Democracy Lab is a wonderful publication -- if you haven't seen it, take a look. I set it up also to come into my mailbox once a week -- it's a great roundup of all the democracy struggles in the world, and they are indeed far-flung these days.
It's published by a thoughtful and serious journalist, Christian Caryl, who I first came across when he worked for a time at Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe. Now he's at the Legatum Institute, an organization I had in fact not heard of before, but which seems to be conservative or libertarian -- and that's to be welcomed in a world where the Foreign Policy discussion is dominated by "progressives". I was surprised that the FP ideologues even let an alternative take on social movements not rooted in Marxism appear on their pages, but perhaps they want to appear truly "bi-partisan" or "diverse".
So I was surprised when I saw on this otherwise excellent publication this recommended reading in the June 1st edition:
Writing for The Independent, Patrick Coburn offers an impassioned defense of Julian Assange.
Now, I get it that "recommended reading" doesn't mean "endorsement," just like "re-tweet" -- except we all know that it really does. You don't recommend pieces you think are wrong-headed. If you are really recommending various things from various points of view, you'd have several -- critics of Assange, of which there have been plenty lately in the British and Australian press, and not just this.
But to post it, and call it "impassioned" to give it a kind of celebratory elan, means one of two things: a summer intern was at the switchboard on this one, or the libertarians in fact think there's something good about Patrick Coburn's whitewash of Assange and WikiLeaks -- and that's disturbing.
Disturbing, but in fact common as I've found from various Facebook fights. Libertarians tend to unquestioningly bash the TSA as their favourite exemplar of government interference in our freedoms, and they are worried that SOPA or Assange's case could also have larger impacts on our liberties and tend to take the side of WikiLeaks.
I find this troubling refusal to look at the facts of these "progressive" causes unjustified, and the libertarian refusal to concede that freedom involves some protection of the liberal state and freedom from each other, too equally troubling. Some libertarians don't seem to believe in the abstraction of the "public good," or at least, have a very self-serving notion of it, and they also can't accept any form of government regulation in the name of that good, viewing it all as suspect; if they are more nuanced, they still "worry" that the government is going to overreach in the WikiLeaks case.
I don't. Stealing classified cables is a crime and rightly characterized as such; inciting others to hack and obtain them is also a crime.
We all get it that publishers of WikiLeaks should enjoy immunity from prosecution as a matter of the First Amendment.
But WikiLeaks itself is not a publisher; it's a source, as First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams and others have aptly put it. It's a source not disconnected from a political cause, but in fact, embodying the political cause of anarchist revolution.
And yeah, even anarcho-revolutionary freaks get freedom of expression rights, even if they call for the overthrow of evil imperial Amerika, we get that, too.
But it's a source without ethics, which incited the hacking; evidence suggests that Assange was not only in direct touch with Bradley Manning, but he incited the hackers of LulzSec to go after his enemies in Iceland including some originally in his own group, and therefore enjoys a proximity to criminal activity that is more than casual (some key LulzSec operatives have now been arrested for attacking government and business websites).
Just how related Assange is to the incitement of the actual hacking is, of course, the job of a trial to determine. The US may never pursue an extradition of Assange as they may not have a case -- after all, despite all the shrill victimologists bleating about the danger of Assange being extradited from Sweden if sent there to face questioning on sexual charges, the US didn't extradite him for all this time from England, which they could have done as they have an extradition treaty.
It's disturbing that this investigation has been underway nearly two years and so little is known about the US government's intentions in prosecution. The Manning trial has been postponed once again.
Defenders of Assange are quick to accentuate the early statements of some American politicians, to the effect that they wanted to try Assange or even assassinate him, as somehow indicative of that big scary thing they think prosecution of WikiLeaks will cause.
But the reality is that since Harold Koh's cease-and-desist letter from the legal department of the State Department, and since the early statements that WikiLeaks had caused harm by Hillary Clinton, very little has been said by any US official in real authority, as distinct from a congressman or candidate in election or conservative radio talk show host. So we don't know what they're going to do. Press reports that seemed to highlight findings that WikiLeaks really didn't do any harm were undone by later FBI evidence presented in the military's hearings in Manning's case showing that in fact there was a connection between Assange and Manning (about which Assange lied) and there was harm -- but this is debated endlessly. I saw this in Dublin in confronting Brigita Jonsdottir, the Icelandic MP who has championed WikiLeaks, at the Irish conference on Internet Freedom at the OSCE -- she even claimed that *if* anyone's privacy was compromised and they suffered harm, that was more than justified and overridden by the fact that the "war crimes" of the US now exposed.
