Antony Loewenstein

Wikileaks Julian Assange on The Simpsons 500th Episode from LeakSource Archive on Vimeo.

I was recently interviewed for a global series about Wikileaks called Did You Have Any Idea? (part one is here):

With the war in Afghanistan an unmitigated clusterfuck, it’s remarkable still how many voices in the corporate press talk about goals, achievements and possibilities (usually given by anonymous “officials”).

American journalist Michael Hastings obtains a fascinating document recently that reveals the depth of the mess:

Earlier this week, the New York Times’ Scott Shane published a bombshell piece about Lt. Colonel Daniel Davis, a 17-year Army veteran recently returned from a second tour in Afghanistan. According to the Times, the 48-year-old Davis had written an 84-page unclassified report, as well as a classified report, offering his assessment of the decade-long war. That assessment is essentially that the war has been a disaster and the military’s top brass has not leveled with the American public about just how badly it’s been going. “How many more men must die in support of a mission that is not succeeding?” Davis boldly asks in an article summarizing his views in The Armed Forces Journal.

Davis last month submitted the unclassified report –titled “Dereliction of Duty II: Senior Military Leader’s Loss of Integrity Wounds Afghan War Effort” – for an internal Army review. Such a report could then be released to the public. However, according to U.S. military officials familiar with the situation, the Pentagon is refusing to do so. Rolling Stone has now obtained a full copy of the 84-page unclassified version, which has been making the rounds within the U.S. government, including the White House. We’ve decided to publish it in full; it’s well worth reading for yourself. It is, in my estimation, one of the most significant documents published by an active-duty officer in the past ten years.

Here is the report’s damning opening lines: “Senior ranking U.S. military leaders have so distorted the truth when communicating with the U.S. Congress and American people in regards to conditions on the ground in Afghanistan that the truth has become unrecognizable. This deception has damaged America’s credibility among both our allies and enemies, severely limiting our ability to reach a political solution to the war in Afghanistan.” Davis goes on to explain that everything in the report is “open source” – i.e., unclassified – information. According to Davis, the classified report, which he legally submitted to Congress, is even more devastating. “If the public had access to these classified reports they would see the dramatic gulf between what is often said in public by our senior leaders and what is actually true behind the scenes,” Davis writes. “It would be illegal for me to discuss, use, or cite classified material in an open venue and thus I will not do so; I am no WikiLeaks guy Part II.”

Hastings speaks about this on Democracy Now! yesterday.

Mainstream support for Wikileaks is often far removed from the daily news cycle. Many journalists seem to feel uncomfortable backing Wikileaks (and Julian Assange) because of his ongoing legal issues, forgetting the key miracle behind the site; the profound challenges to the established information order and exposing the sycophancy between journalists and corporate power.

I was asked, alongside a number of other people including John Pilger, Noam Chomsky and Greens Senator Scott Ludlam, to speak about what Wikileaks means for me, as part of a global series called Did You Have Any Idea?

DID YOU HAVE ANY IDEA? – with Antony LOEWNSTEIN (Part 2) from CaTV on Vimeo.

Because we need to put a serious check on out of control executive and corporate power (via the New York Times):

This much is known: In its hunt for information about three people it believes to be associated with the whistle-blower site WikiLeaks, the Justice Department has sought to extract details about them and their communications on Twitter. What is not yet known is where else the Justice Department went looking.

On Friday, lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation asked a federal court in Virginia to reveal the names of the other Internet companies from whom the Justice Department solicited information about the three people: Jacob Appelbaum, an American citizen; Birgitta Jonsdottir of Iceland; and Rop Gonggrijp of the Netherlands.

Their case has become a testing ground for online privacy and speech, in part because the Justice Department sought the information without a search warrant in 2010. Instead, it relied on a 1994 law called the Stored Communications Act, and asked Twitter to release information about the three Twitter users. It sought, among other things, their Internet Protocol addresses, which identify and can give the location of a computer used to log onto the Internet. Twitter responded by informing the three about the government’s request – and they, in turn, went to court.

In a new interview with Rolling Stone’s Michael Hastings, Julian Assange outlines what is at stake in America’s determination to prosecute him for daring to expose its dirty little secrets:

In diplomatic cables, the investigation into WikiLeaks by the U.S. government has been called “unprecedented both in its scale and nature.” How much do you know about it? Since last September, a secret grand jury was empaneled in Alexandria, Virginia. There is no defense counsel. There are four prosecutors, according to witnesses who have been forced to testify before the grand jury. The jury itself is taken from the local area, and Alexandria has the highest density of government and military contractors anywhere in the United States. It is a place where the U.S. government chooses to conduct all national-security grand juries and trials because of that makeup of the jury pool.

The investigation has involved most of the U.S. intelligence apparatus, the FBI, the State Department, the United States Army. It has subpoenaed the records of most of my U.S. friends or acquaintances. Under what are called Patriot Act production orders, the government has also asked for their Twitter records, Google accounts and individual ISPs. The laws which they’re working toward an indictment on are the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986.

And they’re going after Manning, who is facing a life sentence, to get him to say that you’re a spy? 
To be another chess piece on the board in the attack on us. The U.S. government is trying to redefine what have been long-accepted journalistic methods. If the Pentagon is to have its way, it will be the end of national-security journalism in the United States.

