We don't aim to kick her out of politics, we aim to kick her upstairs. And there's a bonus: President Pelosi as a write-in candidate in November. She's far from ideal, from the point of view of members of this campaign, but for a Democrats we could do a lot worse. Off the record, some of us see this as the best strategy for keeping Hillary out of the White House without letting a Republican in.

So there it is: a vision for 2009 that can evoke some real enthusiasm: Cindy in the House, Pelosi in the White House, the US out of Iraq. Our Constitution back, and Bush and Cheney under criminal indictment.

[Remarks of Daniel Ellsberg at a press conference August 9, 2007 at which Cindy Sheehan announced her independent candidacy for the 8th Congressional District of California, an office now held by Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House.]

Daniel Ellsburg is the author of Secrets: a Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.

Is it already a done deal?

2007-08-01T16:25:00.000-07:00

Congress, Bush and the Real Constitutional Crisis
By Glenn W. Smith
t r u t h o u t | Guest Contributor

Tuesday 31 July 2007

America is in the midst of an authentic constitutional crisis, as the Bush administration moves to reduce Congress to little more than an irrelevant focus group and achieve what no US president has ever achieved: a true above-the-law presidency.

These are the stakes: Will the United States save what is left of its constitutional democracy by restoring checks and balances among the three branches of government?

When the US Supreme Court appointed George W. Bush to the White House by calling off the Florida recount in 2000, many pundits applauded the action because it allegedly headed off a constitutional crisis. That phony rationalization disguised what is now apparent: the real post-Florida 2000 constitutional crisis is the Bush administration's unprecedented, Constitution-destroying lust for power.

The fight should not be measured against partisan positioning for the 2008 elections. Democratic and Republican political consultants will view the crisis that way because that is their job. Consultants are hired to win elections, not save the Constitution. Congressional Democrats must look past the PowerPoints of their consultants. So should Republicans, who are struggling to distance themselves from Bush's negatives without asking the White House for a divorce.

But, there is now no other choice. Bush's drive to place permanent barriers between the people and their government, to lift the presidency above all laws, must be stopped.

Earlier this week, I wrote about the dangerous cultural narrative that frames Congress as an inept community. Our hero myths often include an inept community that must be saved by the lone hero. This cultural narrative has led to a broadly held view that Congress is just such a community.

For those Democrats and Republicans in Congress who remain captive to consultant myopia, I offer this observation. Political experts criticize Senator John Kerry for failing to adequately counter-attack the Swift Boaters. Kerry's mistake, however, was that his campaign behavior undermined his own mythic narrative - the narrative of a courageous Vietnam War hero. Voters who rejected Kerry did so not because they believed the Swift Boaters and were suspicious of his Vietnam valor, but because of the apparent lack of valor that was happening right before their eyes.

Congress is now being Swift Boated by the Bush administration. Americans will judge the valor of Congress, not as presented in ads in 2008, but as witnessed in real time, right now. Polls are no doubt suggesting that voters want Congress to address health care reform and the deteriorating economy. A political fight with Bush over the constitutional balance of power will look like a distraction, like politics as usual, like so much partisan squabbling. Today, it seems that Congress is overcoming that fear and preparing for the fight. They are moving in the right direction with the subpoena of Karl Rove and the opening of a perjury investigation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. We should applaud these actions, and pray for more.

The Bush gambit is to permanently derail progressive policy goals by building an impenetrable wall between the people and their government and by asserting ultimate and absolute presidential authority. These ambitions are made obvious by the administration's actions: Bush's unprecedented veto threats; the obvious "we-don't-really-care-what-you-think" attitude of Gonzales during his committee testimony; the administration questioning Senator Hillary Clinton's patriotism when she asked for details of Bush's Iraq plans; the refusal to disclose details of the administration's emergency government plan.

Even a temporary eviction from the White House beginning in 2009 would not deter the neoconservatives and their anti-democratic allies. A Democratic president will have her/his hands full cleaning up the Bush garbage. While a Democratic president would probably resist further steps along the above-the-law path, it's unlikely a president will willingly give up any power that has accrued to the presidency during the Bush reign. So, the right wing reasons, we'll just pick up in 2012 where we left off in 2008.

The federal courts, packed with conservative appointments, will also do what they can to establish permanent barriers between the American people and their government.

