Antony Loewenstein

A brutal state assessed as such by the US, a nation not adverse to backing countries that display an authoritarian impulse in support of Washington:

The trial of Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky shows the Kremlin preserves a “cynical system where political enemies are eliminated with impunity”, US diplomats say in classified cables released by WikiLeaks today.

Attempts by the Russian government to demonstrate the rule of law is being respected during Khodorkovsky’s prosecution are “lipstick on a political pig“, says a communique to Washington from the US embassy in Moscow in December 2009.

Khodorkovsky, 47, an oil tycoon who was arrested in 2003 and sentenced to eight years in jail for fraud two years later, will appear in court in Moscow today to hear the verdict in his second trial on embezzlement charges. Supporters of the man once Russia‘s richest say the Kremlin ordered the prosecutions in revenge for his funding of opposition parties.

Khodorkovsky could get up to six more years in jail at the end of his current sentence in October next year, if convicted. His business partner, Platon Lebedev, faces the same punishment.

While US officials have already publicly criticised the trial, which began in March last year, the baldness of the language in the secret cables is striking.

Writing to Washington in December last year, a political officer in the US embassy in Moscow noted that one international legal expert believes the trial judge is trying to give Khodorkovsky’s defence lawyers a chance. However, in a withering assessment, the officer adds: “The fact that legal procedures are apparently being meticulously followed in a case whose motivation is clearly political may appear paradoxical.

“It shows the effort that the GOR [government of Russia] is willing to expend in order to save face, in this case by applying a superficial rule-of-law gloss to a cynical system where political enemies are eliminated with impunity.”

The diplomat’s assessment reaffirms those made in US cables released earlier by WikiLeaks, in which Russia is described as a kleptocratic “mafia state” in which officials, oligarchs and organised crime are inextricably linked.

How much faith do we have in intelligence gathering in Afghanistan? Scores to be settled by locals? Frankly, somebody designated as an “enemy” by Western forces may not be anything of the sort, simply a legitimate resistance to foreign occupation. Besides, the West is in bed with a Kabul government backed and run by drug lords. Once again, Australia has been co-opted into the dirty business of propping up an illegitimate regime:

Australian police in Afghanistan have helped compile secret intelligence files on insurgent leaders later targeted in capture-or-kill missions by special forces soldiers.

The Pentagon has confirmed that Australian Federal Police officers are ”assigned to work with” a joint police taskforce in Kabul that produces files later used by military commanders to ”shape the battlefield” – a term often used to describe the capture-or-kill raids mounted by elite troops in Afghanistan.

While Australian police are officially not allowed to contribute intelligence for military purposes, in reality they have little control over who uses the information they help compile once it is shared with the Afghan government and other forces.

Cables released by WikiLeaks show how the joint police effort in Kabul has been hampered by a lack of staff. A request from the US embassy in October last year said more officers were needed to help others working in the Afghan Threat Finance Cell in Kabul under the joint command of the Afghan government and NATO.

One cable says the group ”urgently requires access to translators [for] an increasing amount of wire-intercept information including complex technical and financial records” as the police target halawas – the informal money networks that far outnumber proper banks and are often used by drug traffickers.

The last AFP officer stopped working directly with the Threat Finance Cell in April, but officers still work with the broader police effort called the Counter Narcotics Joint Inter-Agency Task Force, and their intelligence is shared with Afghan police and other agencies.

There has been a rise in capture-or-kill missions aimed at insurgents, with as many as 17 raids each night across Afghanistan by special forces teams from the US, Britain, Australia and other countries.

The soldiers work from a secret hit list – a centralised military database that includes information from police intelligence. US military officers have previously confirmed that some of those targeted include Afghans involved in narcotics who have strong links to the insurgency. One general told a US Senate committee that the aim was to ”persuade them to choose legitimacy or [we] remove them from the battlefield”.

Julian Assange:

Sweden is the Saudi Arabia of feminism. I fell into a hornets’ nest of revolutionary feminism.

The love affair is turning sour. When the sympathetic “liberal” US media start asking serious questions about the Zionist state, Tel Aviv (and its blind Diaspora supporters) have a problem. Perhaps they should call David Remnick a self-hating Jew. That’ll work.

This is what he told Yediot a few days ago:

Do you see a certain change in the US Jewish community?

“A new generation of Jews is growing up in the US. Their relationship with Israel is becoming less patient and more problematic. They see what has happened with the Rabbinical Letter [proscribing rental and sale of property to Arabs -- DR], for example. How long can you expect that they’ll love unconditionally the place called Israel [sic]? You’ve got a problem. You have the status of an occupier since 1967. It’s been happening for so long that even people like me, who understand  that not only one side is responsible for the conflict and that the Palestinians missed an historic opportunity for peace in 2000, can’t take it anymore.

