Category Archives: US government

The DOJ’s conspiracy to criminalize investigative journalism

The New York Times has reported that the Department of Justice is investigating the possibility that Julian Assange could be charged as a conspirator in the leaking of classified documents. The aim would be to draw a distinction between Assange’s actions and those of journalists. But as Glenn Greenwald points out, investigation journalism involves all sorts of actions which would fall foul of the same theory of conspiracy.

Very rarely do investigative journalists merely act as passive recipients of classified information; secret government programs aren’t typically reported because leaks just suddenly show up one day in the email box of a passive reporter. Journalists virtually always take affirmative steps to encourage its dissemination. They try to cajole leakers to turn over documents to verify their claims and consent to their publication. They call other sources to obtain confirmation and elaboration in the form of further leaks and documents. Jim Risen and Eric Lichtblau described how they granted anonymity to “nearly a dozen current and former official” to induce them to reveal information about Bush’s NSA eavesdropping program. Dana Priest contacted numerous “U.S. and foreign officials” to reveal the details of the CIA’s “black site” program. Both stories won Pulitzer Prizes and entailed numerous, active steps to cajole sources to reveal classified information for publication.

In sum, investigative journalists routinely — really, by definition — do exactly that which the DOJ’s new theory would seek to prove WikiLeaks did. To indict someone as a criminal “conspirator” in a leak on the ground that they took steps to encourage the disclosures would be to criminalize investigative journalism every bit as much as charging Assange with “espionage” for publishing classified information.

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Julian Assange freed on bail

The Guardian reports:

Britain’s high court today decided to grant bail to Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder who is wanted in Sweden for questioning over allegations of rape.

Justice Duncan Ouseley agreed with a decision by the City of Westminister earlier in the week to release Assange on strict conditions: £200,000 cash deposit, with a further £40,000 guaranteed in two sureties of £20,000 and strict conditions on his movement.

The New York Times reports:

Federal prosecutors, seeking to build a case against the WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange for his role in a huge dissemination of classified government documents, are looking for evidence of any collusion in his early contacts with an Army intelligence analyst suspected of leaking the information.

Justice Department officials are trying to find out whether Mr. Assange encouraged or even helped the analyst, Pfc. Bradley Manning, to extract classified military and State Department files from a government computer system. If he did so, they believe they could charge him as a conspirator in the leak, not just as a passive recipient of the documents who then published them.

Among materials prosecutors are studying is an online chat log in which Private Manning is said to claim that he had been directly communicating with Mr. Assange using an encrypted Internet conferencing service as the soldier was downloading government files. Private Manning is also said to have claimed that Mr. Assange gave him access to a dedicated server for uploading some of them to WikiLeaks.

Glenn Greenwald writes:

Bradley Manning, the 22-year-old U.S. Army Private accused of leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks, has never been convicted of that crime, nor of any other crime. Despite that, he has been detained at the U.S. Marine brig in Quantico, Virginia for five months — and for two months before that in a military jail in Kuwait — under conditions that constitute cruel and inhumane treatment and, by the standards of many nations, even torture. Interviews with several people directly familiar with the conditions of Manning’s detention, ultimately including a Quantico brig official (Lt. Brian Villiard) who confirmed much of what they conveyed, establishes that the accused leaker is subjected to detention conditions likely to create long-term psychological injuries.

Since his arrest in May, Manning has been a model detainee, without any episodes of violence or disciplinary problems. He nonetheless was declared from the start to be a “Maximum Custody Detainee,” the highest and most repressive level of military detention, which then became the basis for the series of inhumane measures imposed on him.

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US Air Force censors media access

The Wall Street Journal reports:

The U.S. Air Force is blocking its personnel from using work computers to view the websites of the New York Times and other major publications that have posted classified diplomatic cables, people familiar with the matter said.

Air Force users who try to view the websites of the New York Times, Britain’s Guardian, Spain’s El Pais, France’s Le Monde or German magazine Der Spiegel instead get a page that says, “ACCESS DENIED. Internet Usage is Logged & Monitored,” according to a screen shot reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. The notice warns that anyone who accesses unauthorized sites from military computers could be punished.

The Air Force said it had blocked more than 25 websites that contained the documents, originally obtained by the website WikiLeaks and published starting late last month, in order to keep classified material off unclassified computer systems.

Major Toni Tones, a spokeswoman for Air Force Space Command, wouldn’t name the websites but said they might include media sites. Removing such material after it ends up on a computer could require “unnecessary time and resources,” Major Tones said.

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Richard Holbrooke’s final words: “You’ve got to stop this war in Afghanistan.”

