Public and Privates

I'm not surprised by this material, since it's about what I expected from Clinton as the corporatist Reagan Democrat she is. But you can see why she didn't want it made public -- I mean, "There is such a bias against people who have led successful and/or complicated lives"! I feel their pain.

At the Goldman Sachs Builders and Innovators Summit, Clinton responded to a question from chief executive Lloyd Blankfein, who quipped that you “go to Washington” to “make a small fortune.” Clinton agreed with the comment, and complained about ethics rules that require officials to divest from certain assets before entering government. “There is such a bias against people who have led successful and/or complicated lives,” Clinton said.

At a 2013 speech for Morgan Stanley on April 18, Clinton praised the Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction plan — which would reduce corporate tax rates while raising the Social Security age. “But Simpson-Bowles — and I know you heard from Erskine earlier today — put forth the right framework. Namely, we have to restrain spending, we have to have adequate revenues, and we have to incentivize growth. It’s a three-part formula,” she said ...

But there are signs in the emails released by Wikileaks that she also took a fairly progressive stance on certain topics, including health reform ...

But during the campaign this year, she again reversed her position, declaring that single payer will “never, ever” happen in the U.S. Audio obtained by The Intercept last week showed Clinton dismissing the idea of free healthcare during another private event with donors.

I've already seen Clintonistas dismissing the new Wikileaks material as no big deal, underwhelming, a letdown. And maybe it is, if you expected/ hoped it would include celebrations of eating aborted babies. And as I say, there are not really any surprises to her critics; just what we expected.

The thing to remember is that partisans will dismiss any criticism of their candidate. Trump fans aren't going to be bothered by the latest video showing Trump to be a vilely sexist scumbag -- Oh please, is that news? Tell us something we didn't already know -- because they know what he's like and that's why they like him. So do his critics, but they enjoy clucking over his awfulness.  The same is true of Clinton, as it was of Obama.  Oh, she's a devout corporatist and warmonger?  Tell us something we didn't already know!  What did you expect, Che Guevara?

Sentence First, Verdict Later

The trial of Bradley Manning finally began yesterday, and today Democracy Now! reported:

Army prosecutor Captain Joe Morrow accused Bradley Manning of aiding the enemy, including Osama Bin Laden, who allegedly accessed some of the classified State Department cables after they were published by the website WikiLeaks. Morrow said, quote, "This is a case about a soldier who systematically harvested hundreds of thousands of classified documents and dumped them onto the Internet, into the hands of the enemy—material he knew, based on his training, would put the lives of fellow soldiers at risk," he said.

I take for granted that governments and the military will lie, but this lie seems remarkable, since the government's case is that Manning did not dump documents indiscriminately onto the Internet: he gave them to Wikileaks, which in turn published them selectively: first with corporate-media partners in the US and the UK, then by itself.  But the bulk of the material remains unpublished to this day.  (I suspect that many of those who have been throwing tantrums about Manning and Wikileaks believe that everything Wikileaks has released in the past few years came from Manning, though material like the Kissinger documents surely didn't.)

Now, this is not a secret, nor does it take much intelligence to notice that, if Manning wanted to dump all those documents onto the Internet, he didn't need to give them to Wikileaks in the first place.  The function of Wikileaks is not just to publish material passed along to them by whistleblowers -- it is to protect those whistleblowers from retaliation by their organizations, be they corporate or military or governments.  Manning wasn't betrayed by Wikileaks, he was betrayed by a hacker, a rat named Adrian Lamo.

Despite the obviousness of this lie, it's popular in the corporate media and elsewhere.  (Thomas Friedman declared in the same piece that he doesn't "want to live in a country where they throw whistleblowers in jail. That's China."  Actually, that's the US too, and Manning isn't the only imprisoned whistleblower here.)  Captain Morrow's deployment of the lie stood out for me because someone was spamming comments with it last night at another site.  I wrote some comments correcting the falsehood, a bit surprised that it was still current.  I shouldn't have been.  I know as well as anyone that governments lie, the military lies, corporations lie, and many citizens pass along those lies voluntarily.

What ought to be done about indiscriminate dumping of government secrets is a valid question, but I'd have to see an actual case first.  It's easier to talk about the indiscriminate creation of government secrets by the government, which is happening now and has been happening for a long time; but you don't see many complaints about it in the corporate media.

I had the fleeting feeling that it was almost as if Captain Morrow wanted to create reasons for a guilty verdict against Manning to be overturned, but that's too easy.  A more plausible conspiracy theory would be that our government and military want to show their power by conducting an illegal trial on bogus charges, and making a guilty verdict stick -- just because they can, and to remind other potential whistleblowers and critics who has the power around here.  But even that ascribes too much intelligence to them; they're just doing what feels right to them, squashing the disobedient and dissident, because they can.  Let me quote Daniel Ellsberg again: "It is inexcusable to take what [government officials] say at face value. You are not talking to pathological liars, you are talking to professional liars who should be looked at as skeptically as used-car salesmen or Pfizer or Merck spokesmen" (Myra MacPherson, All Governments Lie: The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I. F. Stone [Scribners, 2006], 456.) Wouldn't you think, though, that professional liars would do a better job of it?

Alien vs. Predator?

The image above has begun making the rounds on Facebook, and while I appreciate the point, it's mistaken in some important ways.

