A leading group of doctors in the US concerned with the ethical treatment of patients has questioned the role of military psychiatrists in Quantico, Virginia, where the suspected WikiLeaks source Bradley Manning is being subjected to harsh treatment that some call torture.
The advocacy body Physicians for Human Rights has sounded the alarm over the role of psychiatrists at the brig in the marine base where Manning has been in custody since last July.
The group sees the psychiatrists as trapped in a situation of “dual loyalty”, where their obligations to the military chain of command may conflict with their medical duty to protect their patient.
Christy Fujio, author of a forthcoming report on the issue, said the main concern was that psychiatrists were allowing Manning’s continuing solitary confinement.
“Even if they do not officially approve it, by continuing to examine him and report back to the government on his condition, they are effectively taking part in security operations. Their failure to call it what it is, cruel and inhumane treatment, constitutes a violation of their ethical duties as doctors.”
It shouldn’t be much of a surprise that State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley has resigned his post in wake of his too-candid assessment of the incarceration conditions of suspected Wikileaker Private First Class Bradley Manning.
Last Thursday, Crowley told a panel at MIT that the Pentagon’s treatment of Manning at the Marine bring at Quantico, Va., was “ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid.”
The very next day, President Obama told reporters that he felt Manning’s confinement conditions were “appropriate.” His answer telegraphed a problem for Crowley. “I’ve actually asked the Pentagon whether or not the procedures that have been taken in terms of his confinement are appropriate and are meeting our basic standards,” Obama said, suggesting some of those procedures were to protect Manning’s safety. “They have assured me that they are.”
Manning is currently being held alone in his cell 23 hours a day, and was reportedly being stripped naked at night before being given a tear-proof smock for sleeping. Free speech advocates are shocked, and, as I wrote last week on TIME.com, concerned over Obama’s record as the most aggressive prosecutor of suspected government leakers in U.S. history.
Those advocates have wondered whether the penchant for secrecy in the Obama administration comes from the President, or those around him. Obama’s statement on Manning, followed by Crowley’s resignation, seem to suggest some of this comes from the President himself.
Hillary Clinton’s spokesman has launched a public attack on the Pentagon for the way it is treating military prisoner Bradley Manning, the US soldier suspected of handing the US embassy cables to WikiLeaks.
PJ Crowley, the assistant secretary of state for public affairs at the US state department, said Manning was being “mistreated” in the military brig at Quantico, Virginia. “What is being done to Bradley Manning is ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid on the part of the department of defence,” he said.
Crowley’s comments signal a crack within the Obama administration over the handling of the WikiLeaks saga in which hundreds of thousands of confidential documents were handed to the website.
As news of the remarks rippled through Washington, President Obama was forced to address the subject of Manning’s treatment for the first time.
Asked about the controversy at a White House press conference, Obama revealed he had asked the Pentagon “whether or not the procedures that have been taken in terms of his confinement are appropriate and are meeting our basic standards. They assure me that they are.”
Obama would not respond specifically to Crowley’s comments, which are the first critical remarks from within the administration about the handling of Manning. The prisoner is being held for 23 hours in solitary confinement in his cell and stripped naked every night.
To follow-up on yesterday’s observations about the prolonged forced nudity to which Bradley Manning has been subjected the last two days: brig officials now confirm to The New York Times that Manning will be forced to be nude every night from now on for the indefinite future — not only when he sleeps, but also when he stands outside his cell for morning inspection along with the other brig detainees. They claim that it is being done “as a ‘precautionary measure’ to prevent him from injuring himself.”
Has anyone before successfully committed suicide using a pair of briefs — especially when under constant video and in-person monitoring? There’s no underwear that can be issued that is useless for killing oneself? And if this is truly such a threat, why isn’t he on “suicide watch” (the NYT article confirms he’s not)? And why is this restriction confined to the night; can’t he also off himself using his briefs during the day?
Let’s review Manning’s detention over the last nine straight months: 23-hour/day solitary confinement; barred even from exercising in his cell; one hour total outside his cell per day where he’s allowed to walk around in circles in a room alone while shackled, and is returned to his cell the minute he stops walking; forced to respond to guards’ inquiries literally every 5 minutes, all day, everyday; and awakened at night each time he is curled up in the corner of his bed or otherwise outside the guards’ full view. Is there anyone who doubts that these measures — and especially this prolonged forced nudity — are punitive and designed to further erode his mental health, physical health and will?
The WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is to be extradited to Sweden to face allegations of rape and sexual assault. Assange will appeal, his legal team has confirmed. If they lose he will be sent to Sweden in 10 days.
Speaking outside Belmarsh magistrates court in south-east London after the judgment, Assange attacked the European arrest warrant system.
He dismissed the decision to extradite him as a “rubber-stamping process”. He said: “It comes as no surprise but is nevertheless wrong. It comes as the result of a European arrest warrant system amok.”
There had been no consideration of the allegations against him, Assange said. His extradition would thrust him into a legal system he did not understand using a language he did not speak.
Assange said the US government by its own admission had been waiting to see the British court verdict before determining what action it could take against him.
Glenn Greenwald on the Assange extradition ruling, the jailing of Bradley Manning, and the campaign to target WikiLeaks supporters
We live — as politicians frequently repeat — under the rule of law and there is nothing the legal system frowns on more earnestly than perjury. Hence during trials the solemn ritual that witnesses must swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
And then there is government, where the conduct of the people’s business apparently requires the economical expression of truth, the guarding of secrecy and a subtle contempt for honesty — as though only those who are ignorant about the way the world works would attach great value to truthfulness.
Tom Malinowski, the Washington director of Human Rights Watch, asked HRW staff to canvass sources in Tunisia to gauge the impact of the revelations from WikiLeaks and how they influenced the revolution.
The candid appraisal of Ben Ali by U.S. diplomats showed Tunisians that the rottenness of the regime was obvious not just to them but to the whole world — and that it was a source of shame for Tunisia on an international stage. The cables also contradicted the prevailing view among Tunisians that Washington would back Ben Ali to the bloody end, giving them added impetus to take to the streets. They further delegitimized the Tunisian leader and boosted the morale of his opponents at a pivotal moment in the drama that unfolded over the last few weeks.