Richard Holbrooke died this evening. The Washington Post looked back at his career.

Mr. Holbrooke was sent to Vietnam in 1963, assigned to the lower Mekong Delta as a field officer for the U.S. Agency for International Development, a post that would later give him unique perspective on reconstruction efforts and provincial stabilization in Afghanistan.

His insights drew the attention of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, and he was soon moved there to serve as a staff assistant to two ambassadors, Maxwell D. Taylor and Henry Cabot Lodge Jr.

In 1966, he joined the Vietnam staff in the Johnson White House, where had a front-row seat for what came to be considered an unwise escalation of U.S. military forces based on deceptive assessments.

“Our beloved nation sent into battle soldiers without a clear determination of what they could accomplish and they misjudged the stakes. And then we couldn’t get out,” he said that year at a State Department conference on the American experience in Southeast Asia. “. . . We fought bravely under very difficult conditions. But success was not achievable. Those who advocated more escalation or something called ‘staying the course’ were advocating something that would have led only to a greater and more costly disaster afterwards.”

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The FBI’s effort to silence political dissent in America

In These Times reports:

September 24 began like any other Friday for Joe Iosbaker and Stephanie Weiner. Then, at 7 a.m., FBI agents knocked on the door of the Chicago couple’s house in the city’s North Side.

Armed with a search warrant, more than 20 agents examined the couple’s home, photographing every room and combing through notebooks, family videos and books, even their children’s drawings. Some items were connected to their decades of anti-war and international solidarity activism, but others were not. “Folders were opened, letters were pulled out of envelopes,” says Weiner, an adult education professor at Wilbur Wright College. “They had rubber gloves and they went through every aspect of our home.”

Ten hours after their arrival, as television news crews filmed and activist supporters stood on the sidewalk, the agents drove away with nearly 30 boxes of material, including t-shirts and a photograph of Malcolm X. By that time, Iosbaker and Weiner had been served subpoenas to appear before a grand jury investigating “material support” for “foreign terrorist organizations.” And they knew theirs wasn’t the only home invaded that day. More than 70 FBI agents had raided seven residences in Chicago and Minneapolis and questioned activists in Michigan, California and North Carolina, serving subpoenas to 11 people. A few days later, the Justice Department subpoenaed members of the Minnesota Anti-War Committee (AWC), whose office was also raided on September 24, raising the number to 14. (Editor’s note: five additional Chicago-area activists were subpoenaed in early December; see update below.)

The grand jury and FBI are looking for evidence that connects the 14 activists and their “potential co-conspirators” to two organizations: the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which are both on the State Department’s “Foreign Terrorist Organizations” list. None of the 14 has been charged with a crime, and all deny providing “material support,” including money, to any foreign organization.

Citing the Fifth Amendment, all 14 are refusing to testify before the grand jury, which they say is a secretive arm of a government intent on silencing critics.

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$52bn of American aid and still Afghans are dying of starvation

Patrick Cockburn reports:

The most extraordinary failure of the US-led coalition in Afghanistan is that the expenditure of tens of billions of dollars has had so little impact on the misery in which 30 million Afghans live. As President Barack Obama prepares this week to present a review of America’s strategy in Afghanistan which is likely to focus on military progress, US officials, Afghan administrators, businessmen and aid workers insist that corruption is the greatest threat to the country’s future.

In a series of interviews, they paint a picture of a country where $52bn (£33bn) in US aid since 2001 has made almost no impression on devastating poverty made worse by spreading violence and an economy dislocated by war. That enormous aid budget, two-thirds for security and one-third for economic, social and political development, has made little impact on 9 million living in absolute poverty, and another 5 million trying to survive on $43 (£27) a month. The remainder of the population often barely scrapes a living, having to choose between buying wood to keep warm and buying food.
[…]
Fake photographs are often the only evidence that companies have carried out expensive projects located in parts of Afghanistan too dangerous for donors to visit.

“I went to see a food processing plant in the east of the country which was meant to employ 250 women,” says an Afghan who used to work for an American government aid organisation. “We had started the project and were paying for the equipment and the salaries. But all I found was a few people working on a vegetable plot the size of a small room.”

When he complained he was told by a local official to keep his mouth shut. He said that “if I did not keep quiet there would be trouble on the road back to Jalalabad – in other words they would kill me.”

US officials admit privately that the torrent of aid money that has poured into Afghanistan has stoked corruption and done ordinary Afghans little good. Afghanistan was identified as the third most corrupt country out of 178 in the world in a report released last week by Transparency International.