Most important, I think, is that Wikileaks has primarily published information on governments, not corporations. Oh, there was a flurry of corporate panic at the end of 2010 when Assange announced that Wikileaks would release a trove of documents on corporate malfeasance, but nothing seems to have come of it. The big story about Wikileaks is and has always been the government secrets -- military, diplomatic -- that it has put on the table. The fact that the person who constructed this image got things so far wrong indicates that he or she doesn't really understand what Wikileaks has done; the intent seems more to bash Facebook and Zuckerberg rather than to praise Assange.

Was the information Wikileaks released "private" in the first place? No, except in the narrow and circular sense of "secret." It was public in the truest sense of the word: it concerned events that were paid for by the public dime, and then concealed from the public by public agencies. Governments do not have a right to privacy, especially when they are engaged in criminal enterprises; nor do government officials in their role as government officials. Whether Barack Obama wears boxers or briefs, for example, is a matter I'm happy to leave private, though it's just the kind of fact that many Americans, and the corporate media, would claim that the public has a right to know. (I suspect that Obama would address the boxers vs. briefs question more readily than questions about dead Afghan or Pakistani children, however.) But what our government is doing with its weapons and its troops and its vast amounts of money is what the public has not only a right but an obligation to know. I would include the world, not just Americans, since so much of our crimes are committed on foreign soil.

The original meaning of the word "private" is "secret," and it still often has secrecy as a connotation. Much of what is considered private nowadays is not secret: one's marital status (registered at the courthouse), one's birth date (ditto), the number and names of one's children, and so on. Most people, I think, never consider what they're agreeing to when they join a social network like Facebook, nor despite all the ballyhooed tech-savvy of today's teens do they have any idea how such a system works, or what "privacy" means as a technical term on the Web. But then, neither do most Americans. Even most tech geeks in the 1980s, when I first got online, knew how data packets worked on networks but had little idea what privacy meant on the Net. I shocked the (gay, heterosexually married, closeted) SysOp of a bulletin board system in those days by registering under my own name and posting as an openly gay man; but I knew what I was doing. Other people I knew were outraged to discover that their e-mail wasn't protected by Federal law as their Postal mail was, and that the administrator of a system could read any "private" messages he or she chose to; whatever protection existed was internal to the system.

In the good old days, not so very long ago, anyone could walk into a public library and look through a published street directory, which contained such information as who lived at each address, including children. These directories had many uses, but prominent among them was marketing. A marketer or salesman could check out a neighborhood prior to trying to sell things there. It looks to me as though Facebook and other Internet businesses are just vastly bigger versions of those directories, with all the information organized and searchable by computers. That's just one of the wonders of our Electronic Age, and much of the "privacy" people seem to think they've lost to Facebook's commercial interests was lost long ago; never mind that they themselves freely gave the information to Facebook when they signed up and filled out their profile. Or when they clicked "Like" on this or that corporate product.

Apparently they believe their personal likes and dislikes are "private", hidden in the dark depths of the Intertoobz. But why do they think that all those corporate products are there to be "liked" on Facebook? Nothing is free, and certainly not a vast technological network with hundreds of millions of members. You can't have it both ways, though I suppose in our world you can't even choose the other way. If you want your online "privacy," then you'll need to find another way to pay for the servers and the storage and the programmers; they don't come cheap, especially not on the scale of Facebook. If you want Facebook to be free of charge, then how do you propose to meet its costs? If you want your privacy, then what kind of fool does it take to believe that you can post pictures of you passed out drunk on a global information network and still have any privacy at all?

In another sense of the word, of course, Facebook is private: it's privately owned by Mark Zuckerberg and other shareholders, including its employees. You didn't think it was "public," did you? Like Zuccotti Park? You didn't think it just grew into existence all by itself, like the flowers in the park, available to be picked and/or peed on by anyone who comes along? Truly, the thoughtlessness of many people about the public and the private boggles my mind. But then, it's probably no coincidence that my Facebook friends from Teabag Nation are the ones who always fall for, and pass along, the urban legends about Facebook starting to charge for its services.

Bang Head Against Wall. Repeat As Necessary.

Do you ever feel like throwing back your head and howling like a forlorn dog? I've been feeling like that a lot recently, which has made it difficult to write.

There's been a fair amount of fuss lately about a forthcoming edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the work of a (white?) academic, which replaces the 219 uses of the word "nigger" with the word "slave." I don't like bowdlerization either, but much of the criticism ginned up in the liberal blogosphere has been pointless. It's not as if this edition, published by a small regional press, is going to cause the standard version to disappear. That didn't happen when John Wallace, a school staff member in Virginia, published an edition of Huck Finn with the very same substitution twenty-five years ago; I doubt it will happen now. Does such a revision constitute "censorship"? Only in the tiniest technical sense, as far as I can see. Even if every school in the nation supplied its students with the New South edition for study purposes, the standard version would still be all over the place. Even removing Huck Finn from the curriculum wouldn't be censorship, since literally dozens of books are not in the curriculum, which changes from generation to generation. There have been at least two literary retellings of Huck Finn, both of which dealt with the issues it raises in different ways -- I was about to say, "by de-gaying" it, though that's not quite right, since it isn't gay. But ever since Professor Leslie Fiedler pointed in 1948 to the "homoeroticism" in the original (and in so much classic American fiction), many critics have tried to get rid of it. Is that "censorship"?

