Antony Loewenstein

If this is the future of warfare and intelligence gathering, rest assured it won’t only be Washington doing it.

Last month philosopher Patrick Lin delivered this briefing about the ethics of drones at an event hosted by In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture-capital arm (via the Atlantic):

Let’s look at some current and future scenarios. These go beyond obvious intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR), strike, and sentry applications, as most robots are being used for today. I’ll limit these scenarios to a time horizon of about 10-15 years from now.

Military surveillance applications are well known, but there are also important civilian applications, such as robots that patrol playgrounds for pedophiles (for instance, in South Korea) and major sporting events for suspicious activity (such as the 2006 World Cup in Seoul and 2008 Beijing Olympics). Current and future biometric capabilities may enable robots to detect faces, drugs, and weapons at a distance and underneath clothing. In the future, robot swarms and “smart dust” (sometimes called nanosensors) may be used in this role.

Robots can be used for alerting purposes, such as a humanoid police robot in China that gives out information, and a Russian police robot that recites laws and issues warnings. So there’s potential for educational or communication roles and on-the-spot community reporting, as related to intelligence gathering.

In delivery applications, SWAT police teams already use robots to interact with hostage-takers and in other dangerous situations. So robots could be used to deliver other items or plant surveillance devices in inaccessible places. Likewise, they can be used for extractions too. As mentioned earlier, the BEAR robot can retrieve wounded soldiers from the battlefield, as well as handle hazardous or heavy materials. In the future, an autonomous car or helicopter might be deployed to extract or transport suspects and assets, to limit US personnel inside hostile or foreign borders.

In detention applications, robots could also be used to not just guard buildings but also people. Some advantages here would be the elimination of prison abuses like we saw at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba and Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. This speaks to the dispassionate way robots can operate. Relatedly–and I’m not advocating any of these scenarios, just speculating on possible uses–robots can solve the dilemma of using physicians in interrogations and torture. These activities conflict with their duty to care and the Hippocratic oath to do no harm. Robots can monitor vital signs of interrogated suspects, as well as a human doctor can. They could also administer injections and even inflict pain in a more controlled way, free from malice and prejudices that might take things too far (or much further than already).

More than ten years after 9/11, the Obama administration remains determined to maintain flawed military trials for terror suspects but as this New York Times investigation reveals, housing people on the US mainland hasn’t caused the end of America:

It is the other Guantánamo, an archipelago of federal prisons that stretches across the country, hidden away on back roads. Today, it houses far more men convicted in terrorism cases than the shrunken population of the prison in Cuba that has generated so much debate.

An aggressive prosecution strategy, aimed at prevention as much as punishment, has sent away scores of people. They serve long sentences, often in restrictive, Muslim-majority units, under intensive monitoring by prison officers. Their world is spare.

Among them is Ismail Royer, serving 20 years for helping friends go to an extremist training camp in Pakistan. In a letter from the highest-security prison in the United States, Mr. Royer describes his remarkable neighbors at twice-a-week outdoor exercise sessions, each prisoner alone in his own wire cage under the Colorado sky. “That’s really the only interaction I have with other inmates,” he wrote from the federal Supermax, 100 miles south of Denver.

There is Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, Mr. Royer wrote. Terry Nichols, who conspired to blow up the Oklahoma City federal building. Ahmed Ressam, the would-be “millennium bomber,” who plotted to attack Los Angeles International Airport. And Eric Rudolph, who bombed abortion clinics and the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta.

In recent weeks, Congress has reignited an old debate, with some arguing that only military justice is appropriate for terrorist suspects. But military tribunals have proved excruciatingly slow and imprisonment at Guantánamo hugely costly — $800,000 per inmate a year, compared with $25,000 in federal prison.

The criminal justice system, meanwhile, has absorbed the surge of terrorism cases since 2001 without calamity, and without the international criticism that Guantánamo has attracted for holding prisoners without trial. A decade after the Sept. 11 attacks, an examination of how the prisons have handled the challenge of extremist violence reveals some striking facts:

¶ Big numbers. Today, 171 prisoners remain at Guantánamo. As of Oct. 1, the federal Bureau of Prisons reported that it was holding 362 people convicted in terrorism-related cases, 269 with what the bureau calls a connection to international terrorism — up from just 50 in 2000. An additional 93 inmates have a connection to domestic terrorism.

