Wikileaks lifts fig leaves

The sub rosa quid pro quo character that marks the relationships between MENA monarchies and the succession of the colonial British and imperialist US hegemons is in massive flux currently, thanks to that darn pesky civil society uprising that barely notices borders in the Middle East and North Africa. All parties are in Full Scramble mode, looking for duct tape to fix broken axles and aspirin for organ failure. Deals are proposed and rejected, made and reviewed, and nothing is steady. For the people who have suffered under these nested layers of robber barons, only major reform will prevent more revolutions, and the faces of despots will almost certainly be removed. The very same is true for the outliers who have been hostile to the US but oppressive to their own people. The Arab world is rightfully rejecting the likes of US puppet Hosni Mubarak as it also shakes off fake freedom fighters like Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. Those band aid bargains, thrown like golden apples at the justifiably enraged crowds, may produce momentary hesitation in reform and revolution, but a great deal will be required to produce eventual stability.

An agreement to settle a conflict may put the fire out for good, but too often it only suppresses the flames and leaves smoldering ashes that later burst into flames. An agreement may contribute to the conflict’s gradual constructive transformation, resulting in a stable and equitable relationship between former enemies. On the other hand, the settlement may turn out to be only a pause in a protracted destructive struggle (Kriesberg, 2007, p. 294).

To begin to understand the long overlord relationships in the region, and thus the long simmering and deepening resentments of the people, we can look to the contrails of the British dominance and then the replacement of American influence saturation. In Bahrain, for instance, the intelligence services were run for decades by a Brit, Col. Ian Henderson, a former British colonial police officer. Of course, Bahrainis knew this, and they knew in principle that the US had effectively taken over that role, but when Wikileaks revealed US diplomatic cables that proved that the current Bahraini head of intelligence, "Khalifa bin Abdullah al-Khalifa, another member of the ruling Sunni royal family, 'unabashedly positions his relationship with the U.S. intelligence community above all others,'" the Shia majority knows by the proven evidence that the oppression they experience is a product of the US. The US 5th Fleet bases in Bahrain and the Pentagon has been the military provider and supplier to the royal Sunni family's military.

These long standing relationships have essentially funded state terror against civil society in all the leftover monarchies propped up by the US. Monarchies are easier to corrupt and control than are messy and shifting democracies, so the US, seeking control over the oil region, has always favored monarchies over democracies in the MENA, whether Arab or Persian, all the while trumpeting the false message that we are everywhere with our military to defend and promote democracy. Democracy is the last thing the US has wanted in that region and is now what the people will finally take, using the only power the militaries cannot defeat, civil society that is determined to be free.

References
Kriesberg, L. (2007). Constructive conflicts: From escalation to resolution. Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Driven into the clammy embrace

As Wikileaks is hounded and harassed by the various nefarious agents from the war system--the MilitaryIndustrialGovernment, that is--they are being shoved harder into the big hairy bear's huggy paws. Since the US government has successfully pressured Visa and Mastercard to stop processing donations to keep Wikileaks afloat, the Russians have been contemplating taking over that role with a National Payment Card System.

Of course if that happens we'll see the McCarthyites re-emerging like 1950s stiff-legged zombies justifying even more attacks on Wikileaks for being affiliated with those dirty Russkies. This Manichean Night of the Living Dead deja view of conflict will be an interesting moment for Wikileaks if it occurs. It's a minefield and we'll see who steps where and what explodes.

Luckily, Wikileaks is not accused of violence, just espionage. Also fortunately, there is no Wikistan where the citizens can be attacked by an imperial military. But flirting with Russian government money handling is a fraught problem too. This will probably turn more Americans (not to mention Estonians, Finlanders, Magyars and many others trampled or threatened by Russians over the years) against Wikileaks. Hey, it's a well-trampled path.

Often times a stance against an American corporation or two would justify overthrowing entire governments--just check in with Guatemalans, Iranians, Congolese, Chileans and many others. Combine that with any dalliance with Russians and the game was over. Patrice Lumumba was driven into the Soviet's arms by the Belgian/US aggression against his popular election and independent Congo spirit in 1960. This justified escalation, assassination and overthrow. That story is so familiar.

So, as tough as it may be, I hope Wikileaks is able to figure out another way to keep alive, financially. Maybe Michael Moore could take a page from the Karzai story and just deliver big bags of cash. Maybe we could start using snail mail and personal checks. How ironic is all this? The Internet is the fortress of Wikileaks investigative power and it's also the chink in the armor.