This point might not be worth dwelling on, except that it suggests something interesting about how the United States, and the State Department in particular, approaches the challenge of promoting human rights and democracy in countries like Tunisia. Consider the following proposition: None of the decent, principled, conscientious, but behind the scenes efforts the State Department made in recent years to persuade the Tunisian government to relax its authoritarian grip — mostly through diplomatic démarches and meetings with top Tunisian officials — had any significant impact on the Ben Ali regime’s behavior or increased the likelihood of democratic change. Nor did the many quiet U.S. programs of outreach to Tunisian society, cultural exchanges and the like, even if Tunisians appreciated them and they will bear fruit as the country democratizes.
Instead, the one thing that did seem to have some impact was a public statement exposing what the United States really thought about the Ben Ali regime: a statement that was vivid, honest, raw, undiplomatic, extremely well-timed — and completely inadvertent.
Had anyone at the State Department proposed deliberately making a statement along the lines of what appears in the cables, they would have been booted out of Foggy Bottom as quickly as you can say “we value our multifaceted relationship with the GOT.” [Continue reading…]
U.S. military officials tell NBC News that investigators have been unable to make any direct connection between a jailed army private suspected with leaking secret documents and Julian Assange, founder of the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks.
The officials say that while investigators have determined that Manning had allegedly unlawfully downloaded tens of thousands of documents onto his own computer and passed them to an unauthorized person, there is apparently no evidence he passed the files directly to Assange, or had any direct contact with the controversial WikiLeaks figure.
Meanwhile, the latest of the Doha Debates revealed overwhelming support for WikiLeaks among young Arabs:
Arab youth have overwhelmingly embraced the WikiLeaks phenomenon and told their governments to stop lying to them.
In the latest Doha Debate an audience of mostly Arab and Muslim students supported the motion: This House believes the world is better off with Wikileaks, by a margin of 74 to 26 percent.
The highly-charged debate was held weeks after the whistle-blowing website published confidential US diplomatic cables, exposing official corruption in several Middle East states and a yawning gap between the private and public positions of Arab rulers on Iran.
A student won instant applause when he said: “I would rather live in a world where I am told the truth than in a world where I am told lies”. Another female student from Qatar asked: “Is it really that wrong to know the truth?”
One of the more astonishing revelations in The Palestine Papers — detailed records and minutes of the Middle East peace process leaked to Al Jazeera — is that the administration of US President Barack Obama effectively repudiated the Road Map, which has formed the basis of the “peace process” since 2003. In doing so it has backed away even from commitments made by the George W. Bush administration and blown an irreparable hole in the already threadbare “two-state solution.”
But even worse, the US position perhaps unwittingly opens the door to dangerous Israeli ambitions to transfer — or ethnically cleanse — non-Jewish Palestinian citizens of Israel in order to create an ethnically pure “Jewish state.”
Al Jazeera’s release of The Palestine Papers helps to make clear why there is no Palestinian state. It illuminates a key flaw in Palestinian and western understanding of Israeli thinking. It is this flaw which helps explain why a state has failed to emerge – despite the many, many opportunities in the last nineteen years in which it could have.
The root premise has been, since the outset of the ‘process’, that Israel was intent on having and maintaining a Jewish ‘majority’ within Israel, and that with time – and a growing Palestinian population – Israel would have to acquiesce to a Palestinian state simply to maintain its Jewish majority: that is, by losing Palestinians into their own state, Israel’s Jewish majority could be conserved – and by these means, and only by such means, finally could such a majority be conserved.
It is a very compelling narrative. It suggested that a Palestinian state was inevitable: Palestinians simply had to ‘prove’ their readiness to assume statehood to Israel – and a state would be given them.
Professor Mushtaq Khan from London’s School of Oriental and African Studies argued in a recent talk that it was precisely this type of analysis that lay behind Fatah’s approach to Oslo. It explains, he argues, why the Palestinian leadership at this time never made real attempts to create serious bargaining power vis-à-vis Israel: the leadership simply did not think it necessary. They saw their task to be ‘confidence building’ with the Israelis.
“The Obama way”:
4.29: At a moment when the success of the Tunisian revolution is sending a message across the region about the effectiveness of people’s power and arousing renewed hope for the restoration of lost dignity, the image of Palestinian negotiators ingratiating themselves before Israeli ministers, strikes a very discordant note.
When Ahmed Qurei, a former Palestinian prime minister, told Israel’s foreign minister Tzipi Livni that, “I would vote for you,” he might have been joking, but such a fawning expression of admiration for a minister who so strongly supported the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza, exposes the Palestinian leadership in the worst possible light.
3.30: Mark Perry and Ali Abunimah describe how the Obama administration, contrary the image it presented as being willing to put pressure on the Netanyahu government, has in fact never swerved from the role of acting as “Israel’s lawyer”:
A series of six key documents dating from February of 2009 – a core element of the confidential memos, monographs and meeting notes leaked to Al Jazeera as part of The Palestine Papers – show that George Mitchell and his coordinating team, as well as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, have consistently pressured Palestinian negotiators (and in particular chief negotiator Saeb Erekat) to accept Israeli demands on a host of core negotiating issues.
In addition, the documents show that the United States has been willing to ignore and even abandon key agreements and principles that, in years past, it insisted both parties follow. The evidence for this, in the documents, is compelling – even overwhelming. It explodes the idea that the Obama administration ever even attempted to pull the United States off a doomed course.
The evidence that America remains Israel’s lawyer emerges first in the account of a February 27, 2009 meeting between Mitchell and key members of his team, with Saeb Erekat (and a top assistant) at the U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem.
During several 2008 meetings with Palestinian negotiators, Livni proposed annexing Arab villages to the future Palestinian state, forcing tens of thousands of Israeli Arabs to choose between their citizenship and their land.
“The US position on borders perhaps unwittingly opens the door to dangerous Israeli ambitions to transfer — or ethnically cleanse — non-Jewish Palestinian citizens of Israel in order to create an ethnically pure ‘Jewish state.'”
Her clearest language came on June 21, 2008, when she told senior Palestinian negotiators Ahmed Qurei and Saeb Erekat that their land swaps should include Israeli Arab villages. Udi Dekel, a top adviser to the then-Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert, rattled off a list of villages that would be annexed to Palestine.