The problem is that what they are exposing isn't a war crime, and is a tendentious piece of propaganda by anti-American anarchist movement that simply wants to stick it to the Man.
Patrick Cockburn, like his more prominent brother Alexander, has long been associated with leftwing causes and taking up the lefty perspective on issues. So naturally he backs Assange.
Discounting the pundits "frothing with rage" against Assange even in the lefty Guardian which was burned by the anarchist operation, Cockburn thinks there's a triumph here:
Ignored, in all this, is his achievement as founder of WikiLeaks in publishing US government cables giving people across the world insight into how their governments really behave. Such public knowledge is the core of democracy because voters must be accurately informed if they are to be able to chose representatives to carry out their wishes.
This is certainly tendentious, as it implies that Assange is for working within the bounds of representative democracy -- he isn't -- and it implies that voters aren't accurately informed merely because they don't have access to sensitive classified cables that diplomats write to do the jobs of dealing with not only allies, good and bad, but some of the world's worst tyrants and terrorists. There's nothing that came out in "Cablegate" that would ever warrant a claim that whistle-blower status should be enjoyed by those who casually dumped it into the wild, exposing the sources' names.
I've worked with these cables much more than most people in covering Central Asia, and written lots about them -- and those harmed by them, too. I know for a fact of several cases of people forced to flee countries, suffering harassment of themselves and their families, and damage to their careers merely because they legitimately and rightly went to the US Embassy with their concerns.
The chief reason we don't hear about harm to WikiLeaks sources is obvious: why would anyone want to FURTHER paint a target on their backs? The people I know who have been exposed are just hoping not to be noticed and that the cables mentioning them won't get more airplay than they do, so that more damage isn't caused. If you are now living under threat from an oppressive government over serving as a source to the US, why would you announce that fact?!
As I've often said, the critics on the left who scorn the notion of harm wouldn't be satisfied even if a dissident was found assassinated clutching a WikiLeaks cable in his bloody hands. Jonsdottir has illustrated that in spades by telling me that the compromise of those sources was a loss that had to be borne for the greater cause of exposing American "war crimes". I call this Bolshevism -- not only is it "ends justifies the means" thinking that always pertains to these radical movements, it's a lie -- there are no war crimes exposed.
Says Cockburn:
Some adopt the official line that "lives had been put in danger" by the leaks. This lobby began to fall silent in 2011 when Pentagon officials admitted, off the record, that they had no evidence that anybody had come to harm
But that's not exactly the story. What happened was the Washington Post had a source of some officials who claimed this, but we don't know that those officials in fact had all the relevant information or, as I've aptly pointed out, there really is an effective way to get all the people harmed by WikiLeaks to step forward and paint even brighter targets on their backs.
I don't know whether the lobby has "fallen silent" -- my hypothesis is this, that the government or agencies in the government are divided on this and are warring, and that supervisors have ruled that no official say anything at all about Wikileaks, on or off the record. Indeed, officials are absolutely tight-lipped on this and won't discuss anything with journalists or NGOs. I've gotten a few officials to very circumspectly admit that they know harm was done or to be willing to look at reports of harm, but they never say anything further and will never say anything further because clearly they are under strict rules to keep their mouths shut while this investigation is going on.
That's unfortunate, because the only way to win this war waged on the US by America's enemies is to be out there, day after day, providing the counter-arguments and evidence against the propaganda, patiently, repeatedly, firmly, persuasively. Rather than wimpily remaining silent, the US should be fighting against the idea that it's ok to cripple a liberal democratic state by criminal acts like hacking cables.
If there isn't a State Department official that can do this, there should be Washington think-tanks who do it. There aren't. That's because of the "progressive" and libertarian have formed an alliance on this which views the hypothetical damage to civil liberties a greater concern than the need to defend a liberal state's right to keep classified cables secret -- or more importantly, challenge those who claim they've exposed bad acts by the US that entitle them to "whistle-blower status". That's understandable, but they shouldn't recommend articles that deliberately falsify the record on the way to making their libertarian case.