Like any serious and effective challenge to the war machine, Wikileaks is under attack. Like they did with investigative data gathering and dissemination, I hope they devise new systems of staying alive without getting drawn toward the flypaper of major power rivalry. The major power they appeal to and need to continue to develop is People Power, not just different nation-state power with a musty Cold War stench. I think they know this. I hope we can rise to help them.

Wikileaks protected?

With Sarah "Shoot Him on Sight" Palin and Joe "Single Bullet" Lieberman ranting publicly about Julian Assange and his dangerous activities, many Americans have been convinced that Assange is guilty of something, so arrest him if you can't actually assassinate him, get him to Guantanamo or Egypt or Diego Garcia and at least torture him for a bit.

The Organization of American States, on the other hand, has soberly examined this question and is offering a rapporteurs' write-up of the approach that civilized people and nations should ethically take. They did the research into human rights law, journalistic ethics, and freedom of expression and specifically condemned the US and Canadian elected officials who have been illegally, immorally, and irresponsibly calling for extrajudicial harm to Julian Assange. The OAS language is clear:

"Calls by public officials for illegitimate retributive action are not acceptable."

In the end, we all live in democracies if we understand the latent power of civil society, and we have agency to vote. We can vote these killers out of power whether we live in Ludefiskistan or the Talib caves. We vote with our purchases, we vote with our submission or our resistance, we vote with our voices and we vote with our lives. It is vastly easier when we live in a political democracy, but it is possible even the most oppressive Taliban-controlled villages. We risk far less in the US, and so our excuses for not using our far greater human agency are flimsy. Julian Assange used his powers for the common good and knew he would likely be a target. What is amazing is that the American public is so easily convinced that exposing bad conduct, criminal conduct, by our military and by our elected officials, is the problem, not the conduct itself. Sarah Palin shoots to kill; when will we notice?

We are in a fight for our democracy and we will help or hurt all other democracies as well, depending upon the way we wage this fight and upon the outcome.

Frances Moore Lappé (2006) begins her book, Democracy’s edge: Choosing to save our country by bringing democracy to life, this way:

“Contemporary social critics see America divided—left versus right, conservative versus liberal, religious versus secular. I disagree and even find these framings destructive. They deflect us from the most critical and perhaps the only division we have to worry about. It is that between those who believe in democracy—honest dialogue, basic fairness, mutual respect, inclusivity, and reciprocal responsibilities—and those who do not. In the latter category are those willing to put ends over means, violating these core principles in pursuit of an ultimate goal” (p. 3).

Assange is not a perfect person, but unlike Palin, Lieberman, Huckabee and other degenerates, he does not call for people to die. Instead, he releases evidence that shows murders done by our military, terrorist acts that are done in our names because our military represents each of us in a democracy.

Footage of a civilian just walking by an abandoned building on 12 July 2007 that has been targeted by the US military, and that military choosing to shoot a rocket into the building at that second, rather that humanely wait for a minute or two until the man was safely down the street, this is footage of a war crime, a crime against humanity, a crime done in the name of every US voter and taxpayer. It is part of the longer wikileaks video. The US killing civilians is nothing new at all, sadly, but callously and intentionally choosing to kill a man who just happened to be walking by when they could have waited to engage in a military strike instead of a war crime is just so blatant, so lawless, and yet Assange is the problem, right?

If we allow Assange to be the bad guy--and he never had a role in planning any of the crimes, as did Ellsberg in the Pentagon Papers release, after all--we are seeing the serious erosion of our democracy. Is this our fate, our future? This is all in our hands. Each of us makes our voices heard or we are silent and give our tacit consent. Each of us pays our taxes quietly or we resist, even if only a protest publicly as we pay, since they collect it one way or another at virtual gunpoint.

While Assange is no pacifist, neither has he committed any violent act. He has stolen nothing--all Wikileaks came to him, all the whistleblowing was done by people who sought a way to blow the cover off these misdeeds. If we allow the imprisonment of them, from Manning to Assange, we lose more vitality from our disintegrating democracy. Where are we when the chips are down? It's up to us.

References
Lappé, Frances Moore (2006). Democracy’s edge: Choosing to save our country by bringing democracy to life. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Nonviolence, transparency and the hatred for Wikileaks

Can we gain a bit of rational perspective on the ravening, howling bloodlust of those who have decided that Julian Assange is obviously the problem? Jeffrey Toobin, a legal analyst and journalist I've relied on for years to decipher and rationally explain the law has been bitten by one of the rabid corporado wolves and has in turn joined the pack, saying about Assange that, "he is well beyond sympathy from anyone I'm aware of."

