Let's take poison. Let's ride a motorcycle blind-folded, and other bright ideas

By Fred Reed at Fred On Everything.

November 26, 2010
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Almost forever, the record for stupidity was held by Lumbo, a Cambrian trilobyte born to an early family of retarded trilobites. Lumbo also had Down’s Syndrome. It ws an unbeatable combination. Nobody and nothing was as slow as Lumbo. It was thought that he would hold the record for all time, but then came the governor of Texas, Rick Perry. He thinks it might be a good idea to invade Mexico.

Lumbo doesn’t come close.

The governor thinks, barely, that such a martial lunge might help rid Mexico of drugs, or do something about immigration. He thinks it should perhaps be done with the permission of the Mexican government. It is my hope that Washington will not adopt the governor’s idea, but, given America’s penchant for lurching into catastriphic wars, perhaps we should examine the notion for advisability.

The governor’s wise plan begins by embodying the mistake the Pentagon always makes when it sets out to lose a war, which seems to be every time it holds a war. He, and it, begin by having no faint grasp of the people to be invaded, or of people at all.

Soldiers have difficulty with the notion of people, of citizens, of populations, who are mere impediments to the proper management of a swell war. The military longs for mechanized battle in which men in machines destroy other men in other machines, tank against tank, fighter plane against fighter plane, in a spirit of simple-minded adolescentt romanticism. You know, battle-scarred tanks growling across the Algerian desert, against a flaming red sunset burning out to night, desert wind blowing scarves of heroic etc. People don’t figure in this dream, which is why the results are so regularly dismal.

Now, some practical considerations, a kind traditionally of little interest to military men:

You don’t just sort of invade Mexico as an abstraction. You have to invade an actual part of it. Which?

Well, you could try the cities thick with narcos: Tijuana, Juarez, Culiacan, Ciudad Victoria, all the gang. Good idea, that. As any intelligent officer will tell you—one was reported in Anhalt-Zerbst in 1654, but this was never confirmed—fighting in cities is not a lot of fun. The narcos have AKs and RPGs. They are expert at urban ambushes. They know the cities. They speak the language. They can fade into the population. Consequently frustrated Gis, quickly coming to view the population as subhuman, will begin killing people at random and…have we seen this before?

As an equally unwise plan, the good governor might advocate sending troops after the narcos in the wild, in the Sierra Madre Occidental, up around Copper Canyon, the Barranca del Cobre. Have you seen the barranca country? I have, on the Chihuahua Pacific railway from Los Mochis to Chihuahua. It is like Afghanistan, but with difficult terrain and tree cover. Roads are few. There are canyons in which you could drop the Grand Canyon and have trouble finding it the next day. Did I mention AKs and RPGs? Trees? Rocks? Things to hide behind?

Sefl-explanatory. I hope.
Phredphoto

What the Pentaloons don’t understand, being armed Boy Scouts who believe their own propaganda—“Ooo-rah! Yes sir! Yes sir! Can do, sir!” is that they usually can’t. The chief reason is that people really, really do not like American soldiers invading their countries, wrecking cities and killing their children. The military, which thinks at right angles, cannot wrap its mind around this difficult thought. Thus Americans invariably begin by thinking, “We are right. We are for democracy. We are trying to help these people. Therefore they will love us.”

The second step to disaster is to set up a puppet government, by purchase or intimidation, declare it an ally, and assert that America is helping the legitimate government of a beloved fellow nation. Think Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and note that the Governor Perry says he wants to invade "with Mexico’s permission,” which means puppetizing the government. Of course no government that supports invaders who kill Pablo’s three-year-old and her dog is going to enjoy a whole lot of legitimacy.

The approach doesn’t work, this being regarded as a minor defect by military minds. It’s the glory of the thing, the swoosh and bang and zowwee that count, not practical concerns like winning. But…does it seem salient to you that in all of our hobbyist wars, our locals—our Khmers, our Viets, our Afghans, and so on—fight poorly, while our enemies are passionate and stubborn? Note that after ten years our Afghan soldiers aren’t ready and disappear with their rifles, the Pakis collaborate with the Taliban and hate us, and the Iraqi police are permanently incapable.

Why might this be? Because, when you force part of a country to kill the other part, not too much enthusiasm ensues.