“The US administration is trying out of good will to get a peace process moving and in return Israel lays out conditions like the release Jonathan Pollard. Sorry, it can’t go on this way. The  Jewish community is not just a nice breakfast at the Regency. You think it’s bad that a US President is trying to make an effort to promote peace? That’s what’s hurting your feelings? Give me a break, you’ve got bigger problems. A shopping list in exchange for a two month moratorium on settlement construction? Jesus [sic].”

A letter by Human Rights Watch in the Jerusalem Post chastises the paper for defending apartheid policies in the West Bank:

JPost Dec26-10 [HRW Letter Demolishes Editorial]

The London Observer correctly explains the significance of Wikileaks and the empowering of the public against deceit pursued by the powers that be, and that includes many mainstream journalists:

For a long time now, since digital media became the defining characteristic of our age, a revolution in information and secrecy has been predicted. WikiLeaks, and in particular the continuing exposure of US embassy cables, allows us for the first time to see the contours of that revolution – and some of the implications.

Chief among them seems to be the fact that even the best resourced and most confidential of organisations can no longer rely on a properly secure intelligence network. What once could be stamped “top secret” and locked away in a filing cabinet now becomes digitised and potentially accessible to any number of people with a keyboard and a broadband connection. Diplomats, politicians and business leaders around the world will no doubt overnight become more circumspect about expressing any for-your-eyes-only opinion.

The phrase “citizen journalism” often attaches itself to WikLeaks, as if this was a new phenomenon, but journalism has always relied on leaks and tipoffs and secrets from the wider public. What the internet, and its communities of information gatherers, allows is for this to be done on a more epic and anonymous scale. In this new world, as Julian Assange has acknowledged by using trusted news organisations to reveal the secrets, the process of editing and sifting and contextualising stories becomes more crucial than ever.

If WikiLeaks represents one version of future transparency, recent events have also revealed how those with information to protect will begin to shape the argument against that transparency. Assange was originally scrupulous in trying to avoid his medium becoming the message: it was the information that was important, not the individual or organisation that brought it to the public domain. As the bizarre circus around Assange now proves, however, news generally refuses to be depersonalised. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the particular extradition case, there will always be interests that will move to undermine and destroy the messenger, even as they lose control of the message.

This is really delicious. One of America’s self-appointed leading foreign affairs columnists, the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman, shows himself to be a rather insecure and technologically clueless man. And this is the guy who praises globalisation? Truly insulated:

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman ’75 questioned the ethics of WikiLeaks and technology in journalism during an academic symposium to honor outgoing University President Jehuda ReinharzWednesday evening in the Shapiro Campus Center.

Friedman, who writes many columns on politics and globalization, said that he was torn about whether WikiLeaks was justified to release the more than 250,000 diplomatic cables that it did to The New York Times last month.

“I would not want to live in a world without whistle blowers,” Friedman said. “But I would not want to live in a world where any individual can expose all the internal emails [of an organization].”

Yet Friedman also explained that while America “on balance [is] a real force for good in the world,” Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, does not believe in or support American values.

Commenting on the role of technology, Friedman said that the benefits include the rise in globalization, but WikiLeaks demonstrates some of the potential issues with rapidly growing technology.

“It’s incredibly empowering and it’s incredibly disempowering,” Friedman said.

…

When discussing technology, Friedman insisted that despite new inventions with Facebook and online media, personal interviews and conversations are irreplaceable.

“If you want to have an impact on your world, get off Facebook and into somebody’s face,” Friedman said. “I still get enormous satisfaction from interviewing people wherever I go.”

Admitting that he has never been to Facebook’s website before, Friedman said that “your world may be digital, but politics, God bless it, is still analog.”

The always provocative Evgeny Morozov writes in Foreign Policy about the politics and ethics of online dissent in the form of civil disobedience. What are the limits? And why is it so different from the real world?

This is the post-Wikileaks new paradigm:

First – and I briefly touched upon this subject in my previous post – some Internet experts fear that participating in DDoS attacks, even if one has morally justifiable reasons for doing so, might make DDoS a more acceptable form of silencing dissent. As such, anyone participating in DDoS – even if they have perfectly good reasons for doing so – should first consider the indirect consequences of popularizing DDoS as a tactic. (I have written about DDoS as a new censorship mechanism on numerous occasions – see, for example, the story of the Georgian blogger Cyxymu.)