Yoo-hoo! Jeffrey! Be aware of lots of us!

I don't expect Jeffrey Toobin will ever be aware of me, but I hope he's now aware of the computer experts who are punishing the corporations who have joined the effort to shut down Wikileaks. Amazon, Mastercard, Visa, Paypal and other corporations with whom Wikileaks has done business and who have ended their services to Wikileaks have in turn been under cyberattack from defenders of democracy.

Democracy? How is a cyberattack on Visa a defense of democracy?

Julian Assange and those who have gathered secret government and corporate documents and released them to media outlets (and please bear in mind that Wikileaks has not released much at all beyond that which the corporate media itself has released) are helping make government more transparent and, one might hope, more accountable. When we learn about the completely illegal conduct of the US military that ought to help us decide to rein them in. Instead, the government vilifies the messenger, Wikileaks and the founder, Julian Assange. When Assange is asked about the legitimacy of a US Secretary of State giving illegal orders and he responds, well, if she did then she should resign, why is that out of order?

Revealing information about misconduct is now espionage, according to many. We expect this authoritarianism from the rightwing pundits and politicians, but as Tom Hayden points out, the pack is growing to include more and more erstwhile liberals.

Gunning for the messenger is hardly a brave or rational approach. Let's slow down, actually investigate these revelations, and decide if the public has a right to learn about public policy. Many of us are so weary of the patriarchal militarism that we cannot and should not have a democracy because we are not in authority and we have no need to know nor right to know and, to complete the tautology, "If you knew what they knew, you'd understand why they need to do what they are doing."

Ultimately, Wikileaks goes to the heart of why violence is undemocratic. Violence breeds secrecy, violence indeed mandates secrecy, and nonviolence, which is based on transparency, is far more healthy for democracy. Indeed, nonviolence and democracy are effectively twinned and are coevolving. Sadly, violence and secrecy have long coevolved and we see it manifesting in the lies about Wikileaks that refuse to die, even when exposed again and again, what Glenn Greenwald calls zombie lies. Wikileaks makes these documents available to corporate media, corporate media publishes some of them, and corporate media is immune to attack, yet Assange is targeted.

There are so many new pieces of the truth that it will take a good while to sort it all out. At least let's thank Julian Assange for starting to peel away some of the veils and knock down some of the walls, and let's defend him.

Red Notice: Dick Cheney

Julian Assange embarrassed the US government, exposed the corruption and illegal violence in layer after layer of the war system, and peeled away the layers of obfuscation shielding some of the unsavory relationships amongst those who rule us.

That plus sex without a condom will get you a Red Notice from Interpol, the new laughingstock of law enforcement worldwide. They can't find Joseph Kony, who has abducted more than

30,000 children and displaced more than 1.6 million Ugandans, but since Kony has 60 "wives" and at least 42 children I would imagine it's safe to bet he has sex without a condom, so if Interpol would add that last charge they might be able to successfully conclude their long search.

Dick Cheney never used a condom when he raped Iraq and screwed the American people, so maybe Interpol could see about finding the architect of an illegal invasion that slaughtered thousands of civilians and ripped off more than $1.5 trillion from the US taxpayer.

The legions of US politicians who went along with Cheney and Bush are culpable too. These are elected officials who voted in favor of an invasion that they knew was illegal--the UN and IAEA were both clear that there were no WMD in Iraq and Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein loathed each other. Now they are pouncing on Wikileaks and on Assange, with Joe Lieberman muscling influence to force Amazon to yank server support and Hilary Clinton sending out edicts forbidding State Department staff from looking at the Wikileaks website even in their own homes.

Sigh. Julian Assange has been doing the investigative yeoman's work for the major media of the world for a while now, providing primary source material including video of US military murdering unarmed journalists and shooting children. He should get a Nobel, a Pulitzer, a Congressional Medal of Freedom, and an Academy Award. He should certainly have the gratitude of the media, who got this all for free when they failed to turn up much at all with their for-profit operations.

While the mainstream media has parroted the fiction of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and other lethal liars for a long time, it would be overtaxing our imagination and suspension of disbelief to even attempt to write fiction this bizarre.

We owe Assange a great debt and we owe the world some apologies and reparations for the real, actual, lethal and costly crimes he has uncovered.