Livni: We have this problem with Raja [Ghajar] in Lebanon. Terje Larsen put the blue line to cut the village in two. [This needs to be addressed.] We decided not to cut the village. It was a mistake. The problem now, those living on Lebanese soil are Israeli citizens.
Dekel: Barka, Barta il Sharqiya, Barta il [Garbiya], Betil, Beit Safafa…
Qurei: This will be difficult. All Arabs in Israel will be against us.
Becker: We will need to address it somehow. Divided. All Palestinian. All Israeli.
Two months earlier, in another meeting with Qurei and Erekat, Livni herself mentioned the same villages, describing them – their status in the state of Israel – as a problem in need of resolution.
Livni: Let us be fair. You referred to 1967 line. We have not talked about Jerusalem yet. There are some Palestinian villages that are located on both sides of the 1967 line about which we need to have an answer, such as Beit Safafa, Barta’a, Baqa al-Sharqiyeh and Baqa al-Gharbiyyeh.
Livni’s choice of words is striking. Beit Safafa, Barta’a and Baqa al-Gharbiyya all sit at least partly on the Israeli side of the Green Line; their inhabitants carry Israeli passports, pay taxes to the Israeli government, and overwhelmingly self-identify as Israelis.
But Livni describes them as Palestinians – and suggests that they do not belong in the state of Israel.
2.19: It has long been understood that a negotiated agreement between Israelis and Palestinians would involve so-called “land swaps” through which some of the occupied territory outside Israel’s 1967 borders on which Jewish settlements have been constructed would become part of Israel, in exchange for areas of land within the ’67 borders that would become part of the new Palestinian state.
The following exchange between Israeli and Palestinian negotiators during a meeting held on March 12, 2008, makes it clear that the Israelis do not even recognize the existence of the 1967 line. Keep in mind that these were negotiators representing the so-called moderate government of Ehud Olmert.
The following Israeli [I] and Palestinian [P] negotiators attended the meeting: Israeli: Udi Dekel [UD] and Dani Tirza [DT]; Palestinian: Dr. Samih Al-Abed [SA], Khaled Elgindy [KE], Nizar Farsakh [NF].
Udi Dekel [I]: Now, about today’s meeting, I don’t know what Abu Alaa and [Tzipi] Livni agreed but, as I understand it, we need to agree on a common language when it comes to territory and borders. From your side, I know there was discussion of percentages, or areas (in sq. km)… In the previous two meetings with Abu Alaa and Livni, we started to explain all the considerations of what we mean when we talk of territory and borders.
SA [P]: You are jumping directly into discussing areas. We need to discuss parameters or guidelines. You spoke of sq. km, but we already have a starting point, which is 1967. We just need to have all the maps. This is what we need for a breakthrough. We must have a common language, agree on common maps and data, and then we can have a discussion about the issues.
UD [I]: As you know, our guiding principles are UNSC Res. 242, the need for boundaries that can provide security for Israel, and we’re talking about the situation on the ground, as per Pres. Bush’s letter.
SA [P]: Do you mean the situation as it was then, or now?
UD [I]: Reality now… But we’re not going to argue. We can’t change reality on the ground. We don’t see the 1967 border as a reference, first because we don’t even know exactly where the line is.
SA [P]: We have all the maps that were signed by you.
UD [I]: But that wasn’t exactly the line on the ground.
SA [P]: If not the 1967 line, then what is your reference?
UD [I]: We said already, the situation on the ground.
SA [P]: The wall?
UD [I]: The security fence is not a border. Unfortunately, it is needed for security. Every week we intercept 3 to 4 suicide bombers. As we’ve said before, the fence is not a border and can be moved like we did with Lebanon.
NF [P]: What is your frame of reference?
UD [I]: We’re talking about blocs of settlements—not far in the West Bank, but close to the area we are talking about—are to be part of Israel. In Oslo we used the West Bank outline map.
DT [I]: It is the West Bank outline map, in which under our law Israeli military law is applied.
SA [P]: This is your law. In our law, the line is 1967.
DT [I]: Based on which maps? There is no…
SA [P]: This is the standard we’ve worked from, from Oslo to Taba… we are not going to discuss any other line. If we’re going to waste time this is something else.
UD [I]: This is your opinion, but not our opinion. It is very difficult to locate the exact line of the situation that existed on 4 June 1967.
1.54: This is one of those days when a lot of American journalists must know what it felt like being a native journalist in the Soviet Union — never allowed to swerve from the official line. At the Los Angeles Times, Edmund Sanders yawns: “The documents so far haven’t revealed anything that someone moderately familiar with the Mideast hasn’t already heard.”
12.19: Amjad Atallah suggests that the release of the Palestine Papers “may have the same emotive impact among Palestinians that the suicide of Mohamed Bouazizi had in Tunisia” — another event in which Al Jazeera‘s groundbreaking news coverage played a key role.
WikiLeaks’ data dump of U.S. diplomatic records; the demonstrations in Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, and Yemen; and Hezbollah’s success in Lebanon have created an atmosphere of empowerment among a normally dispirited Arab public. Change is no longer impossible — and the United States no longer needs to be the agent of change.
This means there may be more exhibitions of “people power” with unpredictable consequences. The Arab authoritarian systems (most with the support of the U.S. government) are ill-equipped to deal positively with this type of demand for change.
Different forces in the region will now begin to see how they can take advantage for good or bad from this new reality. Unfortunately, if the United States stays true to form, we’ll simply struggle to see whether we can maintain the status quo.
In other words, President Obama is likely to yet again act as an obstacle, not an instrument of change in the world.
11.59: Noam Sheizaf assesses the effect of the Palestine Papers on the Israeli side.
Prime Minister Netanyahu will probably not suffer any damage on the home front, at least in the short term. Netanyahu might even use the papers to claim that his government’s construction projects in occupied East Jerusalem pose no threat to the peace process, since the Palestinians have already agreed to give up most of the Jewish neighborhoods in this part of the city.
The Israeli government would also benefit from a renewal of the internal war on the Palestinian side. For years, Israel has tried (and for the most part, succeeded) to break Palestinian society into sub-groups with different political interests and agendas. When those groups fight each other, the Palestinian cause suffers.