Cockburn says falsely claims that there were in fact no armed men in the "Collateral Murder" incident. Here's what he writes:
All these critics, and readers who agree them, should first switch on YouTube and watch a 17-minute video film taken by the crew of an Apache helicopter over east Baghdad on 12 July 2007. It shows the helicopter crew machine-gunning to death people on the ground in the belief that they are all armed insurgents. In fact, I cannot see any arms and what in one case was identified as a gun turned out to be the camera of a young Reuters' photographer, Namir Noor-Eldeen, who was killed along with his driver, Saeed Chmagh. The video shows the helicopter coming in for a second attack on a van that had stopped to pick up the dead and wounded. The driver was killed and two children wounded. "Ha! Ha! I hit 'em," shouts one of the US crewmen triumphantly. "Look at those dead bastards."
Well, Cockburn should switch on The New Yorker. There, his pal Assange himself has this to say about his work of propaganda:
“In the first phase, you will see an attack that is based upon a mistake, but certainly a very careless mistake. In the second part, the attack is clearly murder, according to the definition of the average man. And in the third part you will see the killing of innocent civilians in the course of soldiers going after a legitimate target.”
Khatchadourian has more curiosity than Cockburn and interviewed Assange at length for this story, and got him on the record saying this:
“One of them has a weapon,” Assange said, peering at blurry footage of the men walking down the street. “See all those people standing out there.”
“And there is a guy with an RPG over his arm,” Gonggrijp said.
That is, it's not just that the US soldiers mistook a long-lensed camera for an RPG -- that's part of the story. Assange concedes they had weapons; they did have automatic weapons and there was a camera mistaken for an RPG.
Since "Collateral Murder" is so often presented without context to maximize its propaganda value, it's important to note that even Assange concedes that it was a mistake. Soldiers returning from a firefight after numerous skirmishes thought that a group of armed man were active combatants. One of them ducked out from behind a building behaving in a suspicious manner. They were armed. So the soldiers shot them. If they showed some glee in making what they felt was a "righteous kill," that's war, not a war-crime, however awful we may find it as civilians.
Some more critical reviews of "Collateral Murder" can be seen here, here (from Stephen Colbert), here (from the conservative Weekly Standard), here (where the writer also notes with concern the influence of "Call of Duty," the war-game, on US military culture and young men joining the armed services).
The US soldiers left one wounded man to crawl away, but when they saw a van hurry up to the scene and rapidly pick up the wounded, they thought they were seeing rebels help their fallen comrade. They shot at the van. They had no way of knowing there were children in it. Why a father would drive a van with his two kids into a shooting incident and pick up a victim of a shoot-out we may never know, but the wounded children were carried by a US soldier to a hospital and while severely wounded, they survived. The Americans were not baby-killers; they shot at a van picking up a man they saw as a combatant and didn't know there were kids in the van -- as can be obviously seen on the very propagagnda film people like Jacob Appelbaum, an active WikiLeaks supporter and anarchist hacker himself, cite on Twitter mendaciously -- which is why I got into a very long polemical fight with him to expose his lies. (And was then savagely harassed on Twitter by droves of Appelbaum's Anonymous comrades who serve as WikiLeaks shock troops.)
Here's what the New Yorker journalist had to say about the film:
Assange saw these events in sharply delineated moral terms, yet the footage did not offer easy legal judgments. In the month before the video was shot, members of the battalion on the ground, from the Sixteenth Infantry Regiment, had suffered more than a hundred and fifty attacks and roadside bombings, nineteen injuries, and four deaths; early that morning, the unit had been attacked by small-arms fire. The soldiers in the Apache were matter-of-fact about killing and spoke callously about their victims, but the first attack could be judged as a tragic misunderstanding. The attack on the van was questionable—the use of force seemed neither thoughtful nor measured—but soldiers are permitted to shoot combatants, even when they are assisting the wounded, and one could argue that the Apache’s crew, in the heat of the moment, reasonably judged the men in the van to be assisting the enemy. Phase three may have been unlawful, perhaps negligent homicide or worse. Firing missiles into a building, in daytime, to kill six people who do not appear to be of strategic importance is an excessive use of force. This attack was conducted with scant deliberation, and it is unclear why the Army did not investigate it.
The US has not found grounds to prosecute these acts; Reuters, whose journalist was killed in this incident have not pursued the case as a war crime but urged an investigation; no credible human rights group has claimed it is a war crime. It's a tragedy, and maybe an indication that American soldiers should have behaved better, and maybe a good reason why we shouldn't have been in Iraq at all. But it's not what Assange claims it to be -- and he has mendaciously singled it out and tarted it up to be used as an arsenal in his anarchist struggle against the US as the supreme evil in the world -- and Patrick Cockburn has only aided and abetted it by his own misleading column.
