Anarchoblogs

Julian Assange, Daniel Ellsburg and Nic Robertson discussed “The Afghanistan War Logs” leak, Monday evening.

Part One (7:16):

Part Two (5:33):

Part Three (5:23):

The founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, discussed the whistleblowing site’s most recent leak of over 90,000 U.S. military records on “Larry King Live” at CNN, Monday evening.

Sunday evening, The New York Times (NYT), the London Guardian and German weekly Der Spiegel revealed WikiLeaks granted them access to the documents spanning from 2004-09. It is being called the largest leak since Daniel Ellsburg leaked the Pentagon Papers, which exposed U.S. government secrets of its war in Vietnam.

Mr. Assange, earlier today, said the leak exposes “evidence of war crimes” committed by the U.S.-led coalition under the Bush and Obama Administrations. Mr. Ellsburg later joined the broadcast in support of WikiLeaks.

Nic Robertson, senior correspondent at CNN International, referenced an intelligence source saying the leak is “old bad news in a new bad time”—mainly of Pakistan intelligence puppeteering the Afghan militant resistance networks. Later in the episode, Mr. Ellsburg remained to participate in a panel discussion with former NATO Europe Supreme Allied Commander and retired U.S. General Wesley Clark, former military intelligence officer and fellow whistleblower Anthony Shaffer and Rolling Stone contributing editor Michael Hastings—whose recent exposé of the counterinsurgency doctrine in Afghanistan displayed its only foreseeable result as “perpetual war“.

In response to the common red herring question as to WikiLeaks’ being ‘allowed’ to leak documents, Mr. Assange responded to a reporter at an afternoon London press conference:

Well, it’s a matter about whether the coercive power of the state should be used to stop people sharing information, who have no direct connection to the source of the information. You can’t use the coercive power of the state to stop people spreading rumors, to stop people discussing political life, and sophisticated U.S. jurisprudence understands that. And that is why you have things like the First Amendment, which takes the press outside the legislative process, because in the end it is the communication of knowledge which regulates the legislature, which creates the Constitution.

Earlier in the day at Democracy Now!, Rick Rowley—an independent journalist with Big Noise Films who just returned from a trip to Afghanistan, embedded with a division in the extended Marja Surge—summarized the progression of Washington’s mission toward a secret war of extrajudicial assassinations, night raids and mass kidnapping:

Well, I mean, what these documents show—prove—is that the U.S. military has been whitewashing the war in Afghanistan for years and that most of the media has been along for the ride. They’ve systematically covered up civilian casualties. They’ve covered up the successful attacks by the Taliban and their significance. And they’ve covered up the violent criminality of the security forces that we’ve created there, security forces that are preying on Afghan civilians. I mean, the picture that emerges from these documents is, on the one hand, of an insurgency that is resilient and adapting and that is winning the war on the ground, and, on the other hand, of an Afghan state that we’ve constructed there that looks less like a government and looks more like a patchwork of warlords and criminal gangs that’s extorting the local population and that has become more hated in many parts of the country than the Taliban who they replaced.

A third interesting thing that these documents do is they put flesh on a process that we’ve been tracking, along with reporters like Jeremy Scahill, for some time, of a transition to what some people call a special forces war, an entirely covert and classified war that’s conducted with drone strikes and midnight raids and targeted assassinations, where everything is classified, there are no media embeds, and there’s very little accountability. I mean, I think that is the trajectory that this war is taking right now.

Now, the White House has responded. They haven’t denied anything here. They haven’t even denied the conclusions that people are drawing about how terrible the war has been there. Their response has been that this is old news, we knew about this a long time ago, and that, in fact, Obama’s war, Obama’s surge, the new war that began in December 2009, has changed everything. Well, I came back from Afghanistan ten days ago. And while I was embedded with the Marines in Marja and elsewhere in the country, I can tell you that this picture matches perfectly with what’s going on on the ground there right now. In Marja, which was supposed to be the poster child of this new campaign, Marja—you know, it’s a small farming community where two Marine divisions were sent in to try to prove that this war was still winnable. Those two Marine divisions have been pinned down for months. We were there at the beginning of an operation called Operation Cobra that was sending in reinforcements, a couple extra Marine companies, to try to, you know, push out their security perimeter. But it’s the—Obama’s surge has completely derailed. They haven’t brought security to Marjah. They have one to three kilometers of security around their forward operating bases.

And the biggest disaster is that the government that they were—that they’ve brought in and tried to stand up, the famous government in a box that was going to roll out right after the Marines cleared the ground, has disappeared. The officials refused to deploy from Kabul and disappeared. Only the mayor comes in, Mayor Haji Zahir, who’s brought in by helicopter by the Marines and, like, set down in the middle of shuras and meetings that they set up and then bundled back into a helicopter and flown out. And this guy, Haji Zahir, he’s an expat who lived in Germany for years and spent five years in jail for attempted murder in Germany. I mean, that’s the caliber of people who we’ve brought in to make the leaders of this new—of the Afghanistan that we’re building. I mean, it is an abject failure, as far as a nation-building operation on the ground. And, you know, whether you’re talking about the last ten years of the war or 2010, I mean, the picture doesn’t change.