¶ Lengthy sentences. Terrorists who plotted to massacre Americans are likely to die in prison. Faisal Shahzad, who tried to set off a car bomb in Times Square in 2010, is serving a sentence of life without parole at the Supermax, as are Zacarias Moussaoui, a Qaeda operative arrested in 2001, and Mr. Reid, the shoe bomber, among others. But many inmates whose conduct fell far short of outright terrorism are serving sentences of a decade or more, the result of a calculated prevention strategy to sideline radicals well before they could initiate deadly plots.

¶ Special units. Since 2006, the Bureau of Prisons has moved many of those convicted in terrorism cases to two special units that severely restrict visits and phone calls. But in creating what are Muslim-dominated units, prison officials have inadvertently fostered a sense of solidarity and defiance, and set off a long-running legal dispute over limits on group prayer. Officials have warned in court filings about the danger of radicalization, but the Bureau of Prisons has nothing comparable to the deradicalization programs instituted in many countries.

¶ Quiet releases. More than 300 prisoners have completed their sentences and been freed since 2001. Their convictions involved not outright violence but “material support” for a terrorist group; financial or document fraud; weapons violations; and a range of other crimes. About half are foreign citizens and were deported; the Americans have blended into communities around the country, refusing news media interviews and avoiding attention.

¶ Rare recidivism. By contrast with the record at Guantánamo, where the Defense Department says that about 25 percent of those released are known or suspected of subsequently joining militant groups, it appears extraordinarily rare for the federal prison inmates with past terrorist ties to plot violence after their release. The government keeps a close eye on them: prison intelligence officers report regularly to the Justice Department on visitors, letters and phone calls of inmates linked to terrorism. Before the prisoners are freed, F.B.I. agents typically interview them, and probation officers track them for years.

Both the Obama administration and Republicans in Congress often cite the threat of homegrown terrorism. But the Bureau of Prisons has proven remarkably resistant to outside scrutiny of the inmates it houses, who might offer a unique window on the problem.

“Democratic” America post 9/11 (via Associated Press):

In northern Bucharest, in a busy residential neighborhood minutes from the heart of the capital city, is a secret the Romanian government has long tried to protect.

For years, the CIA used a government building — codenamed “Bright Light” — as a makeshift prison for its most valuable detainees. There it held al-Qaida operatives Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, and others in a basement prison before they were ultimately transferred to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in 2006, according to former U.S. intelligence officials familiar with the location and inner workings of the prison.

The existence of a CIA prison in Romania has been widely reported, but its location has never been made public. The Associated Press and German public television ARD located the former prison and learned details of the facility where harsh interrogation tactics were used. ARD’s program on the CIA prison is set to air Thursday.

The Romanian prison was part of a network of so-called black sites that the CIA operated and controlled overseas in Thailand, Lithuania and Poland. All the prisons were closed by May 2006, and the CIA’s detention and interrogation program ended in 2009.

Unlike the CIA’s facility in Lithuania’s countryside or the one hidden in a Polish military installation, the CIA’s prison in Romania was not in a remote location. It was hidden in plain sight, a couple blocks off a major boulevard on a street lined with trees and homes, along busy train tracks.

The building is used as the National Registry Office for Classified Information, which is also known as ORNISS. Classified information from NATO and the European Union is stored there. Former intelligence officials both described the location of the prison and identified pictures of the building.

In an interview at the building in November, senior ORNISS official Adrian Camarasan said the basement is one of the most secure rooms in all of Romania. But he said Americans never ran a prison there.

“No, no. Impossible, impossible,” he said in an ARD interview for its “Panorama” news broadcast, as a security official monitored the interview.

The CIA prison opened for business in the fall of 2003, after the CIA decided to empty the black site in Poland, according to former U.S. officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the detention program with reporters.

Shuttling detainees into the facility without being seen was relatively easy. After flying into Bucharest, the detainees were brought to the site in vans. CIA operatives then drove down a side road and entered the compound through a rear gate that led to the actual prison.

The detainees could then be unloaded and whisked into the ground floor of the prison and into the basement.

The basement consisted of six prefabricated cells, each with a clock and arrow pointing to Mecca, the officials said. The cells were on springs, keeping them slightly off balance and causing disorientation among some detainees.

The CIA declined to comment on the prison.

