How to Successfully Live in a Police State

Here is yet another example of the West's descent into a police state under the "War on Criminality" (or was that a "War on Terrorism"?) initiated by George Bush but vigorously prosecuted under Barack Obama. From a post by Cory Doctorow on BoingBoing:

Scottish mall-cop: it's illegal to take pictures in the mall; Scottish cop: photographers can have their devices confiscated under terrorism laws

by Cory Doctorow

A security guard in Braehead shopping centre near Glasgow questioned a man who was taking pictures of his young daughter looking cute while eating an ice-cream. The guard told him that photography in the mall was "illegal" and demanded that he delete any photos he'd taken while there. When the man told him he'd already posted the photos to Facebook, the guard summoned a policeman, who said that he could confiscate the phone under the UK's terrorism laws. The policeman took his details and "he was eventually allowed to leave."

The official statements from the mall and the police are maddeningly bureaucratic and every bit as stupid as the original incident: "a full review of the circumstances surrounding the incident and the allegations made is under way" say the police; "Our priority is always to maintain a safe and enjoyable environment for all of our shoppers and retailers," says the mall.

Just a reminder: pretty much everything that's legal on the public street is legal in a private store. A store or mall can have a policy saying "You can't wear purple here" or "You must enter the premises backwards" or "No photography allowed," but those are policies, not laws. A store's representatives can ask you to leave for violating their policies, but that's pretty much it (of course, if you refuse to leave, that's a different matter).

The "War on Terrorism" is like America's "War on Drugs". It has no end. There will always be drugs. There will always be terrorists. To start a war that has no end is very George Orwellian and reminds us that governments are not our friends. They are power mad crazies who will use any excuse to aggrandize power to themselves and ever more tightly circumscribe out lives to turn us into mindless robots "in service to the nation". Nuts!

Al Qaeda was a "police action". If Clinton had had the guts to do the right thing in the late 1990s Bin Laden would have been dead and there would have been no 9/11. If Bush had had the guts to do the right thing and put American boots on the ground in Afghanistan in 2001 they could have killed Bin Laden in the mountains of Tora Bora. One good thing I can say: Obama has the guts to use special ops to get the job done. He has taken out a fair amount of Al Qaeda leadership. Good for him. But Obama is no friend of liberty. He has clamped down on whistle-blowers. He has extended the hopeless "war" in Afghanistan. He has kept the torturers going in Guantanamo. He only meekly supported the Arab Spring.

Update... and here is more by Cory Doctorow on BoingBoing about the German government ignoring its own laws to spy on its citizens and insert malware that makes their computers vulnerable to attack by anybody.

Chaos Computer Club cracks Germany's illegal government malware, a trojan that spies on your PC and lets anyone off the street hijack it

By Cory Doctorow at 10:11 pm Monday, Oct 10

Germany's Chaos Computer Club published the sourcecode for a piece of malware used by the German government to spy on citizens. The software was discovered in the wild and reverse engineered. It can be used to spy on or control remote PCs. Because of flaws in the software, anyone who was infected with this by German police was vulnerable to spying by "anyone on the street." The German supreme court banned the use of trojans to spy on German citizens in 2008.

The analysis also revealed serious security holes that the trojan is tearing into infected systems. The screenshots and audio files it sends out are encrypted in an incompetent way, the commands from the control software to the trojan are even completely unencrypted. Neither the commands to the trojan nor its replies are authenticated or have their integrity protected. Not only can unauthorized third parties assume control of the infected system, but even attackers of mediocre skill level can connect to the authorities, claim to be a specific instance of the trojan, and upload fake data. It is even conceivable that the law enforcement agencies's IT infrastructure could be attacked through this channel. The CCC has not yet performed a penetration test on the server side of the trojan infrastructure.

"We were surprised and shocked by the lack of even elementary security in the code. Any attacker could assume control of a computer infiltrated by the German law enforcement authorities", commented a speaker of the CCC. "The security level this trojan leaves the infected systems in is comparable to it setting all passwords to '1234'".

To avoid revealing the location of the command and control server, all data is redirected through a rented dedicated server in a data center in the USA. The control of this malware is only partially within the borders of its jurisdiction. The instrument could therefore violate the fundamental principle of national sovereignty. Considering the incompetent encryption and the missing digital signatures on the command channel, this poses an unacceptable and incalculable risk. It also poses the question how a citizen is supposed to get their right of legal redress in the case the wiretapping data get lost outside Germany, or the command channel is misused.

Electronic Surveillance Scandal Hits Germany [spiegel.de]

Go read the original post to get the embedded links.

I love anything by Cory Doctorow. He is a smart dude and he is concerned about issues that are close to my heart: intellectual property rights, human rights, technology. I confess I've only read a couple of his fiction pieces. I know that's his "day job". But I love the hobbyist Doctorow more than the career Doctorow.

The Truth about Al Qaeda and the Arab Spring

Juan Cole is the most insightful observers of the Middle East. Here is a bit from a post by him on his blog Informed Comment:

Al-Qaeda was grossly over-estimated in the wake of the horrific September 11 attacks. It was a relatively small terrorist group that spent less than half a million dollars on the operation. It should have been dealt with as a police matter, not as the enemy in a trillion-dollar “war” conducted by the Pentagon. It did, however, have a clever over-all strategy and political ideology. It adopted a form of pan-Islamism, a dream of making Islam a basis for a national idea, so that an Islamic superpower could be created, in which Egypt and Saudi Arabia would be provinces. This superpower would be a dictatorship, and would come into being through the actions of pan-Islamic guerrillas in each country who would violently overthrow the national government. The point of attacking the United States was only that it was seen to stand behind the governments of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and so forth, making them impossible to overthrow.

All the major assumptions of Bin Laden and his associates have fallen by the wayside in the Arab world. First, it has been shown that dictators such as Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and Zine El Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia can be overthrown by peaceful crowd action, emulating Gandhi and Martin Luther King. The cry in Tahrir Square last winter in downtown Cairo was “Silmiya, Silmiya!” — Peacefully, peacefully.

...

Just as the massive crowds of young demonstrators constrained regime members such as Rashid Ammar (chief of staff in Tunisia), Air Marshall Hussein Tantawi of Egypt, and technocrat Mustafa Abdel Jalil of Libya to defect to the reformers, so the same masses could convince President Barack Obama at length to demand the departure of Mubarak and of Qaddafi. Obviously, Western support can only be hoped for in the case of a likely transition to democratic regimes with moderate policies, such that domestic reform through moderation synchronizes with gaining foreign acquiescence in it.

Bin Laden had imbibed through Egyptian radical theorist Sayyid Qutb the Leninist notion that change requires vanguard fighters (tala’i`). But the masses showed that they do not need seedy vanguards to represent and potentially to hijack their movements. They are perfectly capable of asserting their own agency.

...

Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush, however, saw the attacks as “an opportunity.” They were an opportunity to assert American dominance of the oil fields of the Middle East, and therefore, they reasoned, of the energy future of the entire world, ensuring the predominance of the American superpower throughout the twenty-first century. They thus followed a successful overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan with a disastrous military occupation of that country. They coddled the military dictatorship of Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan. They threw international law into the trash compactor and invaded and occupied Iraq, kicking off a massive insurgency and then a civil war, and leaving the country a political basket case. They left hundreds of thousands dead and some 4 million displaced. In northern Pakistan and then in Yemen and elsewhere, a covert program of drone strikes was carried out lawlessly and with no oversight; because it is done by the CIA and is classified, our elected officials cannot even confirm that it exists, much less conduct a public debate as to its legality, constitutional validity, or wisdom.

...

Some critics trace the debt and budget crisis to the Bush wars, but in a $14.5 trillion a year economy, the $1 trillion spent on the wars over a decade was not decisive. The real cost of the wars of aggression was a decline in the standing of the US abroad, a gutting of the UN Charter and international legal norms, and a de facto repeal civil liberties at home. The American people, however, are resilient and strong. The American system of government is flexible. If we are supine and abject, our children will not be. Already, federal government intrusion into our lives is being questioned on the right and the left alike. With hard work and a bit of luck, perhaps over the course of a generation, we can get our Bill of Rights back. And if government officials drag their feet too much in returning our inalienable rights to us, the Egyptian and Tunisian youth have already shown the way forward.