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Embedded with the Taliban

For an American cable news organization to embed reporters with the Taliban would be a bold move. CNN isn’t bold. But on Saturday evening it took the moderately risky move of airing a Norwegian journalist’s film of life with Taliban fighters.

“Some people might see this and think that you are trying to humanize this force which is attacking American troops,” Anderson Cooper says to Paul Refsdal. The problem being that if we see a Taliban commander embracing his children we might make a dreadful connection: such a scene must have preceded many a drone attack in which militants and their families have been eliminated. Refsdal simply says: “I show what I saw. I show the everyday life of the Taliban.”

Supporters of the war, however, better shield their eyes from such images — at least if they want to cling to the fiction that American forces are pitted against fanatical inhuman monsters.

As for the attack that is shown in the clip below, the Pentagon claims no such attack occurred. Cooper seems to infer from this that the Taliban has an inflated view of its own capacities. That’s one way of reading it. Another is to recognize that attacks against coalition forces are so frequent that the only ones worth recording are those that do damage — as though the only bullets a soldier need worry about are the ones that hit their target.

However CNN might have attempted to insulate themselves from criticism for airing this documentary, it’s likely impact will be this: that many Americans come away seeing the Taliban for what they are — an indigenous fighting force defending their homeland. In America’s war of independence, the militiamen who drove out the British, no doubt saw themselves in exactly the same way.

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America: the panoptic shiver

At Open Democracy, Paul Rogers writes:

Among the most compelling nuggets of information contained in the batch of United States diplomatic documents released by WikiLeaks and published in leading international newspapers is the list of installations in more than fifty countries which the state department in Washington deems to be a US security concern.

Some of the locations seem obvious (major oil-and-gas processing-plants and pipeline terminuses, for example); but others are far harder to fit any evident national-security frame (such as an Australian pharmaceutical plant specialising in anti-snake-venom treatments, and cobalt-mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo).

But even the more unlikely sites are relevant to a country that sees itself as the world’s sole superpower with interests across the globe. The anti-snake-venom plant in Australia almost certainly has the expertise and equipment to make antidotes to other toxins, and this could be highly significant in the event of a biological-warfare threat.

The cobalt-mines around Kolwezi and Mutshatsha in the southern DRC extract the world’s most important deposits of cobalt ores, and ferro-alloys containing cobalt have the specific property of retaining their shape at very high temperatures. They are therefore much in demand for the guidance-vanes of missile-engines and other elements of modern weapons-systems.

The more surprising elements of the list as much as the expected ones thus illustrate the continued reach of the United States’s strategic and security ambitions. But they also reveal something more: its new vulnerabilities. The increased inter-state competition across much of the global south from China and other rising states is one, familiar, source of these; another and perhaps less visible source is the challenge posed by insurgent groups to these prime targets. Indeed, central Africa may be a good place to begin to track this superpower dilemma.

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How to spot a terrorist

Eric Holder went to California to provide an update on the FBI’s terrorist training program. What he has yet to acknowledge is this: if the FBI can’t catch “terrorists” without first providing them with fake bombs, maybe the guys they’re catching aren’t really terrorists.

Doesn’t the criminal process attach as much importance to means as it does to motives? Disregard means, and we are heading into the Orwellian world of thoughtcrimes.

The New York Times, reporting on the Attorney General’s speech to Muslim Advocates, said:

In his remarks, Mr. Holder said that stings had been used for decades against many types of crimes. And he defended the investigation last month in Portland, Ore., in which a young Somali-American man, Mohamed Osman Mohamud, 19, was arrested after law enforcement agents said he tried to trigger what he thought was a car bomb at a Christmas tree-lighting ceremony.

“I make no apologies for the how the F.B.I. agents handled their work in executing the operation that led to Mr. Mohamud’s arrest,” Mr. Holder said. “Their efforts helped to identify a person who repeatedly expressed his desire and intention to kill innocent Americans.”

He added: “But you also have my word that the Justice Department will — just as vigorously — continue to pursue anyone who would target Muslims, or their houses of worship.”

Despite the attorney general’s reassurances, some in attendance were deeply concerned by the federal government’s ongoing undercover sting operations.

“I grew up during the civil rights era and I’m aware how the civil rights community was infiltrated by provocateurs and agents who sought to undermine the legitimate struggles of the movement,” said Abu Qadir Al-Amin, 60, an African-American imam from Vallejo, Calif. “So my antennae are up and I try to educate the Muslim community so that they don’t put themselves in a vulnerable position if someone comes along suggesting they do something illegal.”