Yet more evidence is emerging of the global scope of torture post 9/11 by the Bush administration with virtual bi-partisan support. Just the latest (via Reprieve in the UK):

As a front-page article in Finland’s leading daily Helsingin Sanomat today explains, the Finnish government have reluctantly been compelled, in response to requests by Amnesty International, to release some data about suspicious planes passing through Finnish territory between 2001 and 2006. But does the government have the will to investigate the loose ends which this data has brought to light?

The mysterious flight of N733MA in March 2006 is a case in point. According to the data released by the Finnish foreign ministry, this plane flew from Porto in Portugal to Finland, arriving in Helsinki at 20:37 on the 25th of March. After that, it disappears from the record, with no onward route given – except that we know from other sources that two hours later it had mysteriously reappeared in Lithuania. According to the parliamentary inquiry on the establishment of CIA secret prisons in Lithuania, on its arrival there this plane was not greeted by the usual border checks, because the security services had written to the border guard the day before … asking them not to check the plane.

Guantanamo detainee Abu Zubaydah filed a case against the government of Lithuania in the European Court of Human Rights last Friday, concerning his secret detention in Lithuania in 2005-6, so the time is ripe for the Finnish government to look seriously at the implications of this, and other, new disclosures. On 23 September Reprieve and partners Access Info Europe filed a freedom of information request about more potential renditions planes passing through Finland. The response, from transport agency Trafi, is now well overdue. Will they, and the government, make the necessary effort to get to the bottom of this murky history? They are likely to be faced with increasingly difficult and embarrassing questions in the near future if not.

Good on Amnesty for running this campaign. And some people are upset?

That’s quite a “liberal” US President:

During the 2008 election, Barack Obama emerged as the consummate anti-war candidate. He wanted to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center, funnel resources to the home front, and generally remedy the nation’s reputation as a global bully. Now, as the 2012 elections ramp up, he continues to carve a softer stance on foreign policy, telling voters that “the tides of war are receding.” But how much has actually changed? Neither disillusioned Democrats nor triumphant Republicans have had much data to go on. Until now.

In an exclusive analysis, Newsweek combed through a decade of military deployment history, and found only a faint line between the Bush and Obama presidencies. The number of American troops abroad has dropped less than 1 percent under President Obama, buoyed by what appears to be a sharp rise in the number of clandestine assignments, and curious growth in the number of personnel at Guantanamo Bay. None of the robust deployment trends begun under Bush have significantly abated. And since World War II, only President Bush has scattered a greater proportion of American might overseas: 39.5, 42.8, and 39.1 percent of American troops were abroad between 2006 and 2008, compared to Obama’s 39.3 percent in 2009 and 38.2 percent as of December 2010, the most recent date for which worldwide data is available.* Even with an aggressive—or, to some minds, reckless—drawdown in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, it would take nearly another 300,000 tickets home before the military was as united at home as they were on September 10, 2001.

As Australian authorities attempt to pursue former Guantanamo Bay prisoner David Hicks – tortured, held illegally and still pursued by leeches who love the authoritarian impulse of US foreign policy – a number of Australians, including me, are speaking out. Thanks to Overland journal for organising this:

On 20 July 2011, the Australian government served David Hicks with a notice of their intent to restrain any funds obtained from the sale of his book, Guantanamo: My Journey, under the Commonwealth Proceeds of Crime Act.

After Hicks was captured in Afghanistan and sold to the US by the Northern Alliance, he spent six years in Guantanamo Bay without trial or charges. He alleges that, during his detention, he was tortured. He spent much of his captivity in 24-hour solitary detention.

Hicks was eventually brought before a military commission, in a procedure condemned by lawyers and human rights groups everywhere. With no other way to get home, he accepted a deal, under which, in return for pleading guilty, he served a short sentence in Australia.

The arrangement was widely acknowledged as a political resolution to a case that was causing increasing embarrassment to both the US and Australian governments. Obviously, Hicks would never have been released had the Americans thought he represented the slightest threat.

Many Australians regard the treatment of David Hicks as an international outrage. What took place – what continues to take place – in Guantanamo Bay deserves more publicity, not less. If the government thinks it has done nothing wrong, it has nothing to fear from a full discussion of the Hicks case.