Sadly, when Obama took office he had a mandate to reject the Bush policies. He had campaigned against them. But he quietly adopted them as his own. He sponsored his own "surge" in Afghanistan. He increased the drone attacks. He kept the secret prisons and Guantanamo but did tone down the official "torture policy" of the US.

I think the post by Juan Cole should be taken to heart. It is an upbeat message for Americans. It is a clarion call to take back their country by rejecting the Republicans and Obama.

How the UK Learned from its US Master

The world is well aware of the crimes of George Bush with his secret prisons and torture regime. But with the fall of Gaddafi, the UK is now getting its chance to shuck and jive in the public limelight and offer up excuses and the necessary exculpations for its behaviour. From an article in the UK's Guardian newspaper:

Sami al-Saadi is considering whether to sue the British government after he and his family were 'rendered' in an operation between MI6 and Gaddafi's intelligence services

A Libyan Islamist has told how he and his family were imprisoned after being "rendered" in an operation MI6 hatched in co-operation with Muammar Gaddafi's intelligence services. The rendition occurred shortly before Tony Blair paid his first visit to the dictator.

Sami al-Saadi, his wife and four children, the youngest a girl aged six, were flown from Hong Kong to Tripoli, where they were taken straight to prison. Saadi was interrogated under torture while his family were held in a nearby cell.

"They handcuffed me and my wife on the plane, my kids and wife were crying all the way," he told the Guardian. "It was a very bad situation. My wife and children were held for two months, and psychologically punished. The Libyans told me that the British were very happy."

Saadi says he is now considering whether to sue the British government, making him the second Libyan rendition victim to threaten legal proceedings in less than a week.

The evidence that the family were victims of a British-led rendition operation is contained in a secret CIA document found in the abandoned office of Moussa Koussa, Gaddafi's former intelligence chief, in Tripoli last week.

In London, meanwhile, an official inquiry into Britain's role in torture and rendition since 9/11 says the government has provided information about the UK's role in the affair, and Whitehall sources defended intelligence agencies' actions by saying they were following "ministerially authorised government policy".

It is the first time evidence has emerged that the British intelligence agencies ran their own rendition operation, as opposed to co-operating with those that were mounted by the CIA.

Go read the whole article.

Democracy only works if government is transparent. When governments have secret armies, especially secret torture chambers, carrying out crimes on "behalf of the people" for which the people do not agree and are horrified to discover, then you don't have a legitimate government. Apparently this simple truth hasn't yet registered on the US or UK governments. You can't run secret "wars" and commit "secret crimes" on behalf of a democratic people if you don't tell them what you are up to and get their permission.

Lifestyles of the Rich and Infamous

For me the 1980s were a nightmare. America fell in love with the TV show Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. I found it wretched to think that people "adored" the rich because of their wealth. But the era from 1980 to now has been marked by this deference to the rich and powerful

People need to wake up from their illusions. This story from CNN should help. Here is yet another story of "lifestyles of the rich and famous" where the curtain is peeled back and you can see the corruption and meanness and the evil that lurks behind the glitter:

As we were about to leave, one of the staff told us there was a nanny who worked for Hannibal Gadhafi who might speak to us. He said she'd been burnt by Hannibal's wife, Aline.

I thought he meant perhaps a cigarette stubbed out on her arm. Nothing prepared me for the moment I walked into the room to see Shweyga Mullah.

At first I thought she was wearing a hat and something over her face. Then the awful realization dawned that her entire scalp and face were covered in red wounds and scabs, a mosaic of injuries that rendered her face into a grotesque patchwork.

Even though the burns were inflicted three months ago, she was clearly still in considerable pain. But she told us her story calmly.

She'd been the nanny to Hannibal's little son and daughter.

The 30-year-old came to Libya from her native Ethiopia a year ago. At first things seemed OK, but then six months into her employment she said she was burned by Aline.

Three months later the same thing happened again, this time much more seriously.

In soft tones, she explained how Aline lost her temper when her daughter wouldn't stop crying and Mullah refused to beat the child.

"She took me to a bathroom. She tied my hands behind my back, and tied my feet. She taped my mouth, and she started pouring the boiling water on my head like this," she said, imitating the vessel of scalding hot water being poured over her head.

She peeled back the garment draped carefully over her body. Her chest, torso and legs are all mottled with scars -- some old, some still red, raw and weeping. As she spoke, clear liquid oozed from one nasty open wound on her head.

After one attack, "There were maggots coming out of my head, because she had hidden me, and no one had seen me," Mullah said.

Eventually, a guard found her and took her to a hospital, where she received some treatment.

But when Aline Gadhafi found out about the kind actions of her co-worker, he was threatened with imprisonment, if he dared to help her again.

"When she did all this to me, for three days, she wouldn't let me sleep," Mullah said. "I stood outside in the cold, with no food. She would say to staff, 'If anyone gives her food, I'll do the same to you.' I had no water -- nothing."

Her colleague, a man from Bangladesh who didn't want to give his name, says he was also regularly beaten and slashed with knives. He corroborated Mullah's account and says the family's dogs were treated considerably better than the staff.

Mullah was forced to watch as the dogs ate and she was left to go hungry, he said.

It seems to sum up how the workers at the beachside complex were viewed by the Gadhafi family.

This is definitely beyond the Queen of Mean, Leona Helmsley, who was a darling of Robin Leach and his unctuous program Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.

The problem with a society where a few are fabulously weathy and many are dirt poor is that the rich become unhinged. They develop delusions of grandeur and think they deserve what they have and turn ugly and mean toward those who are not so "blessed" with the goodies of life. This is a sickness.

Sadly, America has fallen to this illness and is still running a fever. I hoped that with the election of Barack Obama the fever would break, but it hasn't. I know it must and will some day. I wish it were sooner rather than later. But for now, the disease is still running wild in the soul of America.

Dowd Dresses Down Dick Cheney

Maureen Dowd is at her witty best in taking down Dick Cheney in an op-ed in the NY Times. Here are some choice bits:

WHY is it not a surprise to learn that Dick Cheney’s ancestor, Samuel Fletcher Cheney, was a Civil War soldier who marched with Sherman to the sea?

Scorched earth runs in the family.

Having lost the power to heedlessly bomb the world, Cheney has turned his attention to heedlessly bombing old colleagues.

Vice’s new memoir, “In My Time,” veers unpleasantly between spin, insisting he was always right, and score-settling, insisting that anyone who opposed him was wrong.

His knife-in-her-teeth daughter, Elizabeth Cheney, helped write the book. The second most famous Liz & Dick combo do such an excellent job of cherry-picking the facts, it makes the cherry-picking on the Iraq war intelligence seem picayune.

...

He acts like he is America. But America didn’t like Dick Cheney.

It’s easier for someone who believes that he is America incarnate to permit himself to do things that hurt America — like torture, domestic spying, pushing America into endless wars, and flouting the Geneva Conventions.

Mostly, Cheney grumbles about having his power checked. It’s bad enough when the president does it, much less Congress and the courts.

A person who is always for the use of military force is as doctrinaire and irrelevant as a person who is always opposed to the use of military force.

Cheney shows contempt for Tenet, Colin Powell and Rice, whom he disparages in a sexist way for crying, and condescension for W. when he won’t be guided to the path of most destruction.

He’s churlish about President Obama, who took the hunt for Osama bin Laden off the back burner and actually did what W. promised to do with his little bullhorn — catch the real villain of 9/11.

“Tracking him down was certainly one of our top priorities,” Cheney writes. “I was gratified that after years of diligent and dedicated work, our nation’s intelligence community and our special operations forces were able on May 1, 2011, to find and kill bin Laden.”

Tacky.

I fervently hope that Dick Cheney takes a trip to Europe and discovers the pleasures of the ICC (International Criminal Court). I really want to see Cheney and Henry Kissinger as cellmates at the ICC.

The Fumbling Incompetence of Obama

Here is an excellent interview by Keith Olbermann with Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to United States Secretary of State Colin Powell. The video starts with a gaff by Obama's new Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta, who simply gets wrong the "reason" for invading Iraq.

