Sweden: Unable to Diplomatize

So another big infodump is going on at Wikileaks and several associated newscorps, this time involving reams and reams of diplomatic cables.  Unlike previous infodumps, this one is set to be released in a staggered fashion throughout the week, with each day getting its own focus.

Cables related to Canada is scheduled for Thursday.  Personally, I can hardly wait, though I fear there may not be anything particularly juicy - all I've heard so far is rumours about U.S. diplomats talking about Canada's "inferiority complex."  We don't have an inferiority complex, not really (our cultural problems relating to the U.S. are worse than that), but I can see how some who might not quite understand Canadian culture might mistake our identity issues for such...  So that's not really such a big deal for me.  As I said, hopefully there's something more interesting related to Soviet Canuckistan, but we'll see.

Already we've hearing the bleating objections of the powers-that-be, who are once again terribly butthurt over the whole ordeal of their secrets being revealed for all and sundry.  These leaks, they claim, stand to get a lot of people hurt or killed (where have we heard that objection before?  It's crying wolf at this point, really) and to impede the U.S. government's ability to engage with other nation-states in a diplomatic fashion, since frank diplomatic statements cannot be made without fear of public exposure.  Negotiations between nations, so the argument goes, need to be kept secret until they've reached their completion, at which point the public can hear a press release about it.  Breaking down the logic, the argument goes like this:

-Diplomacy needs secrecy to work.
-Diplomacy prevents wars.
-Transparency and secrecy are mutually exclusive.
-Therefore, transparency will prevent diplomacy from being an effective tool.
-A nation will be disinclined to use an ineffective tool.
-Thus, diplomacy will be shunned in favour of other methods.
-Ergo, transparency will cause more wars.

It's a fairly decent logical construction, but like all logical constructions it's only true if you buy into the premises.  Here's where Sweden comes into the picture.

See, there's a law in Sweden that makes the vast majority of government records and documents public.  And when I say vast majority, I mean it - to the point that every government e-mail is free for any citizen to read.  At one point, a secret Scientology document was basically made available to the public because it was sent to a high-ranking government official, which thereby made it available to Swedes at large.  Another time it got evil biotech corp Monsanto's panties in a bunch because this policy of transparency allowed Greenpeace to get its hands on a document relating to one of their evil biotech corp products.

Sweden is ranked by Transparency International as the most transparent government on the planet thanks to these and other policies (it's followed by New Zealand and Denmark.)  According to the argument laid out above, these countries would be unable to engage in any sort of diplomatic relations.  This is clearly an absurd claim.

That means the first premise in that logical construction I detailed above is untrue, and as a result the entire argument falls apart.

But all that's really besides the  point, because here's the bottom line:  Voters, citizens, have responsibilities.  These responsibilities include overseeing the people we put into place to represent us as our government.  This requires us to inform ourselves as best we can not only the things our governments do on our behalf, but also the relationships they form with other governments.  It is ludicrous to expect a governmental body to police itself.  Therefore, we need as much transparency as we can scrape together in order to hold them to task for the things they do.  There should be little to no privilege of secrecy here, because time and time again it has been proven that governments use any secrecy they can achieve for unethical behaviour.  Even if heightened transparency makes some tasks more difficult it's a small price to pay.

More nations should follow Sweden's example.  More citizens should demand their governments do so.

UPDATE:  There's a really great article at the Guardian over the whole ethical argument of leaking that I recommend reading. It lays out the same basic argument that I've been making for months in a very succinct manner:

Anything said or done in the name of a democracy is, prima facie, of public interest. When that democracy purports to be "world policeman" – an assumption that runs ghostlike through these cables – that interest is global.

Legion Election

Apparently it's a bit of a tradition in the Legion of Superheroes to have a fan-vote election for the next leader of everyone's favourite teenagers-in-the-future superteam. Prior to a few days ago, I had no idea this was the case, despite having read the series off-and-on over the years.

You can cast your vote for the candidate of your choice here.

