A federal judge on Tuesday threw out a lawsuit that had sought to block the American government from trying to kill Anwar al-Awlaki, a United States citizen and Muslim cleric in hiding overseas who is accused of helping to plan attacks by Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen.
The ruling, which clears the way for the Obama administration to continue to try to kill Mr. Awlaki, represents a victory in its efforts to shield from judicial review so-called targeted killings, one of its most striking counterterrorism policies.
In an 83-page opinion, Judge John D. Bates said Mr. Awlaki’s father, the plaintiff, had no standing to file the lawsuit on behalf of his son. He also said decisions about targeted killings in such circumstances were a “political question” for executive branch officials to make — not judges.
Judge Bates acknowledged that the case raised “stark, and perplexing, questions” — including whether the president could “order the assassination of a U.S. citizen without first affording him any form of judicial process whatsoever, based the mere assertion that he is a dangerous member of a terrorist organization.”
Jameel Jaffer, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, said: “If the court’s ruling is correct, the government has unreviewable authority to carry out the targeted killing of any American, anywhere, whom the president deems to be a threat to the nation.” He said: “It would be difficult to conceive of a proposition more inconsistent with the Constitution, or more dangerous to American liberty.”
I guess Hillary Clinton already has her hands full overseeing the State Department’s UN credit card number theft operations along with coordinating cyber attacks on WikiLeaks — the Middle East peace process would just have to go on the back burner. There will be a statement tomorrow.
I wonder whether Israel still gets a free squadron of F-35 striker jets, for… well, just for being Israel. On the other hand, the US could consider offering firefighting equipment instead of fighter jets.
The decision to throw in the towel on getting a paltry three-month extension of the settlement slowdown is not “a retreat,” the Washington Institute for Near East Policy’s David Makovsky tells Politico. That’s true. You can only retreat if you first advance.
The United States has decided to abandon an effort to persuade Israel to issue a new temporary West Bank settlement moratorium in order for direct Israeli-Palestinian peace talks to resume, U.S. officials said Tuesday.
“After consulting with the parties, we have determined that a moratorium extension will not at this time provide the best basis for resuming negotiations,” a U.S. official said on the condition of anonymity Tuesday.
“We are still going to continue our engagement with both sides on the core issues and we continue to work towards the goal of a framework agreement,” the official said.
“We hope, obviously, to get the parties to direct talks, but in the meantime, we will continue our engagement with both sides,” the official said, declining to use the word “proximity” in reference to the talks. “We are not changing course. We are still very much committed” to getting a framework agreement.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is due to make a statement Wednesday on the Middle East peace process. On Friday, Clinton will speak to the Saban forum, which will also be addressed by Palestinian Nation Prime Minister Salam Fayyad and Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak.
There will be “no dramatic change” in policy that Clinton announces, a second U.S. official said Tuesday on condition of anonymity.
State Department spokesman PJ Crowley insists: “The process has not stopped. We obviously recognize that, we face a difficult obstacle, and we will continue to engage the parties on the way forward.”
Meanwhile, Brazil and Argentina are showing another way forward which does not depend on the ineffectual Obama administration: recognizing the state of Palestine.
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.
‘Never waste a good crisis” used to be the catchphrase of the Obama team in the runup to the presidential election. In that spirit, let us see what we can learn from official reactions to the WikiLeaks revelations.
The most obvious lesson is that it represents the first really sustained confrontation between the established order and the culture of the internet. There have been skirmishes before, but this is the real thing.
And as the backlash unfolds – first with deniable attacks on internet service providers hosting WikiLeaks, later with companies like Amazon and eBay and PayPal suddenly “discovering” that their terms and conditions preclude them from offering services to WikiLeaks, and then with the US government attempting to intimidate Columbia students posting updates about WikiLeaks on Facebook – the intolerance of the old order is emerging from the rosy mist in which it has hitherto been obscured. The response has been vicious, co-ordinated and potentially comprehensive, and it contains hard lessons for everyone who cares about democracy and about the future of the net.
There is a delicious irony in the fact that it is now the so-called liberal democracies that are clamouring to shut WikiLeaks down.