How so? 
They’re trying to interpret the Espionage Act to say that any two-way communication with a source is a collaboration with a source, and is therefore a conspiracy to commit espionage where classified information is involved. The Pentagon, in fact, issued a public demand to us that we not only destroy everything we had ever published or were ever going to publish in relation to the U.S. government, but that we also stop “soliciting” information from U.S. government employees. The Espionage Act itself does not mention solicitation, but they’re trying to create a new legal precedent that includes a journalist simply asking a source to communicate information. A few years ago, for example, the CIA destroyed its waterboarding interrogation videos. In the Manning hearing, prosecutors described how we had a most-wanted list, which included those interrogation videos if they still existed.

The WikiLeaks site had a “most-wanted” list of stories you were eager to get? 
This list was not put together by us. We asked for nominations from human rights activists and journalists from around the world of the information they most wanted, and we put that on a list. The prosecution in the Manning hearing has been attempting to use that list as evidence of our solicitation of information that is likely to be classified, and therefore our complicity in espionage, if we received such information.

From a journalist’s perspective, a list like that would be the equivalent of a normal editorial meeting where you list the crown jewels of stories you’d love to get. 
Exactly.

So if you’re going to jail, then Bob Woodward’s going to jail. 
Individuals like Sy Hersh and Dana Priest and Bob Woodward constantly say to their sources, “Hey, what about this, have you heard anything about it? I heard that there’s been an airstrike in Afghanistan that’s killed a bunch of civilians – do you have any more details, and can you prove them with paper?” And all those would be defined as conspiracy to commit espionage under the Pentagon’s interpretation.

Julian Assange tells The Power Index that Canberra needs to grow a back-bone (fat chance):

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange remains frustrated by the lack of assistance from the Australian federal government over his prolonged overseas legal plight, three weeks ahead of his appeal against extradition in the UK Supreme Court.

In an exclusive interview with The Power Index, the platinum-haired whistleblower revealed Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd’s office had been in contact with his lawyers in the past month but with “no results”.

When asked if he had been receiving adequate assistance from the federal government over his potential extradition from Britain to Sweden, Assange replied: “Of course not”.

“Almost no Australian who is involved in trouble overseas receives the assistance they should,” he said. “Australia is famous for its lack of assistance to its people who enter into difficulty overseas.”

A clearly-discouraged Assange said Prime Minister Julia Gillard, former Attorney-General Robert McClelland and other members of the ALP had “risen above their population and developed network connections with elites in other countries”.

“That is their game … and in doing so they develop a base outside their own country and are no longer political accountable to the people of their country,” he told The Power Index.

“[They] have been working their international connections, yes at my expense, but also at the expense of the Australian people.”

Assange is currently awaiting a hearing in the Supreme Court to be held early in February, where a panel of seven judges will consider his appeal against extradition on accusations of rape and sexual assault of two women.

If Assange loses the appeal he could face extradition within weeks. There is another option of appeal which could see him take the case to the European Court of Human Rights.

The 40-year-old Australian said the prime minister, who has denounced the actions of WikiLeaks as “illegal” in the past, had not been in contact recently.

A spokesperson for foreign minister Kevin Rudd told The Power Index that consular officers have been in touch with Assange’s lawyers and were “closely monitoring” his case.

“The Australian government cannot interfere in the judicial processes of other governments but Australia’s ambassador to Stockholm has sought and obtained assurances from Swedish authorities that Mr Assange’s case will proceed in accordance with due process,” the spokesperson said.

“Such assurances have also been sought and obtained from the relevant UK authorities.”

Greens Senator Scott Ludlam said he believed the government had not done enough to assist Assange, who has been under house arrest for more than a year.

“I think it would be much better for the Australian government to pull out all the stops and that means not just consular assistance, it means diplomatic activity and it means political statements,” he told The Power Index.

“We need to hear the prime minister and the attorney-general quite clearly advocating to the US that they would not support onward extradition of an Australian journalist to face trumped up charges in the United States.”

Is there a better description of what all reporters should be doing as explained here by American journalist Michael Hastings in 2010?

Look, I went into journalism to do journalism, not advertising. My views are critical but that shouldn’t be mistaken for hostile – I’m just not a stenographer. There is a body of work that shows how I view these issues but that was hard-earned through experience, not something I learned going to a cocktail party on fucking K Street. That’s what reporters are supposed to do, report the story.

Salon’s Glenn Greenwald writes about the new Hastings book, The Operators, and explains why so many corporate hacks don’t like him or the message:

…There is a perverse, inverse relationship between the amount of power someone wields in Washington and the willingness of most establishment journalists to engage in reporting that exposes or embarrasses them. These journalists love to swarm with contempt on the marginalized and powerless in their world (people and groups like Julian Assange, Occupy Wall Street, Christine O’Donnell, Ron Paul, Dennis Kucinich, etc.), but when it comes to those who exercise real power and are members in good standing of the Washington establishment — war Generals, senior White House officials, corporate officials and lobbyists — they tread with extreme caution when they do anything other than obediently convey messages.

Welcome to the future (via Daily Kos):

Following this week’s hearing against Bradley Manning in the US, something quite profound has occurred, largely ignored by the mainstream media. It’s a point made below by Kevin Gosztola, who writes “The Dissenter” blog at Firedoglake, on Democracy Now! and should resonate with anybody who cares about journalism that challenges the fundamentals of the state:

I would say that the final thing that really struck me about this hearing is how they presented the evidence—the government—and actually linked Bradley Manning to aiding al-Qaeda. I mean, that essentially is criminalizing national security journalism, if you really work this thing out, because what they’re saying is anybody who puts this information on the internet—if you do a report on a drone strike, if you do a report on anything related to military operations, and then al-Qaeda reads it, then you could be accused of aiding the enemy.