And you should definitely go and vote! Why? Because, as Mightygodking points out, one of the candidates is a forward-thinking, charity-minded, red-blooded socialist! And he's even a half-slug-caterpillar-bird thing from the planet Vyrga. With teleportation powers.

So vote for Gates today!

Killing Civilians for Sport

I had a hard time deciding the topic for today's post... Part of me really wanted to talk about the Conservatives' muzzling of federal scientists, since that's a Canadian thing and fairly recent. But I'm still pretty damn angry about the news out of Afghanistan, even if it's almost a week since the story broke, and I think it's important enough to override more local stuff. Not the least of which is because a certain perspective becomes apparent as you read the various reports on the events and the order in which they happened, one that I haven't seen much comment on.

From the Guardian article on the event:

Twelve American soldiers face charges over a secret "kill team" that allegedly blew up and shot Afghan civilians at random and collected their fingers as trophies.

Five of the soldiers are charged with murdering three Afghan men who were allegedly killed for sport in separate attacks this year. Seven others are accused of covering up the killings and assaulting a recruit who exposed the murders when he reported other abuses, including members of the unit smoking hashish stolen from civilians.

So, more war crimes in Afghanistan, this time of as blatant a nature as you can get. I mean, this is the sort of thing you'd expect to find in a bad movie - one that would get a public outcry in the U.S. for unfairly depicting U.S. Soldiers. But here it is, and it happened in the really real world.

Of course, if you've even glanced at the story, you probably know all this. What you might not realize is something that reveals itself only by really thinking about the implications of some of the reported events:

The killings came to light in May after the army began investigating a brutal assault on a soldier who told superiors that members of his unit were smoking hashish. The Army Times reported that members of the unit regularly smoked the drug on duty and sometimes stole it from civilians.

The soldier, who was straight out of basic training and has not been named, said he witnessed the smoking of hashish and drinking of smuggled alcohol but initially did not report it out of loyalty to his comrades. But when he returned from an assignment at an army headquarters and discovered soldiers using the shipping container in which he was billeted to smoke hashish he reported it.

Basically, what happened was the self-described "kill squad" decided to smoke hashish in the wrong place - a recruit who was otherwise willing to look the other way if they smoked anywhere else wasn't willing to put his own ass on the line because they were using the container he was responsible for as their smoke house. So, he told on them, they found out, and then they beat him up.

Then, as revenge, he told his superiors about their war crimes.

This suggests two things: 1. He knew about the war crimes already, much like he knew about the drug use before they got him involved in it. 2. He considered their drug use in his container worse than murdering civilians, since otherwise he would have reported them in a different order, and much sooner than he did.

Think about that for a second. Of course, this should come as no surprise; according to a survey of U.S. troops in Iraq, almost half of all army soldiers (and more than half of Marines) have said they would cover up war crimes for their fellow soldiers. Moreover, if the statistics in that survey hold up for Afghanistan (and I see no reason they wouldn't), then going by the numbers there are almost ten thousand war criminals stationed there, as one in ten have admitted to committing abuses against civilians.

I'd be very interested to see how coalition forces rate against these statistics. I suspect it would be very revealing, but I've yet to see a proper survey performed.

Ultimately, all this adds up to the mission in Afghanistan being a failure - and it's likely the door for success has long passed. No "surge" strategy will work here (for that matter, the surge strategy didn't really work in Iraq, but that's a whole 'nother topic). If the coalition is even still trying to win hearts and minds, they're failing miserably - and it's because of events like this. There's even a good chance that the Army was warned after the first murder and chose to ignore the warning, though I don't know if we'll ever know for sure whether that's true.

Can anyone state the official goal of the war in Afghanistan, quoted from an official in a position of responsibility, stated for public consumption? The last thing I remember hearing is about how it's for the well-being of Afghans - particularly Afghan women - because if the coalition in general departs, and the U.S. in specific, then blood will run in the streets.