Consider, for instance, how the views of the US administration have changed in just a year. On 21 January, secretary of state Hillary Clinton made a landmark speech about internet freedom, in Washington DC, which many people welcomed and most interpreted as a rebuke to China for its alleged cyberattack on Google. “Information has never been so free,” declared Clinton. “Even in authoritarian countries, information networks are helping people discover new facts and making governments more accountable.”
She went on to relate how, during his visit to China in November 2009, Barack Obama had “defended the right of people to freely access information, and said that the more freely information flows the stronger societies become. He spoke about how access to information helps citizens to hold their governments accountable, generates new ideas, and encourages creativity.” Given what we now know, that Clinton speech reads like a satirical masterpiece.
“WikiLeaks cables portray Saudi Arabia as a cash machine for terrorists,” declares The Guardian, reporting on the US State Department’s concerns about the Kingdom’s role in funding al Qaeda and other militant organizations.
Reporters Eric Lichtblau and Eric Schmitt wait until paragraph nineteen of their report to declare: “Saudi Arabia, a critical military and diplomatic ally, emerges in the cables as the most vexing of problems.” Paragraph nineteen! Why wasn’t that in the first paragraph? Just because President Obama has demonstrated his willingness to bow to King Abdullah, does the Times feel obliged to assume the same posture?
Saudi Arabia is the world’s largest source of funds for Islamist militant groups such as the Afghan Taliban and Lashkar-e-Taiba – but the Saudi government is reluctant to stem the flow of money, according to Hillary Clinton.
“More needs to be done since Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support base for al-Qaida, the Taliban, LeT and other terrorist groups,” says a secret December 2009 paper signed by the US secretary of state. Her memo urged US diplomats to redouble their efforts to stop Gulf money reaching extremists in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
“Donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide,” she said.
Three other Arab countries are listed as sources of militant money: Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates.
The cables highlight an often ignored factor in the Pakistani and Afghan conflicts: that the violence is partly bankrolled by rich, conservative donors across the Arabian Sea whose governments do little to stop them.
The problem is particularly acute in Saudi Arabia, where militants soliciting funds slip into the country disguised as holy pilgrims, set up front companies to launder funds and receive money from government-sanctioned charities.
Justin Elliot looks back at Israel’s repeated predictions that Iran would soon acquire nuclear weapons.
Officials at the U.S. Department of State, we learned from the secret cables released by WikiLeaks last week, have serious questions about the accuracy — and sincerity — of Israeli predictions about when Iran will obtain a nuclear weapon. As one State official wrote in response to an Israeli general’s November 2009 claim that Iran would have a bomb in one year: “It is unclear if the Israelis firmly believe this or are using worst-case estimates to raise greater urgency from the United States.”
So we thought this was as good a time as any to look at the remarkable history of incorrect Israeli predictions about Iran — especially given that the WikiLeaks trove is being used to argue that an attack on Iran is becoming more likely.
According to various Israeli government predictions over the years, Iran was going to have a bomb by the mid-90s — or 1998, 1999, 2000, 2004, 2005, and finally 2010. More recent Israeli predictions have put that date at 2011 or 2014.
NGO Monitor was captured perfectly in The Forward by liberal jewish thinker Leonard Fine who said it was “an organization that believes that the best way to defend Israel is to condemn anyone who criticizes it.” But now, no longer satisfied with its McCarthyite efforts to not just condemn, but actually take down respected human rights organizations, it is seeking to stop critical funding of the Electronic Intifada, a key media source for information and analysis about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Electronic Intifada (EI) is a pioneering online news outlet that has been an essential resource for activists, scholars and journalists since its inception in 2002. Its coverage is unapologetically sympathetic to the Palestinian struggle for human rights, grounded in an understanding of international law and universal human rights. Years before the current proliferation of blogs and alternate news sources, EI was there first, providing a much needed antidote to one-sided mainstream news coverage of Israel and Palestine. And they continue to provide original reporting and news and analysis you still can’t get anywhere else.
Which perhaps is why NGO Monitor has made the preposterous claim that EI is “an anti-Semitic website,” stunningly based on the fact that one staffer is a supporter of the BDS movement and executive director, Ali Abunimah, in his non EI-related speaking engagements, “calls for a one-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and routinely uses false apartheid rhetoric.” Really? This is what they’ve got?
Illan Pappe addressing the Palestine Solidarity conference in Stuttgart, Germany on November 27, talks about challenging the ideological foundation of the state of Israel.