And I am impressed to see how many white people are quite comfortable telling black kids that they should toughen up and deal with it when white kids call them "nigger." Or even that, since they have encountered the word many times already in their lives, a few more times won't hurt. After all, they've heard the word many times in hiphop, so why should it bother them if it turns up in Huck Finn? On the whole, I'm inclined to agree with Toni Morrison's take (PDF) that trying to excise the N-word is "a purist yet elementary kind of censorship designed to appease adults rather than educate children" -- though appeasing adults instead of educating children is just what the American school system has largely evolved to do. And brushing off the problem by saying that the teacher should be able to deal with it, while in principle correct, is also ignoring the difficulties teachers face. Mark Twain's handling of race doesn't fit well into the multiple-choice tests that have taken over so much of American school time, thanks not to teachers but to various bureaucrats (and of course the highly lucrative testing industry). Just about everyone who derisively opposes the NewSouth edition seems determined not to think about the problems Huck Finn poses.

Some writers (sorry, I'm too burned out to supply enough links -- will try to fix it later) accused the editor of the NewSouth edition of thinking that if we just eliminate the n-word, that will be enough to stop racism. I think that's a straw man; I haven't seen anything to support the claim. I don't believe, when I pick on people for using "faggot" and other homophobic epithets, that stopping their use is all that's needed to eliminate antigay bigotry. But since their use is a sign of bigotry, attacking those who use them is one small part of working against bigotry. I've argued before that the best way for gay people to deal with the epithets is to reclaim them, but in the meantime, anyone who uses them in the traditional way should expect to be confronted. (As The Onion once put it: if we don't protect free speech, how will we know who the assholes are?)

Come to think of it, I think I detect some kind of connection between this jumping on the bandwagon against the NewSouth edition and some recent attempts by ostensible progressives / leftists to rehabilitate the word "faggot" as a pejorative for what one of them called "kneelers." And one of John Caruso's commenters who was especially furious about removing the n-word from Huck Finn also seems to be concerned with establishing Ralph Nader's bonafides as a manly man rather than a "shrinking violet." But of course there couldn't possibly be a connection. If there comes a day when white racism really is not a problem in the US, then it will be possible to teach Huck Finn as a purely historical document, whose language can simply be glossed by teachers. The trouble is that things haven't yet changed enough.

For that matter, as several commenters at Racialicious asked rhetorically, if Huck Finn is taught to teach white students the humanity of black people (the very kind of "politically correct" approach to literature that the critics of the NewSouth edition condemn out of the other side of their mouths), wouldn't books by black authors do the job even better? Frederick Douglass's Autobiography, for example. As Toni Morrison suggests, trying to turn Huck Finn into an anti-racist tract does as much injury to its complexity (and as she shows, its incoherence on many levels) as denouncing it as a "racist tract" would do. In the good old days beloved of many white people my age and older, books by black authors about black experience were not in the curriculum. That's no longer the case, thanks to "politically correct" demands of "identity politics" that a wider range of voices need to be heard, and taught. But the gains that have been made are always in danger of being lost, and the threat comes from all over the political spectrum.

We all have our blind spots, though, and John Caruso wrote a much better post on the US media distortion of the Wikileaks controversy. But even he weaseled, just a tiny bit, on the accusation that Julian Assange "stole" documents.

It's true that Assange didn't personally "steal" the material Wikileaks has been publishing, but if I'm not mistaken it's also illegal to fence stolen goods: the fact that you didn't personally steal them doesn't exculpate you. And it's also true, as Glenn Greenwald has been pointing out, that reporters not only receive leaked material, they encourage sources to get that material for them. The reason why so many Americans are having tantrums about Wikileaks is not that they consider government secrets to be sacrosanct -- they have no objection to the US spying on other countries to steal their secrets, for example, and would probably be happy if even Wikileaks published "stolen" material about their own pet conspiracy theories -- but because they don't want to know the bad things their government is doing. So while it's true that, in a narrow sense, neither Assange nor Wikileaks "stole" those documents, it's somewhat a waste of energy to defend them against the accusation. If Assange had personally entered the corridors of the Pentagon, rifled the file drawers, and walked out with the materials Wikileaks has been publishing, he'd be a hero even if he was legally a thief.

I was struck by a deranged commenter to one of Greenwald's posts who wrote that Assange "received stole [sic] property and should not have made them public, instead he could have shown real backbone by notifying the ones who were robbed (the American people) and returned them." That's exactly what Wikileaks did, of course: notified the American people that their military and their government were hiding these things from them, and let them know some (a very small part, since Wikileaks can only publish what others leak to them) of what their government was illegitimately withholding from them.

And ah, then, there's my RWA1 on Facebook, who linked to an attack on Hugo Chavez with the comment, "The American Left has disgraced itself by apologizing for this incipient Mussolini." Oh, come on! If Chavez really were a Mussolini, neither RWA1 nor most Americans would have any objection to him. Hell, the US got along with the Mussolini at first: he was good for business and hostile to labor, which is what matters for good relations with the US, right or far-right. When Venezuela was ruled by a dictatorship, the American Right was perfectly comfortable with it. Saddam Hussein got along just fine with the US, until we no longer needed him.

A good many years ago I confronted RWA1 on just this point. Like many conservatives he tended to get green around the gills when reminded what his tax dollars were paying for in Latin America and elsewhere, but he rallied. At first he blustered about "those goddamned Latin American generals!" I reminded him that those goddamned Latin American generals were trained, paid, and equipped by the US government, and wouldn't last a week without our support. Well, he said glumly, we had to do something to stop those countries from going Communist. (Which is neither here nor there, since the US has supported coups to overturn elected social-democratic governments that had nothing to do with Communism.)