The move against Hicks’ memoirs should concern everyone. But it is of particular relevance to writers and publishers, precisely because of the direct interference into publications with which the government politically disagrees. How can Australian publishers feel safe publishing material that is controversial knowing that the Australian government is willing to use laws to financially penalise perceived opponents? Fundamentally, this is an issue of political censorship.

As lawyer Elizabeth O’Shea put it, ‘Anyone who believes in the right to a fair trial and freedom from torture should defend Hicks.’ The government’s application is to be heard 3 August in NSW. We’re asking those in the publishing industry to sign this petition (leave your name below or send us an email) because this action has alarming political and financial implications for writers and publishers everywhere.

Signed

Jacinda Woodhead – writer and editor
Dr Jeff Sparrow – writer and editor
Elizabeth O’Shea – lawyer
Dr Rjurik Davidson – writer and editor
Rodney Hall – author
James Bradley – novelist and critic
Julian Burnside AO QC
Sophie Cunningham – writer and editor
Dr Peter Minter – writer and editor
Alison Croggon – poet, critic and novelist
Professor Wendy Bacon – the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism, UTS
The Hon Alastair Nicholson AO RFD QC
Mary Kostakidis – broadcaster and journalist
Emmett Stinson – lecturer in publishing and communications
Jo Case – writer and editor
Zoe Dattner – publisher
Professor Chris Nash – Monash University
John Marnell – editor
Adam Ford – writer and editor
Antony Loewenstein – journalist
John Martinkus – academic and journalist, University of Tasmania
Christos Tsiolkas – writer
Emily Maguire – writer
Kate Eltham – writer, publisher and arts manager
Clare Strahan – writer and editor
Joshua Mostafa – writer
Tim Coronel – publisher, editor and journalist
Greg Black
Roselina Press – writer and editor
Mark Davis – writer and academic

My following article appears in today’s ABC’s The Drum:

The triumphalism after the American targeted assassination of Osama bin Laden is a sure sign that the US is incapable of understanding the significance of the painful years since September 11. We suffered and now you must, too.

“I’ve never been so excited to see the photo of a corpse with a gunshot wound through the head”, tweeted Emily Miller of The Washington Times.

Most in the mainstream press have simply regurgitated White House propaganda without question, including key details of bin Laden’s death and lifestyle.

The glee with which many in the American public, political and media elites have celebrated the murder of bin Laden may be unsurprising but it provides a welcome insight into an infantile and violence-obsessed culture. He used mayhem against Us and We must unleash overwhelming firepower against Him and His followers.

9/11 was slaughter on a huge scale and American hurt, confusion and anger was understandable. Finding the perpetrators of the crime was essential but it is difficult to cheer when a man receives bullets to the head unless, of course, we want to marinate in the juices of a John Wayne fantasy.

“We responded [to 9/11] exactly as these terrorist organizations wanted us to respond”, says former New York Times Middle East correspondent Chris Hedges. “They wanted us to speak the language of violence”.

The corporate media is filled with undeniably fascinating stories of how the US tracked bin Laden to his Pakistani hideout. The potential complicity of forces within the Pakistani intelligence services will be investigated but is unlikely to lead to a serious reduction in US funding for the corrupt elites there. The ongoing US-led war in Afghanistan guarantees Washington is joined at the hip to the Pakistani military. And once again, the Pakistani people will be killed without mercy.

But largely missing from the mountains of coverage in the last days are the profound changes 9/11 brought to the world, and the pyrrhic victories scored by bin Laden and his group of murderous thugs.

The militarisation of America and the engagements in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Palestine, Egypt, Jordan, Indonesia and elsewhere has not made the US homeland any safer. In fact, the opposite is true. The thought that an old man sitting in an expensive compound in Pakistan with no internet or phone access is truly the most dangerous and wanted man in the world shows the skewed priorities of a brutal super-power hell-bent on revenge.

The murder of bin Laden wasn’t justice, as claimed by Obama and a range of commentators. It was a targeted assassination, an art perfected by Israel, and an illegal tool that has not made the Zionist nation any less likely to face attack from designated enemies. America will be no different.

The post 9/11 security state is now well and truly entrenched in our lives. The arrival of President Barack Obama did nothing to change that; it was merely accelerated with a nicer, kinder face. Privatised killing is now ubiquitous in Iraq and Afghanistan as an out-of-control and multi-trillion dollar industry finds ways to kill and make new foes in the process.