Let’s leave philosophy aside for a moment and just use some common sense. Would we advise anyone participating in lunch-counter sit-ins during the civil rights era not to do it because it may popularize sit-ins as a tactic that might be abused by all sorts of crazy people and criminals? I don’t think so: just because one can organize a sit-in to block an entrance to the offices of ACLU to protest their defense of civil liberties would hardly be a factor in deciding whether to block an entrance to the offices of the Department of Defense to protest a war.

Why is DDoS different? Arguably, physical civil disobedience is often much easier to conduct than its virtual counterpart: having 100 people show up and block entrance to Amazon’s offices, on average, is far more effective than having the same 100 people launch DDoS attacks on its web-site. Sure, there are oddballs like Jester, who claims to have taken the entire WikiLeaks with a solo DoS attack; but such people are not exactly missing from the offline domain. Cindy Sheehan has been quite effective acting solo – is it a reason to impose a moratorium on acts of civil disobedience? I don’t think so.

I think that those who worry about the adverse effects of popularizing DDoS as a tactic misunderstand what civil disobedience is (moreover, I’m not sure they understand the distinction between its direct and indirect varieties). Civil disobedience involves breaches of law by definition; anyone lamenting the popularization of DDoS as a tactic is only lamenting the fact that those practicing it would violate the rule of law. But what such critics do not seem to understand is that for a breach of law to count as civil disobedience its perpetrators should be willing to accept the consequences, get arrested and serve jail time if this if what the law demands. Submitting oneself to the rule of law after breaching it is the compensatory act that makes such acts morally permissible.

hose who oppose DDoS on the grounds that it will popularize DDos as a tactic are essentially saying: don’t breach the rule of law because it would lead others to breach the rule of law. Note that such a position leaves no space to comment on whether the laws that are being breached are unjust to begin with or, in case the laws are, indeed, just, whether violating them may be a morally permissible way to right other wrongs (i.e. engage indirect civil disobedience).

No wonder so many in positions of power fear Wikileaks. What we are seeing is diplomacy and statecraft laid bare. And the results are devastating. We are lied to on a daily basis.

And what of the countless corporate journalists taken on embedded trips to Afghanistan, simply “reporting” futile battles and tiny details that ignore the big picture? They’ve been on the drip-feed and it shows:

We squabbled with our allies, yet in public we talked of close co-operation. We frustrated the Americans with unfulfilled promises. Our politicians big-noted in public but dithered in private. Our bamboozled bureaucrats tried to make sense of the details. All along, the public was kept in the dark.

Not any longer.

Thanks to WikiLeaks, we have an insight into the diplomatic skirmishes behind the war in Afghanistan, now in its ninth year and which has cost 21 Australian lives.

Leaked US diplomatic cables expose friction between Australia and its allies, undermining the public veneer of coalition solidarity.

We did not trust the Dutch, our key partner in Afghanistan.

We confounded the Americans by dithering over Kevin Rudd’s promised ”civilian surge” – a promise made to head off a US request for more troops, by offering advisers and police instead.

Ministers and officials were left in the dark over the promise, while federal departments bickered as they struggled to make the pledge a reality.

The US State Department cables, released exclusively by WikiLeaks to The Sunday Age, include reports from the US embassy in Canberra that reveal deep distrust between Australian and Dutch forces in Oruzgan province, where Australia was part of a Netherlands-led force.

In February 2007, Australian officers, concerned the Taliban were preparing a do-or-die offensive, started planning to send special forces back to Oruzgan.

This was just five months after the Howard government pulled them out, in September 2006, when it argued Oruzgan was ”relatively stable” and that Australian reconstruction troops remaining in the province were well protected by their own forces and Dutch troops.

But the claims of stability and the stated faith in the Dutch were undermined when intelligence reports warned of a Taliban resurgence.

While the army planned another special forces deployment, officials in Canberra briefed journalists that the troops would be under Australian – not Dutch – command. But privately, Australia actually wanted them under US command.

The Wikileaks stories keep on coming.

One:

The Drug Enforcement Administration has been transformed into a global intelligence organization with a reach that extends far beyond narcotics, and an eavesdropping operation so expansive it has to fend off foreign politicians who want to use it against their political enemies, according to secret diplomatic cables.

In far greater detail than previously seen, the cables, from the cache obtained by WikiLeaks and made available to some news organizations, offer glimpses of drug agents balancing diplomacy and law enforcement in places where it can be hard to tell the politicians from the traffickers, and where drug rings are themselves mini-states whose wealth and violence permit them to run roughshod over struggling governments.