So it goes. What has me wanting to bang my head against the wall, you see, is not the great unwashed, the illiterate, the know-nothing Teabaggers, or Fox News; it's highly educated, politically progressive (except for RWA1 of course) people who are supposedly on the same side I am, but who (among other matters) throw hissyfits over trivial matters like the NewSouth edition of Huck Finn, who feel it necessary to exonerate Julian Assange of accusations of theft. And contrary to RWA1, much of what he would consider "the American left" has been trying to distance itself from any appearance of defending, let alone apologizing for, Hugo Chavez.

You Know -- Them

Here's a fine representative example of the kind of American political discourse that makes me want to stop writing, stop reading, maybe bang my head against the wall for a few hours, and ... beyond that, I don't know. Anyway, it's a comment on a Glenn Greenwald post, and it reads:

I WANT TO SEE THEM LEAK

Reports of how the Zionists and Cheney's inside CIA organization planned and carried out 9/11 in order to begin this entire coup.

This would have to include details of the stolen 2000 election, who prepared and edited the Patriot Act, and the names of all those who enriched themselves with the insider information.

Now that'd be some juicy readin'.

Short and sweet. "Zionists" is sort of the cherry on top, but the whole thing is precious, or as my old friend Grant would say, "precocious." Leave aside the Truther tinfoil hat stuff, but as I've asked such people in the past, if We already know that They "planned and carried out 9/11", who needs Wikileaks? I love the ambiguity of "this entire coup," too: does the writer think that things only began going bad after September 11, 2001, or even with Dubya taking the oath of office? It would seem so, but of course things were far from aboveboard before Bush ambled onto the scene. Were Cheney and the Zionists also behind the 1993 attempt to blow up the World Trade Center? Were they behind the Vietnam War, which involved government lying on a grand scale that was exposed with the publication of the Pentagon Papers? There was a lot of double-dealing in the leadup to World War II, and World War I for that matter. And how about the sinking of the Maine? Lincoln was as cagey about the reasons for quashing the Confederate Rebellion as either Bush was about either Iraq War. And those are just the highlights of US government malfeasance; there must be corresponding conspiracies in the past of every country that has ever existed.

Who edited and prepared the Patriot Act? I thought that was more or less public knowledge -- much of the Patriot Act had been on the Clinton administration's wish list, and was part of a bipartisan tradition of expanding government powers of surveillance, control and punishment over the general population. The same goes for the "details of the stolen 2000 election", about which a great deal has never been particularly secret, and has been published and analyzed. I'm sure there are details that haven't been released, but enough is already known to shake things up if enough citizens cared. (That's another of my pet peeves about the Truthers and others like JFK Assassination Buffs who chortle knowingly about the secret documents and records that We need to know about. I'm sure that there are lots of goodies locked away from public view, but there's enough evidence in the public domain to [paraphrasing Noam Chomsky] send every American President since World War II to the gallows. We already know that our leaders are vicious gangsters, they don't really make a secret of it, and probably the only way to get at the buried evidence is to start indicting them for the crimes we already know they've committed. But the Truthers and JFKers are curiously uninterested in such matters.)

But as I said, leave that aside. It's easy to dismiss this writer as just another Conspiracy Theorist, but he also uses the rhetoric of the corporate mainstream media and our government officials. "Them" can't refer to Wikileaks, who didn't leak the material now exciting so much commentary and controversy: Wikileaks receives the leaked material and publishes it to the Web, or through its media partners. But if you didn't already know that and cling firmly to the knowledge, you'd hardly know it from respectable commentators, who think that Wikileaks or Julian Assange himself leaked everything, or hacks into government computers and plunders the riches thereof, and therefore can decide what to leak. As Greenwald keeps reminding his readers, Wikileaks can only release and publish what other people send to them. And until someone leaks it, we (as opposed to We) don't know what is being kept from us. But a surprising amount of discrediting and even incriminating information is already Out There.

A Commitment to Transparency

This morning I was listening to NPR's "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me," and they mentioned that a cable released by Wikileaks had indicated that China shut down Google because some Chinese official googled himself and found unflattering remarks about his august self. So much for many right-wing frothers' accusation that Wikileaks doesn't and wouldn't publish material that would embarrass Russia or China.

I hadn't heard about this leak, so I did a search and found this blog at Forbes.com whose writer begs to differ. He thinks that the anecdote is "more colorful than it is instructive." He points to the big picture.

Taken together, the cables convey a sophisticated and sobering U.S. understanding of the Chinese leadership: It has no “reform wing,” it operates on a consensus basis, with President Hu Jintao as a “corporate CEO” brokering among various “vested interests,” and with leaders all determined to see their legacies survive succession.

In other words, at the very top the Communist Party of China is exactly what it seems to be to most, a system bent on preserving itself, that captures the men who rise in it, conforming their ambitions to the system’s priorities.

The system’s priority is certainly not to open itself up to critical examination, so that the Chinese people could find out, for example, which leaders have been touched by hints of scandal, which well-connected families are enriching themselves in various industries, or, as one source told a diplomat in one cable, which officials might have profited from ”shady deals behind land transactions.”