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WikiLeaks and the Espionage Act

WL Central reports:

Today, Jennifer Robinson, one of the lawyers for Julian Assange, told The Guardian that the US government may be about to press charges against Julian Assange under the Espionage Act. She said that the legal team had heard from “several different US lawyers rumours that an indictment was on its way or had happened already, but we don’t know”. Ms Robinson told ABC News that “Our position of course is that we don’t believe it (the Espionage Act) applies to Mr. Assange and that in any event he’s entitled to First Amendment protection as publisher of Wikileaks and any prosecution under the Espionage Act would in my view be unconstitutional and puts at risk all media organizations in the U.S.”

Rumours about the possibility of Julian Assange having been indicted by a grand jury, whose proceedings are secret, have been circulating for a while. The Christian Science Monitor had a few days ago quoted Stephen Vladeck, an expert in national security law at American University, who said that an empaneled grand jury could have already been considering the case. “We wouldn’t know what they’re doing until the whole thing is concluded,” he said. The Monitor also quoted CNN legal expert Jeffrey Toobin, who said “I would not be at all surprised if there was a sealed arrest warrant currently in existence.”

Prominent civil rights attorney Harvey A. Silverglate, who worked on the Pentagon Papers case, also raised the possibility in an interview with NECN, while also pointing out that prosecution would be extremely difficult, and for many reasons not in the interest of the United States government.

As we previously covered, the legal consensus appears to be that a prosecution under the Espionage Act would be both difficult and dangerous for the United States, notably with regards to First Amendment protections (also see: EFF, ACLU.)

The US Congressional Research Service published on December 6 a report titled “Criminal Prohibitions on the Publication of Classified Defense Information” [PDF]:

This report identifies some criminal statutes that may apply, but notes that these have been used almost exclusively to prosecute individuals with access to classified information (and a corresponding obligation to protect it) who make it available to foreign agents, or to foreign agents who obtain classified information unlawfully while present in the United States. Leaks of classified information to the press have only rarely been punished as crimes, and we are aware of no case in which a publisher of information obtained through unauthorized disclosure by a government employee has been prosecuted for publishing it. There may be First Amendment implications that would make such a prosecution difficult, not to mention political ramifications based on concerns about government censorship. To the extent that the investigation implicates any foreign nationals whose conduct occurred entirely overseas, any resulting prosecution may carry foreign policy implications related to the exercise of extraterritorial jurisdiction and whether suspected persons may be extradited to the United States under applicable treaty provisions. (emphasis ours)

The report’s conclusion states: “Thus, although unlawful acquisition of information might be subject to criminal prosecution with few First Amendment implications, the publication of that information remains protected.”

A new poll finds that only 31% of Americans believe that the publication of secrets is protected by the First Amendment.

This implies that most Americans have unquestioningly swallowed the line that the boundaries that circumscribe freedom for the press are those defined by the US government. The government defines the terms of national security and the press must not challenge those definitions.

In other words, the press should have as much freedom as the government sees fit.

In other words, the press can enjoy the same amount of freedom that a well-trained dog enjoys once it has learned to never strain at its leash.

In other words, most of the Americans who say that America is at war in order to protect our freedom, see that freedom as being akin to the freedom of a domesticated animal.

We know how to bark, how to wag our tails and how to catch treats.

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How WikiLeaks turned the First Amendment into a ‘problem’

First Amendment attorney Floyd Abrams says: “WikiLeaks may just be the price we pay for freedom of the press in this country.”

Why not: “WikiLeaks demonstrates the value of the First Amendment”?

After all, what’s the good of having a free press when journalists so willingly serve the interests of the establishment? If the Fourth Estate had not turned itself into a fourth branch of government, WikiLeaks would have little reason to exist — or at least, little reason to be challenging the authority of the US government.

Freedoms not exercised will easily be taken away.

Time reports:

Thanks to nearly a century of cases dealing with the clash between national security and the freedom of the press, the Constitution provides enormous protection for publishers of state secrets. Those who leak the secrets in the first place — government officials, even soldiers, for instance — can and are prosecuted, such as Army private, Bradley Manning, now sitting in a military prison after having been charged with illegally downloading secret files amid suspicions that he gave them to WikiLeaks.

Putting someone like Assange in jail for publishing documents he did not himself steal, on the other hand, is exactly the kind of thing that First Amendment makes difficult. “From everything we’ve seen, [Manning] was merely responding to the notion that Assange might publish the cables,” former CIA inspector general Frederick P. Hitz told TIME. “There’s nothing to show that Assange played an active role in obtaining the information.” He conceded that the leaks had been tremendously damaging, but added “I don’t see any easy effort there” in pursuing charges.