How to neutralize Wikileaks

The US government is suffering from a rash of Wikileaks embarrassment, with many of our most unsavory bad manners revealed for the whole world to see. The US mainstream media has joined the howling mob of corporate and political forces eager to lock up Julian Assange or even kidnap him and render him over to the torture fiends in Hosni Mubarak's basement. What should we do about this if we like the idea of nonviolence and good government but not the idea of a clumsy, red-faced America barging around on everyone's bad side all the time?

The little book Getting to Yes with its method of principled negotiation would help us strategize a way forward, I believe. We could think about that method, which eschews the hard edged positional stance all dug in like we see Hillary Clinton, and it also rejects the abject surrender of accommodation. Instead, advises negotiators Roger Fisher, Bill Ury and Bruce Patton, let's assess this conflict and find a way out of it so that everyone gets quite a bit of what they want.

What if a good mediator could arrange for frank and safe talks with Assange? What would he want? What do we want? Some possible outcomes from the two sides:

• Good government
• Secure communication
• Nonviolence
• Enhanced security for the American people
• Enhanced security for all people
• An end to war
• An end to corruption
• Cessation of embarrassing leaks

Why would any of this be a problem for our government? Why would any of this be a problem for Julian Assange? There are many possible outcome paths that would meet all these conditions and gain all these results. The easiest would be for us to hire Assange and clear him to access all government and corporate records and ferret out corruption so that we could quietly fix it before it became embarrassing. Yes, some of it might be so egregious that it would require public announcements of apology and policy change. For example, shooting unarmed journalists should not be swept under the rug. We should be grateful to Assange for uncovering this and we should instantly release Bradley Manning with a letter of commendation, as we compensate the families of the murdered newsgatherers and other Iraqis. We should regard this as a prompt to pull out of Iraq completely and simply offer aid through the UN, Mercy Corps and other agencies with zero US military presence.

Assange is giving us the chance to reinvigorate our democracy and reset our relationships in the world. Let us get to yes and work with him. His efforts are heroic and helpful. Why do we wish to make enemies of someone who is trying to help us become a better nation? He is acting in the interests of truth and transparency, two of the strongest pillars of real democracy. If our diplomats can't handle revelations calling Putin and Medvedev 'Batman and Robin,' tough. The real services of Wikileaks are way past that minor silliness and into the basics of good governance and integrity.

Thank you, Julian Assange.

Homeschooled democracy: Lifting the veils

Raised by a hippie on an island off another island...that is the story of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Homeschooled by a mother who was determined to raise a freethinker, Assange is now the bane and torment of the war system East and West, revealing documents that Chinese, Somali, US, and other warlords wish had remained private. He even cracked and displayed emails from Sarah Palin's yahoo account. Not much there worth knowing, but his forays into the veiled worlds of those who profit from other people's misery or commit bloody acts and then try to euphemize or otherwise justify or obscure those acts--those illuminating actions by Assange have rocked our world.

He is a creature of a peripatetic paranoid mother--justifiable fear of a criminally abusive former husband made them secretive and mobile--Assange has carried that to a new place, or rather, various places. He does not even own a home, couch surfing, hoteling, safehousing with his volunteers in Reykjavik or who-knows-where. His computer world is so protected that he claims that in order for the Pentagon or anyone else to take down his website they would have to basically 'dismantle the Internet.' And if they did, it's all backed up in various countries with various volunteer geeks so 'noided-out that they only go by letters, not even names. Behind them are others holding materials that Assange himself could not find, in order to protect it from him if something happens to him.

Is all this secrecy really nonviolent? What about all the calls in all the literature on nonviolence for transparency? And how can secrecy protect democracy when we in the peace movement critique that secrecy so much, since it leads to unwanted weapons programs and loss of civil rights?

These are tough questions for Assange and for us. As a veteran of the Plowshares movement--I've gone out twice to personally, by hand tool, dismantle a portion of the US thermonuclear command structure--I can say that some secrecy is necessary in order to deal with the military, but that the least is the best. And ultimately, that is what Assange is doing--using secrecy to crack secrets in order to open them to all of us so that we can think critically about the organization we fund to kill others, our military. Assange is helping us open the world of the military operations to the light of day, so that we can judge for ourselves.

