Why Haven't I Heard About Rap News Before?

Because guys.  Seriously, guys.  This shit is awesome, guys.



Catchy, funny, informative, and relevant.  I think I'm in love.

Double Standards

Paypal: "We cannot in good conscience support the whistleblower site Wikileaks. But the KKK is fine in our books."
Visa, Mastercard: "We concur. The poor governments of the world need protecting, but what's a few lynchings between friends?"

I know satire's been dead for a while now, but damn.

Harper Advisor Calls for Assange's Assassination

Why are conservatives so hateful of transparency that they'd rather see people murdered than know more about what world governments get up to when they think the plebs aren't watching?

Mr. Flanagan, it's not "being manly" to call for such. It's being so incredibly insecure that you can't face the idea of an independent media revealing the truth.

Either that, or it's having a tremendously small penis and needing to call for assassinations on public television to compensate. But I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt, here.

UPDATE: I really have to wonder... All those people (some of whom are in powerful positions in the media) calling for Assange's death, what was their stance on the fatwa against Salman Rushdie? Or are such calls okay when it's a white guy making them?

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.

Collateral Murder revisited

You might remember the whole Wikileaks release of the Apache killings of several reporters and unarmed Iraqi civilians back in April.

Well, Evan McCord was one of the soldiers on the ground who was on the scene, and a while ago he gave a speech about the events of that day.  You can watch it here.  It's...  uncomfortable to watch and listen to, almost as much as watching the original footage...  But he has important things to say, so I recommend giving it a watch when you have the time.

At the very least, his courage in speaking out should be commended.

The Importance of Wikileaks

There's a book titled "Claim of Privilege" by Barry Siegel. Not too hard to find. Here's the Publishers Weekly write-up, as quoted on the Amazon dot com:

In 1948, three civilian engineers died in the crash of an air force B-29 bomber that was testing a missile guidance system; in their widows' lawsuit, the Supreme Court upheld the air force's refusal to divulge accident reports that it claimed held military secrets. But when the declassified reports surfaced decades later, the only sensitive information in them involved the chronic tendency of B-29 engines to catch fire, egregious lapses in maintenance and safety procedures, and gross pilot error. Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Siegel (Shades of Gray) ably recounts the case, a scandal and cover-up with grave constitutional implications. The 1953 Supreme Court decision gave the executive branch sweeping authority to conceal information under national security claims without judicial review, a precedent confirmed when the Court refused to reopen the case in 2003. (The author notes the influence of Cold War anxieties and the 9/11 attacks in these rulings.) Siegel insists on decorating the story with often extraneous human-interest profiles of everyone involved. But his is an engrossing exposition of the facts and legal issues in the case, which produced a disturbing legacy of government secrecy and misconduct still very much alive. (June)

This is just one example of gross mismanagement of justice in the name of "national security." There are many others, both before and since, and it wouldn't take very long to drudge up a few. Governments want the people over which they rule to trust and support them; whether they're a democracy or a totalitarian regime, this remains true. This is why it's so important for societies to do exactly the opposite - question at every turn, demand transparency and accountability, and make sure the things they do in your name are things with which you agree.

The media (or at least those portions of the media which are stuck suckling at the U.S. Government's tit, which is most of them) would have you believe that the latest batch of documents released by Wikileaks - which, I'd agree, was released in a careless manner - did nothing but put people in danger. "There is nothing new to be found in these documents," goes the refrain, "anyone who's been paying attention already knew all this stuff."

There's some truth to this statement, though it makes one wonder why most of this was classified in the first place.

It's certainly true that it's been a poorly-kept secret at best that Coalition forces have been utilizing teams of assassins to target high-profile insurgent leaders; this is something that's been reported on before, though usually with a certain level of deniability on the part of Government spokespersons. But there are certain details that have emerged as a result of the leak that are rather eye-opening. As Prattap Chatterjee reports:

"Find, fix, finish, and follow-up" is the way the Pentagon describes the mission of secret military teams in Afghanistan which have been given a mandate to pursue alleged members of the Taliban or al-Qaeda wherever they may be found. Some call these “manhunting” operations and the units assigned to them “capture/kill” teams.

Whatever terminology you choose, the details of dozens of their specific operations -- and how they regularly went badly wrong -- have been revealed for the first time in the mass of secret U.S. military and intelligence documents published by the website Wikileaksin July to a storm of news coverage and official protest. Representing a form of U.S. covert warfare now on the rise, these teams regularly make more enemies than friends and undermine any goodwill created by U.S. reconstruction projects.

...

In more than 100 incident reports in the Wikileaks files, Task Force 373 is described as leading numerous “capture/kill” efforts, notably in Khost, Paktika, and Nangarhar provinces, all bordering the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of northern Pakistan. Some reportedly resulted in successful captures, while others led to the death of local police officers or even small children, causing angry villagers to protest and attack U.S.-led military forces.

The core information used here is from the diarydig website that catalogues and analyzes the Wikileaks documents. Very interesting/disturbing is the way that local leaders of reconstruction projects are forced to apologize to communities for the actions of these sorts of teams - the aid workers we put there are distrusted by the populace because they're seen as part of the same group. And really, why wouldn't they be? If my country was being occupied and my countrymen being killed on such a regular basis, I split hairs like that, either.

In fact, it gets worse than this. If you look through the data, there's only a single case where Task Force 373 successfully assassinated their target; every other incident involves friendly fire, killing afgan police, or a civilian massacre. That's one successful mission out of a hundred for a task force that's illegal by international law in the first place.

This isn't helping.

"We have an important job to do there," various Coalition governments assure us - my own government included. We do? What is it? We're not saving any lives, our very presence in Afganistan is causing far more harm than we could possible prevent... We're not fighting for equal rights for women, despite our claims to the contrary and terrible articles found in Time magazine; our presence there is actively making things worse because we tend to prop up and protect the very people who do these terrible things (despite our claims to the contrary). Initially, the coalition went in to dismantle the Taliban and get bin Laden. Well, okay. The first part's done, the second part can't be done anymore, at least not in Afganistan.

Now, what?

Supposedly, we're still there in an effort to rebuild Afganistan after the tremendous damage we've inflicted there.

So, what is it? Revenge? How many lives must end, how much blood must be spilt, before the West in general, and the U.S. in specific, has had its revenge on that part of the world for 9/11? It was nine years and over a million deaths ago.

Just how many Afgan and Iraq lives is a single U.S. life worth? Or, to put it more selfishly, how many Coalition soldiers' lives have to be wasted before we can admit that we're not helping, there's little point to staying, and we should just leave? Any chance we likely had to complete the mission (assuming the mission statements ever given in Afganistan actually had anything to do with truth) is probably gone.

So, why are we still there?

It's a damn good question, in my mind. And it's the sort of question that makes Wikileaks so important in this day and age, because as the media becomes more profit-driven, as cutbacks limit the media's ability to get at the unvarnished truth (if they were ever able to do so), the importance of finding an alternative for the public grows.

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!"



Uploaded with ImageShack.us

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.

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.