True believers in secrecy know that its most staunch defenders are secrecy’s worst enemies. They know that the inevitable consequence of the rampant proliferation of a secrecy culture, will be to feed doubt that secrecy itself has any legitimacy. The assumption will take hold that secrecy’s one and only function is the protection of power.
Secrecy is maintained by constructing barriers between those who can know and those who can’t. The powers of a Security State have less to do with protecting secrets than with controlling the barriers of secrecy and determining who can be allowed in and who must be kept out. In other words, secrecy ends up having more to do with maintaining inequities in the distribution of power than in protecting the public interest.
In the multitude of ways that the Obama administration has mishandled the WikiLeaks drama, none is worse than the signal it has just sent out to a generation of young Americans: if you have an inquiring mind, don’t bother applying for a job with the US government. If however you are happy to blindly follow orders and have a slavish admiration for institutional authority — who knows, maybe one day you could become president.
The Office of Management and Budget today directed all federal agencies to bar unauthorized employees from accessing the Wikileaks web site and its leaked diplomatic cables.
In an email to federal agencies obtained by TPM, the OMB’s general counsel directed the agencies to immediately tell their employees to “safeguard classified information” by not accessing Wikileaks over the Internet.
Classified information, the OMB notes, “remains classified … until it is declassified by an appropriate U.S. Government authority.” Employees may not view classified info over a non-classified system (i.e., the Internet), the OMB says, “as doing so risks that material still classified will be placed onto non-classified systems.”
Reading a classified document appearing in the New York Times presents the risk that the designation of its secrecy will lose effect in the minds of those who are required to maintain a reverential respect for rubber stamps.
Meanwhile, the State Department, apparently hoping it might be able to lobotomize a few young minds in preparation for government service, sent out some friendly advice:
Students of Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs were warned this week not to spread the Wikileak cables online if they ever wanted a job at the State Department.
The warning came through the office of career services, from an unnamed alumnus who now works at State and wanted to pass along the message.
“The documents released during the past few months through Wikileaks are still considered classified documents. He recommends that you DO NOT post links to these documents nor make comments on social media sites such as Facebook or through Twitter,” reads the email, sent by the office of career services. Engaging in these activities would call into question your ability to deal with confidential information, which is part of most positions with the federal government.”
Oh the irony, that any of us could have been so naive as to imagine that the Bush era might be followed by a more enlightened administration. Instead, a cast of colorful characters who were easy to demonize has been replaced by something worse: technocratic zombies who have normalized and solidified the power grabs initiated by their Machiavellian predecessors.
And this is what it has come to under Obama’s leadership: that the surest way of predicting how this administration will act, is simply to ask: what would be the most cowardly course of action? For that is the direction in which we can be sure it will proceed.
If this failing was merely that of a particular president or political party, America might not be in such bad shape, but the test came on 9/11 and America has been failing ever since.
Danger always poses a challenge. Will fear scream so loudly that nothing else can be heard?
“Courage is the ability to follow your principles even when you’re scared to death,” said Lt Cmdr Charles Swift after successfully challenging the Bush administration before the Supreme Court in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld.
Swift appears in Secrecy — a documentary no less relevant now than when it came out in 2008. (If you’re a Netflix subscriber you can “watch instantly.”)
Last year (before WikiLeaks had acquired such prominence), the film’s directors Peter Galison and Robb Moss joined professors Jack Goldsmith (author of The Terror Presidency and former Assistant Attorney General in the Bush administration) and Martha Minow from Harvard Law School, for a discussion on the documentary, moderated by Jonathan Zittrain from Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society.
Ever since 9/11, protecting America has been the name of the political game, yet there has been no consensus about what constitutes that which is under threat and in need of protection. Global hegemony? Rampant consumerism?
What has gradually become clear is that it is American democracy itself which faces the greatest challenge and if the issue of secrecy is to be addressed in a way that supports rather than undermines democracy, it will be approached using the same principles that shape the whole operation of government, with checks and balances, for these are the principles which if not applied will fall into disrepair, leaving an America armed to protect everything while no longer standing for anything.