An essential ingredient in our wars is underestimation of the enemy, reflecting a general American contempt for everybody else. Cheese-eating surrender monkeys, that sort of thing. The Viet Cong were rice-propelled paddy maggots who didn’t have a single B-52. Iraq would be a cake walk, the Afghans were louse-ridden towel-headed farmers, and so on.

An infantryman's paradise, or gateway thereunto.
Phredphoto

Still, it is perhaps worth noting that as the US army lowers recruiting standards to reflect flabby American males, the Mexicans work construction. In the barranca country you find hard and hardy people, Tarahumaras and tough farmers who have trucks now thanks to the marijuana crop. Soft they are not. Mexicans have fought long and bloody wars—the Revolution, the Cristero War, the current drug wars in which 29,000 have died since 2006 in armed conflict (which suggests that there are a whole lot of them and not afraid to fight, doesn't it?). Sound like Afghans?

Further: Mexicans, all Mexicans, are violently hostile to any invasion, on any terms at all, by the US. They’ve been down that trail before. I mentioned the governor’s idea to my (Mexican) wife. I’ve never seen her face so hard. This is universal. If you want to see a united Mexico, send the Gis.

The Mexicans are not as reliably hostile to the traffic in drugs, or to the traffickers, as Washington would like. The common attitude is that if the gringos don’t want drugs, why do they buy them? Why is it Mexico’s problem? The traffic has brought relative prosperity to places formerly without electricity. In a country not enamored of a corrupt government, the narcos not infrequently are seen as Robin Hoods. Various bands make a living singing narcocorridos, songs glorifying the traffoclers: Los Tigres del Norte, Los Tucanes de Tijuana, La Sombra Norteña.

Here we come to the final error of American military interventions: the belief that everybody wants to be like America, that they want democracy or are capable of it, that we just have to show them how we want them to live and they will gratefully do it. Ah, fond hope. We are going to make Afghanistan into a democracy, an idea as probable as making a frog into a television set. In Afghanistan the military invaded Marjuh and said it was going to impose a “government in a box,” whereupon an Afghan town would be just like a village in Iowa. Oh sure. Any day now. And in Mexico the Mérida Initiative is going to produce honest police and judges, whereupon Mexico will resemble Switzerland.

This is posted with thoughts of "just in case anyone wondered". It is a history and status of the Communist Party USA in its own words as taken from its Facebook page. CPUSA's website is at http://www.cpusa.org/. There is a membership application form at http://www.cpusa.org/join-us/.

The Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) is a Marxist-Leninist political party in the United States.

For approximately the first half of the 20th century it was the largest and most widely influential communist party in the country, and played a prominent role in the U.S. labor movement from the 1920s through the 1940s, founding most of the country's major industrial unions (which would later implement the Smith Act) and pursuing intense anti-racist activity in workplaces and city communities throughout this first part of its existence. Simultaneously the CPUSA survived the Palmer Raids, the first Red Scare, and many similar attempts at suppression of communist activity by the Government of the United States through the end of World War II. By August 1919, only months after its founding, the CPUSA had 60,000 members, including anarchists and other radical leftists, while the more moderate Socialist Party of America had only 40,000.

The Communist Party affiliated International Workers Order and its 15 sections organized around linguistic and ethnic lines provided mutual aid and cultural activities to a membership that peaked at 200,000 at its height.

By the 1950s, however, the combined effects of the second Red Scare, McCarthyism, the Secret Speech, and the Cold War began to break apart the party's internal structure and confidence. U.S. Government prosecution efforts were aided by the party's membership in the Comintern because it cast the Party not only as subversive, but also as a "foreign" agent. Members who did not end up in prison for party activities tended either to disappear quietly from its ranks or to adopt more moderate political positions that were at odds with the CPUSA's party line. By 1957, membership had dwindled to less than 10,000.

Effectively eliminated as a revolutionary opposition force, the party transformed its militant revolutionary line into a more evolutionary one, participating with more vigor in the U.S. electoral system and advocating "peaceful coexistence", a shift which by the early 1960s led to dozens of angry breakaways by more militant CP members who saw them as conciliatory "sellout" moves. This New Left continued to follow the idea of armed class war and generally turned to Mao Zedong for inspiration. The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 led to further disillusionment and defections. Meanwhile, the major leaders of the American Civil Rights Movement were very careful to keep communists at arm's length for fear of also being branded communist—policies that isolated the CPUSA even further.