He judges too, but gives us the unvarnished documents, the film from the attack helicopter, the memos and confidential reports that show that the US is funding the Taliban and is getting the very rocket-propelled grenades and even surface-to-air shoulder-launched missiles into the hands of Taliban fighters who then use them against US helicopters and other military targets. We finally see that which has been shrouded in a need-to-know world that has clearly misappropriated your paycheck to kill civilians and US troops, two populations we are supposed to care about.

While it may seem like a paradox that Assange must act with profound secrecy in order to open the secrets we need to know as an informed electorate, the difference is that Assange doesn't shoot people and doesn't violate human rights. Might his leaks someday hurt someone indirectly, by giving information to those who wish harm on US troops or intelligence agents who have somehow been outed by Assange? That is possible, but that is nowhere near the same as performing acts of violence himself. That charge is much like blaming someone for the theft of her car because she forgot the keys in it for a few minutes. The blame lies with the thief. The caution lies with the forgetful driver, not the blame. Assange needs to be cautious and he is. He meticulously scrubs his documents and videos of all tags so that his sources are protected (of course, they cannot be protected from their own leaking if, like Bradley Manning, they start claiming credit).

So thank you, Julian. You have opened the curtain on some ugly scenes, and what you've done has eroded support for war, which is purely to the good. Your track record over the years shows you have never done any hacking for personal gain and, speaking for peace loving people, I say thank you.

Nested truths, cascading problems

"House Approves Money for Wars, but Rift Deepens, By ELISABETH BUMILLER and CARL HULSE, Published: July 27, 2010
WASHINGTON — The House of Representatives agreed on Tuesday to provide $59 billion to continue financing America’s two wars, but the vote showed deepening divisions and anxiety among Democrats over the course of the nearly nine-year-old conflict in Afghanistan."
--New York Times, 28 2010

We see at least five basic truths emerging from the Afiascostan situation.

One, Barack Obama baldly lied to us when he promised in his campaign that the days of funding wars via supplemental spending bills--acting as though an ongoing war were suddenly an unpredictable emergency--those days were done. Just elect me, he promised, and you'll never see that bait-and-switch again. We got gamed. This supplemental was voted in at his personal request.

Two, the war president and his pushbutton Senate and House war allies are committed to absolutely draining the American taxpayer of all lootable funds. All the idiot lights on the American societal dashboard are flashing red--unemployment is worsening, housing is sliding, BP has befouled the Gulf of Mexico for the next century, militarism has penetrated even the grade schools of our coarsening country with Starbase, we are wondering where our next energy meal is coming from--and yet these federal elected 'leaders' have just conspired to continue this incredible self-inflicted hemorrhage.

Three, this H.R. 4899 desanguination of both your paycheck and the social services available to you and yours is done despite a nearly Ellsbergian whistleblow on the war with the Wikileaks release of 91,000 documents that conclusively prove American war crimes in the conduct of the war. This corpus of open secret disclosures effectively shows yet again that all the US military is ultimately doing there is aiding al-Qa'ida and Taliban and other Islamist recruiting around the world.

Four, applying one bit of commonsense and human decency to this would result in the US ending its armed occupation of Afghanistan and launching a far less expensive rebuilding program via the UN. This would serve to dry up motivation to shoot, bomb, kidnap, stab and otherwise attack Americans. This cannot be done at gunpoint. Rebuilding America's image will be done by unarmed and unguarded people giving help, never by armed troops. We will do this with nonviolence--gasp!--or it will never be done. Never.

Five, the Republicans will fight tooth and nail against every single thing Obama might try to do for people on the ground. Their unity is mindlessly complete, forming a solid phalanx across access to help for the unemployed, the sick, those needing education, and simple household need for poor people. But give them a chance to vote more money for war and the bipartisan roses suddenly bloom, reddened by the blood of war victims on all sides and by the lifesblood of our culture and society. The Ds and Rs probably couldn't agree on whether the sun rises in the east, but they can find solidarity in war spending. A Reuters-Ipsos poll this week shows the Democrats-in-the-headlights will pay heavily for this next November 2.

At some point the US will downsize,

draw in its horns from its military forward power projection wars and bases, and assume a more normal stature amongst the world nations. The only question is, will the US be worth saving at that point or will we continue this literal insanity straight over the cliff? All signals are flashing, the klaxons are blaring, and somehow the country seems to be looking only at their entertainment centers for the next chapter in the Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton NewsShow. Militarism and the addiction to amusement while wearing Bad News Cancellation Headphones is our recipe for a long, slow, painful demise. We wonder if and when more might notice?