In the run-up to a new round of nuclear talks between the P5+1 and Iran on Monday, Western commentators are re-hashing old arguments that the Islamic Republic is either too politically divided or too dependent on hostility toward the United States for its legitimacy to be seriously interested in a nuclear deal. From this perspective, the Obama administration has been more than forthcoming in its efforts to “engage” Tehran; the obstacles to diplomatic progress are all on the Iranian side.
But a sober examination of the Obama administration’s interactions with Iran since President Obama took office in 2009 reveals a dismaying mix of incompetence and outright duplicity that has done profound damage to American interests and credibility. In light of this record, the question is not whether the United States should have any confidence it can productively engage the Islamic Republic. The real question is: why should Iranian officials believe they can trust President Obama and his administration to deal with them straightforwardly and with a genuine interest in finding a diplomatic solution to the nuclear standoff?
The recent release of the Wikileaks cables confirms the assessment we have been offering since May 2009: The Obama administration has failed to follow up on President Obama’s early rhetorical overtures to Tehran with bold steps and substantive proposals to demonstrate its seriousness about rapprochement. Strategic engagement — think Nixon and China — is not the same as “carrots and sticks”. In fact, strategic engagement requires a self-conscious effort by the United States to put “sticks” aside in order assure Iran that it is serious about realigning relations. And that is something the Obama administration has never been willing to do. (Obama’s vague letters to Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — dispatched as Obama ignored two letters sent by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — were seen in Tehran as just the latest U.S. attempt to “game” Iran’s political system rather than to come to terms with it.)
In its first months in office, the Obama administration sought to protect Bush administration officials facing criminal investigation overseas for their involvement in establishing policies the that governed interrogations of detained terrorist suspects. A “confidential” April 17, 2009, cable sent from the US embassy in Madrid to the State Department—one of the 251,287 cables obtained by WikiLeaks—details how the Obama administration, working with Republicans, leaned on Spain to derail this potential prosecution.
The previous month, a Spanish human rights group called the Association for the Dignity of Spanish Prisoners had requested that Spain’s National Court indict six former Bush officials for, as the cable describes it, “creating a legal framework that allegedly permitted torture.” The six were former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales; David Addington, former chief of staff and legal adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney; William Haynes, the Pentagon’s former general counsel; Douglas Feith, former undersecretary of defense for policy; Jay Bybee, former head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel; and John Yoo, a former official in the Office of Legal Counsel. The human rights group contended that Spain had a duty to open an investigation under the nation’s “universal jurisdiction” law, which permits its legal system to prosecute overseas human rights crimes involving Spanish citizens and residents. Five Guantanamo detainees, the group maintained, fit that criteria.
Soon after the request was made, the US embassy in Madrid began tracking the matter. On April 1, embassy officials spoke with chief prosecutor Javier Zaragoza, who indicated that he was not pleased to have been handed this case, but he believed that the complaint appeared to be well-documented and he’d have to pursue it. Around that time, the acting deputy chief of the US embassy talked to the chief of staff for Spain’s foreign minister and a senior official in the Spanish Ministry of Justice to convey, as the cable says, “that this was a very serious matter for the USG.” The two Spaniards “expressed their concern at the case but stressed the independence of the Spanish judiciary.”
The President and the Press: Address before the American Newspaper Publishers Association
President John F. Kennedy, Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, New York City, April 27, 1961
Ladies and gentlemen, the very word secrecy is repugnant, in a free and open society, and we are as a people, inherently and historically, opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and secret proceedings.
We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweigh the dangers which are cited to justify it.
Even today there is little value in opposing the threat of a closed society by imitating it’s arbitrary restrictions.
Even today there is little value in ensuring the survival of our nation, if our traditions do not survive with it.
And there is very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon by those anxious who wish to expand it’s meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment.
That I do not intend to permit, to the extent that it is in my control.
And no official of my administration whether his rank is high or low, civilian or military, should interpret my words here tonight, as an excuse to censor the news, to stifle dissent, to cover up our mistakes, or to withhold from the press and the public the facts they deserve to know.
For we are opposed, around the world, by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy, that relies primarily on covet means for expanding it’s fear of influence, on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation, instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night, instead of armies by day.
It is a system which has conscripted, vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific, and political operations.
Its preparations are concealed, not published. It’s mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned. No rumor is printed. No secret is revealed.