The US and its allies have provided over the last years an overwhelming range of weapons to murderers (former opponents now known as “allies”) in nations where conventional US forces have been unable to subdue a legitimate insurgency.

It’s grimly ironic that the Australian media obsesses over every word of supposed terrorism expert Australian David Kilcullen – described on Monday night’s ABC TV Lateline as “one of the world’s top counter-insurgency specialists” – without asking whether his skills have actually succeeded and at what cost.

An insurgency still rages in Iraq and has never been stronger in Afghanistan, and the methods by which US forces tried to destroy resistance movements involved arming former enemies and unleashing horrific violence against those who wouldn’t accept US rule. That’s some victory that plays directly into the narrative articulated by bin Laden from the 1990s: Western forces only want to occupy and subjugate Muslims.

Besides, Kilcullen is closely associated with the likely next CIA director David Petraeus, whose military tactics against insurgents have been vicious and counter-productive. He will certainly bring a far more militarised mindset to America’s intelligence community.

But resistance to Western domination of the Arab world wasn’t achieved by Al-Qaeda. Their murder of countless Muslims and quasi-death cult ideology failed to connect with enough people looking for something more than just opposition to sclerotic Western-backed dictatorships across the region.

Hamas, Hizbollah head Hassan Nasrallah and Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have succeeded where Al-Qaeda failed; they spent years cementing themselves in the fabric of societies that were being ignored by the state. These nationalist movements, with various degrees of aggression and repression, have far more successfully captured the spirit of the post 9/11 times than bin Laden’s superficially appealing dogma. And most Muslims worldwide haven’t bought the hardline Islamist line for years.

This year’s Arab revolutions have shown the almost irrelevance of Al-Qaeda. Millions of Arabs in Egypt, Tunisia, Palestine, Libya, Saudi Arabia and beyond have found ways to challenge despots and US-backed autocrats in ways unimagined and impossible for bin Laden. Freedom movements, partly religious and partly secular, have fundamentally transformed a region that most of its largely young population only associated with social and political stagnation. Al-Qaeda has been almost silent in the last while, a force that had no way to harness, let alone lead, grievances of the oppressed masses.

None of us will feel safer with the death of bin Laden and why should we? The arguments for his organisation’s force have only strengthened since 9/11, even if his tactics were abhorrent and failed to attract huge numbers of followers. America and its allies are now far widely engaged across the Muslim world, militarising lands in the name of “fighting terrorism”. Wikileaks has shown the futility of such actions, detailing US officials attempts to pressure autocratic nations to crack down on unwanted elements while stirring up hatred of citizens under the path of ever-increasing drone attacks (in Yemen, Pakistan and now Libya).

The West will never feel more secure with the murder of a terrorist leader. Almost nowhere in the media orgy of celebration (including, disappointingly, Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show) was anything discussed about occupation. It didn’t exist, seemingly completely separate to the rise and once high popularity of bin Laden. Pakistan’s apparent protection of the Al-Qaeda leader will only deepen America’s desire to further occupy that nation’s mind. Obama is a war President, a badge he wears with pride, such is his escalation of covert missions in numerous nations in the last years.

There has been a deliberate conflation by a litany of politicians, corporate journalists and think-tankers in the last decade to frame every resistance to Western policy as terrorism. It is not. Take Afghanistan, where the Taliban has virtually no relationship with Al-Qaeda anymore and will continue to fight for the liquidation of foreign forces, whether we like or not. They’ll have no concern with Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard and Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd mouthing platitudes about staying the course in Afghanistan with a warlord infested, Kabul government.

bin Laden died a man who had profoundly changed the landscape of the world. He failed to rally Muslims to his brutal cause but his shadow will continue to hover over Western policy towards the Islamic world. We have been sold a lie, one pushed by the Israelis for decades, that the killing of countless terrorists will bring peace. Colonising Muslim lands is seemingly irrelevant, or locking up innocent men in Guantanamo Bay or escalating a drone war in Pakistan.

The West has much to learn.

Antony Loewenstein is an independent journalist and author of My Israel Question and The Blogging Revolution.

The recently released Wikileaks files on Guantanamo Bay showed a US empire arrogant on fear and power.