Yet from a wider perspective, the release of the Palestinian offers during the 2008 talks serves as proof that Israel in fact had a partner for peace on the Palestinian side. Actually, the question from now on will be whether Israel itself is a partner for an agreement. Furthermore, after the steps Palestinian and Israeli negotiators took towards each other in previous rounds of talks, the current Israeli offers, such as a temporary state on half of the West Bank’s territory, will appear cynical and unrealistic.
For years, Israel has used the peace process as a way to hold back international pressure on the Palestinian issue. It will be harder to do so from now on. This will be Netanyahu’s greatest problem.
11.47: Rashid Khalidi on Democracy Now!: Leaked “Palestine Papers” underscore weakness of Palestinian Authority, rejectionism of Israel and U.S.
“The biggest Yerushalayim in Jewish history”
11.35: In the Financial Times [registration required], Nadia Hijab writes:
When, some 30 years on, the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat returned from the failed Camp David summit in 2000, he was excoriated by the US and Europe for rejecting Israel’s “generous offer”. By contrast, many Palestinians heaved a sigh of relief that Mr Arafat had refused to sign an agreement that would have ceded Jerusalem, and trisected the West Bank.
Now these new leaks reveal that it is the PLO/PA that has been making the generous offers, and Israel has been rejecting them. If the documents are to be believed, almost all of East Jerusalem has been on the table. Perhaps this time we should be grateful Israel hasn’t signed.
What next? The Palestinian leadership have two plausible options, but will likely take neither.
The first would to be attempt to retake the high ground. This would mean dissolving the PA, and refocusing its attention on the PLO’s primary task – the liberation of Palestine. This would also involve repairing relations with Hamas, and trying to bring all Palestinian political and civil forces into a rejuvenated organisation.
The second is to continue down the road of hoping that someone, somewhere will exert pressure on Israel to give up the occupied territories and recognise Palestinian rights.
10.56: The Guardian describes anger and disbelief among Palestinians in Gaza reacting to the release of the Palestine Papers:
Tailor Maher Mohammad, 50, said the revelations were incredible. “I couldn’t believe my eyes when I watched it, this is cheating to Palestinian people. Jerusalem is a holy land, nobody can make concessions regarding it because it’s not for Palestinians only but for all Muslims.”
Mahmoud Ismael, 58, a shopkeeper, questioned the motives of the person who leaked the documents. Palestinians, he added, expected little from their leaders whether Fatah or Hamas. “Both of them don’t care about Palestine, they care only about their benefits,” he said.
Salah Bardaweel, a senior Hamas leader, said the organisation was studying the document. “We are asking the president Mahmoud Abbas to go to the public and announce his position on what was leaked by Al Jazeera, and make it clear we don’t accept that and assure the Palestinian principles on the key issues.”
The main problem now, he added, was “not between Hamas and Fatah, it’s now between the Palestinian people and the Palestinian negotiator”.
10.03: Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat accused of treason:
9.23: Some Palestinians who don’t like the message have attacked the messenger. AJ’s Alan Fisher tweets: “The crowd has managed to get into the office in Ramaallah. #aljazeera’s staff is ok. Some walls have graffiti”. Fisher nows says the crowd has gone and the AJ building is under police protection.
[The British member of parliament] Gerald Kaufman once described Labour’s 1983 manifesto as the longest suicide note in history. If ever a set of documents merits this epithet, it is surely the one we publish today. Written by Palestinian officials, obtained by al-Jazeera and shared with the Guardian, the papers are the confidential record of 10 years of efforts to seek a peace agreement with Israel.
It is hard to tell who appears worst: the Palestinian leaders, who are weak, craven and eager to shower their counterparts with compliments; the Israelis, who are polite in word but contemptuous in deed; or the Americans, whose neutrality consists of bullying the weak and holding the hand of the strong. Together they conspire to build a puppet state in Palestine, at best authoritarian, at worst a surrogate for an occupying force. To obtain even this form of bondage, the Palestinians have to flog the family silver. Saeb Erekat, the PLO chief negotiator, is reduced at one point to pleading for a fig leaf: “What good am I if I’m the joke of my wife, if I’m so weak,” he told Barack Obama’s Middle East envoy George Mitchell.
9.12: AJ’s Clayton Swisher outlines the land swap agreement that Palestinian negotiators were offering — a swap that would be like exchanging real estate in Manhattan for vacant desert lots in Arizona:
9.05: Tariq Ali says that the extent of the capitulation documented in the papers would have shocked even Edward Said, who at its inception described the Oslo peace process as a ‘Palestinian Versailles’:
Even he would have been taken aback by the sheer scale of what the PLO leadership agreed to surrender: virtually everything except their own salaries. Their weaknesses, inadequacies and cravenness are now in the public domain.
Now we know that the capitulation was total, but still the Israeli overlords of the PLO refused to sign a deal and their friends in the press blamed the Palestinians for being too difficult. They wanted Palestine to be crushed before they would agree to underwrite a few moth-eaten protectorates that they would supervise indefinitely. They wanted Hamas destroyed. The PLO agreed. The recent assault on Gaza was carried out with the approval of Abbas and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, not to mention Washington and its EU. The PLO sold out in a literal sense. They were bought with money and treated like servants. There is TV footage of Ehud Barak and Bill Clinton at Camp David playfully tugging at Arafat’s headgear to stop him leaving. All three are laughing. Many PLO supporters in Palestine must be weeping as they watch al-Jazeera and take in the scale of the betrayal and the utter cynicism of their leaders. Now we know why the Israel/US/EU nexus was so keen to disregard the outcome of the Palestinian elections and try to destroy Hamas militarily.
9.00: Haaretz‘s Akiva Eldar says Palestine Papers trump US State Department cables released by WikiLeaks:
The documents revealed by Al Jazeera are much more important than the documents recently released by WikiLeaks. The former document the talks that took place in 2008 between the head of the Palestinian negotiating team and then Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, as well as with American officials, which is not just a chapter in history.
The compromises presented by the Palestinians vis-a-vis permanent borders in the West Bank and East Jerusalem are relevant to today. The Palestinian map that was shown to Ehud Olmert and representatives of the Bush administration was presented again two months ago to representatives of President Barack Obama, as well as Obama’s Mideast envoy George Mitchell and later Netanyahu’s representative Isaac Molcho. Molcho refused to accept the document.