No president should fear public scrutiny of his program. For from that scrutiny comes understanding. And from that understanding comes support or opposition, and both are necessary.
I am not asking your newspaper to support an administration. But I am asking your help in the tremendous task of informing and alerting the American people. For I have complete confidence in the response and the dedication of our citizens whenever they are fully informed.
I not only could not stifle controversy from your readers — I welcome it. This administration intends to be candid about its errors. For as a wise man once said, “an error doesn’t become a mistake until you refuse to correct it”.
We intend to accept full responsibility for our errors and we expect you to point them out when we miss them. Without debate, without criticism, no administration and no country can succeed. And no republic can survive.
That is why the Athenian lawmaker Solon decreed it a crime for any citizen to shrink from controversy. And that is why our press was protected by the first amendment, the only business in America specifically protected by the constitution, not primarily to amuse or entertain, not to emphasize the trivial and sentimental, not to simply give the public what it wants, but to inform, to arouse, and to reflect, to state our dangers and our opportunities, to indicate our crises and our choices, to lead, mould, and educate and sometimes even anger public opinion.
This means greater coverage and analysis of international news, for it is no longer far away and foreign, but close at hand and local. It means greater attention to improved attention to greater understanding of the news, as well as improved transmission, and it means finally, that government at all levels, must meet its obligation, to provide you with it’s possible information, outside the narrowest limits of national security.
And so it is to the printing press, to the recorder of man’s deeds, the keeper of his conscience, the courier of his news, that we look for strength, and his assistance, confident that with your help, Man will be what he was born to be: free and independent.
The Defense Department forced all “war on terror” detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison to take a high dosage of a controversial antimalarial drug, mefloquine, an act that an Army public health physician called “pharmacologic waterboarding.”
The US military administered the drug despite Pentagon knowledge that mefloquine caused severe neuropsychiatric side effects, including suicidal thoughts, hallucinations and anxiety. The drug was used on the prisoners whether they had malaria or not.
The revelation, which has not been previously reported, was buried in documents publicly released by the Defense Department (DoD) two years ago as part of the government’s investigation into the June 2006 deaths of three Guantanamo detainees.
Army Staff Sgt. Joe Hickman, who was stationed at Guantanamo at the time of the suicides in 2006, and has presented evidence that demonstrates the three detainees could not have died by hanging themselves, noticed in the detainees’ medical files that they were given mefloquine. Hickman has been investigating the circumstances behind the detainees’ deaths for nearly four years.
Interviews with mefloquine and malaria experts and a review of peer-reviewed journals and government documents show there were no preexisting cases where mefloquine was ever prescribed for mass presumptive treatment of malaria.
Gary Anderson, a retired US Marine colonel, says that Julian Assange is an enemy combatant and is “as much an enemy to the United States as any Al Qaeda operative.”
Not long ago an Esquire headline writer posed the question: “Should we execute Julian Assange?” “We” being the national American vigilante?
“Lives are at risk” is one of those fire-alarm imperatives that drains blood from the brain. It sets arms and legs and vocal chords in motion, fixes the mind on red-light conclusions and turns quiet deliberation into an unaffordable luxury.
A few years ago in Reader’s Digest, Michael Crowley rang the same alarm bell when he demanded that life-threatening websites like Cryptome (a sibbling of WikiLeaks) be shutdown.
To understand what nuts and zealots can do with this sort of information [available through sites like Cryptome], recall what happened in the early 1990s when three abortion doctors were killed after pro-life extremists created “wanted” posters displaying the physicians’ names and photographs. A few years later, a website showed pictures of other abortion doctors, and listed the murdered ones with their names crossed out. Eventually the site’s Web server shut it down.
Having been an outlet for State Department and CIA propaganda in the 1940s and 50s, Reader’s Digest was already on shaky ground positioning itself as a champion of public interest, but it was the Department of Justice which revealed that on occasions Reader’s Digest itself had been a source of dangerous information.