At 1:50 the video mentions the outrageously brutal treatment of Bradley Manning. Manning comes up in the discussion with Wilkerson at 4:15 in the video. Wilkerson's position: "the treatment of Bradley Manning is unconscionable".

At 2:05 the video begins the interview with Wilkerson:



All of this shows that Obama is a continuous of Bush policies despite running an anti-war campaign with a promise to end the war in Iraq, close down Guantanamo, and generally stop the excesses of Bush's "war on terrorism". Sadly, Obama has ratcheted the war up, not down.

Obama sold himself to the electorate as anti-war and as a more moral and honourable person than Bush, but he has shown himself to be as indifferent to rights or the limits of the law as Bush in his most extreme positions. The press doesn't explore this, but this is incredible. See 6:00 into the video where Wilkerson is upset that the Justice Department refuses to investigate the 2008 financial collapse and the on-going torture treatment of detainees.

Torture Nation

Here is a bit from an interesting article by Glenn Greenwald in Salon magazine:

In response to the growing controversy over the inhumane detention conditions of Bradley Manning, the U.N.'s top official on torture, Juan Mendez, announced last December that his office would formally investigate whether those conditions amounted to torture. Since then, the Obama administration has steadfastly rejected Mendez's repeated requests to interview Manning in private: something even Bush officials allowed for "high-level" Guantanamo detainees accused of being top Al Qaeda operatives (see p. 3). Now, Mendez is publicly accusing the Obama administration of violating U.N. rules by refusing him private access to Manning:

The United Nations' torture investigator on Tuesday accused the United States of violating U.N. rules by refusing him unfettered access to the Army private accused of passing classified documents to WikiLeaks.

Juan Mendez, the U.N.'s special rapporteur for torture, said he can't do his job unless he has unmonitored access to detainees. He said the U.S. military's insistence on monitoring conversations with Bradley Manning "violates long-standing rules" the U.N. follows for visits to inmates. . .

Mendez said the U.S. government assured him Manning is better treated now than he was in Quantico, but the government must allow the U.N. investigator to check that for himself.

Mendez said he needs to assess whether the conditions Manning experienced amounted to "torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment" while at Quantico.

"For that, it is imperative that I talk to Mr. Manning under conditions where I can be assured that he is being absolutely candid," Mendez said.

During the Bush years, the pronouncements of the U.N.'s rapporteur for torture were widely hailed in progressive circles, but caring about what the U.N. thinks -- like concerns over detainee abuse -- is so very 2006. After all, look over there: it's Michele Bachmann [speaking of things that are very 2006, Human Rights Watch (remember them?) has issued a report detailing that the Obama administration is in flagrant breach of its treaty obligations (remember those?) by continuing to shield Bush torture crimes from all forms of accountability]. As for the Obama administration's strange refusal to allow a private U.N. interview with Manning -- something even Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was allowed by the Bush Pentagon in 2006 with the ICRC -- hasn't the Government taught us that you have nothing to hide if you've done nothing wrong?

I remember 50 years ago when Americans could proudly say they didn't torture. Sure I wasn't aware of the torture during the suppression of the Phillipine independence movement, and the massacres and torture in Vietnam was still in the future. But even the Vietnam years were not the blatant torture regime the US has become since Bush and now Obama have been leading the military.

The treatment of "innocent until proven guilty" Bradley Manning is a national disgrace.

How to Strangle Democracy in Its Cradle

Earlier this year it was exhilerating to watch the Egyptian people struggle for their rights and for a meaningful democracy. But those in power are like illusionists. Now you see it, now you don't. Here's a video to give you an idea of where "democracy" is now headed under the military council:



More details from this CNN report.

Sadly, this backsliding is all too familiar. This is why the story of civilization is a long litany of painful struggle, moments of glory, then a falling back into the black pit of corruption and misrule. Those who want to seize power to suck the blood out of the citizenry are many. The citizens can rarely put up the superhuman effort such as was seen in Egypt to try and achieve democracy. That is why history is such a long, ugly, disheartening story of struggle and strangulation. It is hard, really hard, to get out of the grasp of the greedy powerful who have their hands at your throat almost always.

Bush Team Takes a Victory Lap on the "Success" of Torture

It is really sickening to see all the major figures in the Bush administration come crawling out of the woodwork to "take credit" for the killing of Osama bin Laden by the military under Obama's direction. This from the team whose titular head, Bush, claimed that he no longer had any interest in OBL.

But this scurrilous crew now claim that "enhanced interrogation" (aka TORTURE) was the key that allowed the victory of getting OBL. Funny. Barry Ritholz has a very long list of real experts who publicly state that torture is absolutely useless in getting meaningful material in an interrogation:

Virtually all of the top interrogation experts – both conservatives and liberals (except for those trying to escape war crimes prosecution) – say that torture doesn’t work:

• Army Field Manual 34-52 Chapter 1 says:

“Experience indicates that the use of force is not necessary to gain the cooperation of sources for interrogation. Therefore, the use of force is a poor technique, as it yields unreliable results, may damage subsequent collection efforts, and can induce the source to say whatever he thinks the interrogator wants to hear.”

• The C.I.A.’s 1963 interrogation manual stated:

Intense pain is quite likely to produce false confessions, concocted as a means of escaping from distress. A time-consuming delay results, while investigation is conducted and the admissions are proven untrue. During this respite the interrogatee can pull himself together. He may even use the time to think up new, more complex ‘admissions’ that take still longer to disprove.

• According to the Washington Post, the CIA’s top spy – Michael Sulick, head of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service – said that the spy agency has seen no fall-off in intelligence since waterboarding was banned by the Obama administration. “I don’t think we’ve suffered at all from an intelligence standpoint.”

• The CIA’s own Inspector General wrote that waterboarding was not “efficacious” in producing information.

• A 30-year veteran of CIA’s operations directorate who rose to the most senior managerial ranks (Milton Bearden) says (as quoted by senior CIA agent and Presidential briefer Ray McGovern):

It is irresponsible for any administration not to tell a credible story that would convince critics at home and abroad that this torture has served some useful purpose.

This is not just because the old hands overwhelmingly believe that torture doesn’t work — it doesn’t — but also because they know that torture creates more terrorists and fosters more acts of terror than it could possibly neutralize.

The above is just a very small snippet of the public statements. Go read the original post by Ritholtz to see just how universal the agreement among real experts is that torture is of no benefit.

Talk about zombies. The Bush "team" with its bad ideas, bad leadership, economic failures, military failures, etc. just can't be killed. Here they are back in force trying to pull the same stunt and convince people that OBL was "gotten by Bush" and not by that socialist Kenyan pretender Obama. Incredible. These people not only torture, they are torturing me by refusing to get off the stage of history after their time is up. They continue to want to distort truth and bend the world to their warped views.

A Petty and Vindictive Government

If you oppose US policy, you will be punished. Even if you have broken no law, you will be punished. For authorities do not like "citizens" who do not know their place: subservient to the instruments of state, the bureaucrats.

Presumably in a democracies, everybody is king of their own castle replete with rights and safeguarded from unauthorized search and seizure, from harassment by the state. But in practice, a riled up government will put the "citizen" in his place, i.e. with his neck under the boot of authority and power.

Here is a relevant example from the Boston Globe:

David House, 24, a former MIT researcher from Cambridge, alleges in the suit filed in US District Court in Boston that federal agents seized his laptop, USB storage device, video camera, and cellphone when he arrived at the airport on Nov. 3 after a vacation in Mexico, then kept him from catching a connecting flight to Boston while they interrogated him about his association with Private First Class Bradley Manning.

The suit, filed on House's behalf by the American Civil Liberties Union, says House "was asked no questions relating to border control, customs, trade, immigration, or terrorism,'' yet agents kept his laptop, USB device, and camera for 49 days while they reviewed personal and private information as part of an investigation into his work for the Bradley Manning Support Network. The electronics were returned to him Dec. 22, a day after the ACLU faxed a letter to government officials demanding their immediate return.

"If the government had legitimate reason for wanting to seize my laptop ... they could obtain a warrant,'' House said during a telephone interview. "Instead they wait for me to cross the border so they can claim this nebulous authority.''