The leaked documents completely discredit the claim that there is “no peace partner” made by the leader of the newly formed Atzmaut faction, Ehud Barak, and his boss, Benjamin Netanyahu.
8.53: Al Jazeera interviews Abdel Bari Atwan, Editor Al-Quds Al-Arabi
Amnesty International has written a letter to Defense Secretary Robert Gates objecting to the conditions of Bradley Manning’s detention, which was first reported here. The group denounces the oppressive conditions under which Manning is being held as “unnecessarily harsh and punitive,” and further states they “appear to breach the USA’s obligations under international standards and treaties, including Article 10 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.” The letter describes Manning’s treatment as particularly egregious “in view of the fact that he has no history of violence or disciplinary infractions and that he is a pre-trial detainee not yet convicted of any offence.” Moreover:
The harsh conditions imposed on PFC Manning also undermine the principle of the presumption of innocence, which should be taken into account in the treatment of any person under arrest or awaiting trial. We are concerned that the effects of isolation and prolonged cellular confinement . . . may, further, undermine his ability to assist in his defence and thus his right to a fair trial.
The letter follows a report from Manning’s lawyer, former Lt. Col. David Coombs, that the conditions of his detention temporarily worsened in the past week, prompting a formal complaint under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. [Continue reading…]
To say that the Obama administration’s campaign against WikiLeaks has been based on wildly exaggerated and even false claims is to understate the case. But now, there is evidence that Obama officials have been knowingly lying in public about these matters. The long-time Newsweek reporter Mark Hosenball — now at Reuters — reports that what Obama officials are saying in private about WikiLeaks directly contradicts their public claims:
Internal U.S. government reviews have determined that a mass leak of diplomatic cables caused only limited damage to U.S. interests abroad, despite the Obama administration’s public statements to the contrary.
A congressional official briefed on the reviews said the administration felt compelled to say publicly that the revelations had seriously damaged American interests in order to bolster legal efforts to shut down the WikiLeaks website and bring charges against the leakers. . . .
“We were told (the impact of WikiLeaks revelations) was embarrassing but not damaging,” said the official, who attended a briefing given in late 2010 by State Department officials. . .
But current and former intelligence officials note that while WikiLeaks has released a handful of inconsequential CIA analytical reports, the website has made public few if any real intelligence secrets, including reports from undercover agents or ultra-sensitive technical intelligence reports, such as spy satellite pictures or communications intercepts. . . .
National security officials familiar with the damage assessments being conducted by defense and intelligence agencies told Reuters the reviews so far have shown “pockets” of short-term damage, some of it potentially harmful. Long-term damage to U.S. intelligence and defense operations, however, is unlikely to be serious, they said. . . .
Shortly before WikiLeaks began its gradual release of State Department cables last year, department officials sent emails to contacts on Capitol Hill predicting dire consequences, said one of the two congressional aides briefed on the internal government reviews.
However, shortly after stories about the cables first began to appear in the media, State Department officials were already privately playing down the damage, the two congressional officials said.
In response to Hosenball’s story, Obama officials naturally tried to salvage the integrity of their statements, insisting that “there has been substantial damage” and that there were unspecified “specific cases where damage caused by WikiLeaks’ revelations have been assessed as serious to grave.” But the only specific cases anyone could identify were ones where the U.S. was caught by these documents lying to its own citizens or, at best, concealing vital truths — such as the far greater military role the U.S. is playing in Yemen and Pakistan than Obama officials have publicly acknowledged.
And this, of course, has been the point all along: the WikiLeaks disclosures are significant precisely because they expose government deceit, wrongdoing and brutality, but the damage to innocent people has been deliberately and wildly exaggerated — fabricated — by the very people whose misconduct has been revealed. There is harm from the WikiLeaks documents, but it’s to wrongdoers in power, which is why they are so desperate to malign and then destroy the group.
On Saturday, the New York Times revealed that the Stuxnet malware attack on Iran’s uranium enrichment program was a joint US-Israeli operation. The report illustrates the officially sanctioned relationship between the US government and the US press when it comes to the publication of classified information. Indeed, this relationship is so well understood that on matters of national security, the New York Times can be regarded as effectively serving as the US government’s ministry of information.
Although the report does not cite government sources — even anonymous officials — there seems little doubt that on an intelligence issue such as this (there could not be one of greater sensitivity) the newspaper’s editors would at least have shown the report to administration officials before publication. Which is to say, the New York Times would not publish a story of this nature without government approval. That is not to say that the accuracy of the report was being vouched for but that, at the least, the government could tolerate (and might well welcome) the disclosure of the classified information it contained.
This gets to the heart of the Obama administration’s fight against WikiLeaks: it’s not about the protection of secrecy; it’s about control of classified information. In other words, it’s about the exercising of the political power to pick and choose when the law should be upheld and when it can be disregarded.
WikiLeaks presents a challenge to centralized power; not governance by law.
On Friday, Andrew Sullivan — who heralded Iranian unrest 18 months ago as the Twitter revolution — was quick to dub the popular uprising in Tunisia a “WikiLeaks revolution” :
There seems little doubt that the Wikileaks-released cable describing the opulence of now former president Ben Ali’s lifestyle played a key part in bringing him down.
But what did WikiLeaks reveal?
In a July 2009 cable published by The Guardian on December 7, US Ambassador Robert F. Godec wrote:
The problem is clear: Tunisia has been ruled by the same president for 22 years. He has no successor. And, while President Ben Ali deserves credit for continuing many of the progressive policies of President Bourguiba, he and his regime have lost touch with the Tunisian people. They tolerate no advice or criticism, whether domestic or international. Increasingly, they rely on the police for control and focus on preserving power. And, corruption in the inner circle is growing. Even average Tunisians are now keenly aware of it, and the chorus of complaints is rising. Tunisians intensely dislike, even hate, First Lady Leila Trabelsi and her family. In private, regime opponents mock her; even those close to the government express dismay at her reported behavior. Meanwhile, anger is growing at Tunisia’s high unemployment and regional inequities. As a consequence, the risks to the regime’s long-term stability are increasing.