I'm sure this (and more) is accurate enough. It just doesn't distinguish China importantly from any other country. The US' reaction to Wikileaks doesn't exactly betoken an eagerness to "open itself up to critical examination," for example. (Speaking of deafness to irony, try Arnaud de Borchgrave: "But hardly a word has been written or spoken about the motives of the WikiLeaks' chief leaker.") And any American "officials [who] might have profited from 'shady deals behind land transactions," I'm sure, would be quite happy to have their malfeasance exposed to the people, because we live in a country under the rule of law, not men. But openness is for them, not for us, right?

The United States of Hysteria

It's been entertaining to watch the Obama administration's reaction to the latest batch of Wikileaks material, predictable though it is. This irresponsible behavior will cost many lives! Wait, diplomats' lives? They aren't usually on the front lines of battle. But this lie, that the material Wikileaks has released has somehow led to the death of our accomplices and collaborators, plays so well in the corporate media that Obama and Clinton and others apparently decided to use it again.

As Daniel Ellsberg once said, "It is inexcusable to take what [government officials] say at face value. You are not talking to pathological liars, you are talking to professional liars who should be looked at as skeptically as used-car salesmen or Pfizer or Merck spokesmen" (Myra MacPherson, All governments lie: the life and times of rebel journalist I. F. Stone [Scribners, 2006], 456.) Wouldn't you think, though, that professional liars would do a better job of it?

Speaking of I. F. Stone, over at alicublog, Stone's granddaughter, who goes by the nom de Web of aimai, could only splutter in frustration in the comments to this post.

I am so large with not caring. Over at Balloon Juice all the usual left authoritarians are shrieking at the left anarchists that they are as bad as the righties and wikileaks is total nihilism. Meanwhile: all government's [sic] lie. Basically. As true now as when my g-father said it.

Sure, a dedicated Obama fan and Democratic loyalist doesn't care. I'm not convinced.

For a good summary of the huffing and puffing and bloooooow Wikileaks' house down that's been going on, see Glenn Greenwald's latest, which has links to several other articles, especially this FAIR blog post which shreds the New York Times' claim that the documents show that North Korea had sold missiles to Iran that "could for the first time give Iran the capacity to strike at capitals in Western Europe or easily reach Moscow." It turns out that this allegation was made in a meeting between American and Russian officials, and it seems to rest entirely on the word of the Americans, with no other evidence. Who wouldn't believe American officials warning about the apocalyptic peril of Iranian aggression? The Russians, for one. Me, for another.

My friend the ambivalent Obama supporter wrote on Facebook that "if any of our intelligence assets ARE compromised someone should swing for this." I pointed out to him that so far, despite the government's claims, no one has been harmed by Wikileaks' activities. Is anyone going to swing for the vast bloodbath that the US has inflicted on Afghanistan and Iraq? The US helicopter crew who murdered unarmed Iraqis in 2007, revealed by Wikileaks earlier this year, not only didn't swing, they were exonerated by a military inquiry. Obama has ruled out any accountability for the Bush administration gangsters who tortured and murdered in violation of American and international law. But Wikileaks, who haven't killed anyone, they should swing.

Kid -- We Don't Like Your Kind

Back in the Sixties, in his epic Alice's Restaurant Massacree, Arlo Guthrie told how he'd been rejected for military service because of his criminal record -- for littering.

I went over to the sergeant, said, "Sergeant, you got a lot a damn gall to ask me if I've rehabilitated myself, I mean, I mean, I mean that just, I'm sittin' here on the bench, I mean I'm sittin here on the Group W bench 'cause you want to know if I'm moral enough join the army, burn women, kids, houses and villages after bein' a litterbug."

Julian Assange of Wikileaks walked out of a CNN interview yesterday (h/t) when the interviewer insisted on asking questions about "internal disputes within Wikileaks" instead of the issues raised by the latest cache of documents released by Wikileaks last week, on the US war in Iraq, as he had evidently been led to believe it would be.



This exchange increases my admiration for Assange, who remains remarkably calm and rational. He puts the interviewer on the defensive immediately and keeps her there throughout. The interviewer's performance is contemptible; no doubt she was Just Following Orders, as we used to say, and CNN's treatment of these important issues is, as Assange says, completely disgusting. "I'm going to walk," he says calmly, "if you're going to contaminate us revealing the deaths of 104,000 people with attacks against my person." And then he walks.

Also disgusting has been the conduct of the US government in response to these new documents. First there was the bogus claim, recycled from the release of the Afghanistan documents (via), that Assange and Wikileaks 'potentially have blood on their hands' because the documents put US personnel and local informants and collaborators at risk -- outrageously shameless coming from a government that is wading in the blood of thousands of innocent people in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. The claim about Afghanistan has been shown to be false, and so probably will be the current one about Iraq.

I imagine the CNN interviewer really felt as baffled by Assange's refusal to go along with her script as she claimed she was. CNN, like most American media, are basically tabloids, preferring to dodge issues in favor of personalities. In The Bush Dyslexicon Mark Crispin Miller describes at length how, after the third debate between Al Gore and George W. Bush in October 2000,

the "analysts" at CNN said not one word about the substance of the candidates' exchange but just kept harping on the general "statements" were putatively "trying" to make about themselves through their tone and body language.

Although a waste of time, the postdebate bull session was at least not strongly biased, nor was its anti-intellectualism too pronounced. On ABC there was a far more noxious session on the subject of the third debate.