With continued erosion of what little mass support remained, and very little if any continued influence in mainstream politics, in the late 1980s the party finally became estranged even from the leadership of the Soviet Union itself. Its opposition to Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika meant the Communist Party of the Soviet Union cut off its support of the CPUSA in 1989. The party languished without state support from such a major entity. In 1991, the party held its convention and tried to resolve the issue of whether the collapse of the Soviet Union should mean that the Party reject Leninism. A Party majority reasserted its classic Marxist-Leninist line, and the faction urging social democracy left and established itself as the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism.

The CPUSA has never regained the influence it wielded before the McCarthy period, and no longer espouses the ideology of its earlier days. Unlike similar groups in most parts of Europe, the CPUSA exercises no power within the U.S. government. Although still proclaiming themselves advocates of a socialist revolution, the party today calls for a "peaceful transition to socialism" in the U.S. "wherever possible" and its constitution makes "advocacy of … force and violence or terrorism" a reason for expulsion from the party. However, despite this notable loss of influence and the fact that the CPUSA exercises no political influence within or upon the Government of the United States, it does continue to exist as an organization, today under the leadership of Sam Webb, who asserts that the number of registered members has climbed to over 15,000.

The CPUSA is based in New York City, its newspaper, originally The Daily Worker, is today the People's Weekly World, and its monthly magazine is Political Affairs Magazine. The Party's stated goal is to achieve a free, prosperous, and peaceful society free of racism, sexism, homophobia, and exploitation, in which all people have the opportunity to develop to their fullest potential. This approximates the goals of many social welfare-oriented leftists such as US-based social democrats and Progressive Democrats of America, despite the CPUSA's self-proclaimed communist label. Members from Gus Hall's period still remain within the party's ranks.

The following article was credited to Guy Rundle and posted on RSNews in a section labelled "Crikey" on Thursday 9 December 2010. It is posted here with author considered relavent internal links active. That is with thought readers here might want to peruse their entirety and draw personal conclusions, fantasy laden as personal prejudices dictate. Even if truth is not forthcoming, it could enhance enjoying the show between graffiting circled W's. Crikey may rest on a sexualy sensitive host, for it disguised each suggestive word by inserting "-"'s. Those are replaced here with meaningful letters and with appologies to more sqweamish readers.

Anna Ardin, one of the two complainants in the rape and sexual assault case against WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange, has left Sweden, and may have ceased actively co-operating with the Swedish prosecution service and her own lawyer, sources in Sweden told Crikey today.

The move comes amid a growing campaign by leading Western feminists to question the investigation, and renewed confusion as to whether Sweden has actually issued charges against Assange. Naomi Klein, Naomi Wolf, and the European group Women Against Rape, have all made statements questioning the nature and purpose of the prosecution.

Ardin, who also goes by the name Bernardin, has moved to the West Bank in the Palestinian Territories, as part of a Christian outreach group, aimed at bringing reconciliation between Palestinians and Israelis. She has moved to the small town of Yanoun, which sits close to Israel’s security/sequestration wall. Yanoun is constantly besieged by fundamentalist Jewish settlers, and international groups have frequently stationed themselves there.

Attempts by Crikey to contact Ardin by phone, fax, email and twitter were unsuccessful today.

Ardin’s blog has restarted after a fortnight hiatus, and her twitter feed has restarted after a two-month break. The twitter feed appears to be commenting on her ongoing profile in the media with the latest entry reading: “CIA agent, rabid feminist / Muslim lover, a Christian fundamentalist, frigid & fatally in love with a man, can you be all that at the same time …”

The previous tweet appears to extend support to WikiLeaks, after financial agencies withdrew their services, reading “Mastercard, Visa and Paypal?—?hit it, now!”*

One source from Ardin’s old university of Uppsala reported rumours that she had stopped co-operating with the prosecution service several weeks ago, and that this was part of the reason for the long delay in proceeding with charges?—?and what still appears to be an absence of charges.