Congress has no choice but to destroy those barriers now. The crisis cannot be reduced to a messy or selfish partisan confrontation. Truth is, many Republicans are as interested as Democrats in saving our constitutional democracy. The further truth is, the stakes matter much, much more than any potential partisan consequences for either major party.

In the end, the battle for the future of America may make necessary the impeachment of a president who is very publicly moving to destroy our constitutional form of government. It may not seem the politically prudent thing to do. But this is a president who lied us into a war, who uses his pen to make laws (constitutionally reserved for Congress) through signing statements, who commutes the sentence of a convicted criminal to protect himself from scrutiny, who believes he has the right to declare anyone he wants an enemy combatant and then "disappear" that person the way we taught our tyrannical and thuggish client-state dictators to do during the Cold War. If these are not sufficient to justify a legal and constitutional challenge to the legitimacy of the Bush presidency, exactly what would a president have to do before we would impeach him?

Republicans and Democrats in Congress can look at our predicament and decide to save their own asses; Democrats running against Bush; Republicans running from Bush. That would be politics as usual.

Or, they can act fearlessly to save the country, and, despite what today's polls might tell them, earn the gratitude of voters who today might be wishing the nightmare will just come to an end. But the best way to end a nightmare is to wake up.

Congress can interrupt the narrative of its own ineptitude and restore the dignity and power of a people who are willing to govern themselves. But to do so, we must be awake to the real constitutional crisis that is at hand.

--------

Glenn W. Smith is a Senior Fellow with The Rockridge Institute.

DailyGlobeReview

last vestige of east european sensible socialism...wikileaks connection

The Minsk Election in a Wikileaks Mirror

Sad News from Mexico

Assange aticle by the new yorker - execellent as usual [by the ny'er]

A Reporter at Large

No Secrets

Julian Assange’s mission for total transparency.

by Raffi Khatchadourian June 7, 2010

tortured logic

Tortured Logic: It's Clear Where the Secrecy-Obsessed Obama Administration is Headed in Its Pursuit of WikiLeaks

ha aretz article on Israel's lack of realistic miltary options

Israel may have no military option against Iran

Israeli leaders should understand that the attack option isn't really an option - a thousand new fire trucks and even the Iron Dome missile defense system will not provide protection.

WikiLeaks Conjures Litvinenko’s Ghost [from anti-war.com]

Read more by Justin Raimondo

the trans-partisan alliance

Exactly the kind of article I am happy to link to. more to follow in comments

Vision: Can Human Beings Drop Their Divisive, Reactionary Thinking and Move to a Higher Level?

Sign up to stay up to date on the latest Vision headlines via email.

Excellent Mark LeVine editorial from Al Jezzera

Assange freed on Bail [from an article in 'the hindu'

Julian Assange freed on bail

Virginia Court calls mandatory Health Insurance UNCONSTITUTIONAL

guardian article on wikileaks Cyberwar : authenticity of swedish investigations : general updatew/ a few comments

WikiLeaks backlash: The first global cyber war has begun, claim hackers

Media

Technology

World news

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Comments in chronological order (Total 343 comments)

Wikileaks vs. the Empire

from counterpunch:

Julian Quixote

Hacktivists strike back at illegal U.S. Government hacking and spineless corporations

Hackers hit Mastercard and Visa over Wikileaks rowMastercard and Visa both say their customers' accounts are not at risk

Wikileaks Revelations

wikileak roundup

Consider this a counter-revolution brainstorm #1.1 : california ballot initiative to recognizing the incorrigible illegality of the federal government

Wikileaks mirror sites

dec 4 Assange interview

La noticia en otros webs

US government tells future employees DO NOT SHARE WIKILEAKS on facebook and twitter...

How the US media is dumping on WikiLeaks - and censoring the cable disclosures

How the US media is dumping on WikiLeaks - and censoring the cable disclosures

You destroy the conspiracy, in other words, by making it so paranoid of itself that it can no longer conspire

Julian Assange and the Computer Conspiracy; “To destroy this invisible government”

america is waiting [ no longer ! ]

Wikileaks : the historical insurance policy file

a different slant on the civil war than what I recall from Godwin!

woody wilco and bragg and dylan - just in case you missed the mermaid avenue volumes

want to know the future of Iraq? Follow the Oil

A patient discovers real medicine after a decade of 'the best medicine in the world' i.e. Western Med.

Pelosi or Sheehan - there is no choice

Is it already a done deal?