That these claims can be made when the Afghans don't want us there, when actual Afghan women's organizations want us all out because we're making things worse, not better... That these claims can be made while our side sends out murder squads both official (Task Force 373) and unofficial (this Stryker brigade)... Well. Hypocrisy ain't just for the Greeks, you know. Sooner or later, we're going to have to face the possibility that, as much as any conflict can have good guys and bad guys, we may just be on the side of the bad.

Ironically, once upon a time, I was a supporter of the war in Afghanistan. I'm not sure exactly when I changed my mind on the subject, but I'm sure it was related to something like this.

Blood, Lies, and Wikileaks

Unless you've been actively avoiding the topic, most Westerners should be aware of the existence of Wikileaks by now; this is the internet media organization that's been responsible for some really astonishing leaks of government and corporate documents and news (much of which related to government and corporate malfeasance). Some of it's been so impressive that they won the Amnesty International 2009 Media Award. Anyway, some time ago Wikileaks released 77,000 classified U.S. Military documents they'd managed to get ahold of. They had 92,000, but withheld 15,000 of them which they felt would put people at undue risk based on the contents and/or classifications attached to those documents.

The end result is a pretty bleak picture of what's going on over there.

Of course, shortly after the leak went live - which was done partnered with Der Spiegel, the New York Times, and the Guardian - the media narrative has become all about how Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange, now has blood on his hands because the documents released included non-redacted names of informants.

I'll admit, this is regrettable. Wikileaks, to their credit, used the NYT as a go-between with the Department of Defence to get help in redacting sensitive names found in the documents, but the Department of Defence refused. Wikileaks is an organization with all of five employees - they didn't have the manpower to do it themselves. This meant they had a choice: go forward and get the information out there, or sit on it.

Some organizations would have sat on it, denying the public its right to know the sort of things being done in their name. That's not really how Wikileaks rolls, though, so they released the documents. Go to the Wikileaks.org website if you want to take a peek.

But that's all background - this is all old news. So, why am I talking about this now, rather than when it was all fresh?

Because this article at Newsweek, about a surge in death threats and violence in the wake of the Afganistan documents leak, is pissing me off. Allow me to explain why.

This narrative much of the media is running with is based on what is basically fabrication. That newsweek article? It's based entirely on a twisted version of this news feed, which points out that the tribal elder who was killed received no death threats, no one has claimed responsibility for his killing, and was never named in the Wikileaks documents anyway. In fact, to date no one has been able to point to a single death or act of violence directly attributable to the leak. It's all hypothetical, though you can bet that if it weren't there'd be somebody at the White House crowing about it as loud as they could.

If a surge in violence is occurring in Afganistan in the wake of the Wikileaks thing - which, based on the contents of the documents, is a very suspect idea since those documents suggest that the surge of violence has been growing for years - then it's simply based on the fact that the media reported that some people in Afganistan have been working with coalition forces as informants. Which means that it doesn't matter one whit if you redact the names - people are going to be targeted for being "suspected informants" anyway. (But then that's what's been happening all along, isn't it?) So this admonishment of Wikileaks and Julian Assange, when you wipe away all the crap, becomes less "You should have redacted the names" and more "You shouldn't let the public know about things!"



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These accusations sound stunningly familiar, in fact. It's the same sort of shpiel that's been thrown out since this whole War on (Some) Terror started. Stop me if you've heard these before:

Are you an anti-war protester? Then you're hurting the troops! You must love terrorists!

Are you questioning the bombing of Baghdad? Saddam gassed his own people! How can you support that monster!

You want torturers and people who imprison others without trial brought to task and made to answer for their actions? You must hate freedom!

You're shedding light on the failure of U.S./Coalition military policy, and the frequency with which civilians are murdered collateral damaged? You've got blood on your hands!

Classification of information is abused by governments as a matter of course, and really much of the modern media just sort of rolls over and plays dead for the powers-that-be. I'm honestly not sure if this wasn't always the case - I'd like to think there was once a time when official news outlets were on a noble quest for the truth, and certainly there seems to have been a time when they were more powerful than they are now, but I suspect that in truth this golden age of news agencies never truly existed. Still, the internet and the global society that it's helping facilitate, baby step by baby step, is a pretty powerful potential source for information, as Wikileaks is fast proving.