News of Ardin/Bernardin’s departure comes as reports circulate of Ardin’s connection to the right-wing Cuban exile community in Miami, something that Crikey readers learnt of months ago. The reports have helped fuel wilder conspiracy theories about the nature of Ardin’s involvement with WikiLeaks and Assange.

A former politics student who had done internships at Sweden’s DC embassy, Ardin completed her thesis on Cuban political opposition groups, many of whom have involvement?—?and funding?—?from the US interests section, the only US diplomatic representation in Cuba. Ardin initially began her research in Havana and left after being advised that her position was no longer safe. She completed the research in Miami.

However, it seems more likely that the Cuban episode is part of the same political nomadism that led her to WikiLeaks. An office holder with the Social Democratic party’s Christian “brotherhood” faction, Ardin is active in a range of causes from Latin America to animal liberation.

Ardin’s move and confusion over her involvement and the real status of the charges against Assange come as the campaign questioning the charges against him has come to include a number of leading feminist activists. Naomi Klein tweeted that:

“Rape is being used in the #Assange prosecution in the same way that women’s freedom was used to invade Afghanistan. Wake up! #wikilieaks.”

While in The Huffington Post, Naomi Wolf posted a (quite funny) article asking Interpol to apprehend every date she’s had who turned out to be a narcissistic jerk.

In The Guardian Karin Axelsson of Women Against Rape questioned why Assange’s case was being pursued more assiduously than cases of rape judged more serious (Sweden has three degrees of severity for rape charges).

These moves are evidence of the situation your correspondent suggested in Crikey yesterday?—?that the Assange case is proving to be the final process by which the second-wave feminist coalition formed in the late 1960s splits substantially, with feminists with differing attitude to Western state power finding themselves on different sides of the debate.

Indeed, it puts one in the unusual position of saying that commentators such as Wolf are being too anti-complainant in their construction of the charges as nothing other than a couple of bad dates. It’s a strange world, and getting stranger.

The lawyer for Ardin and Wilen, the two complainants, has hit back at attacks and criticism of his clients, saying that they had been put on trial and effectively assaulted twice. He claimed to be in daily contact with the women, which suggests that he has a better reception to Yanoun than many of its inhabitants have to the outside world.

Even if the case comes to trial, the prospects of conviction look slim. Crikey asked Flinders University sex crime law expert Dr Mary Heath to go over the charges (which may still be accusations at this stage) as they were relayed in Assange’s extradition bail hearing, and she made the following comments:

“Practically speaking, I would not like the chances of the prosecutor on charge 3?—?pressing his erect penis into the complainant’s back … legally speaking I would have to suggest the chances of conviction would be slim for any Australian offence where both accused were adults. Proving non consent might be difficult but proving awareness of non consent would be even harder.

“Charges 1 and 2 (holding partner down, and unsafe sex despite earlier expressed opposition to such) involve contexts where there would be room for defence argument about consent. On charge 1, when is one person ‘holding down’ another person lying beneath them, and when are they simply having consensual sex in a position involving one person being on top of the other person? Is this force or just rough but consensual (compared to cases I’ve read, the allegation would hardly count as rough).

“On charge 2, prior unwillingness is not enough, the complainant must not be consenting and the accused must be aware of this ‘at the time of intercourse’. Did complainant one change her mind? Did Assange believe she changed her mind, and perhaps on reasonable grounds the charge does not disclose?

“On charge 4 (sex while complainant was sleeping), recent experience in South Australia suggests this also could be difficult to prove if there was any kind of sexual interaction prior to the complainant falling asleep, which might give the defence a plausible argument that belief in consent was present. I was deeply unimpressed by the level of protection the courts (let alone public attitudes) offered to people who are asleep or unconscious due to drugs/alcohol.

“… The one thing that is clearer, perhaps, is that the charges may turn on withdrawal of consent once a sexual act had commenced. The law of almost every jurisdiction in Australia would recognise withdrawal of consent after a sexual act commenced as rendering that sexual act non consensual (and therefore rape). As for proving it … I reiterate what I said about proof previously.”

The Guardian reports that former Crown Prosecution Service extradition expert Raj Joshi said that extradition was unlikely:

“On what we know so far, it is going to be very difficult to extradite. The judge has to be satisfied that the conduct equals an extraditable offence and that there are no legal bars to extradition.