He accused the government of launching a "fishing expedition'' in an effort to find out who was supporting Manning and said it has had a chilling impact on his group's legal efforts to raise money for Manning because supporters fear they will also be targeted by the government. Manning, a former Army intelligence analyst, has been imprisoned by the military for a year on charges of leaking classified information about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that were posted on WilkiLeaks.

I get a chuckle out of right wingers who get in a lather about "death panels" and the smothering red tape of government. In reality those are figments of the imagination. The real oppression of the modern state is reserved for suppressing those who hold dissenting views whether right or left. Government expects obedience and views itself a authorized to take "whatever measures needed" to ensure the powers of the state. That is not the spirit of the American Constitution. It took the view that the power of the state needed to be limited to prevent tyranny because the context of the founding fathers was in a state in which authority ran roughshod over traditional liberties. So they worked hard to set up a government carefully circumscribed in its powers. But two centuries is plenty of time to forget the intentions of the Constitutional fathers.

Bradley Manning is a textbook case of overweening governmental power brought down on an individual. He is presumably "innocent before proven guilty" but his prison conditions have been essentially torture. This isn't detention for the purposes of assurance of an appearance in court. This is the state punishing somebody that it has already decided is guilty. Worse, it is a state using torture while claiming that its use of brutal treatment is not torture. Barack Obama, the same guy who decided that the niceties of arresting Bin Laden could be omitted by going straight to directed assassination is the same guy presiding over torture of a legally innocent man whose trial about leaking state secrets has not yet been held.

I thought the government of Richard Nixon was harsh and criminal. But Nixon never shot is "political enemies" and he certainly didn't seize and torture Daniel Elsberg over the release of the secret Pentagon Papers. The last 40 years have revealed a collapse of the rule of law and respect for constitutional rights in the US.

The US is in good company. The Washington Post reports that Belarus has arrested seven of the candidates for the presidency in the 2010 election:

A Belarusian presidential candidate was sentenced to five years in prison Saturday following a trial that he denounced as political punishment for challenging the nation’s authoritarian ruler.

...

Sannikov, a 57-year-old former deputy foreign minister, said that he was tortured by the secret police and that its chief personally threatened harsh reprisals against his wife and their 4-year-old son.

Sannikov’s wife, Irina Khalip, who is an independent journalist, is facing a trial, and authorities threatened earlier this year to put their son in an orphanage.

Another four opposition activists were also given prison terms of 3 and 3 1/2 years in the same trial.

Sannikov’s trial was the latest move in an ongoing crackdown on dissent unleashed by the government of President Alexander Lukashenko, who was declared the winner of the December’s election with nearly 80 percent of the vote. International observers strongly criticized the election.

...

Dubbed “Europe’s last dictator” by the West, Lukashenko has run Belarus with an iron fist for nearly 17 years, retaining Soviet-style controls over the economy and cracking down on opposition and independent media. However, his authority has been shaken recently by a worsening financial crisis and a subway bombing.

This is the path that the US is on. One where "citizens" must never question the power of the state.

Torture as American Policy

Here is an excellent article on how torture impeded the search for Osama bin Laden and how those responsible for the American "torture policy" are working hard to make it look like torture did some good to protect themselves from prosecution.

This is an essay by Barry Ritholtz in his blog The Big Picture:

Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and John Yoo were all instrumental in implementing the U.S. torture program.

So it is no surprise that they are now pretending that torture helped get Bin Laden. See this, this and this.

They’re trying to avoid war crimes prosecution.

As I noted in 2009:

Cheney was the main architect of the torture policy (according to the number 2 man at the State Department and others).

So of course he would defend torture – he’s trying to keep his behind out of the defense chair at a war crimes tribunal.

Cheney defending torture is exactly like Charles Manson appearing on all of the news shows defending murder as a public policy.

Matthew Alexander – a former top Air Force interrogator who led the team that tracked down Abu Musab al-Zarqawi – agrees:

“These guys are trying to save their reputations, for one thing,” Alexander said. “They have, from the beginning, been trying to prevent an investigation into war crimes.”

As does Colonel Wilkerson, the former number two man at the State Department:

Indeed, as Dan Froomkin notes in a little-noticed essay, torture actually delayed by years more effective intelligence-gathering methods which would have resulted in finding Bin Laden:

Defenders of the Bush administration’s interrogation policies have claimed vindication from reports that bin Laden was tracked down in small part due to information received from brutalized detainees some six to eight years ago.

But that sequence of events — even if true — doesn’t demonstrate the effectiveness of torture, these experts say. Rather, it indicates bin Laden could have been caught much earlier had those detainees been interrogated properly.

“I think that without a doubt, torture and enhanced interrogation techniques slowed down the hunt for bin Laden,” said an Air Force interrogator who goes by the pseudonym Matthew Alexander and located Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, in 2006.

It now appears likely that several detainees had information about a key al Qaeda courier — information that might have led authorities directly to bin Laden years ago. But subjected to physical and psychological brutality, “they gave us the bare minimum amount of information they could get away with to get the pain to stop, or to mislead us,” Alexander told The Huffington Post.

“We know that they didn’t give us everything, because they didn’t provide the real name, or the location, or somebody else who would know that information,” he said.

In a 2006 study by the National Defense Intelligence College, trained interrogators found that traditional, rapport-based interviewing approaches are extremely effective with even the most hardened detainees, whereas coercion consistently builds resistance and resentment.

“Had we handled some of these sources from the beginning, I would like to think that there’s a good chance that we would have gotten this information or other information,” said Steven Kleinman, a longtime military intelligence officer who has extensively researched, practiced and taught interrogation techniques.

“By making a detainee less likely to provide information, and making the information he does provide harder to evaluate, they hindered what we needed to accomplish,” said Glenn L. Carle, a retired CIA officer who oversaw the interrogation of a high-level detainee in 2002.

***

For Alexander, Kleinman and others, the key takeaway is not just that the torture didn’t work, but that it was actually counterproductive.

“The question is: What else did KSM have?” Alexander asked. And he’s pretty sure he knows the answer: KSM knew the courier’s real name, “or he knew who else knew his real name, or he knew how to find him — and he didn’t give any of that information,” Alexander said.

Alexander’s book, “Kill or Capture,” chronicles how the non-coercive interrogation of a dedicated al Qaeda member led to Zarqawi’s capture.

“I’m 100 percent confident that a good interrogator would have gotten additional leads” from KSM, Alexander said.

***

This new scenario hardly supports a defense of torture on the grounds that it’s appropriate in “ticking time bomb” scenarios, Alexander said. “Show me an interrogator who says that eight years is a good result.”

Indeed, Froomkin points out that the type of torture used is a special type focused on obtaining false confessions:

Experts agree that torture is particularly good at one thing: eliciting false confessions.

Bush-era interrogation techniques, were modeled after methods used by Chinese Communists to extract confessions from captured U.S. servicemen that they could then use for propaganda during the Korean War.

And Froomkin notes that torture hurts national security:

“They don’t want to talk about the long term consequences that cost the lives of Americans,” Alexander added. The way the U.S. treated its prisoners “was al-Qaeda’s number-one recruiting tool and brought in thousands of foreign fighters who killed American soldiers,” Alexander said. “And who want to live with that on their conscience?”

For background, see this.

Note: Cheney and Rumsfeld were never very interested in capturing Bin Laden. Their focus was elsewhere. So their revisionist statements about the usefulness of torture for intelligence purposes must be taken with a grain of salt. In reality, their torture program was crafted to justify the Iraq war, not to catch Bin Laden (and see this.)

There is a great deal of embedded links in the above article. Go to the original article to access the links.

The Film "Rendition"

Here is the trailer for the film Rendition.

This is about the insane US policy of rendition started by Bush that grabbed some terrorist, maybe, but certainly grabbed a lot of innocent men and shipped them off to secret CIA prisons around the world for torture and passed them on to favoured Middle East regimes for more intensive torture.

From a 2007 article by the Voice of America:

Daniel Benjamin, of The Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. says rendition harms U.S. credibility.

"The issues of rendition and torture have become intertwined in the public imagination in our nation and in the minds of our friends abroad," he said. "Abuses that have been committed in the name of the Global War on Terror trouble the conscience of those who care about America's reputation and those who have been proud of our nation's role as a champion of the rule of law."

Frederick Hitz of the Center for National Security Law at the University of Virginia, says rendition should be illegal.