Diplomats recorded unforgettable vignettes from the largely unseen war on drugs:

¶In Panama, an urgent BlackBerry message from the president to the American ambassador demanded that the D.E.A. go after his political enemies: “I need help with tapping phones.”

¶In Sierra Leone, a major cocaine-trafficking prosecution was almost upended by the attorney general’s attempt to solicit $2.5 million in bribes.

¶In Guinea, the country’s biggest narcotics kingpin turned out to be the president’s son, and diplomats discovered that before the police destroyed a huge narcotics seizure, the drugs had been replaced by flour.

¶Leaders of Mexico’s beleaguered military issued private pleas for closer collaboration with the drug agency, confessing that they had little faith in their own country’s police forces.

¶Cables from Myanmar, the target of strict United States sanctions, describe the drug agency informants’ reporting both on how the military junta enriches itself with drug money and on the political activities of the junta’s opponents.

Officials of the D.E.A. and the State Department declined to discuss what they said was information that should never have been made public.

Like many of the cables made public in recent weeks, those describing the drug war do not offer large disclosures. Rather, it is the details that add up to a clearer picture of the corrupting influence of big traffickers, the tricky game of figuring out which foreign officials are actually controlled by drug lords, and the story of how an entrepreneurial agency operating in the shadows of the Federal Bureau of Investigation has become something more than a drug agency. The D.E.A. now has 87 offices in 63 countries and close partnerships with governments that keep the Central Intelligence Agency at arm’s length.

Because of the ubiquity of the drug scourge, today’s D.E.A. has access to foreign governments, including those, like Nicaragua’s and Venezuela’s, that have strained diplomatic relations with the United States. Many are eager to take advantage of the agency’s drug detection and wiretapping technologies.

In some countries, the collaboration appears to work well, with the drug agency providing intelligence that has helped bring down traffickers, and even entire cartels. But the victories can come at a high price, according to the cables, which describe scores of D.E.A. informants and a handful of agents who have been killed in Mexico and Afghanistan.

In Venezuela, the local intelligence service turned the tables on the D.E.A., infiltrating its operations, sabotaging equipment and hiring a computer hacker to intercept American Embassy e-mails, the cables report.

And as the drug agency has expanded its eavesdropping operations to keep up with cartels, it has faced repeated pressure to redirect its counternarcotics surveillance to local concerns, provoking tensions with some of Washington’s closest allies.

Two:

It was three months into Barack Obama’s presidency, and the administration — under pressure to do something about alleged abuses in Bush-era interrogation policies — turned to a Florida senator to deliver a sensitive message to Spain:

Don’t indict former President George W. Bush’s legal brain trust for alleged torture in the treatment of war on terror detainees, warned Mel Martinez on one of his frequent trips to Madrid. Doing so would chill U.S.-Spanish relations.

Rather than a resolution, though, a senior Spanish diplomat gave the former GOP chairman and housing secretary a lesson in Spain’s separation of powers. “The independence of the judiciary and the process must be respected,” then-acting Foreign Minister Angel Lossada replied on April 15, 2009. Then for emphasis, “Lossada reiterated to Martinez that the executive branch of government could not close any judicial investigation and urged that this case not affect the overall relationship.”

The case is still open, on the desk of a Spanish magistrate, awaiting a reply from the Obama administration on whether it will pursue a probe of its own.

But the episode, revealed in a raft of WikiLeaks cables, was part of a secret concerted U.S. effort to stop a crusading Spanish judge from investigating a torture complaint against former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and five other senior Bush lawyers.

…

The cause for alarm at the U.S. Embassy was what a U.S. diplomat called a “well documented” 12-inch-tall dossier compiled by a Spanish human rights group. In the name of five Guantánamo captives with ties to Spain, it accused the Bush legal insiders of laying the foundation for abuse of detainees in the months following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Of particular concern was that a swashbuckling Spanish magistrate, Baltasar Garzón, might get the probe under Spain’s system, which gave judges extraordinary investigative powers.

Garzón had earlier made headlines by swearing out arrest warrants for Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet while he was getting medical attention in London, and Osama bin Laden. U.S. ambassador Eduardo Aguirre Jr. cast him as a publicity hound with an “anti-American streak” in one confidential cable.

If those efforts are any guide, a Spanish prosecution of the so-called Bush Six seems unlikely. Britain never turned Pinochet over to Spain for a war crimes trial, and bin Laden is still at large.

Rather, indictments would undermine U.S. diplomatic credibility on human rights and likely ground the six Bush lawyers in the United States, for fear of arrest overseas.