“Assange’s team will argue, how can the conduct equal an extraditable offence if the [Swedish] prosecutor doesn’t think there is enough evidence to charge, and still has not charged.”

This has added to speculation that the Swedish moves, which have coincided with the release of the Cablegate stories, are politically motivated as stalling tactics, allowing Assange to be detained while the US “prepares an extradition/rendition request”, according to Assange’s UK lawyer Mark Stephens.

Paint It Loud. Paint It Proud.

WikiLeaks’ rivals will be hard to fight

The Economist | Dec 9th 2010 | from PRINT EDITION

REMEMBER Napster? In July 2001 a court told it to block access to copyrighted music files. But this did not stop people swapping tunes—and Napster returned as a legal subscription service.

Similarly, WikiLeaks may die, but leaking will not. An existing rival is Cryptome, founded in 1996 as a part-time “amateur operation” by John Young and Deborah Natsios, two New York architects with libertarian leanings. A new site, not yet named, will start in Germany this month, created by Daniel Domscheit-Berg, who left WikiLeaks after feuding with its founder, Julian Assange. He says power will be “as distributed as possible” in the new outfit.

The rivals differ in their approaches to technology and in their methods. WikiLeaks seeks donations. Mr Young pays his site’s monthly $200 hosting costs from his own pocket. Mr Domscheit-Berg has not said how his new service will finance itself, but he is writing a book about his time at WikiLeaks which may sell well.

It seems that both sites will be even bolder with the material they disclose. Mr Young, who has already posted more than 58,000 files, including suppressed photographs of American soldiers killed in Iraq, denies that naming names in leaked documents endangers anybody. Editing them out, he says, is a sign of self-importance by those who run whistle-blowing sites. And the new German site wants to allow leakers to decide how their documents will appear.

If the history of file-sharing is any guide, rivals will multiply. Technology is on their side. Software called BitTorrent allows personal computers to join what is called a “swarm of hosts”, which download and upload from one to another, with no guiding authority. Cisco, which makes networking equipment, thinks file-sharing now comprises nearly half of consumer internet traffic: a poor return on the music and film industries’ efforts to stop it. This swarm can sting.

This article by Shreya Roy Chowdhury, was featured on today's Times of India.

An interesting side was that the same page carried two advertisements. On the left was one by PayPal, which refuses contributions for Wikileaks. But, next to it on the right with identical format and design there was another labelling itself as an alternative to PayPal. Hey! Business is business, huh?.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's supporters are putting the 'B' back in 'backlash'. As news of his arrest hit websites and networking sites, a cyberwar was declared.

They're calling it Operation Payback. A group of activist hackers (hactivists) went to work on PostFinance, the Swiss Bank that froze donations made to the whistleblower site, and brought it down for some time. Next, they promised to target PayPal, the online payment company that cancelled WikiLeaks account; Anon_Operation posted on Twitter, target: www.paypal.com is YOYOing.

Other posts lead supporters to a file mysteriously titled insurance.aes256. Apparently, insurance.aes256 contains all the secret files released by WikiLeaks, the cables and then some. But this 1.39GB file is encrypted. Assange's lawyer has hinted that the key will be made available if anything happens to Assange. Blackmail? Perhaps. But it has worked. Thousands have downloaded the file and are generously seeding making it available for others to download while waiting for the key to be disclosed.

The absence of anything related to WikiLeaks from Twitter's top trends list for a long time has drawn suspicion and flak. "Twitter tells me Julie Andrews is trending in Australia. The hills are alive with the sound of lying," said one tweet. Tweets are also being used to give fire commands to hackers to synchronize attacks; links to blog posts that explain how to easily and legally help WikiLeaks (over 10,000 page views in less than 24 hours boasts the blogger) are provided.

Julian Assange is number one on the list of contenders for Time magazine's Person of the Year with an average rating on 90% based on over 24,000 votes; any news report on him is followed by a string of comments.

Ed: The Torrent for downloading the insurance.aes256 file is easily found on the web. There is no shortage of torrent seeders and the 1.38 Gb file can be download in a couple hours with broadband internet access.