"I view it much as I do the executive order prohibition on political assassination," he said. "We should not be in the business of coercive torturous interrogations, directly or indirectly."

Another witness, David Cole of Georgetown University's Law Center suggested that Congress should call for an independent investigation of the Bush administration's rendition policy.

This article mentions a real human being, the Canadian Maher Arar, who was snatched off a plane transiting through the US between Tunisia and Canada. After many years Maher Arar got public hearings in Canada to expose the RCMP and CSIS involvement in his mistreatment, he got an official apology from the government, and he got an cash settlement from the government. What he didn't get back was the lost years, the pain, and memories of the cruelties he underwent "by mistake".

Of course, the US refuses to this very day, to take responsibility for the wrongs it did. It refuses to acknowledge the facts. It refuses to pay any restitution. It refuses to give back the good name of these people it has so irreparably harmed. It refuses to give justice to its victims... just another cruel torture added to those already meted out by the government of the people of the United States.

The cruel joke of the heinous US policy is that an innocent person like Maher Arar continues to be harrassed and mistreated by the us as the Voice of America article makes clear:

Testifying by video link from Canada, because he remains barred from the United States, Arar condemned what he calls the immoral practice of rendition.

"Let me be clear, I am not a terrorist, I am not a member of al-Qaida or any other terrorist group," he said. "I am a father, a husband, and an engineer. I am also a victim of the immoral practice of rendition."

U.S. lawmakers offered Arar apologies and regrets, and voiced disappointment that the U.S. government has not done the same.

But "regrets" given informally are not justice. There has been no justice for Maher Arar or any of the other innocent victims of this cruel, inhumane, unjust, vicious, an illegal US policy started under Bush (and supposedly ended under Obama, but who knows, it may still continue but be more "efficiently" executed in the sense that any innocents are never seen or heard from again so any "mistakes" are never known).

The film Rendition gives the "Hollywood view" of this crime. It ends with the "good American official" who realizes that this one case was wrong and who rights end so that the poor guy can get home to his loving wife and kids. In the real world, some of these injustices end in judicial murder. Nobody gets to go home. The wife and kids are left in limbo never even knowing that a judicial crime was committed against them. In other cases, the unfortunate innocent does finally get home, but as a broken man who may not be a gibbering fool, but is psychologically devastated and will never get his previous life back. In the real world, the bureaucrats under Clinton, Bush, and Obama (sure Obama put an executive order out to stop the "torture" but I don't believe it has ended, I think they have simply gone into blacker "black ops" to make it hard for the world to find out). Americans don't realize that something like 2% of the federal budget goes into "secret" operations which are effectively beyond the control of the legislators and even the President. The US is a rogue state. I have no explicit "proof" of this other than that history has shown that the US has gone down this path of illegality for many, many decades.

Somebody who has a very dark view of this black ops & black budget side of the US is Catherine Austin Fitts who said the following in an interview:

What we do know is that under the laws of the Constitution, which say money cannot be spent unless it is appropriated. It is essentially a violation of the Constitution to do that, with one exception. And this is where the black budget comes up. There are provisions under the National Security Act of 1947 and the CIA Act of 1949 for military and military intelligence to crawl money from outside of different agencies’ budgets, and spend it on non-transparent purposes. That’s sometimes why it’s called the “black budget”.

And what I found out both as Assistant Secretary of Housing, and then what I found with my company … and with the group of honest guys kicked out of HUD, was you had an agency whose legal purpose and political purpose was to help finance the mortgage markets, whose mortgage insurance programs were increasingly caught up in financing black budget operations. And this is very much tied to what’s going on in the mortgage markets.

She's gone a little wacky from my viewpoint, but her concern about how much the US has gone rogue is a legitimate concern and is something that voters have no way of knowing because all of this is "secret" and can't and won't be told so voters have no way of knowing what "their government" is doing on their behalf.

Japanese Government Incompetence

Governments think they can lie to their people and get away with it. They think they can lie to the outside world and get away with it. Maybe in feudal times that was a successful strategy, but for well over 150 years that has been a recipe for a bigger scandal and a lot more problems. But governments persist in lying.

Here's the latest from Japan from the UK's Guardian newspaper:

Nuclear experts have thrown doubt on the accuracy of official information issued about the Fukushima nuclear accident, saying that it followed a pattern of secrecy and cover-ups employed in other nuclear accidents. "It's impossible to get any radiation readings," said John Large, an independent nuclear engineer who has worked for the UK government and been commissioned to report on the accident for Greenpeace International.

"The actions of the Japanese government are completely contrary to their words. They have evacuated 180,000 people but say there is no radiation. They are certain to have readings but we are being told nothing." He said a radiation release was suspected "but at the moment it is impossible to know. It was the same at Chernobyl, where they said there was a bit of a problem and only later did the full extent emerge."

According to some reports, 17 helicopter crewmen helping in rescue efforts were contaminated with low-level radiation, but Japanese officials declined to comment.

The country's government has previously been accused of covering up nuclear accidents and hampering the development of alternative energy.

Governments must think people are idiots. That was the message of Philip J. Crowley when he was reported by a CBS news report as saying:

Chief State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley quit on Sunday after causing a stir by describing the military’s treatment of the suspected WikiLeaks leaker as “ridiculous” and “stupid,” pointed words that forced President Barack Obama to defend the detention as appropriate.

But of course Hilary Clinton fired him and Obama "officially" announced that Bradley Manning was "well treated according to acceptable standards". Yeah sure, if you think being in isolation for months, stripped naked, forced to undergo "suicide checks" that are pure humiliation and harrassment. Oh wait a second... I forgot... the US is a torture nation so in fact the treatment of Bradley Manning is in fact "standard procedure"!

How to Know When Waterboarding is Not Torture

As Salon magazines Glenn Greenwald points out, there is a very simple test. If it is done by the US it is definitely not "torture" but if it is done by any other country, then it is definitely "torture". Clear?

New York Times Washington Bureau Editor Douglas Jehl on why his paper refuses to describe Bush's waterboarding program as "torture":

I have resisted using torture without qualification or to describe all the techniques. Exactly what constitutes torture continues to be a matter of debate and hasn’t been resolved by a court. This president and this attorney general say waterboarding is torture, but the previous president and attorney general said it is not. On what basis should a newspaper render its own verdict, short of charges being filed or a legal judgment rendered.

From the New York Times obituary today:

As a hero of the French Resistance, Stéphane Hessel was in exile with Charles de Gaulle in London, imprisoned in concentration camps, waterboarded in Nazi torture sessions and saved from hanging by swapping identities with an inmate who had died of typhus. . . . Asked how he survived torture, he said, "The third time of waterboarding, I said, 'Now, I’ll tell you.' And I told them a lie of course." He added: "One survives torture. So many people unfortunately have been tortured. But it's not a thing to recommend."

So according to The New York Times, it's journalistically improper to call waterboarding "torture" -- when done by the United States, but when Nazi Germany (or, more generally, China) does exactly the same thing, then it may be called "torture" repeatedly and without qualification. An organization which behaves this way may be called many things; "journalist" isn't one of them.

No moral ambiguity here. No concern over self contradiction or making a mockery of yourself. When George Bush ran the flag of "not torture" up the pole, the New York Times stood up and saluted like any good "patriotic" newspaper.

With "journalism" like that, why bother sending reporters into the field to gather facts. The "news" can be produced like Fox "news", i.e. from the comfort of an air-conditioned office away from the messy reality of facts on the ground.

Last Man Standing

From an article by David Freed in the Atlantic magazine entitled "The Last Stand of Ricardo Sanchez". This article recounts sad facts about guys in white hats and black hats:

But Sanchez, who prior to his retirement was the highest-ranking Latino to have served in the Army, has his own burden to bear. His year directing military operations in Iraq soon after the fall of Baghdad saw low-level enemy resistance erupt into full-blown insurgency and virtual civil war. And revelations of detainee abuse that occurred on his watch at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison forced him to retire from the Army in 2006.