Further, he writes:
I was in Baghdad when the shooting took place and I remember at the time disbelieving, along with other journalists, the Pentagon's claim that the dead were all armed insurgents, but we could not prove it. Rebel gunmen did not amble about the streets in plain view when a US helicopter was nearby. The existence of a video of the killings became known, but the US Defense Department adamantly refused to release it under the Freedom of Information Act. The official story of what had happened would not have been effectively challenged if a US soldier, Bradley Manning, had not turned over the video to WikiLeaks, which released it in 2010.
But they were armed. And Assange concedes that. Why did journalists travel with armed men? Not all journalists make the decision to do this, and this is heatedly debated within the war correspondents' community. What side were the armed men they were with on?
In fact, the tragic incident was challenged by the Committee to Protect Journalists and other human rights groups who also sought to get information from FOIA, get the release of the video, and get an investigation.
But the patient human rights method of careful questioning and documentation moves too slowly for anarchists, and they wanted to help history along with agitation and propaganda.
After inciting the fake allegations of "war crimes" around the "Collateral Murder," Cockburn next takes up a thesis that I think Democracy Lab would be far more critical of, if they had the space and time to examine the issues, and that is that these cables "helped democracy" and were therefore a kind of "patriotism" because they let citizens "know what their government was doing".
Then Cockburn cites lamely as proof of this thesis a cable that says Hamid Karzai was "a paranoid and weak individual unfamiliar with the basics of nation-building". He concedes that specialists say this was "scarcely news". But it wasn't news to readers of The New York Times or even the Daily News, either. Just because American officials thought this didn't mean that they also didn't concede the need to keep Karzai in power as the least bad of all bad options, at least in their assessment. It's not "hypocrisy" that they send soldiers to die for a "paranoid and weak individual"; it's pragmatism that makes them work with what they got.
Cockburn then claims dramatically, "Assange and WikeLeaks unmasked not diplomatic reticence in the interests of the smooth functioning of government, but duplicity to justify lost wars in which tens of thousand died."
Oh, baloney. There's nothing of the sort. First of all, it's not a secret with ample press coverage in the US and UK about the corruption and problems of the Karzai Administration and US frustrations. Secondly, the US didn't fight this war merely because they had opted to keep a weak president in power; they were keeping the week president in power because they had opted to fight a war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban, which threatened the US and were responsible for committing the terrorist attack of 9/11 or harbouring those who helped it. Cockburn, tone-deaf to the problems of terrorism like so many on the British and European left, can't concede this; it's just not in his monoverse of politics.
He then ends with a claim that is really inflated and any American even on the left could challenge him on:
In Iraq, in the months before the US presidential election in 2004, foreign embassies in Baghdad all knew and reported that US soldiers were only clinging to islands of territory in a hostile land. But the Bush administration was able to persuade US voters that, on the contrary, it was fighting and winning a battle to establish democracy against the remnants of Saddam Hussein's regime and the adherents of Osama bin Laden.
But the Iraq war was not really a central issue in the 2004 election, and even for those who opposed it and thought it ill-conceived (like me), wasn't a factor in their vote if they were voting for Bush (I didn't). I don't see that Bush "persuaded" Americans he was "establishing democracy" -- I'm not at all persuaded that this was an issue about which most Americans cared. The Iraq war had very little public opposition and very little discussion -- and I think that's mainly because the average American, unlike the British left or the American "progressives," can read a dispatch from the AP about how terrorists or suicide bombers attacked Iraqi people in a market-place or a school or a mosque or a church or in line to get a job as a policeman, and figure out that it's those forces killing civilians, not American troops, and that whatever reasons, false or true, brought us into Iraq, that was what the war was about.
Cockburn then ends with a claim that America is like Russia or China:
State control of information and the ability to manipulate it makes the right to vote largely meaningless. That is why people like Julian Assange are so essential to democratic choice.
Er, state control of information? The main issues of WikiLeaks were covered by investigative reporters, even in the Times, which the left scorns and hates because they think they helped Bush sell his war, even when they critically reported on Iraq. Julian Assange, a hateful anarchist bent on bringing the US to its knees so it will deliberately close and then become unlike its ideals and therefore discredited, has no good end in mind. Here is a man who works for the Kremlin's agitprop TV station, RT, interviewing the leader of Hamas, a terrorist group.
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