"The truth will always win"

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange wrote this Op-Ed for The Australian today.

IN 1958 a young Rupert Murdoch, then owner and editor of Adelaide’s The News, wrote: “In the race between secrecy and truth, it seems inevitable that truth will always win.”

His observation perhaps reflected his father Keith Murdoch’s expose that Australian troops were being needlessly sacrificed by incompetent British commanders on the shores of Gallipoli. The British tried to shut him up but Keith Murdoch would not be silenced and his efforts led to the termination of the disastrous Gallipoli campaign.

Nearly a century later, WikiLeaks is also fearlessly publishing facts that need to be made public.

I grew up in a Queensland country town where people spoke their minds bluntly. They distrusted big government as something that could be corrupted if not watched carefully. The dark days of corruption in the Queensland government before the Fitzgerald inquiry are testimony to what happens when the politicians gag the media from reporting the truth.

These things have stayed with me. WikiLeaks was created around these core values. The idea, conceived in Australia , was to use internet technologies in new ways to report the truth.

WikiLeaks coined a new type of journalism: scientific journalism. We work with other media outlets to bring people the news, but also to prove it is true. Scientific journalism allows you to read a news story, then to click online to see the original document it is based on. That way you can judge for yourself: Is the story true? Did the journalist report it accurately?

Democratic societies need a strong media and WikiLeaks is part of that media. The media helps keep government honest. WikiLeaks has revealed some hard truths about the Iraq and Afghan wars, and broken stories about corporate corruption.

People have said I am anti-war: for the record, I am not. Sometimes nations need to go to war, and there are just wars. But there is nothing more wrong than a government lying to its people about those wars, then asking these same citizens to put their lives and their taxes on the line for those lies. If a war is justified, then tell the truth and the people will decide whether to support it.

If you have read any of the Afghan or Iraq war logs, any of the US embassy cables or any of the stories about the things WikiLeaks has reported, consider how important it is for all media to be able to report these things freely.

WikiLeaks is not the only publisher of the US embassy cables. Other media outlets, including Britain ‘s The Guardian, The New York Times, El Pais in Spain and Der Spiegel in Germany have published the same redacted cables.

Yet it is WikiLeaks, as the co-ordinator of these other groups, that has copped the most vicious attacks and accusations from the US government and its acolytes. I have been accused of treason, even though I am an Australian, not a US, citizen. There have been dozens of serious calls in the US for me to be “taken out” by US special forces. Sarah Palin says I should be “hunted down like Osama bin Laden”, a Republican bill sits before the US Senate seeking to have me declared a “transnational threat” and disposed of accordingly. An adviser to the Canadian Prime Minister’s office has called on national television for me to be assassinated. An American blogger has called for my 20-year-old son, here in Australia, to be kidnapped and harmed for no other reason than to get at me.

And Australians should observe with no pride the disgraceful pandering to these sentiments by Prime Minister Gillard and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have not had a word of criticism for the other media organisations. That is because The Guardian, The New York Times and Der Spiegel are old and large, while WikiLeaks is as yet young and small.

We are the underdogs. The Gillard government is trying to shoot the messenger because it doesn’t want the truth revealed, including information about its own diplomatic and political dealings.

Has there been any response from the Australian government to the numerous public threats of violence against me and other WikiLeaks personnel? One might have thought an Australian prime minister would be defending her citizens against such things, but there have only been wholly unsubstantiated claims of illegality. The Prime Minister and especially the Attorney-General are meant to carry out their duties with dignity and above the fray. Rest assured, these two mean to save their own skins. They will not.

Every time WikiLeaks publishes the truth about abuses committed by US agencies, Australian politicians chant a provably false chorus with the State Department: “You’ll risk lives! National security! You’ll endanger troops!” Then they say there is nothing of importance in what WikiLeaks publishes. It can’t be both. Which is it?

It is neither. WikiLeaks has a four-year publishing history. During that time we have changed whole governments, but not a single person, as far as anyone is aware, has been harmed. But the US , with Australian government connivance, has killed thousands in the past few months alone.