Holder has said the government will explore whether Assange could be charged with a form of theft since the records had been stolen, though such a course is fraught will obstacles, given that the files are digital copies of government records. Holder said too the government will consider whether Assange might be guilty of conspiring somehow with Manning, or went beyond the traditional role of publisher by acting as a kind of broker in dissemenating the files to newspapers around the world. What worries famed First Amendment attorney Floyd Abrams is that if the government stretches to get around the Constitution to charge Assange, it may end up damaging the press freedoms enjoyed by every publisher. Nobody should applaud Assange, Abrams told TIME, but trying to remedy the harm he caused could easily leave the country worse off. “WikiLeaks may just be the price we pay for freedom of the press in this country,” Abrams said.

The New York Times reports on the administration’s ongoing effort to find a legal trap in which they might snare Assange:

Justice Department officials have … examined whether Mr. Assange and WikiLeaks could be charged with trafficking in stolen government property.

But scholars say there might be legal difficulties with that approach, too, because the leaked documents are reproductions of files the government still possesses, not physical objects missing from its file cabinets. That means they are covered by intellectual property law, not ordinary property law.

“This is less about stealing than it is about copying,” said John G. Palfrey, a Harvard Law School professor who specializes in Internet issues and intellectual property.

Intellectual property law criminalizes the unauthorized reproduction of certain kinds of commercial information, like trade secrets or copyrighted music, films and software files. But those categories do not appear to cover government documents, which by law cannot be copyrighted and for which there is no ordinary commercial market.

Mr. Assange has received leaks of private-sector information as well. He has indicated, for example, that his next step might be to publish a copy of the contents of a hard drive belonging to an executive at a bank — apparently, Bank of America.

If he does so, some of the problems associated with trying to find a way to prosecute him for distributing leaked government documents could disappear. The works of a person in the private sector are automatically copyrighted, and bank documents could be deemed trade secrets.

“If you had large-scale dissemination of a private-sector company’s records, there might be some kind of argument there similar to commercial espionage,” said James Boyle, a Duke University law professor who specializes in intellectual property and public-domain issues.

There would still be obstacles. For example, Mr. Assange could claim that his distribution of the files was allowable under the “fair use” exception to copyright law and that it was not for financial gain. Still, “fair use” does not allow wholesale reproduction, and prosecutors could argue that his organization was raising money from its activities.

Even so, Mr. Boyle cautioned, intellectual property law is not well designed to prosecute what WikiLeaks is doing.

“The reason people are upset about this is not about commercial theft or misusing the fabulous original expressions of U.S. diplomats,” Mr. Boyle said. “I think it is the wrong tool. You go after Al Capone for tax evasion rather than bootlegging — fine. But this is a bridge too far.”

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Latest graduate in FBI’s terrorist training program

Since it’s difficult to identify and capture terrorists, the FBI seems to have concluded that an effective counterterrorism program can only work if they first find potential terrorists, coach them and then catch them. It’s a bit like sports hunting for those whose pride in displaying a trophy is undiminished by the fact that the animal was raised to be shot.

Associated Press reports:

A 21-year-old man charged with trying to blow up a military recruiting center briefly hesitated when he heard about a federal sting operation that nabbed an alleged terrorist in Oregon last month but decided to keep going with his plan, authorities said.

Antonio Martinez, a naturalized U.S. citizen who goes by the name Muhammad Hussain after recently converting to Islam, faces charges of attempted murder of federal officers and attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction.

He told an informant working with the FBI he thought about nothing but jihad and wasn’t deterred even after a Somali-born teenager was arrested in Portland, Ore., the day after Thanksgiving in a sting, court documents released Wednesday showed.

The Oregon suspect intended to bomb a crowded downtown Christmas tree-lighting ceremony. But – like Martinez – the people he’d been communicating with about the plot were with the FBI. Martinez wondered if he was headed down a similar path, documents say.

After hearing about the Oregon case, Martinez was uneasy and called the informant demanding to know who he was, according to court documents.

“I’m not falling for no b.s.,” he told the informant. He said he still wanted to go ahead, but the informant told him to think about it overnight and call the next day, which Martinez did.

In the following days, Martinez reiterated his support for the plan several times, documents show, at one point reassuring the informant that he didn’t feel pressured to carry it out: “I came to you about this, brother.”

The bomb he’s accused of trying to detonate was fake and had been provided by an undercover FBI agent. It was loaded into an SUV that Martinez parked in front of the recruiting center, authorities said, and an FBI informant picked him up and drove him to a nearby vantage point where he tried to set it off.

“There was never any actual danger to the public during this operation this morning,” U.S. Attorney Rod J. Rosenstein said Wednesday. “That’s because the FBI was controlling the situation.”