But here’s an insight from Lawrence Wilkerson, retired Army colonel who served as Colin Powell’s right-hand at the State Department, that explains a lot. From a speech in 2009 on the “mosaic philosophy”:

This philosophy held that it did not matter if a detainee were innocent. Indeed, because he lived in Afghanistan and was captured on or near the battle area, he must know something of importance (this general philosophy, in an even cruder form, prevailed in Iraq as well, helping to produce the nightmare at Abu Ghraib). All that was necessary was to extract everything possible from him and others like him, assemble it all in a computer program, and then look for cross-connections and serendipitous incidentals–in short, to have sufficient information about a village, a region, or a group of individuals, that dots could be connected and terrorists or their plots could be identified.

Thus, as many people as possible had to be kept in detention for as long as possible to allow this philosophy of intelligence gathering to work. The detainees’ innocence was inconsequential. After all, they were ignorant peasants for the most part and mostly Muslim to boot.

My following article appears in today’s ABC The Drum:

The Wikileaks-released Guantanamo Bay files provide an invaluable insight into the mindset of the US and its allies since September 11.

An infrastructure of torture was implemented, a practice still defended by the US government today, to allegedly protect the homeland from future attack.

The result was hundreds of innocent men kidnapped and incarcerated without trial – a “legal and moral disaster”, according to The New York Times – and President Obama continues shielding torturers in the previous and current administrations. He has pledged to Look Forward and Not Back. The current President has merely extended the Bush administration’s indefinite detention regime for so-called terror suspects.

Salon’s Glenn Greenwald unleashed necessary fury about this reality:

The idea of trusting the government to imprison people for life based on secret, untested evidence never reviewed by a court should repel any decent or minimally rational person, but these newly released files demonstrate how warped is this indefinite detention policy specifically.

Yet this authoritarian impulse to believe untested claims by the US government is exactly what many in the media have been doing for years, repeating without question deliberately leaked intelligence files on the “worst of the worst” prisoners.

One local example is The Australian columnist Chris Kenny, failed Liberal politician and former chief of staff to former Foreign Minister Alexander Downer. During a Twitter conversation on Wednesday with Paul Barrett, a former Secretary of Australian Departments of Defence and Primary Industries & Energy, Kenny wrote, “You’re arguing to set free people who have murdered thousands” when Barrett asked why the US refused to conduct fair and open trials for individuals who had never faced justice.

In Kenny’s worldview, the American military has smeared hundreds of Muslims as terrorists and that’s good enough for him. The fact that the Wikileaks file shows the vast majority of Guantanamo Bay detainees had no connection to September 11 or terrorism can be ignored.

This has been the default position of the vast bulk of the corporate press since 9/11. In Australia, especially the Murdoch press has smeared former Guantanamo Bay inmates David Hicks and Mamdouh Habib. This continued with Downer who called both men “terrible, terrible people”, perhaps because he fears what an independent investigation may find in regards to his own government’s alleged complicity in their long incarceration.

Australian journalist Sally Neighbour published an analysis a few days ago that inadvertently undermined her own paper’s years of misleading reporting:

The dossiers on Mamdouh Habib and David Hicks reveal the so-called evidence used to justify their incarceration to be a confused mishmash replete with glaring factual errors and inconsistencies, principally based on self-incrimination that would not be admitted in a proper court of law and tainted by the inclusion of information obtained under torture.

What Neighbour conveniently omitted from her report were the journalists and editors who have dined for years on rehashing US government released propaganda against Hicks and Habib, including The Australian, and smearing them constantly. Clearly media accountability was not on the agenda for a decade of establishment stenography. Today’s Australian editorial begrudgingly acknowledges the torture suffered by Habib and Hicks but issues no apology for spending years accusing them both of terrorism.

Thankfully this week’s Sydney Morning Herald editorially called the treatment of Hicks and Habib by its rightful name, torture.

It took one of the world’s more diligent and un-embedded journalists on Guantanamo Bay inmates, Andy Worthington, to unpack the Wikileaks revelations and highlight the decade of ignoring legal precedent for the Cuban and American black hole down which countless men were tortured and housed.

Reading Worthington’s copious work over the years makes a reader wonder why more mainstream reporters didn’t investigate the prison camp with a very critical eye. Is it because, as a former Bush official said, too many US journalists wanted to be seen as “patriotic” and protect America’s “interests”. Truth came a distant third. Guantanamo Bay was a place where psychological experiments and torture was common-place.