Gareth Porter, investigative journalist at Inter Press Services and scholar on geopolitics, highlighted the confirmation of Pak intel’s role in the insurgency as “the most politically salient issue”.

As for general rundowns of media and White House reaction, the NYT’s “At War” blog, Greg Mitchell at his Nation blog and Andrew Sullivan at his Atlantic blog put together solid rundowns, if one is so compelled, but beware—as there’s plenty of premature hyperbole yelled around.

Filed under: Af-Pak War, National News, Political Science Tagged: Af-Pak War, Afghanistan, anarchism, Andrew Sullivan, Anthony Shaffer, anti-Statism, Bill of Rights, Bush Administration, CIA, civil liberties, Constitution, covert ops, Daniel Ellsburg, embed journalists, First Amendment, free press, free speech, Gareth Porter, Germany, Greg Mitchell, Haji Zahir, IED's, ISAF, Jeremy Scahill, journalism, Julian Assange, Kandahar Surge, Larry King, libertarian, liberty, Marja Surge, media, Michael Hastings, NATO, NY Times, Obama Adminsitration, Operation Cobra, Rick Rowley, SOF, Special Operations Forces, Task Force 373, UK, Wesley Clark

Getting the lawers out to tackle a spoof - seems a bit like bullying to me...The Metro has obtained a High Court injunction against “all persons responsible for the publication and/or distribution” of a Metro spoof paper that was distributed by campaigners at London tube stations on Friday morning. But since the spoof was produced and distributed anonymously, the injunction seems to have been

A recent study released by the civil liberties advocacy group highlights the rise in U.S. government Big Brother policies by localizing the National Security State with no accountability.

Politically motivated domestic surveillance and harassment are surging in the U.S., a recent study by the American Civil Liberties Union (A.C.L.U.) found. Though recent reports have indicated the military is taking a Bush Administration spy program out of hibernation—of datamining information collected through domestic surveillance policies—the civil liberties group added that local agencies and private corporation are violating rights to privacy and free speech with impunity.

The release of the report, “Policing Free Speech: Police Surveillance and Obstruction of First Amendment‐Protected Activity” [.pdf], coincides with the civil liberties advocacy group’s launch of “Spy Files“, a “web hub on domestic political surveillance, which will serve as a comprehensive resource on domestic spying”, according to a statement.

“It will include a database of documents obtained through state and federal open-records requests as well as links to news reports and other relevant materials,” it added.

Analyzing 111 incidents in 33 states, the group found that all levels of law enforcement are abusing weak standards of probable cause to meet low burdens of proof to threaten and spy on people. The government’s policies result in harassing, surveying and kidnapping people “for doing little more than peacefully exercising their First Amendment rights” displays a regression of basic human rights defense, according to the A.C.L.U., which added:

Political spying—rampant during the Cold War under the F.B.I.’s COINTELPRO, the C.I.A.’s Operation Chaos and other programs—has experienced a steady resurgence in the years following 9/11 as state and local law enforcement are being urged by federal law enforcement agencies to participate in counterterrorism practices.

“In our country, under our Constitution, the authorities aren’t allowed to spy on you unless they have specific and individual suspicion that you are doing something illegal,” said Michael German, A.C.L.U. Policy Counsel and former F.B.I. Special Agent. “Unfortunately, law enforcement in our country seems to be reverting to certain old, bad behaviors when it comes to political surveillance. Our review of these practices has found that Americans have been put under surveillance or harassed by the police just for deciding to organize, march, protest, espouse unusual viewpoints and engage in normal, innocuous behaviors such as writing notes or taking photographs in public.”

Community policing projects—“suspicious activity reporting” (S.A.R.) programs [.pdf]—are expanding the reach of what the U.S. Supreme Court called the “reasonable suspicion” standard, a “Spy Files” post adds:

S.A.R. programs increase the probability that innocent people will be stopped by police and have their personal information collected for inclusion in law enforcement and intelligence data bases. They also open the door to racial profiling and other improper police practices by giving police unwarranted discretion to stop people who are not reasonably suspected of wrongdoing.

[...]

The Supreme Court established “reasonable suspicion” as the standard for police stops in Terry v. Ohio in 1968. This standard required suspicion supported by articulable facts suggesting criminal activity was afoot before a policeman could stop a person for investigative purposes. Likewise, the Department of Justice established a reasonable suspicion standard for the inclusion of personally identifiable information into criminal intelligence systems. Title 28, Part 23 of the Code of Federal Regulations states that law enforcement agencies receiving federal funds:

shall collect and maintain criminal intelligence information concerning an individual only if there is reasonable suspicion that the individual is involved in criminal conduct or activity and the information is relevant to that criminal conduct or activity [emphasis added].

S.A.R. programs threaten this reasonable, time-tested law enforcement standard by encouraging the police and the public to report behaviors that are not reasonably indicative of criminal or terrorist behavior.