The FBI’s dubious approach to counterterrorism was highlighted earlier this week in a Washington Post report on a convicted forger named Craig Monteilh who became an FBI informant and is now suing the agency.

The Islamic Center of Irvine in Southern California was a target of Monteilh’s operations.

In the Irvine case, Monteilh’s mission as an informant backfired. Muslims were so alarmed by his talk of violent jihad that they obtained a restraining order against him.

He had helped build a terrorism-related case against a mosque member, but that also collapsed. The Justice Department recently took the extraordinary step of dropping charges against the worshiper, who Monteilh had caught on tape agreeing to blow up buildings, law enforcement officials said. Prosecutors had portrayed the man as a dire threat.

Compounding the damage, Monteilh has gone public, revealing secret FBI methods and charging that his “handlers” trained him to entrap Muslims as he infiltrated their mosques, homes and businesses. He is now suing the FBI.

Officials declined to comment on specific details of Monteilh’s tale but confirm that he was a paid FBI informant. Court records and interviews corroborate not only that Monteilh worked for the FBI – he says he made $177,000, tax-free, in 15 months – but that he provided vital information on a number of cases.

Some Muslims in Southern California and nationally say the cascading revelations have seriously damaged their relationship with the FBI, a partnership that both sides agree is critical to preventing attacks and homegrown terrorism.

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Lying for the State Department

Is skill in the art of lying a prerequisite for the job of State Department spokesman, or is it just an ability acquired through on-the-job training?

James Rubin, State spokesman for the Clinton administration, demonstrated that he retains his fluency in an interview he did this afternoon alongside Salon‘s Glenn Greenwald and John Burns from the New York Times who were all guests on KCRW’s On The Point.

Glenn Greenwald:

I’ve written about this before, but what’s most remarkable is how — as always — leading media figures and government officials are completely indistinguishable in what they think, say and do with regard to these controversies; that’s why Burns and Rubin clung together so closely throughout the segment, because there is no real distinction between most of these establishment reporters and the government; the former serve the latter. Below is the clip itself; I’m posting the specific evidence showing that Rubin’s general claim (that these cables contain no deceit or wrongdoing) as well as his specific claims about Yemen were absolutely false:

Regarding Rubin’s claims about Yemen: here is the cable reflecting a meeting between Gen. David Petraeus and the Yemeni President in January, 2010, proving that it was the U.S., not Yemen, which perpetrated the December, 2009 air strike. Moreover, it records this:

President Obama has approved providing U.S. intelligence in support of ROYG [Republic of Yemen government] ground operations against AQAP targets, General Petraeus informed Saleh. . . . Saleh lamented the use of cruise missiles that are “not very accurate” and welcomed the use of aircraft-deployed precision-guided bombs instead. “We’ll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours,” Saleh said, prompting Deputy Prime Minister Alimi to joke that he had just “lied” by telling Parliament that the bombs in Arhab, Abyan, and Shebwa were American-made but deployed by the ROYG.

As Salon‘s Justin Elliott noted, this cable “confirms that the Obama Administration has secretly launched missile attacks on suspected terrorists in Yemen, strikes that have reportedly killed dozens of civilians.” Despite that, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley had the following exchange on December, 15, 2009, with reporters:

QUESTION: On the conflict in Yemen, Houthis say that U.S. warplanes have launched airstrikes in northern Yemen. Is the U.S. involved in any military operations in Yemen?

MR. CROWLEY: No.

QUESTION: No?

MR. CROWLEY: But we — those kinds of reports keep cropping up. We do not have a military role in this conflict.

In response to having been caught spouting these falsehoods in the wake of the WikiLeaks release, Crowley claimed that he confined his denial to only one attack in which the U.S. was not involved (the one on the Yemeni Houthis), but the clear words from the Press Conference prove that his denial applied to “any military operations in Yemen” (Q: “Is the U.S. involved in any military operations in Yemen? MR. CROWLEY: No”). The WikiLeaks cable reveal that is false; the airstrike launched by the U.S. occurred a mere two days later, on December 17.

Among Rubin’s many dubious claims, none is more disingenuous than his assertion that the Yemeni government’s choice to lie to its own people is one over which the US has no control, and thus he implies, no interest. On the contrary, the Obama administration has just as deep an investment as does the Yemeni government in concealing from the Yemeni people the depth of America’s military involvement in their country.

Having opted for a policy which runs the risk of turning Yemen into another Somalia, the administration is holding on to the dubious idea that so long as this emerging war can avoid being officially stamped “made in America,” Yemen’s feeble government might be able to retain its grip on power.