This session, featuring Sam Donaldson, George Stephanopoulos, Cokie Roberts, and George Will, "captures perfectly the the barbarous synergy between the right and TV news, each feigning populism for its own elitist purposes." Roberts complained that the issue debated by the candidates wasn't "the important point there. ... Because that's not what comes across when you're watching the debate. What comes across when you're watching the debate is this guy from Washington doing Washington-speak" [pages 68-69]. The irony of four Beltway media insiders denouncing Al Gore for being a Beltway insider, while delicious, was totally lost on Roberts. It's a reminder of how little facts matter, but personalities do matter, to the corporate media. The New York Times' hatchet job on accused leaker Bradley Manning is another reminder.

But even a lot of liberals and progressives distrust Assange and Wikileaks and are willing to focus more on Assange's personality than on US crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. When Assange was accused (inaccurately, if not outright falsely) of rape in Sweden a couple of months ago, I remember some writer (on Salon, maybe? I can't find it) saying that maybe Assange just likes "rough" sex, as some aggressively intellectual or political men do, so maybe there was a misunderstanding between him and one of his partners. This writer had, if I recall correctly, no basis for the speculation that Assange likes "rough" sex; it was as if the writer was trying to give as much benefit of the doubt as possible to the people who were trying to smear and discredit him, while technically asserting his quasi-innocence. I have no idea what kind of sex Assange likes, any more than I know what kind of sex, say, Dan Choi likes. I'm quite willing to investigate personally in both cases, but until I can do so, I prefer to refrain from irrelevant speculations.

It's also irrelevant whether Assange is "imperious," at one commenter claimed at Salon.com, linking to an article from Der Speigel. If he is, that would not diminish by even one the death toll of American and American-supported violence in Iraq or Afghanistan. It would not affect the value, for better or worse, of the documents Wikileaks has released. If Assange's motives or mental state should be subjected to such scrutiny, why not extend that scrutiny to Presidents Bush and Obama, their administrations, and their many apologists? Obama has told us at length about his father issues, in print. Why not use this information to analyze his relationship with, say, Hamid Karzai? Why not speculate about the psychic health of the Bloomberg reporters who wrote about cash from Iran being funneled to the Karzai regime but managed to avoid mentioning cash Karzai receives from the US, and reported with straight faces a State Department spokesman's rebuke that "Iran should not interfere with the internal affairs of the Afghan government"? Oh no, only the US is allowed to interfere with the internal affairs of the Afghan government. But I'm being facetious.

I imagine there's a lot of stress at Wikileaks these days. The US government, along with others, will try to exploit it. It's standard operating procedure to try to discredit dissidents by calling them crazy, delusional, paranoid. But no one should fall for their game.

The "How Many Times Have I Heard That One Before?" Department

From the Daily Beast, via Antemedius, via Sideshow:

The US is apparently convinced that whistleblower Bradley Manning, who was arrested two weeks ago, did indeed hand over 260,000 US diplomatic cables concerning the Middle East over to Wikileaks....

American officials would not discuss the methods being used to find Assange, nor would they say if they had information to suggest where he is now. "We'd like to know where he is; we'd like his cooperation in this," one U.S. official said of Assange.

Gee, that sounds familiar. Remember when the US was apparently convinced that Saddam Hussein was in cahoots with Al-Qaeda and had Weapons of Mass Destruction that he could toss across the unfortified Iraq-US border in, like five minutes? (We'd have liked to have Mr. Hussein's cooperation in this, too.) Remember when the US was apparently convinced that the American scientist Wen Ho Lee had given our nuclear secrets to the Chi-coms? (Cooperation, Dr. Lee?) For an oldie but goodie, remember when the US was apparently convinced that Ho Chi Minh was a willing puppet of the Russkies? (It's in your own interests to cooperate, Mr. Ho.)

Right now the US is also apparently convinced that Iran has Weapons of Mass Destruction that it can toss across the flimsy, unguarded Iran-US border with nothing to protect us. (Also that Iran is moving toward a military dictatorship, which the US of course deplores.) Also that Hamas seized control of Gaza in a brutal coup against the Palestinian authority.

This doesn't mean, of course, that the US is never correctly convinced about anything. But how do you tell? Generally it's wiser to assume that the American government (like any government) is lying at the outset.

When Corruption Is Outlawed, Only Outlaws Will Be Corrupt

(image)

We hear a lot about how corrupt Hamid Karzai's government is, and I imagine much of it is true: Karzai is, after all, our creature, our man in Kabul. Almost by definition, a leader installed by invaders is going to be corrupt. If the US had thought Karzai would have too much of a mind of his own, we'd have looked for someone else. It's also useful that such a person should be at least somewhat dirty, so we'll have an excuse for taking him down (or letting him fall) when we choose to do so.

So, when Democracy Now reported this morning that

Afghan President Hamid Karzai has ordered an investigation into a recent NATO air strike that reportedly killed as many as fifty-two civilians, including women and children. Karzai called on NATO troops to "put into practice every possible measure to avoid harming civilians during military operations." Afghan officials say the civilians died when a NATO helicopter gunship opened fire on a compound where they had taken shelter after fleeing an expected firefight between Taliban fighters and NATO troops. US military officials have rejected the claims of the Afghan government, saying there is no evidence civilians were injured or killed.

I had to snicker derisively. The US denial is of course tantamount to an admission of guilt, since the US military always lies about its atrocities. (So does every military and every government, of course, but there's all this American Exceptionalism around.)