Average Tunisians were keenly aware of the corruption of their rulers, hated the president’s wife and his family and were expressing growing anger about unemployment — and all of this put the regime at risk. And yet — here’s the inexplicable element — somehow, all of these observable facts once encapsulated in a cable from the US embassy and then leaked by WikiLeaks became a “revelation” confirming what the average Tunisian already knew.
Tunisia is a small country that usually garners little international attention, so WikiLeaks can be given some credit for enlightening the rest of the world about the political instability of this Arab backwater, but to claim that WikiLeaks “played a key part” in bringing down the Tunisian president seems a bit of a stretch.
If the cable did include an important revelation, it was one unlikely to fuel Tunisians’ revolutionary fervor: that the Obama administration was being advised by it embassy to be less openly critical of the regime than the Bush administration had been.
For several years, the United States has been out in front — publicly and privately — criticizing the GOT [Government of Tunisia] for the absence of democracy and the lack of respect for human rights. There is a place for such criticism, and we do not advocate abandoning it. We do recommend a more pragmatic approach, however, whereby we would speak to the Tunisians very clearly and at a very high level about our concerns regarding Tunisia’s democracy and human rights practices, but dial back the public criticism.
In other words, the United States under Barack Obama’s presidency, would not stray from the longstanding American approach which attaches a higher value to stability than democracy — that sees US interests deeply invested in the continuity of autocratic rule in most of the Arab world’s so-called “moderate” states.
If dictators in the Middle East are seen as the bulwark preventing the rise to power of Islamists, then the US will nod in the direction of the oppressed by making calls for “democratic reform” even if the prospect of democracy is nowhere in sight. Indeed, democratic reform rather than being a stepping stone towards democracy is more likely seen as a preferable substitute, since democracy itself opens the door to those dreaded Islamists.
If the current administration preferred a “pragmatic” approach towards Tunisia and the instrumental role of WikiLeaks has been overstated, what about the influence of social media? Yesterday, Ben Wedeman from CNN tweeted: “No one I spoke to in Tunis today mentioned twitter, facebook or wikileaks. It’s all about unemployment, corruption, oppression.”
Jamal Dajani, who was in Tunis at the beginning of the month, writes:
It is very easy, but over-simplistic and naive to decide on a social media interpretation for the Jasmine Revolution, as we have been witnessing by many bloggers and self-appointed Middle East experts, many of whom neither speak Arabic nor have spent an extended period of time in the Middle East. They desperately want to convince us that Tunisians needed an external technological Western invention in order to succeed. A Twitter revolution of some sorts, as they previously labeled the Iranian Velvet Revolution, as though Arab masses were not capable on their own of saying “enough is enough.”
Certainly social media was used as a communication tool for Tunisians to air their frustrations with the economy, unemployment, censorship, and corruption. But many factors lead to its success, such as a well organized trade unions movement, and the most potent weapon in the Arab world, the youth.
Likewise during the 2009 summer uprising in Iran, Twitter only had a very minor role. In the London Review of Books, James Harkin notes:
In 2009, according to a firm called Sysomos which analyses social media, there were 19,235 Twitter accounts in Iran – 0.03 per cent of the population. Researchers at al-Jazeera found only 60 Twitter accounts active in Tehran at the time of the demonstrations, which fell to six after the crackdown.
Also, to the extent that the internet and social media did serve as revolutionary tools in Iran, they also served as a means to thwart the revolution.
As we know from the post-protest crackdown in Iran, the Internet has proved a very rich source of incriminating details about activists; the police scrutinized Facebook groups, tweets, and even email groups very closely. Furthermore, the Iran government may have also analyzed Internet traffic and phone communications related to the opposition.
Now, Tunisia is no in Iran. Its long-ruling dictator is now gone and the new government is unlikely to engage in repressions on the same scale. Yet if Ben Ali’s regime didn’t fall, it appears certain to that the authorities would be brutally going after anyone who has ever posted a damning Facebook post or an angry email. As we have seen in the few weeks leading to Ali’s exit, the Tunisian cyber-police have proved to be far more skilled in Internet repression than their counterparts abroad: it’s safe to assume they would have dug as much evidence as the Iranians.
This brings me to a somewhat depressing conclusion: if the dictator doesn’t fall in the end, the benefits of social mobilization afforded by the Internet are probably outweighed by its costs (i.e. the ease of tracking down dissidents – let alone organizers of the protests).
It’s easy those of us in the West to celebrate a distant revolution from the comfort of an armchair, facing no risk of getting shot or being imprisoned, yet experiencing an illusion of participation through the immediacy of social media.
Swiftly named the Jasmine Revolution and now viewed as a domino that might lead to the collapse of authoritarian regimes across the region, it’s too early to know whether this is indeed a revolution.
AFP reports that Prime Minister Mohammed Ghannouchi:
… held consultations with the leaders of the main opposition parties in Tunis on the formation of a national unity government to fill the power vacuum left by Ben Ali’s abrupt departure after 23 years in power.
Two parties banned under Ben Ali — the Communist party and the Islamist Ennahdha party — have been excluded from the government talks.
Whatever the eventual outcome of the turmoil now raging in Tunisia, it may end up causing as much alarm on the Arab street as it does among the autocratic rulers. As Stephen Walt warns:
Tunisia’s experience may not look very attractive over the next few weeks or months, especially if the collapse of the government leads to widespread anarchy, violence and economic hardship. If that is the case, then restive populations elsewhere may be less inclined to challenge unpopular leaders, reasoning that “hey, our government sucks, but it’s better than no government at all.”
Brian Whitaker notes the fallout from Tunisia has already spread to Libya where demonstrators have clashed with security forces.
Will it develop into anything bigger? A month ago, I would have said the likelihood of that was zero. Post-Tunisia, though, it’s difficult to be quite so sure..
We can expect to see many more incidents like this over the coming months in various Arab countries. Inspired by the Tunisian uprising, people are going to be more assertive about their grievances and start probing, to see how far they can push the authorities. In the light of Tunisia we can also expect a tendency, each time disturbances happen, to suggest (or hope) that they are the start of some new Arab revolution. The reality, though, is that almost all of them will quickly fizzle out or get crushed. But one day – who knows when? – another of them will grow wings and bring down a regime.