In January 2008 the D.N.I. [Information Sharing Environment (I.S.E.)] Program Manager published functional standards for state and local law enforcement officers to report ‘suspicious’ activities to fusion centers and to the federal intelligence community through the I.S.E. The behaviors it described as inherently suspicious included such innocuous activities as photography, acquisition of expertise, and eliciting information. The following March the Los Angeles Police Department (L.A.P.D.) initiated its own S.A.R. program to “gather, record, and analyze information of a criminal or non-criminal nature, that could indicate activity or intentions related to either foreign or domestic terrorism,” and included a list of 65 behaviors L.A.P.D. officers “shall” report, which included taking pictures or video footage, taking notes, drawing diagrams and espousing extreme views. In June 2008, long before either of these programs could be evaluated, the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security teamed up with the Major City Chiefs Association to issue a report recommending expanding the S.A.R. program to other U.S. cities. (Indeed, in April 2009 the L.A.P.D. admitted its S.A.R. program had not foiled any terrorist threats during its first year in operation.) The F.B.I. began its own S.A.R. collection program called eGuardian in 2008, and in 2010 the military announced it would implement a S.A.R. program through eGuardian.

Programs like COINTELPRO, Operation Chaos, the Denver Police Department labeling a Nobel Peace Prize-winning Quaker organization and a 73-year-old nun as “criminal extremists,” and a case—just settled this week—of an antiwar activist being spied on and arrested on false charges to keep him from attending a protest are “quickly becoming a dime a dozen”, Amanda Simon posted today at the A.C.L.U. Blog of Rights.

In a separate post, describing the objective of “Spy Files”, the A.C.L.U. stated these policies are “directed at all of us” and the motivations are politically manufactured fear. They are not isolated to federal law enforcement, military intelligence and foreign intelligence agencies, but extend to local agencies—even those unrelated to law enforcement:

Today the government is spying on Americans in ways the founders of our country never could have imagined. The FBI, federal intelligence agencies, the military, state and local police, private companies, and even firemen and emergency medical technicians are gathering incredible amounts of personal information about ordinary Americans that can be used to construct vast dossiers that can be widely shared with a simple mouse-click through new institutions like Joint Terrorism Task Forces, fusion centers, and public-private partnerships. The fear of terrorism has led to a new era of overzealous police intelligence activity directed, as in the past, against political activists, racial and religious minorities, and immigrants.

This surveillance activity is not directed solely at suspected terrorists and criminals. It’s directed at all of us. Increasingly, the government is engaged in suspicionless surveillance that vacuums up and tracks sensitive information about innocent people. Even more disturbingly, as the government’s surveillance powers have grown more intrusive and more powerful, the restrictions on many of those powers have been weakened or eliminated. And this surveillance often takes place in secret, with little or no oversight by the courts, by legislatures, or by the public.

“Spy Files” has a section where users can monitor government “spying on First Amendment activity” cases by state.

Filed under: National News, Political Science Tagged: 9/11, ACLU, Amanda Simon, Bush Administration, CIA, civil liberties, COINTELPRO, constitutional rights, corporatism, counterterrorism, DIA, domestic surveillance, fascism, FBI, free speech, fusion centers, government spying, human rights, ISE, JTTF, LAPD, law enforcement, libertarian, liberty, Obama Administration, Operation Chaos, police, reasonable suspicion, SAR programs, SCOTUS, Spy Files, Sweden, terrorism, Terry v. Ohio, US, War on Terror

The Army intelligence analyst ‘boasted’ of leaking three specific other items to Wikileaks and over 250,000 embassy cables, including video of a massacre in Afghanistan that is yet to be released.

Continue reading at Little Alex in Wonderland …

Okay, I said I would stay off David Laws and get back to the business of attacking politicians and governments and so I am, in a way.  One of the things that the Laws fall from grace has done is raise the ugly spectre of people calling for curbs, one way or another, on the influence of "big media".  Let me say from the outset, "I am a Liberal and I am against this sort of thing"....

(This feed is supplying post/comment summaries only, please click through to the webpage to read the whole article...)

LOCAL NEWS WINNIPEG:ISRAELI APARTHEID WEEK PRESS STATEMENT: The following press statement from the Israeli Apartheid Week Winnipeg gives their point of view about the mercifully recently concluded debate in the Manitoba Legislature about a statement o…

Continue reading at Molly'sBlog …

“Minorities have an illustrious past, full of suffering, torture, smear, and even death.   Jesus Christ was killed by a majority.” –  Senator William Ezra Jenner of Indiana speaking in opposition to invoking cloture by majority vote on January 4, 1957, cited by Senator Robert Byrd, Senate speech on March 1, 2005, warning against a [...]

The morning mail can always be guaranteed to bring something out of the fever swamps. This one calls itself libertarian.  But it shows every sign of a Stalinist disposition, down to the puerile and quasi-racist invective. I’ll parse it after I’ve had breakfast. Just a small sample of the abuse you get for pouring yourself [...]

Just as I was blogging about hate [this is government jargon] speech having the ability to become inflammatory and harmful (something some libertarians don’t seem able to understand), along comes a GOP operative to provide the requisite moronic example - he compared a gorilla to Michelle Obama. Frankly, this isn’t only bigotry, it’s an [...]