Stories of crimes contained in popular literature and magazines also constitute a rich source of bombmaking information. For example, the August 1993 edition of Reader’s Digest contains an account of efforts by law enforcement officers to track down the killer of United States Court of Appeals Judge Robert S. Vance and attorney Robert Robinson. That article contained a detailed description of the explosive devices used by the bomber in committing the murders, including such information as the size of the pipe bombs, how the bombs were constructed, and what type of smokeless powder was used in their construction. According to the Arson and Explosives Division of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, in a bombing case originating in Topeka, Kansas, the devices were patterned after the bomb used to kill Judge Vance. Upon questioning, the suspect admitted to investigators that he constructed the bomb based on information contained in the Reader’s Digest article.
As Daniel Ellsberg notes, in its efforts to clamp down on embarrassing leaks, the government’s first recourse is invariably to declare that “lives are at stake”
That’s a script that they roll out — every administration rolls out — every time there’s a leak of any sort. The best justification they can find for secrecy is that lives are at stake. Actually lives are at stake as a result of silence and lies which a lot of these leaks reveal.
In the latest revelations from WikiLeaks, the dangers of secrecy are no more clearly evident than in what we now learn about the vulnerability of Pakistan’s nuclear stockpiles — an issue we have previously been repeatedly assured poses no immediate risk. Secretly, we now learn, America’s leading diplomats in Pakistan did not share the confidence that the administration wanted to instill among Americans whose ignorance it preferred to guard.
Less than a month after President Obama testily assured reporters in 2009 that Pakistan’s nuclear materials “will remain out of militant hands,” his ambassador here sent a secret message to Washington suggesting that she remained deeply worried.
The ambassador’s concern was a stockpile of highly enriched uranium, sitting for years near an aging research nuclear reactor in Pakistan. There was enough to build several “dirty bombs” or, in skilled hands, possibly enough for an actual nuclear bomb.
In the cable, dated May 27, 2009, the ambassador, Anne W. Patterson, reported that the Pakistani government was yet again dragging its feet on an agreement reached two years earlier to have the United States remove the material.
She wrote to senior American officials that the Pakistani government had concluded that “the ‘sensational’ international and local media coverage of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons made it impossible to proceed at this time.” A senior Pakistani official, she said, warned that if word leaked out that Americans were helping remove the fuel, the local press would certainly “portray it as the United States taking Pakistan’s nuclear weapons.”
The fuel is still there.
It may be the most unnerving evidence of the complex relationship — sometimes cooperative, often confrontational, always wary — between America and Pakistan nearly 10 years into the American-led war in Afghanistan. The cables, obtained by WikiLeaks and made available to a number of news organizations, make it clear that underneath public reassurances lie deep clashes over strategic goals on issues like Pakistan’s support for the Afghan Taliban and tolerance of Al Qaeda, and Washington’s warmer relations with India, Pakistan’s archenemy.
The issue here, however, is more complex than transparency vs secrecy. While the dangers posed by nuclear stockpiles in Pakistan — and for that matter anywhere else — should concern everyone, the overbearing relationship between the US and a client state which it has turned into a theater for remote war, has fed popular and well-founded suspicion about the intentions of the US government. Pakistanis widely believe that the United States is intent on stealing the Islamic republic’s nuclear crown jewels. Those suspicions will now be further compounded as Pakistan’s government struggles to placate competing international and domestic fears.
If transparency is the buzzword of this political moment, maybe it should be seen as a signal that a larger issue is in desperate need of remedying — an issue that WikiLeaks cannot address: that the need for transparency is symptomatic of a global deficit in trust.
We have repeatedly been given reason to expect that government leaders, corporations and other powerful institutions cannot be trusted. WikiLeaks now fuels that mistrust and those who feel threatened can either shrink behind the barricades of secrecy or acknowledge that they must address the monumental task of building confidence in the fragile idea of public service.
This is not a conspiracy theory. To say that terrorism is a fabrication of a national security state is to say that when the label “terrorist” starts being indiscriminately applied to anyone who threatens the government we have taken another step towards totalitarianism.
Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., the incoming chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, is calling for WikiLeaks to be designated a terrorist organization.
As Republicans come into power, they’re going to explore what can be done. They can’t do much. But let’s be honest. The quest to find some way to define Assange’s group as terrorists is not about fighting terrorism. It’s about indulging the fantasy, well put by Cornell law professor William Jacobson, of Assange being hunted down like a Robert Ludlum villain and possibly “killed while resisting arrest.”