But what of the latest Wikileaks revelations themselves which, for the record, should be seen as merely US official opinion rather than actual factual reporting? We learn that the US allowed a number of repressive country’s intelligence services access to Guantanamo Bay detainees, including officials from China, Russia and Saudi Arabia.

This highly prejudicial process was also committed by Australia during the Howard government when it emerged in 2005 that Chinese officials were allowed to interrogate Chinese asylum seekers in Sydney’s Villawood detention centre.

In the years after 9/11 (and also before), America was kidnapping terror suspects and sending them through extraordinary rendition to authoritarian states where these prisoners would be tortured for information. The latest Guantanamo Bay files confirm that Washington was also asking repressive regimes to assist them in identifying people as well as probably threatening their families back home.

The Wikileaks files detail America’s treatment of Al Jazeera cameraman Sami al-Hajj who languished without charge for six years in Guantanamo Bay. It can now be confirmed that he was only held in the prison camp because the Bush administration hated the Qatar-based news network and wanted to gain more information about its alleged connection to terrorism. It is a chilling warning to media companies the world over.

The response of the Obama administration to the latest document dump was typically Orwellian. The lawyers representing detainees at Guantanamo Bay were told, even after the mainstream press had widely disseminated the Wikileaks documents, that the files remained legally classified. The New York Times perfectly highlighted the issue:

Joseph Margulies, a Northwestern law professor who represents Abu Zubaydah, the detainee accused of being a terrorist facilitator who was waterboarded by the Central Intelligence Agency, said he could not comment on the newly disclosed assessment of his client, which is posted on The Times Web site.“Everyone else can talk about it,” Mr. Margulies said. “I can’t talk about it.”

Although Wikileaks itself was not a major focus of this release (only briefly, anyway), it again proved the power of the whistle-blowing website. Western news organisations were forced to collaborate with an organisation with a relatively small staff and budget. The obvious question remains; why didn’t The New York Times, The Washington Post or The Guardian receive the scoop with their own investigations?

If former US army soldier Bradley Manning was the leaker of this information – President Obama has already said Manning is guilty, undoubtedly affecting any potential trial – he has given the world an invaluable insight into a superpower’s tyranny; he is a patriot in the truest sense of the word.

Antony Loewenstein is an independent journalist and author of My Israel Question and The Blogging Revolution.

I appeared last night on ABCTV News 24′s The Drum alongside ABC journalist Marius Benson and lobbyist Sue Cato (video here).

While China, we learn via Wikileaks, ignores Australia’s supposed concerns for human rights, I asked if Prime Minister Julia Gillard actually cared about human rights as there had been no public comments from her after this week’s Guantanamo Bay files on countless innocent prisoners tortured by the world’s super-power. US crimes are not abuses in the eyes of our political and media elites. The words “human rights” are used as a political weapon as opposed to being something to cherish. Gillard’s current trip to China is solely about trade and military ties. Can the media and politicians be honest about this, please?

We discussed the alleged medical experimentation in Guantanamo Bay and the doctors complicit in the process. Both David Hicks and Mamdouh Habib have accused the US of doing this to them and yet we still don’t take their allegations seriously; how much did the Australian government know?

Finally, the UN report on war crimes in Sri Lanka during the country’s civil war (the massive allegations have unsurprisingly been denied by Colombo). The fact that up to 40,000 innocents may have been murdered by Sri Lanka (and far less by the Tamil Tigers) requires a robust and international trial. I called on Australia and the global community to back a transparent inquiry (a position supported by a Guardian editorial). Like the Goldstone report into Israeli and Hamas crimes, this latest UN investigation warrants the most serious response, despite China, the US, the West and Australia all likely to not show much enthusiasm.

Sadly, Canberra is more concerned about working with Colombo to stop poor Tamils getting onto boats and coming to Australia. So much for our priority ever being human rights accountability.

Really:

Anyone surfing the Internet this week is free to read leaked documents about the prisoners held by the American military at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to print them out or e-mail them to friends.

Except, that is, for the lawyers who represent the prisoners.

On Monday, hours after WikiLeaks, The New York Times and other news organizations began publishing the documents online, the Justice Department informed Guantánamo defense lawyers that the documents remained legally classified even after they were made public.

Because the lawyers have security clearances, they are obligated to treat the readily available files “in accordance with all relevant security precautions and safeguards” — handling them, for example, only in secure government facilities, said the notice from the department’s Court Security Office.