Although an Army inspector general’s report cleared Sanchez of any wrongdoing, it found failures of oversight and execution at all levels, as did congressional and news-media investigations. Sanchez says his former superiors dodged his repeated requests for guidelines that could have helped to avert the Abu Ghraib scandal. Now, in a remarkable turn for a general who helped lead the prosecution of the war, he is calling for the creation of a “truth commission” to probe possible crimes involving waterboarding and other torturous interrogation techniques put into practice during the Bush years. For someone who has lived by the military code since joining the junior ROTC at the age of 15, it is something of a quixotic quest.

...

Before deciding to lambaste the White House’s prosecution of the war, Sanchez tells me, he went through three years of “tremendous soul-searching.” He sought advice from several four-star officers, who, he says, supported his decision to come forward and even helped him shape his message. But after he first delivered that message in a speech to military journalists in October 2007, when he accused the Bush administration, Congress, and the State Department of incompetence and of engaging in partisan politics at the risk of troop safety, “nobody wanted to get involved, because of potential fratricide across the board, and they began to very quickly walk away.”

Sanchez was working part-time as a paid consultant to the military, mentoring other generals in joint and interagency war-fighting operations as well as senior noncommissioned officers assigned to top leadership positions. The Joint Forces Command stopped calling Sanchez after this speech, he says, and his mentoring contract was not renewed—a decision he believes came straight from Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Mullen’s spokesman, Captain John F. Kirby, said that his boss “was, in fact, troubled by some of the public positions” Sanchez took after leaving the service, but denied that Mullen played any role in ending Sanchez’s contract.

The lucrative consulting jobs that have come to many of his retired peers have eluded Sanchez: not a single company doing business with the federal government has ever contacted him about full-time employment. Fellow flag officers he once considered friends have shunned him, he says, as “radioactive.” The only general to lend him a hand in retirement, according to Sanchez, has been Wesley Clark, the retired four-star general and 2004 Democratic candidate for president, who helped him land a seat on the board of Asynchrony Solutions, an information-technology consulting firm headquartered in St. Louis.

...

In May of 2009, surrounded by the likes of Rachel Maddow and Ron Suskind at an event billed as a “Blueprint for Accountability,” Sanchez upped the ante by launching his call for a truth commission about the Iraq War. “If we do not find out what happened,” he told a reporter at the event, “we are doomed to repeat it.”

But given the political climate, Sanchez tells me in his kitchen, he doubts that any senior members of the Bush administration will be made to answer for their transgressions anytime soon.

...

I notice a chain around his neck and ask him if he still wears his dog tags. Sanchez gazes at me for a long moment, as though surprised anyone would notice, then reaches inside his shirt and produces them, jangling.

“I will always be a soldier,” he says, eyes misting. “I will go to my grave with these dog tags around my neck. It’s my whole life.”

The sad fact is that the guys wearing the black hats get to dance on, get the big money, get to thumb their nose a "the little people" and their quaint ideas about morality and justice. While the guys in white hats get to bite their tongue and twist in anguish knowing that they were screwed by the "golden boys" the "wise guy insiders" the ones who know "it is all a game" and "he who dies with the most toys wins". Guys who believe in honour, duty, justice, fairness, and hard work are chumps. They get to do all the work and never get the glory. While they are sweating the hard stuff, the guys in the black hats are taking the glory and plotting their next escapade.

George Bush was a spoiled frat boy his whole life. He's never been accountable for his failures. He's never been called to account for the harm and grief he has caused. When he got in trouble he could call his powerful daddy to get him out of the scrape. And Bush got to be top dog. For Bush that was a short jog up from his born-with-a-silver-spoon-in-his-mouth life. For a guy like Ricardo Sanchez to make it from the bottom of the labouring class up to a lieutenant general was a long hard climb. It was equivalent to climbing Mt. Everest from the bottom to within 1000 feet of the top. Meanwhile, Bush got up in the morning from the highest base camp only a couple of thousand feet from the top of Mt. Everest, breakfasted on the finest foods labouriously carried up the flanks of the mountain on the backs of sweating men. Finished his breakfast and took a short stroll to the top of the mountain, the presidency. He didn't break a sweat. He was "born" to be president.

Bush was perfect for the presidency because his morals were for sale. He was just what corporate America wanted as a leader. A born-again Christian who could sell his religion to the fools in the pentecostal movement to get the big numbers to win the presidency. But Bush is a funny kind of Christian. He never bothered with the "it is harder to get a rich man into heaven than it is to get a camel through the eye of the needle" kind of Christian. He never heard the "sell all that you have, give it to the poor, and follow me" call from Jesus. He just heard about the bit that if you put on a pious face, you can dupe a lot of people into supporting you. You could use your easy Christian morality to turn America into a "torture nation". You could use your power to invade Iraq in a "war of choice, not necessity" and kill hundreds of thousand and bankrupt the US. And do that with style. I still love your arrival in "fighter pilot" uniform on the deck of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln shortly after the troops got to Baghdad and you strode out to the microphones under the banner "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED".

Yep... I still chuckle about that. Good one! That's up there with Obama's "CHANGE THAT YOU CAN BELIEVE IN". I love it!

By the way... if you want to understand why Iraq will cost the American taxpayer 3 TRILLION DOLLARS, click here and look at this graphic.

Obama Extends the Bush Torture Policy

The LA Times newspaper has come out with a strong editorial questioning the brutal treatment of accused spy Bradley Manning. I've bolded the key bit:

Pfc. Bradley Manning, the 23-year-old Army intelligence analyst suspected of providing documents to WikiLeaks, can't reasonably complain that the military has him in custody. But the conditions under which he is being held at the Marine detention center at Quantico, Va., are so harsh as to suggest he is being punished for conduct of which he hasn't been convicted.

Manning has been charged with unlawfully downloading classified information and transmitting it "with reason to believe that the information could cause injury to the United States." He has been incarcerated at Quantico for five months and has yet to receive the military equivalent of a preliminary hearing.

Nevertheless, Manning is in "maximum custody." Also, under a "Protection of Injury" order, he is confined to his cell for 23 hours a day, even though his lawyer says a psychologist has determined he isn't a threat to himself. His lawyer also says that Manning is denied sheets and is unable to exercise in his cell, and that he is not allowed to sleep between 5 a.m. and 8 p.m. If he attempts to sleep during those hours, he is made to sit up or stand by his guards.

Some speculate that by treating Manning harshly, officials hope to induce him to implicate WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange (though Assange would be subject to civilian, not military, justice). But a desire to secure his cooperation isn't a justification for protracted imprisonment under the conditions imposed on Manning.

...

Some see Manning as a whistle-blower who deserves leniency for exposing official duplicity; others believe that, like anyone who engages in civil disobedience, Manning, if guilty, should accept punishment for his actions. But regardless of one's view of his alleged conduct, the conditions under which he is being held are indefensible.

The fact is that Obama was a constitutional lawyer. He knows the US Constitution prohibits "cruel and unusual" punishment. He knows that the law of the land is that your are "innocent until proven guilty". But Obama is allowing the law to be made a mockery while the military is torturing Bradley Manning before he is found guilty of anything. This is outrageous. Obama promised "change you can believe in" but he is serving up the same old Bush "torture is our national policy" criminality. Shame!

The Persecution of Julian Assange

My personal view is that Julian Assange did society a big favour in releasing the material held by the US military to cover up their killing of a Reuters correspondent and about a dozen innocent Iraqi civilians. But I'm not convinced that simply dumping secret documents deserves approval. I'm all for journalists who use first amendment rights to tell people secrets and expose corruption. I believe that in the mess of documents dumped by Wikileaks there are probably lots and lots of examples of corruption and lies by government. But I get queasy when a guy simply dumps documents. I prefer my "journalist" to work through the documents, validate claims, create a coherent story, and present that to the public.

I also believe that the US government is persecuting Assange to "teach him a lesson". I think this is wrong. The guy who did the espionage was Bradley Manning, not Julian Assange. the US government has a right to go after Manning but not Assange. (Meanwhile, it is clear that the US government is violating all ethical standards in their treatment of Bradley Manning keeping him for months in soliatary confinement. This is torture.)

The Julian Assange "rape" case is pretty clearly a fabrication being pushed by Sweden as a client state for what the US authorities want: they want Assange moved to Sweden from which they can extradite him to the US. It is all really sordid.