And all of this assumes there’s something talismanic about declaring someone a “terrorist.” In reality, American agents could capture any boogeyman they wanted and prosecute him in the United States. The 1992 decision in U.S. v. Alvarez-Machain affirmed that the government was within its rights when a Mexican citizen was abducted and brought to the U.S. to be tried for the murder of a Drug Enforcement Administration agent. “We have kidnapped people to bring them to justice,” explains David Cole, a law professor at Georgetown. “Whether it applies in this case, I don’t know.”
It probably doesn’t. What’s being lost in the James Bond scenarios about taking down WikiLeaks is that its current, highly embarrassing leaks don’t actually threaten American intelligence assets. They create problems for diplomats, and by extension they embarrass the United States. They cause the State Department to lose face. That’s not terrorism as we define it.
So how does King or anyone else turn Julian Assange into a terrorist? They either have to define terrorism in some real way that would eventually open up media organizations to terror charges of their own, or WikiLeaks actually has to do something materially to benefit terrorists. Neither scenario seems likely. What is likely: None of this gets past the shouting stage.
Weigel’s analysis may be sound in the short term but the broader question is not legal. It is whether in American popular discourse the term “terrorist” continues to acquire legitimacy in broader and broader applications or whether those who criticize the term’s flagrant abuse are able to shout louder and get more widely heard. So far the terrorists are winning.
On Dec. 16 I will join Daniel Ellsberg, Medea Benjamin, Ray McGovern and several military veteran activists outside the White House to protest the futile and endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Many of us will, after our rally in Lafayette Park, attempt to chain ourselves to the fence outside the White House. It is a pretty good bet we will all spend a night in jail. Hope, from now on, will look like this.
Hope is not trusting in the ultimate goodness of Barack Obama, who, like Herod of old, sold out his people. It is not having a positive attitude or pretending that happy thoughts and false optimism will make the world better. Hope is not about chanting packaged campaign slogans or trusting in the better nature of the Democratic Party. Hope does not mean that our protests will suddenly awaken the dead consciences, the atrophied souls, of the plutocrats running Halliburton, Goldman Sachs, ExxonMobil or the government.
Hope does not mean we will halt the firing in Afghanistan of the next Hellfire missile, whose explosive blast sucks the oxygen out of the air and leaves the dead, including children, scattered like limp rag dolls on the ground. Hope does not mean we will reform Wall Street swindlers and speculators, or halt the pillaging of our economy as we print $600 billion in new money with the desperation of all collapsing states. Hope does not mean that the nation’s ministers and rabbis, who know the words of the great Hebrew prophets, will leave their houses of worship to practice the religious beliefs they preach. Most clerics like fine, abstract words about justice and full collection plates, but know little of real hope.
Hope knows that unless we physically defy government control we are complicit in the violence of the state. All who resist keep hope alive. All who succumb to fear, despair and apathy become enemies of hope.
WikiLeaks revelations that American officials were planning to raise pressure on Iran with more sanctions and a missile defense shield – even while President Obama was making high-profile public overtures to Iran – are being seen in Tehran as validation of deep skepticism from the start about Obama’s effort.
Iranians and analysts alike say the leaked diplomatic cables show a half-hearted attempt at engagement in which the US administration’s “dual track” policy of simultaneously applying pressure and negotiating was undermined by a singular focus on the pressure track and a growing assumption that engaging Iran was pointless.
“Although the [American] gestures sounded sincere and honest, according to these documents there was at least a parallel approach to keeping both options open, though they were 180 degrees apart,” says a veteran observer in Tehran who could not be named for security reasons. “WikiLeaks indicates that from the beginning [Obama] was very sharp on this issue, and some Iranian officials … were right [in their skepticism].”
The US undertook its engagement strategy with Iran with the clear conviction that it would fail. At the same time, it was preparing (and disseminating in private) an alternative pressure strategy. This is the most serious indictment of all.
According to the record, the Obama administration was briefing allies almost from the start — and before Iran had even had a chance to respond to offers of engagement — that we expected this initiative to fail and that we were actively preparing the pressure track that would immediately follow.
Iran could hardly have been unaware of all this, so the chance that they would respond favorably — even before the contested election in June 2009 and the brutal crackdown that followed — was essentially zero. The only conclusion I can draw from this is that Obama was never sincere about his engagement strategy. It has yet to be tried.
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