Contrary to what many people imagine, protests and even large-scale riots are not uncommon in the Arab countries. They occur mostly in marginalised regions or among marginalised sections of the population and, normally, they pose no great threat to the regime.
Last month – one day before the trouble started in Tunisia – there was a Sunni-versus-Shia riot in the Saudi city of Medina. Eight hundred people are said to have taken part; windows were smashed and dozens of cars damaged or destroyed. Outside the kingdom, hardly anyone noticed.
The New York Times reports that the Stuxnet worm which was designed to attack Iran’s nuclear enrichment program was a joint US-Israeli operation. One of the crucial elements in developing the plan was being able to test the malware’s ability to disable P-1 centrifuges — the type that Iran employs in cascades of thousands of centrifuges in it Natanz enrichment facility. Israel has row upon row of this type of centrifuge at its clandestine nuclear weapons production facility in Dimona.
The question is: how did Israel come to possess so many P-1 centrifuges? Did Israel obtain the centrifuges from AQ Khan?
The CIA was tracking the AQ Khan network for decades before it eventually shut it down in 2003. Douglas Frantz, co-author of Fallout: The True Story of the CIA’s Secret War on Nuclear Trafficking, told NPR: “By the time they finally acted in 2003, an enormous amount of the world’s most dangerous technology had been sold to the world’s most dangerous regimes. And that, in our view, was a policy failure, a policy failure of enormous proportions, really.”
The account starts in the Netherlands. In the 1970s, the Dutch designed a tall, thin machine for enriching uranium. As is well known, A. Q. Khan, a Pakistani metallurgist working for the Dutch, stole the design and in 1976 fled to Pakistan.
The resulting machine, known as the P-1, for Pakistan’s first-generation centrifuge, helped the country get the bomb. And when Dr. Khan later founded an atomic black market, he illegally sold P-1’s to Iran, Libya, and North Korea.
The P-1 is more than six feet tall. Inside, a rotor of aluminum spins uranium gas to blinding speeds, slowly concentrating the rare part of the uranium that can fuel reactors and bombs.
How and when Israel obtained this kind of first-generation centrifuge remains unclear, whether from Europe, or the Khan network, or by other means. But nuclear experts agree that Dimona came to hold row upon row of spinning centrifuges.
“They’ve long been an important part of the complex,” said Avner Cohen, author of “The Worst-Kept Secret” (2010), a book about the Israeli bomb program, and a senior fellow at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. He added that Israeli intelligence had asked retired senior Dimona personnel to help on the Iranian issue, and that some apparently came from the enrichment program.
Last week, on January 3, The Guardian published a scathing Op-Ed by James Richardson blaming WikiLeaks for endangering the life of Morgan Tsvangirai, the leader of the democratic opposition in Zimbabwe. Richardson — a GOP operative, contributor to RedState.com, and a for-hire corporate spokesman — pointed to a cable published by WikiLeaks in which American diplomats revealed that Tsvangirai, while publicly opposing American sanctions on his country, had privately urged their continuation as a means of weakening the Mugabe regime: an act likely to be deemed to be treasonous in that country, for obvious reasons. By publishing this cable, “WikiLeaks may have committed its own collateral murder,” Richardson wrote. He added: “WikiLeaks ought to leave international relations to those who understand it – at least to those who understand the value of a life.”
This accusation against WikiLeaks was repeated far and wide. In The Wall Street Journal, Jamie Kirchick — the long-time assistant of The New Republic‘s Marty Peretz — wrote under this headline: “Julian Assange’s reckless behavior could cost Zimbabwe’s leading democrat his life.” Kirchick explained that “the crusading ‘anti-secrecy’ website released a diplomatic cable from the U.S. Embassy in Harare” which exposed Tsvangirai’s support for sanctions. As “a result of the WikiLeaks revelations,” Kirchick wrote, the reform leader would likely be charged with treason, and “Mr. Tsvangirai will have someone additional to blame: Julian Assange of WikiLeaks.” The Atlantic‘s Chris Albon, in his piece entitled “How WikiLeaks Just Set Back Democracy in Zimbabwe,” echoed the same accusation, claiming “WikiLeaks released [this cable] to the world” and that Assange has thus “provided a tyrant with the ammunition to wound, and perhaps kill, any chance for multiparty democracy.” Numerous other outlets predictably mimicked these claims.
There was just one small problem with all of this: it was totally false. It wasn’t WikiLeaks which chose that cable to be placed into the public domain, nor was it WikiLeaks which first published it. It was The Guardian that did that. [Continue reading…]
As someone who jumped to the same false conclusion, I stand corrected and appreciate Greenwald’s tenacity in so closely tracking and analyzing this hugely important story.
Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, could be at “real risk” of the death penalty or detention in Guantánamo Bay if he is extradited to Sweden on accusations of rape and sexual assault, his lawyers claim.
In a skeleton summary of their defence against attempts by the Swedish director of public prosecutions to extradite him, released today, Assange’s legal team argue that there is a similar likelihood that the US would subsequently seek his extradition “and/or illegal rendition”, “where there will be a real risk of him being detained at Guantánamo Bay or elsewhere”.
“Indeed, if Mr Assange were rendered to the USA, without assurances that the death penalty would not be carried out, there is a real risk that he could be made subject to the death penalty. It is well known that prominent figures have implied, if not stated outright, that Mr Assange should be executed.”
Paragraphs 92-99 of the outline detail Sweden’s history of violating the Convention Against Torture by rendering War on Terror suspects to Egypt to be tortured, and concludes: “based on its record as condemned by the United Nations Committee against Torture and the Human Rights Committee, Sweden would bow to US pressure and/or rely naively on diplomatic assurances from the USA that Mr. Assange would not be mistreated, with the consequence that he would be deported/expelled to the USA, where he would suffer serious ill-treatment.” This danger is legally relevant because the governing Extradition Act bars the expulsion of a prisoner where “extradition would be [in]compatible with the Convention rights within the meaning of the Human Rights Act 1998.” The outline also cited vigilante calls from leading right-wing figures for Assange’s murder (yesterday, it was discovered that a prominent right-wing blogger, Melissa Clouthier, had registered the website JulianAssangeMustDie.com).