The UK's Guardian newspaper has an excellent article spelling out all the details of the case. The following does not sound like rape to me. A woman who claims to be raped doesn't stay in the same bed with the man who raped her, she doesn't go out and party with him for a week following "the rape", and she doesn't introduce her girlfriend to the rapist, etc. etc. Read the details:

Her account to police, which Assange disputes, stated that he began stroking her leg as they drank tea, before he pulled off her clothes and snapped a necklace that she was wearing. According to her statement she "tried to put on some articles of clothing as it was going too quickly and uncomfortably but Assange ripped them off again". Miss A told police that she didn't want to go any further "but that it was too late to stop Assange as she had gone along with it so far", and so she allowed him to undress her.

According to the statement, Miss A then realised he was trying to have unprotected sex with her. She told police that she had tried a number of times to reach for a condom but Assange had stopped her by holding her arms and pinning her legs. The statement records Miss A describing how Assange then released her arms and agreed to use a condom, but she told the police that at some stage Assange had "done something" with the condom that resulted in it becoming ripped, and ejaculated without withdrawing.

When he was later interviewed by police in Stockholm, Assange agreed that he had had sex with Miss A but said he did not tear the condom, and that he was not aware that it had been torn. He told police that he had continued to sleep in Miss A's bed for the following week and she had never mentioned a torn condom.

On the following morning, Saturday 14 August, Assange spoke at a seminar organised by Miss A. A second woman, Miss W, had contacted Miss A to ask if she could attend. Both women joined Assange, the co-ordinator of the Swedish WikiLeaks group, whom we will call "Harold", and a few others for lunch.

Assange left the lunch with Miss W. She told the police she and Assange had visited the place where she worked and had then gone to a cinema where they had moved to the back row. He had kissed her and put his hands inside her clothing, she said.

That evening, Miss A held a party at her flat. One of her friends, "Monica", later told police that during the party Miss A had told her about the ripped condom and unprotected sex. Another friend told police that during the evening Miss A told her she had had "the worst sex ever" with Assange: "Not only had it been the world's worst screw, it had also been violent."

Assange's supporters point out that, despite her complaints against him, Miss A held a party for him on that evening and continued to allow him to stay in her flat.

On Sunday 15 August, Monica told police, Miss A told her that she thought Assange had torn the condom on purpose. According to Monica, Miss A said Assange was still staying in her flat but they were not having sex because he had "exceeded the limits of what she felt she could accept" and she did not feel safe.

The following day, Miss W phoned Assange and arranged to meet him late in the evening, according to her statement. The pair went back to her flat in Enkoping, near Stockholm. Miss W told police that though they started to have sex, Assange had not wanted to wear a condom, and she had moved away because she had not wanted unprotected sex. Assange had then lost interest, she said, and fallen asleep. However, during the night, they had both woken up and had sex at least once when "he agreed unwillingly to use a condom".

Early the next morning, Miss W told police, she had gone to buy breakfast before getting back into bed and falling asleep beside Assange. She had awoken to find him having sex with her, she said, but when she asked whether he was wearing a condom he said no. "According to her statement, she said: 'You better not have HIV' and he answered: 'Of course not,' " but "she couldn't be bothered to tell him one more time because she had been going on about the condom all night. She had never had unprotected sex before."

The police record of the interview with Assange in Stockhom deals only with the complaint made by Miss A. However, Assange and his lawyers have repeatedly stressed that he denies any kind of wrongdoing in relation to Miss W.

And the following details about how the women behaved in texting something different from what their police statements were and trying to sell "the story" to tabloids" does not sound like an honest complaint of rape:

Assange's solicitor, Mark Stephens, said: "The allegations of the complainants are not credible and were dismissed by the senior Stockholm prosecutor as not worthy of further investigation." He said Miss A had sent two Twitter messages that appeared to undermine her account in the police statement.

Assange's defence team had so far been provided by prosecutors with only incomplete evidence, he said. "There are many more text and SMS messages from and to the complainants which have been shown by the assistant prosecutor to the Swedish defence lawyer, Bjorn Hurtig, which suggest motivations of malice and money in going to the police and to Espressen and raise the issue of political motivation behind the presentation of these complaints. He [Hurtig] has been precluded from making notes or copying them.

"We understand that both complainants admit to having initiated consensual sexual relations with Mr Assange. They do not complain of any physical injury. The first complainant did not make a complaint for six days (in which she hosted the respondent in her flat [actually her bed] and spoke in the warmest terms about him to her friends) until she discovered he had spent the night with the other complainant.

"The second complainant, too, failed to complain for several days until she found out about the first complainant: she claimed that after several acts of consensual sexual intercourse, she fell half asleep and thinks that he ejaculated without using a condom – a possibility about which she says they joked afterwards.

"Both complainants say they did not report him to the police for prosecution but only to require him to have an STD test. However, his Swedish lawyer has been shown evidence of their text messages which indicate that they were concerned to obtain money by going to a tabloid newspaper and were motivated by other matters including a desire for revenge."

Even if Assange "raped" these women, you don't throw the guy in jail, put him in solitary confinement for days, and require a bail of $330,000 in cash. The whole thing reeks of political manipulation, of lies, of forces having nothing to do with "justice" interfering with this case.

To my mind, Naomi Wolf in this Huffington Post article has got this case right:

Dear Interpol:

As a longtime feminist activist, I have been overjoyed to discover your new commitment to engaging in global manhunts to arrest and prosecute men who behave like narcissistic jerks to women they are dating.

I see that Julian Assange is accused of having consensual sex with two women, in one case using a condom that broke. I understand, from the alleged victims' complaints to the media, that Assange is also accused of texting and tweeting in the taxi on the way to one of the women's apartments while on a date, and, disgustingly enough, 'reading stories about himself online' in the cab.

Both alleged victims are also upset that he began dating a second woman while still being in a relationship with the first. (Of course, as a feminist, I am also pleased that the alleged victims are using feminist-inspired rhetoric and law to assuage what appears to be personal injured feelings. That's what our brave suffragette foremothers intended!).

Thank you again, Interpol. I know you will now prioritize the global manhunt for 1.3 million guys I have heard similar complaints about personally in the US alone -- there is an entire fraternity at the University of Texas you need to arrest immediately. I also have firsthand information that John Smith in Providence, Rhode Island, went to a stag party -- with strippers! -- that his girlfriend wanted him to skip, and that Mark Levinson in Corvallis, Oregon, did not notice that his girlfriend got a really cute new haircut -- even though it was THREE INCHES SHORTER.

Terrorists. Go get 'em, Interpol!

Yours gratefully,

Naomi Wolf

Go read the article to get the embedded links.

And this article on the Huffington Post:

As I have been making the case on media outlets in the past few days that the British and Swedish sex crime charges related actions against Julian Assange are so extraordinarily and unprecedentedly severe -- compared to how prosecutors always treat far more cut-and-dry allegations than those in question in this case worldwide, including in the Scandinavian countries, and that thus the pretext of using these charges against Assange is a pimping of feminism by the State and an insult to rape victims -- I have found myself up against a bizarre fantasy in the minds of my (mostly male) debating opponents.

The fantasy is that somehow this treatment -- a global manhunt, solitary confinement in the Victorian cell that drove Oscar Wilde to suicidal despair within a matter of days, and now a bracelet tracking his movements -- is not atypical, because somehow Sweden must be a progressively hot-blooded but still progressively post-feminist paradise for sexual norms in which any woman in any context can bring the full force of the law against any man who oversteps any sexual boundary.

...

Guess what: Sweden has HIGHER rates of rape than other comparable countries -- including higher than the US and Britain, higher than Denmark and Finland -- and the same Swedish authorities going after Assange do a worse job prosecuting reported rapes than do police and the judiciary in any comparable country. And these are flat-out, unambiguous reported rape cases, not the 'sex by surprise' Assange charges involving situations that began consensually.

Indeed, the Swedish authorities -- who are now being depicted as global feminist sex-crime-avenger superheroes in blue capes -- were shamed by a 2008 Amnesty International report, "Case Closed", as being far more dismissive of rape, and far more insulting to rape victims who can be portrayed as 'asking for it' by drinking or any kind of sexual ambiguity -- than any other country in their comparison group. As Amnesty International put it in a blistering attack: "Swedish Rapists Get Impunity."