In order for the democratic process to work, the public needs to be able to inform itself of what's being done in its name. This goes not just for the U.S., but for every citizen of every coalition nation - a group that includes me. It's tremendously regrettable if anyone gets hurt as a result of this leak - and I'm glad that no one has yet. But civilians are being slaughtered like it's going out of style in Afganistan, and my government owns a part of the responsibility for those actions by virtue of taking an active role in this bout of military adventurism. This is all being done in my name.

That means I have a right to know what's really going on there. I have a need to know, so I can act as a responsible citizen. Wikileaks is not perfect, but it helps fulfil that need, and any accusations by Coalition government bodies of its founder having "blood on his hands" is, at best, disingenuous. It's classic beam vs. mote territory, really.

Landmark Charter Case

It took almost eight years for the case to make its way through our court system, but in the end the precedent has been set in the Supreme Court of Canada regarding the denial of Alan Ward's rights. As the article at the CBC says:

The ruling means that people whose rights have been infringed can seek damages even if they suffered no actual loss and even if the authorities acted in good faith.

So, score one for the good guys. Luckily, the denial of citizens' rights by state authorities is incredibly rare here, so it's doubtful this precedent will ever really apply to any other cases.

Harper, Statistics, and the Left-Wing Bias of Reality

By now, most anyone who reads my blog has probably heard that Harper recently launched his latest salvo in his party's war on facts and knowledge. If not, you can read all about it in that left-wing rag, the Globe and Mail. Basically, Harper wants to scrap the long-form compulsory census and replace it with a voluntary form. But to make up for the fact that it's voluntary, he'll be mailing the census forms to many more households than previous, so that the whole thing is 30 million dollars more expensive!

That's fiscal responsibility for you. And why did he scrap the long form? Privacy complaints, goes the claim.

Guess how many complaints were made over the census in the past decade?

Go on, guess.

The answer is three.

Why am I talking about this? Well, a recent disastrous internal town hall meeting brought it into my mind. During this internal town hall, a chief statistician seems to be gearing up to resign in protest over these changes. His is just the latest voice being added in protest of this move, a chorus that indicates a potential Fed-Province battle on the horizon, with the media and scholastic circles siding firmly on the side of the provinces.

Will this finally be the straw that breaks the back of the Canadian voting populace? Will we finally vote out this evil prick? Hope springs eternal.

This is, of course, part of a pattern on Harper's part - he's long been antagonistic towards StatsCan. Now, Harper's supposed to be savvy and, to be fair, he's pretty good at twisting the political process to his own ends. In a gaming group he'd be what's called a Rules Lawyering Jerk. Everything he does may technically be within the lines, but only as much as does the "I'm Not Touching You!" game that children play in the back seat of the car. Allow me a visual aid.



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But this is a bad move. It's an obvious bad move - he had to have been aware of the chances that this could play very poorly with pretty much everyone. So, why?

The answer is ideology. The Tories are, more than any other party, driven by ideology, and rather than look at reality and allow their ideology to conform to known facts, they blaze on with their ideologically pure agenda and demand reality conform to them. It's pretty much classic neo-con, an art perfected during Bush's tenure south of the border. Anytime the Tories seek to introduce some terrible bit of legislation that directly contradicts what expert research says works, they'll come back with some rejoinder about how they couldn't give a wet fart about what some ivory tower intellectuals think. (E.g., gun registry, pensions, nuclear safety, global warming, environmental science, &c.) Still, every time they do this, it costs them.

So, they gut the census. They can't do away with it entirely, of course - that would require a vote which they'd inevitably lose. But Harper can make these changes unilaterally - it's in his power to do so - and that will effectively ruin whatever benefits the census provides, as any good statistician will tell you. Hell, anyone who's taken any statistics course whatsoever, who has even a passing familiarity with how statistics works will be able to tell you of how little value a purely voluntary census would be. Selection bias, anyone? And it even costs more! But money well spent to remove the opposition's ability to point at solid research and say "The world doesn't work the way you want it to."