US Secretary of Defence Robert Gates admitted in a letter to the US congress that no sensitive intelligence sources or methods had been compromised by the Afghan war logs disclosure. The Pentagon stated there was no evidence the WikiLeaks reports had led to anyone being harmed in Afghanistan . NATO in Kabul told CNN it couldn’t find a single person who needed protecting. The Australian Department of Defence said the same. No Australian troops or sources have been hurt by anything we have published.

But our publications have been far from unimportant. The US diplomatic cables reveal some startling facts:

The US asked its diplomats to steal personal human material and information from UN officials and human rights groups, including DNA, fingerprints, iris scans, credit card numbers, internet passwords and ID photos, in violation of international treaties. Presumably Australian UN diplomats may be targeted, too.

King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia asked the US Officials in Jordan and Bahrain want Iran ‘s nuclear program stopped by any means available.

Britain’s Iraq inquiry was fixed to protect “US interests”.

Sweden is a covert member of NATO and US intelligence sharing is kept from parliament.

The US is playing hardball to get other countries to take freed detainees from Guantanamo Bay . Barack Obama agreed to meet the Slovenian President only if Slovenia took a prisoner. Our Pacific neighbour Kiribati was offered millions of dollars to accept detainees.

In its landmark ruling in the Pentagon Papers case, the US Supreme Court said “only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government”. The swirling storm around WikiLeaks today reinforces the need to defend the right of all media to reveal the truth.

Julian Assange is the editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks.

Julian Assange Arrested In London
For Sweden - Can You Spell "USA"?

The London Metropolitan Police has confirmed that Julian Assange was arrested this morning on behalf of the Swedish authorities, reports The Guardian: "Julian Assange, 39, was arrested on a European Arrest Warrant by appointment at a London police station at 9.30am."

The statement notes that he is due to appear at City of Westminster Magistrates' Court today.

"As of last night Assange had still not been told of the full allegations against him, his lawyer Jennifer Robinson explained in a Guardian video to be released soon," notes The Guardian.

WL Central would like to ask all of our readers to support Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. You can donate to WikiLeaks to help with legal costs, speak up in support, contact your elected representatives and ask them to uphold Julian Assange's rights, join a protest.

A demostration to protest Julian Assange's arrest is being organized today at 13:30 London time in front of the Westminster Magistrates' Court. Please join if you can!

If Julian Assange can be silenced, so can every one of us. Stand up, speak up: for him, for yourself, for all of us. Before it's too late.

Iranian Official Responds to Wikileaks
'The United States Is Behind This Deliberate Leak'

This article was taken from today's Spiegel Online International. It might be of interest that though the article calls into question common assumptions concerning the latest leaks, a link to the Spiegal article appeared on the Wikileaks site.

REUTERS
Iran has its own special take on the diplomatic cables recently published by WikiLeaks. Presidential Advisor Esfandiar Rahim Mashai assumes that the United States government leaked the documents itself. In an interview with SPIEGEL ONLINE, he says that Washington's goal is to play off the governments in the Middle East against one other.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Have you read what Washington's ambassadors in your neighboring Arab countries write about Iran?

Esfandiar Rahim Mashai: I've been traveling a lot recently, so I haven't had a chance yet. But our experts are examining the disclosures very intensively and have reported everything to me.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Are you surprised by the clarity with which some Gulf States, as well as Egypt, call upon the United States to stop Tehran's nuclear ambitions?

Mashai: These documents are not authentic. The national interests of the United States and its allies are behind this. They see the world through their eyes, pursue their own goals, and draw the conclusions that suit their purposes.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: What are the intentions of the United States, in your view?

Mashai: America wants to portray itself as the leader of the world, as master of the destinies of nations. It wants to play off the regimes in the region against one another. It wants the world to believe that we are divided. It wants to legitimize its presence and influence in the region.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: But the diplomatic reports were published against Washington's will and are damaging to the United States. The WikiLeaks disclosures are not a State Department PR campaign.

Mashai: Are you sure about that? How, then, did WikiLeaks gain access to the documents?

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Presumably through a US Army private who had access to a central government database and has since been arrested.

Mashai: Do you believe that? Then you must be very naïve indeed. No, the United States is behind this deliberate leak. The Americans are trying to paint the world in black and white. They underscore the differences among nations and want to show everyone that peace is only possible in cooperation with them.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Do you question the authenticity of the more than 250,000 documents?