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Leiberman suggests New York Times could be investigated

The Guardian reports:

Joe Lieberman, the chair of the Senate homeland security committee, told Fox News: “To me the New York Times has committed at least an act of, at best, bad citizenship, but whether they have committed a crime is a matter of discussion for the justice department.”

Lieberman also said that the department of justice should indict Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, under the 1917 Espionage Act and try to extradite him from the UK. Asked why this had not happened, Lieberman admitted there was probably an argument going on over how to charge Assange.

“I think this is the most serious violation of the Espionage Act in our history,” Lieberman said, adding: “It sure looks to me that Assange and WikiLeaks have violated the Espionage Act.”

At the daily state department briefing in Washington, DC, Philip Crowley, the department’s press spokesman, said: “What WikiLeaks has done is a crime under US law.”

The Guardian appears to have misquoted Crowley. According to the transcript of yesterday’s briefing, he said:

What we’re investigating is a crime under U.S. law. The provision of 250,000 classified documents from someone inside the government to someone outside the government is a crime. We are investigating it. And as we’ve said, we will hold those responsible fully accountable. That investigation is still ongoing.

From all the information currently available, the only individual who is believed to have committed a crime is Private First Class Bradley Manning. He has been has been arrested and charged with the unauthorized use and disclosure of classified information.

The New York Times reporter David Sanger told NPR:

The Times knew that this material was going to be out there anyway. We didn’t get the initial leak,” he says. “If we had done nothing — if we had ignored it — I think it would have looked strange. I think that also would have been irresponsible. It is the responsibility of American journalism, back to the founding of this country, to get out and try to grapple with the hardest issues of the day and to do it independently of the government.

Which is why the Times‘ sycophantic executive editor, Bill Keller, consulted with the administration for advice on each of the cables it has published. So much for “independence.”

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Paypal and the State Department’s legal charade

“On November 27, the State Department — the US government basically — wrote a letter saying that the WikiLeaks activities were deemed illegal in the United States and as a result our [acceptable use] policy group had to make the decision of suspending the account,” PayPal’s VP of Platform Osama Bedier said on stage at Le Web 2010 conference in Paris today, TechCrunch reported. He later clarified that this letter was not sent to Paypal but was addressed to Julian Assange and his lawyer Jennifer Robinson.

This is what the State Department letter from legal adviser Harold Hongju Koh says on the legality of WikiLeaks activities:

As you know, if any of the materials you intend to publish were provided by any government officials, or any intermediary without proper authorization, they were provided in violation of U.S. law and without regard for the grave consequences of this action. As long as WikiLeaks holds such material, the violation of the law is ongoing.

The letter then goes on to provide an assessment of the damage that publication of “documents of this nature at a minimum would” cause. It also claims that WikiLeaks is not acting in accordance with the organization’s stated principles.

The only illegal action that the State Department identified was one that could be committed by a US government official. If WikiLeaks itself was violating or about to violate any law, it’s hard to imagine that the State Department would be mealy mouthed about stating the fact. Indeed, not only would the legal infraction be spelled out but likewise the legal consequences.

For that reason — the lack of legal recourse — State was forced to fall back on moral persuasion, in the hope that it might pressure WikiLeaks to do what the US government regards as “the right thing.”

The fact that the administration is now clutching at straws in its pursuit of a legal case against WikiLeaks is evident in the suggestion that Assange might be charged with receiving stolen property. If that happens, Bill Keller at the New York Times better get ready to turn himself in — for that matter, virtually every journalist in America should volunteer to be arrested.

One can only assume that Paypal, Visa, Mastercard and other corporations that are now acting as lackeys for the Obama administration in its witch-hunt against WikiLeaks, hope that come the day they themselves run afoul of the law, they can expect leniency in return for today’s favors. Even worse, they seem happy to display a corporate-government solidarity that reflects the all too transparent fact that representative democracy now means government of corporations, for corporations, by corporations.

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There’s a war going on inside America

Robert Reich writes:

The deal the President struck with Republican leaders is an abomination.

It will cost $900 billion over the next two years — larger than the bailout of Wall Street, GM, and Chrysler put together, larger than the stimulus package, larger than anything that’s come out of Washington in years.

It makes a mockery of deficit reduction. Worse, the lion’s share of that $900 billion will go to the very rich. Families with incomes of over $1 million will reap an average of about $70,000, while middle-class families earning $50,000 a year will get an average of around $1,500. In addition, the deal just about eviscerates the estate tax — yanking the exemption up to $5 million per person and a maximum rate of 35 percent.

And for what?

Wealthy families won’t spend nearly as large a share of what they get out of this deal as will middle-class and working-class families, so it doesn’t do much to stimulate the economy.