Sometimes I think about the adage "you get the government you deserve," and I despair.

EDIT: Seems that Sheikh is no longer merely considering resigning... He's actually gone through with it, as reported here.

Harper's a Liar? Say it aint so!

This one flew completely under my radar, but apparently Harper's changed the rules regarding drilling of the East Coast, so that drilling companies no longer have to have a back-up plan in place to drill a relief well in the event of a blow-out.

You know, the sort of plan that would have prevented what's going on in the Gulf of Mexico right now. That's a small story, not making many headlines, but maybe you've heard of it?

That's some commitment to ideology. Particularly given it's exactly what he promised he wouldn't do just a month before.

What a douchenozzle. What is it with guys named Steve, anyway?

In other news, this guy's building a fusion reactor in his basement. Which is pretty cool.

Those Merger Rumours

So, as Mordaith pointed out to me, there are persistent rumours floating about regarding a Liberal-NDP merger - despite both parties' best efforts to quash such rumours. This idea is being floated simply to defeat the next Harper government (a worthy goal, make no mistake)... That is, not because the parties have a lot of common ground in terms of policy (they don't), but because they oppose so much of the PC agenda.

This is a terrible idea, of course, and not only because giving voters less choice is usually a bad thing, nor simply because without the NDP Canada will lose its only true left-wing party. No, besides those reasons, it's a bad idea because, as DemocraticSPACE points out, these parties would better spend their energy elsewhere:

Single-party federal majorities are becoming a thing of the past. No single party is truly national. We have a party whose support is largely rural and suburban (Conservatives), a party whose support is largely urban (Liberals), a party whose support is largely in heavily unionized areas (NDP), and a party whose support is in Quebec (Bloc). I don’t see this fundamentally changing any time soon. These are natural tendencies, given different shared interests.

And Canada has been living with a minority government for six years already. We’ve been operating in a situation where one party has to count on the support of another on an issue-by-issue basis. That would be fine if not for our voting system, which is the very thing that creates uncertainty and instability. Why? Because minute shifts in public sentiment can reward one party with a bounty of seats won by narrow margins. So we see endless games on Parliament Hill. A better (more stable) situation instead of perpetual minorities governments and political charades would be stable two-party coalitions, which would be the most common result of a more proportional voting system.

Head over to DemocraticSPACE for the full article. It's worth the read.

CCER

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You may or may not be aware, but very soon copyright laws in Canada - particularly as it pertains to the internet and electronic media in general - will be getting an overhaul.

It won't be a good overhaul. In fact, it will be an overhaul that flies in the face of what Canadians said they wanted during the consultation process, and goes against the advice of a number of very prominent Copyright experts.

You can learn more at the Canadian Coalition for Electronic Rights website. You can also go there and take the two or three minutes it takes to use their fancy web gadget to send an e-mail to your MP to voice your protest. Really, it's super-easy to do, and it's important. So please go do it.

Wikileaks Founder Detained while Abroad

Glenn Greenwald has the story over at salon.com.

Wikileaks is, in my opinion, one of the most important developments on the internet pretty much since ever. It's certainly a lot more important than, say, Youtube - though obviously not nearly as ubiquitous. It provides a commodity that is increasingly scarce in this age of overinformation: Truth.

So this doesn't surprise me in the least. In fact, it's not the first time a Wikileak volunteer has been harassed by a government agency. I hope that Julian Assange doesn't let this intimidation stop him from continuing his work on the site, though he may wish to adopt a more decentralized management scheme from here on out.

Given just how beloved our own home-grown fraudster is around these parts, somehow I suspect that Conrad Black's support of Sarah Thompson in Toronto's upcoming mayoral race isn't doing her any favours.

In fact, if I were any more paranoid, I'd also suspect that Conrad Black knows this, and is backing her simply to ensure she doesn't get elected. But I'm not that paranoid; I think Black's just a touch delusional, shall we say, about his public image.