Go read the article to get the embedded links.

US Upholds Its Noble Tradition as a Torture Nation

From an article in Salon magazine by Glenn Greenwald:

Bradley Manning, the 22-year-old U.S. Army Private accused of leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks, has never been convicted of that crime, nor of any other crime. Despite that, he has been detained at the U.S. Marine brig in Quantico, Virginia for five months -- and for two months before that in a military jail in Kuwait -- under conditions that constitute cruel and inhumane treatment and, by the standards of many nations, even torture. Interviews with several people directly familiar with the conditions of Manning's detention, ultimately including a Quantico brig official (Lt. Brian Villiard) who confirmed much of what they conveyed, establishes that the accused leaker is subjected to detention conditions likely to create long-term psychological injuries.

Since his arrest in May, Manning has been a model detainee, without any episodes of violence or disciplinary problems. He nonetheless was declared from the start to be a "Maximum Custody Detainee," the highest and most repressive level of military detention, which then became the basis for the series of inhumane measures imposed on him.

From the beginning of his detention, Manning has been held in intensive solitary confinement. For 23 out of 24 hours every day -- for seven straight months and counting -- he sits completely alone in his cell. Even inside his cell, his activities are heavily restricted; he's barred even from exercising and is under constant surveillance to enforce those restrictions. For reasons that appear completely punitive, he's being denied many of the most basic attributes of civilized imprisonment, including even a pillow or sheets for his bed (he is not and never has been on suicide watch). For the one hour per day when he is freed from this isolation, he is barred from accessing any news or current events programs. Lt. Villiard protested that the conditions are not "like jail movies where someone gets thrown into the hole," but confirmed that he is in solitary confinement, entirely alone in his cell except for the one hour per day he is taken out.

In sum, Manning has been subjected for many months without pause to inhumane, personality-erasing, soul-destroying, insanity-inducing conditions of isolation similar to those perfected at America's Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado: all without so much as having been convicted of anything. And as is true of many prisoners subjected to warped treatment of this sort, the brig's medical personnel now administer regular doses of anti-depressants to Manning to prevent his brain from snapping from the effects of this isolation.

There is much, much more. Lots more depressing details. Go read the whole article.

I blame Obama. The "change you can believe in" guy. This is the brave new world he has helped create... funny, it is the same old corrupt, evil, mean-spirited, torture-filled world of George Bush. The joke is on the American electorate who in 2008 thought they voted to change US policies! Their votes didn't. (I have a mental picture of the vote-rigging in the recent Haitian elections. That is essentially what happened in the US. Except rather than having to stuff ballot boxes, they used mass communications to "sell" the electorate on lies and more lies.)

Nothing seems able to stop the descent into hell by the American government:

A March, 2010 article in The Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law explains that "solitary confinement is recognized as difficult to withstand; indeed, psychological stressors such as isolation can be as clinically distressing as physical torture."

For that reason, many Western nations -- and even some non-Western nations notorious for human rights abuses -- refuse to employ prolonged solitary confinement except in the most extreme cases of prisoner violence.

The US tortures "disposable" citizens of other countries in its foreign wars. The US is now are busy torturing its own citizens. And the US public is like sheep. They line up to be abused by TSA all in the name of "security". They ignore news report like that of the torture of Bradley Manning.

There is nothing quite as funny as a people who shout "give me liberty or give me death" heading willingly into concentration camps under the very leaders they elected. The Germans used the slogan "Arbeit Macht Frei". I'm guessing the American gulag will have signs like "Camp Infinite Liberty" and "Endless Justice and Freedom" as the slogans they hang over their concentration camps. And I'm sure the prisoners will sing "America the Beautiful" each day as they are tortured and forced to grovel on the ground in front of jack-booted thugs. Yes, this is the apotheosis of American "liberty". George Bush must be beaming. And I can see Barack Obama's head poking up over Bush's shoulder with a grin on his face. Yes... this is the "hope" they have brought the American people.

I believe that history will judge America harshly. I believe that Bradley Manning was trying to help the American people discover the monstrous misdeeds of their own government:

If one believes the authenticity of the highly edited chat logs of Manning's online conversations with Adrian Lamo that have been released by Wired (that magazine inexcusably continues to conceal large portions of those logs), Manning clearly believed that he was a whistle-blower acting with the noblest of motives, and probably was exactly that. If, for instance, he really is the leaker of the Apache helicopter attack video -- a video which sparked very rare and much-needed realization about the visceral truth of what American wars actually entail -- as well as the war and diplomatic cables revealing substantial government deceit, brutality, illegality and corruption, then he's quite similar to Daniel Ellsberg. Indeed, Ellsberg himself said the very same thing about Manning in June on Democracy Now in explaining why he considers the Army Private to be a "hero".

War Criminals in High Places in the United States

From a post by Tom Ricks on his blog The Best Defense:

In February 1968, a U.S. soldier was court-martialed simply for holding down a Vietnamese man while two Vietnamese soldiers waterboarded him, according to Guenter Lewy's America in Vietnam. (329)

I mention this because both George W. Bush and former Vice President Dick Cheney now have publicly admitted they were approving of waterboarding, a form of torture that once was a crime in the eyes of the U.S. government -- and still is under international laws.

I'm hoping George Bush gets an itch to visit Europe. I'm thinking a trip to England would be appropriate!

How the US Does an Injustice Then Covers Its Tracks

Here's an interesting article in the Washington Post about the Khalid al-Masri case:

A top American diplomat warned Germany against issuing arrest warrants for U.S. commandos involved in the 2003 abduction of a German citizen wrongly suspected of terrorist ties, a classified State Department cable obtained by WikiLeaks reveals.

Khalid al-Masri, a Lebanese who had lived in Germany since 1994, was abducted while on holiday in Macedonia and flown to Afghanistan, where he says he was beaten and sodomized during repeated interrogations before being transferred to the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In April 2004 CIA Director George Tenet decided Masri had been mistakenly detained, according to news reports, and the following month he was released.

A prosecutor in Munich subsequently investigated the Masri affair, and on Jan. 31, 2007 issued arrest warrants for 13 of the suspected kidnappers, all thought to be CIA personnel.

Washington was very upset by the action, according to a cable from the No. 2 official at the American embassy in Berlin, deputy chief of mission John M. Koenig. The cable was marked “Secret//Noforn,” meaning no foreign dissemination.

On Feb. 6, 2007, Koenig met with German Deputy National Security Adviser Rolf Nikel to express U.S. unhappiness with the arrest warrants, and cautioned German federal officials against trying to enforce them.

Koenig “reiterated our strong concerns about the possible issuance of international arrest warrants in the al-Masri case,” according to the cable, sent in the name of the U.S. ambassador to Germany, William R. Timken.

The “issuance of
 international arrest warrants would have a negative impact on our bilateral relationship,” Koenig said, “remind(ing) Nikel of the repercussions to U.S.-Italian bilateral relations in the wake of a similar move by Italian authorities last year.”

The reference to “repercussions” in Italy was not immediately clear. At the time, a prosecutor in Milan was seeking the arrest of nearly two dozen CIA operatives and a U.S. military officer in connection with the abduction of another al-Qaeda suspect, known as Abu Omar, but the Italian government had refused his request that they be extradited to stand trial. All but a few were convicted of kidnapping in absentia.

There's more. Go read the whole article with its links.

I love the way the US doesn't bother with the truth. The article quotes US authorities saying that after they discovered their mistake "the following month he was released". Funny. He was flown from Afghanistan where he was being tortured to Albania and then dumped on a back road without so much as an apology. Wow. That is "being released". That's like the mob slipping a guy off the side of a boat with concrete shoes claiming that they were now "done and were releasing the guy they grabbed". Yeah... releasing him to let the fishes nibble on him.

Most Americans have no clue about the many, many people who were "snatched" by the US, tortured, and then the US discovered its "mistake" and they dumped the poor victim. No justice here. Nothing. But I guess that is the way Americans want other countries to start treating American citizens. You know, a murder happens, you have an American tourist somewhere in the country, you pick them up, torture them for "their murder", then decide that "it was a mistake" so you drive them to the border and push them into another country. That's how the US wants its citizens handled because that is what it is doing with other countries citizens!