It’s quite notable that the mere threat of ending up in American custody is considered (at least by Assange’s lawyers) to be a viable basis for contesting extradition on human rights grounds. Indeed, this argument is not unusual. Numerous countries often demand, as a condition for extradition to the U.S., assurances from the U.S. Government that the death penalty will not be applied. Similarly, there are currently cases pending in EU courts contesting the extradition of War on Terror detainees to the U.S. on the ground that they will be treated inhumanely by virtue of the type of prolonged, intensive solitary confinement to which Bradley Manning — and thousands of other actual convicts — are subjected.
And now we have the spectacle of Julian Assange’s lawyers citing the Obama administration’s policies of rendition and indefinite detention at Guantanamo as a reason why human rights treaties bar his extradition to any country (such as Sweden) which might transfer him to American custody. Indeed, almost every person with whom I’ve spoken who has or had anything to do with WikiLeaks expresses one fear above all others: the possibility that they will end up in American custody and subjected to its lawless War on Terror “justice system.” Americans still like to think of themselves as “leaders of the free world,” but in the eyes of many, it’s exactly the “free world” to which American policies are so antithetical and threatening.
A statement released by WikiLeaks, innumerates the many instances in which prominent figures in the US media have called for Assange’s murder:
WikiLeaks staff and contributors have also been the target of unprecedented violent rhetoric by US prominent media personalities, including Sarah Palin, who urged the US administration to “Hunt down the WikiLeaks chief like the Taliban”. Prominent US politician Mike Huckabee called for the execution of WikiLeaks spokesman Julian Assange on his Fox News program last November, and Fox News commentator Bob Beckel, referring to Assange, publicly called for people to “illegally shoot the son of a bitch.” US radio personality Rush Limbaugh has called for pressure to “Give [Fox News President Roger] Ailes the order and [then] there is no Assange, I’ll guarantee you, and there will be no fingerprints on it.”, while the Washington Times columnist Jeffery T. Kuhner titled his column “Assassinate Assange” captioned with a picture Julian Assange overlayed with a gun site, blood spatters, and “WANTED DEAD or ALIVE” with the alive crossed out.
John Hawkins of Townhall.com has stated “If Julian Assange is shot in the head tomorrow or if his car is blown up when he turns the key, what message do you think that would send about releasing sensitive American data?”
Christian Whiton in a Fox News opinion piece called for violence against WikiLeaks publishers and editors, saying the US should “designate WikiLeaks and its officers as enemy combatants, paving the way for non-judicial actions against them.”
WikiLeaks spokesman Julian Assange said: “No organisation anywhere in the world is a more devoted advocate of free speech than Wikileaks but when senior politicians and attention seeking media commentators call for specific individuals or groups of people to be killed they should be charged with incitement — to murder. Those who call for an act of murder deserve as significant share of the guilt as those raising a gun to pull the trigger.”
Not so long ago, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange could count on American journalists to support his campaign to publish secret documents that banks and governments didn’t want the world to see.
But just three years after a major court confrontation that saw many of America’s most important journalism organizations file briefs on WikiLeaks’ behalf, much of the U.S. journalistic community has shunned Assange — even as reporters write scores, if not hundreds, of stories based on WikiLeaks’ trove of leaked State Department cables.
Some call him a traitor, responsible for what’s arguably one of the biggest U.S. national security breaches ever. Others say a man who calls for government transparency has been too opaque about how he obtained the documents.
The freedom of the press committee of the Overseas Press Club of America in New York City declared him “not one of us.” The Associated Press, which once filed legal briefs on Assange’s behalf, refuses to comment about him. And the National Press Club in Washington, the venue less than a year ago for an Assange news conference, has decided not to speak out about the possibility that he’ll be charged with a crime.
With a few notable exceptions, it’s been left to foreign journalism organizations to offer the loudest calls for the U.S. to recognize WikiLeaks’ and Assange’s right to publish under the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment.
Prosecutors investigating the disclosure of thousands of classified government documents by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks have gone to court to demand the Twitter account activity of several people linked to the organization, including its founder, Julian Assange, according to the group and a copy of a subpoena made public late Friday.
The subpoena is the first public evidence of a criminal investigation, announced last month by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., that has been urged on by members of Congress of both parties but is fraught with legal and political difficulties for the Obama administration. It was denounced by WikiLeaks, which has so far made public only about 1 percent of the quarter-million confidential diplomatic cables in its possession but has threatened to post them all on the Web if criminal charges are brought.
Dozens of Pentagon and State Department officials have worked for months to assess the damage done to American diplomatic and military operations by the disclosures. In recent weeks, Justice Department officials have been seeking a legal rationale for charging Mr. Assange with criminal behavior, including whether he had solicited leaks.
The move to get the information from five prominent figures tied to the group was revealed late Friday, when Birgitta Jonsdottir, a former WikiLeaks activist who is also a member of Iceland’s Parliament, received an e-mail notification from Twitter.
In the message, obtained by The New York Times, the company told her it had received a legal request for details regarding her account and warned that the company would have to respond unless the matter was resolved or “a motion to quash the legal process has been filed.” The subpoena was attached.
The subpoena was issued by the United States attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia on Dec. 14 and asks for the complete account information of Pfc. Bradley Manning, the Army intelligence specialist awaiting a court martial under suspicion of leaking materials to WikiLeaks, as well as Ms. Jonsdottir, Mr. Assange and two computer programmers, Rop Gonggrijp and Jacob Appelbaum. The request covers addresses, screen names, telephone numbers and credit card and bank account numbers, but does not ask for the content of private messages sent using Twitter.
Some published reports in recent weeks have suggested that the Justice Department may have secretly impaneled a grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia, which often handles national security cases, to take evidence in the WikiLeaks inquiry. But the subpoena, unsealed by a Jan. 5 court order at the request of Twitter’s lawyers, was not issued by a grand jury.
In Twitter messages, WikiLeaks confirmed the subpoena and suggested that Google and Facebook might also have been issued such legal demands. Officials for Facebook declined to comment, and Google did not immediately respond to an inquiry.
Meanwhile, WikiLeaks tweeted: “WARNING all 637,000 @wikileaks followers are a target of US gov subpoena against Twitter, under section 2. B http://is.gd/koZIA”
I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for an email notification from Twitter. As for the silence from Google and Facebook — that speaks volumes.
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