The deal further concentrates income and wealth in America — when it’s already more concentrated than at any time in the last 80 years.

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How Israel and the US benefited from the murder of Rafik Hariri

Who has benefited most from the assassination of Rafik Hariri in Beirut in 2005? As the International Court of Justice arrives at its version of events, Dyab Abou Jahjah, writing in Open Democracy, finds confirmation in WikiLeaks for pointing us in a different direction.

Lebanon nowadays seems much bigger than it actually is. In a way this is no surprise for a country that always was a playground for regional and international agendas and a laboratory for testing any new formula in the area. However, this time, Lebanon is much more than that. Since 2006 it has become clear to all serious observers that this country is the focal point of a strategic divide, or more accurately the strategic divide in the Middle East. By virtue of the victory of Hezbollah against Israel in 2006, the Lebanese resistance has become a major factor in tipping the balance in favour of the Syrian/Iranian influence in the region as against that of the American/Israeli-led project. The latter project aims at further fragmenting political and social regional structures based upon sectarian and ethnic divisions, in order to create a new Middle East in which – to put it simply – Israel can play boss over everybody.

The Iranian and the Syrian regimes naturally oppose this scheme as it targets them in the first instance, but Iran at least also opposes this for ideological reasons. For the surge of the neo-conservative ‘creative chaos’ strategy in Iraq and beyond, the war against Lebanon in 2006 was supposed to be the final blow to any resistance, especially as this occurred at a time when Iraqi resistance was starting to be divided, weak and marginal, and the American grip over Iraq was growing stronger. Hezbollah’s defeat of the Israeli onslaught stopped the American surge in its tracks. The tide has started to turn since that moment: since then, both the Lebanese resistance and its Syrian and Iranian allies have been strengthened.

At this point, for the Americans and the Israelis a new priority was established: to destroy Hezbollah by any means necessary. This conclusion is confirmed by one of the documents lately published on wikileaks where the heads of the CIA and the Mossad are to be observed contemplating a possible augmentation of the pressure on Syria to make it take its distance from Iran, in order eventually to weaken Hezbollah. In that conversation between Meir Dagan and Frances Townsend, Dagan conveys to his American counterpart the “advantage of such an approach” – that, “the legal ground is already in place for action by the UNSC.” It is in this context that one must read the actions of the international tribunal investigating the death of Rafik Hariri and the indictment of Hezbollah that it will be releasing shortly.

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Truth in chains

Chris Floyd writes:

Well, they got him at last. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, the target of several of the world’s most powerful governments, turned himself into British authorities today and is now at the mercy of state authorities who have already shown their wolfish – and lawless – desire to destroy him and his organization.

It has been, by any standard, an extraordinary campaign of vilification and persecution, wholly comparable to the kind of treatment doled out to dissidents in China or Burma. Lest we forget, WikiLeaks is a journalistic outlet – just like The New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel, all of whom are even now publishing the very same material – leaked classified documents — available on WikiLeaks. The website is also a journalistic outlet just like CNN, ABC, CBS, Fox and other mainstream media venues, where we have seen an endless parade of officials – and journalists! – calling for Assange to be prosecuted or killed outright. Every argument being made for shutting down WikiLeaks can – and doubtless will – be used against any journalistic enterprise that publishes material that powerful people do not like.

And the leading role in this persecution of truth-telling is being played by the administration of the great progressive agent of hope and change, the self-proclaimed heir of Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi, the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Barack Obama. His attorney general, Eric Holder, is now making fierce noises about the “steps” he has already taken to bring down WikiLeaks and criminalize the leaking of embarrassing information. And listen to the ferocious reaction of that liberal lioness, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who took to the pages of Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal to call for Assange to be put in prison – for 2,500,000 years:

When WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange released his latest document trove—more than 250,000 secret State Department cables—he intentionally harmed the U.S. government. The release of these documents damages our national interests and puts innocent lives at risk. He should be vigorously prosecuted for espionage.

“The law Mr. Assange continues to violate is the Espionage Act of 1917. That law makes it a felony for an unauthorized person to possess or transmit “information relating to the national defense which information the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation.” … Importantly, the courts have held that “information relating to the national defense” applies to both classified and unclassified material. Each violation is punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

So there you have it. Ten years for each offense; 250,000 separate offenses; thus a prison term of 2.5 million years. Naturally, tomorrow the same newspaper will denounce Feinstein for being such a namby-pamby terrorist-coddling pinko: “Why didn’t she call for Assange to be torn from limb to limb by wild dogs, as any right-thinking red-blooded American would do!?”

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