The same thing goes for the Obama administrations's efforts to downplay this weekend's release by Wikileaks of a huge batch of documents about the US war in Afghanistan, which "provide a devastating portrait of the war in Afghanistan, revealing how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents, how a secret black ops special forces unit hunts down targets for assassination or detention without trial, how Taliban attacks have soared, and how Pakistan is fueling the insurgency." The White House first complained that this was a threat to US security, citing a "potential national security concern" and then declaring that "there’s no broad new revelations in this". All quite familiar. (It's not just the White House, of course. The AP reports that Senator Jane Harman, D-CA, claimed (via) that "Someone inadvertently or on purpose gave the Taliban its new 'enemies list.'" That's a lie, since no one in the US government could have vetted all the material in the time before Harman's remark, and the newspapers which reported on it collaborated with the White House to remove identifying details. Not that I could get all that excited if it were true, since those collaborators provide the US with information for our atrocities.)

(P.S. July 28: The London Times claims that it found identifying details in the documents; Julian Assange of Wikileaks denies it; "Robert Riegle, a former senior intelligence officer, said: "'It's possible that someone could get killed in the next few days.'" Of course, people are getting killed in Afghanistan all the time, often by US troops or predator drones using intelligence given by Afghan informants.)

Amy Goodman's interview with Guardian editor editor David Leigh shows another familiar pattern: the White House worried that the released material would endanger Afghan collaborators, people who had worked with the US. But as Leigh says,

Well, I’ll say it again: we had already decided, on Spiegel, on the New York Times and on The Guardian, what we were going to do, and we were going to take out names that we thought might be in danger of reprisals. And we decided not to publish certain intelligence reports that describe that kind of thing. So all those decisions had been taken. So the White House was pushing at an open door when it said, "We don’t want people to be in danger." So they’re not—they’re congratulating us for something we had already decided to do.

As Glenn Greenwald says, "Yes, leaking classified information is against the law - so is improperly classifying evidence of crimes or other wrongdoing" (via).

But best of all was DN's report of an appearance by former hacker Adrian Lamo, who'd turned in Bradley Manning, the alleged whistleblower for Wikileaks' earlier release of the video of a US massacre in Iraq. Lamo spoke at a Hackers on Planet Earth conference and got a rough reception:

ADRIAN LAMO: I think that the government behaved themselves better than a lot of people would give them credit for. To set the record clear, I am not an informant. I’m a witness in a criminal case. It’s not that different, in my eyes, from being a witness in any other case that could involve potential loss of life.


EMMANUEL GOLDSTEIN: Adrian, I mean, you say it’s—you know, it’s been a pleasant experience for you, you know, working with the government on this, I guess. But Bradley Manning, the alleged leaker, is currently sitting in prison in Kuwait, I believe, and he could be locked up for the rest of his life. How do you feel about that?


AUDIENCE MEMBER: Tortured!


ADRIAN LAMO: I think that it’s a little bit ludicrous to say that Bradley Manning is going to be tortured. We don’t do that to our citizens.


AUDIENCE MEMBER: Guantánamo!


ADRIAN LAMO: I mean, obviously it’s been much worse for him, but it’s certainly been no picnic for me. And I knew from the get-go that it was going to be a low point in my interactions with the community. And I—


UNIDENTIFIED: Yet you could have ignored him. When he first contacted you, you were not obliged to ever answer him. You could have simply ignored him, and none of this would have ever happened.


ADRIAN LAMO: And Mr. Manning could have ignored the diplomatic cables, and he could have ignored the collateral murder video, but he followed his conscience, as I did mine.


AUDIENCE MEMBER: From my perspective, I see what you have done as treason.

It's best if you watch the clip and hear it for yourself, though. When I listened, I echoed the audience response to Lamo's claim that the US doesn't torture its citizens:

It's Not a Bug, It's a Feature

I imagine that most people who read this blog have already seen by now the Wikileaks video of a US attack helicopter crew massacring Iraqi civilians, including two Reuters journalists. If you haven't, here it is: not work-safe, not human-safe. It's pretty disturbing, but since your tax dollars paid for it if you're an American or Briton or citizen of other members of the Coalition of the Willing, you should see it.



As I begin writing this post, the video has been viewed more than 4 million times on YouTube alone. There's been some good discussion, notably by Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com, John Caruso at The Distant Ocean, and this piece at Counterpunch by Alexander Cockburn. (Greenwald was smeared by the libblogger Oliver Willis, whose commenters took him apart while he whined and lied and generally followed the canons of mainstream political discourse in the US nowadays. That's what's wrong with mainstream political discourse in the US nowadays, of course.) World media have covered the case while US corporate media have done their best to brush it aside; again, no surprise.

One reason I haven't written about it before, though, is that while it's disturbing and awful and criminal, it doesn't strike me as news, or even particularly disturbing and awful and criminal. Compare the more recent atrocity in Afghanistan, where American special forces soldiers murdered several Afghan civilians (including two pregnant women and a teenaged girl) and then tried to cover it up, or American terrorist warlord Barack Obama's announcement that he has the right to order the murder of American citizens on his own executive authority.

Like any other aggressive state, the US has directed its soldiers to do such things throughout its history, yet even some leftists are professing themselves shocked! shocked! to learn that there's massacring going on here. ("Your body count, Sergeant." "Thank you.") Professing shock over the 2007 massacre buys into the line that defenders of such violence will push: that this was an aberration, the work of a few bad apples, not the fault of the United States of America, which is not a perfect country but its virtues outweigh its defects.