Another, April 1, 2009, cable shows the U.S. Embassy’s political officer and legal advisor discussing Garzón with his boss, chief prosecutor Javier Zaragoza, who expresses his displeasure with the case. Separately, a third U.S. diplomat told a senior Spanish Justice Ministry official “for international judicial cooperation” that the U.S. government considered the potential for a prosecution “a very serious matter.”

…

Civil rights attorney Michael Ratner, whose Center for Constitutional Rights has championed Guantánamo detainee rights, called the cables taken together “quite dramatic.”

“The U.S. prides itself on our own independent judiciary,” Ratner said. “But here you have the hypocrisy of the U.S. government trying to influence an independent judicial system to bend its laws and own rules.”

“And it’s the Obama administration doing it to protect Bush people,” he said.

The Christmas Day New York Times editorial takes a strong stand against any moves to silence publications that may reveal embarrassing or critical information about major financial institutions:

The whistle-blowing Web site WikiLeaks has not been convicted of a crime. The Justice Department has not even pressed charges over its disclosure of confidential State Department communications. Nonetheless, the financial industry is trying to shut it down.

Visa, MasterCard and PayPal announced in the past few weeks that they would not process any transaction intended for WikiLeaks. Earlier this month, Bank of America decided to join the group, arguing that WikiLeaks may be doing things that are “inconsistent with our internal policies for processing payments.”

The Federal Reserve, the banking regulator, allows this. Like other companies, banks can choose whom they do business with. Refusing to open an account for some undesirable entity is seen as reasonable risk management. The government even requires banks to keep an eye out for some shady businesses — like drug dealing and money laundering — and refuse to do business with those who engage in them.

But a bank’s ability to block payments to a legal entity raises a troubling prospect. A handful of big banks could potentially bar any organization they disliked from the payments system, essentially cutting them off from the world economy.

The fact of the matter is that banks are not like any other business. They run the payments system. That is one of the main reasons that governments protect them from failure with explicit and implicit guarantees. This makes them look not too unlike other public utilities. A telecommunications company, for example, may not refuse phone or broadband service to an organization it dislikes, arguing that it amounts to risky business.

Our concern is not specifically about payments to WikiLeaks. This isn’t the first time a bank shunned a business on similar risk-management grounds. Banks in Colorado, for instance, have refused to open bank accounts for legal dispensaries of medical marijuana.

Still, there are troubling questions. The decisions to bar the organization came after its founder, Julian Assange, said that next year it will release data revealing corruption in the financial industry. In 2009, Mr. Assange said that WikiLeaks had the hard drive of a Bank of America executive.

What would happen if a clutch of big banks decided that a particularly irksome blogger or other organization was “too risky”? What if they decided — one by one — to shut down financial access to a newspaper that was about to reveal irksome truths about their operations? This decision should not be left solely up to business-as-usual among the banks.

The sound and fury directed at Wikileaks in the last month has (largely) been against the group itself rather than the revelations in the cables. Salon’s Glenn Greenwald outlines what we now know and why many in the political and media elites are afraid of the public learning of crimes committed in their names:

As revealing as the disclosures themselves are, the reactions to them have been equally revealing.  The vast bulk of the outrage has been devoted not to the crimes that have been exposed but rather to those who exposed them:  WikiLeaks and (allegedly) Bradley Manning.  A consensus quickly emerged in the political and media class that they are Evil Villains who must be severely punished, while those responsible for the acts they revealed are guilty of nothing.  That reaction has not been weakened at all even by the Pentagon’s own admission that, in stark contrast to its own actions, there is no evidence — zero — that any of WikiLeaks’ actions has caused even a single death.  Meanwhile, the American establishment media — even in the face of all these revelations — continues to insist on the contradictory, Orwellian platitudes that (a) there is Nothing New™ in anything disclosed by WikiLeaks and (b) WikiLeaks has done Grave Harm to American National Security™ through its disclosures.

It’s unsurprising that political leaders would want to convince people that the true criminals are those who expose acts of high-level political corruption and criminality, rather than those who perpetrate them.  Every political leader would love for that self-serving piety to take hold.  But what’s startling is how many citizens and, especially, “journalists” now vehemently believe that as well.  In light of what WikiLeaks has revealed to the world about numerous governments, just fathom the authoritarian mindset that would lead a citizen — and especially a “journalist” — to react with anger that these things have been revealed; to insist that these facts should have been kept concealed and it’d be better if we didn’t know; and, most of all, to demand that those who made us aware of it all be punished (the True Criminals) while those who did these things (The Good Authorities) be shielded.