I'm more troubled by liberals and leftists who are demonizing the helicopter crew and other military killers, and who even accuse others of justifying the atrocity. This commenter (DavidByron at April 9, 2010 01:56 p.m. -- sorry, no permalink) in this thread, for example:

I find the number of comments trying to pretend that soldiers are nice people really pretty depressing.

What do these monsters have to do to convince you all? They'd all cut their own mother's head off and spit down the neck for giggles. They are merciless killers and they enjoy their work.

You all need to get real about that.

This is exactly what apologists for US violence have said about our enemies, be they Red Indians, Viet Cong, or Islamofascists. Because they are like that, the US can't afford to be Mr. Nice Guy. What measures DavidByron hoped to justify against Iraq veterans, I don't know; maybe, like another commenter (eatbees at April 7, 2010 05:34 AM), he believes "we shouldn't bring them home. We should give them a phony war to fight in which half of them are the Blue Team and half of them are the Red Team, and they can take out their fantasies on each other." Their fantasies?

Now, I don't "pretend that soldiers are nice people"; that's irrelevant. As I wrote in a comment in that same thread, invaders cannot invoke self-defense. Suppose you're a Mafia hood, and your boss tells you to break into someone's house. The resident pulls a gun on you; you kill them. You can't plead self-defense. The American invaders of Iraq are in a similar position, morally if not legally. Even if someone on the ground in this video had weapons (as apologists for the massacre claim, following the Army's propaganda), the Americans were not acting in self-defense, even pre-emptive self-defense: they were invaders and murderers.

That's not to say that they're "pure human shit to begin with", as another commenter (the pair at April 7, 2010 06:43 PM) declared. The Mafioso I just invented might be a nice guy, good to his buddies, respectful to his superiors, kind to his Mom, a regular at Mass and confession. All that is irrelevant when he breaks into your house and, confronted by you and your shotgun, blows you away.
The glee the helicopter crew exhibit as they kill people is distasteful, of course, but I doubt that Iraqi insurgents (or Vietnamese resistance forces, or American Indian warriors at the Little Big Horn) are coolly dispassionate as they kill American soldiers or other Iraqis. John Caruso (April 9, 2010 at 3:01 PM) asked another commenter, "Are you really saying you'd choose to keep that policy in place as long as it was carried out by nicer soldiers? It's a false dichotomy, but assuming it actually did hold I most definitely would choose to 'lose the policy but keep the murderous thugs' (keep them here in this country, that is, rather than massacring civilians in Iraq and elsewhere)."

When you invade and occupy a country, the people there are going to shoot at you, put bombs by the roads to blow you up, and so on. They will do this no matter how many candy bars your soldiers give to their kids, how many sick children they give medical treatment, how many freeze-dried meals they give to people whose homes they've blown up. (Speaking of medical treatment for children, there were two children in the van the copter crew destroyed; their father was among the people killed. Headquarters overruled taking them to a US military hospital, and ordered them sent to an Iraqi hospital. The outcome is reported here.) And even the "nicest" soldiers will stop being so nice in the face of being shot at and blown up. The only right invaders have is to leave.

But the American invaders aren't going to leave. And while I sympathize with unemployed, under-educated working-class kids who join the military with an eye to improving their career options, since 2003 no one can enlist without knowing that they are likely to be sent to Iraq and Afghanistan to kill innocent people. No matter how they feel before they enlist, they are entering a meat grinder that will teach them to treat other people as things -- not their fellow soldiers, of course, but gooks, dinks, hajis. One of the more interesting points raised in Alexander Cockburn's Counterpunch article, when he quoted a "retired U.S. Army man," who wrote,

The damage this incident and its video evidence will do is immense … it will irrefutably confirm for many that large chunk of anti-American propaganda which insists the American flyers are just playing computer shoot-em-up games using real flesh and blood as a proxy for the digital figures they usually slaughter only in the arcades.

How much is simulator training responsible for the disconnection from reality demonstrated in this incident? The crew was detached from reality …

It ain't propaganda if it's true. If you train your soldiers with hypercharged video games, which is what simulators are -- advanced versions of the video games (often with military themes) that kids have been raised on since early childhood -- and then put them into engagement using video equipment that resembles a video game, then of course they'll be "detached." Simulators are probably very effective in overcoming the normal human inhibition about killing other human beings; those who've read Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game may recognize the pattern. (Even a bigot like Card has written some good books.) But that's what armies are for: to kill people and blow shit up.
That is why Cockburn's retired Army source is wrong when he continues, "How [is] the Army … producing crews that, having the potential for such incompetence, cannot detect it among themselves. If anyone in that crew had paused and asked if the action being taken was correct, surely it would have been aborted … The Army has to find out why." The crew was not incompetent; if you've seen the video, you know that they checked their actions every step of the way with headquarters. They were doing what they were expected and supposed to do: to kill hajis. They are part of an occupying army in a country that wants them out, one way or another. That's why the original Army investigation exonerated the killers, as Cockburn wrote:

Reuters, which by that time had already had four employees killed in Iraq by the U.S. military (ultimately, to date, eight), demanded an investigation, which the Army says it undertook but found no breach of its Rules of Engagement by the pilots or U.S. Army intelligence.

This massacre was not a failure, but a success. It was bad public relations, to be sure, but the entire US presence in Iraq is bad public relations. Incidents like this one are not a bug of the military system -- they're a feature.