Mashai: I don't want to get into individual documents and their authenticity. But I have no doubt that a US government plan is behind this disclosure. When someone wants to suggest something, they include fake information with real information so as to create a certain impression. That's why each country has to analyze the documents that relate to it, which is what our experts in Tehran are doing now.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: In other words, you do take the embassy reports very seriously.

Mashai: We are only examining them to figure out the Americans' tricks.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: You refuse to believe that your neighbors fear Iran?

Mashai: That's what we read in the reports. But it's the United States that is trying to instill fear of Iran in these countries. No one is afraid of us, nor should they be. But one can also see these reports as evidence of how much pressure the United States exerts on some governments. When that happens, things are said that the other party wants to hear.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Is that how you explain the statement by the Saudi Arabian king, who demands that the United States "cut off the head of the (Iranian) snake?"

Mashai: That isn't the language of the Saudi Arabian king. In their reports, the US ambassadors can claim that anyone said anything. Our friends in the region are denying everything.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: … because they don't want to upset Tehran any further.

Mashai: They don't deny the mistakes they've made in the past, such as when they supported Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in his war against us. And we generously forgave them. Even if one of our friends had said something unfortunate, the Iranian nation would forgive them.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: So, in your view, the fear of your nuclear program is pure fantasy on the part of the US ambassadors in the region?

Mashai: We want to use nuclear energy in a peaceful way. Our neighbors know that. If they fear anything, it's a military strike against Iran by the United States and its allies. If they are afraid, then it's the result of American and Zionist propaganda.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Are your fellow Iranians able to view the WikiLeaks disclosures on the Internet, or is the site blocked, like so many others in Iran?

Mashai: Anyone can access the site. Why should be block it? We are a great nation that doesn't have a problem with such disclosures. Our nation is smart enough to see through this campaign.

(Further Left Forum notes: An Iranian user of our Chat Room was able to reach the Wikileak site yesterday, not directly but by using a Virtual Private Network (VPN) opperating elsewhere. )

The Wikileaks the raw address http://88.80.13.160/ has been working off and on (from here) today. It appeares to be a redirect to another address http://213.251.145.96/, which currently works. Wikileaks can also be reached through 208 mirror sites listed thereon.

This article appeared as the lead editorial in today's edition of The Hindu

It has been one long battle for WikiLeaks merely to exist on the Internet since it started publishing the U.S. diplomatic cables. The cat-and-mouse game that it has had to play to retain an accessible address in cyberspace is the result of a virulent attack launched by right-wing lawmakers in America and their supporters, and commercial entities such as Amazon, which caved in to the pressure. But more fundamentally, the WikiLeaks saga represents the acid test for free speech. With each tranche of documents published online, the world is witnessing the total loss of dominance of secretive governments over information. The backlash has come swiftly, with bellicose American Senators engaging in plain intimidation to get commercial entities to stop offering services to WikiLeaks on the ground that it is distributing material it does not own. Some politicians have made a jingoistic pitch and called for the execution of the source of the leaks. This is nothing but Digital McCarthyism. Were it not for the threat it poses to the free Internet, it would even appear amusing. Earlier this year, President Barack Obama was ‘troubled' by the cyber attacks on Google, which were said to originate in China, and wanted those responsible to face the consequences. The more freely information flows, the stronger society becomes, he had said during an earlier visit to China. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was also strongly critical of Internet restrictions in China. Now the boot is on the other foot. Concern for free speech is nowhere in evidence as extra-legal methods are deployed to deny Americans their First Amendment rights.

The campaign against WikiLeaks is a clear move to censor political material on the Internet and, potentially, on other media. The first moves made by lawmakers such as Senator Joe Lieberman, who chairs the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, have no legal foundation and yet have succeeded with Amazon and PayPal. What has followed is shockingly repressive and obscurantist. The Library of Congress blocked access to WikiLeaks across its computer systems, including reading rooms, and Columbia University students aspiring for diplomatic careers have been advised not to comment on, or link to, the whistleblower website's revelations. It is doubly tragic that such concerted attacks are securing support from countries with a progressive legacy such as France. The intolerant response to WikiLeaks is a potential threat to all media and must be fought. Senator Lieberman and other lawmakers have introduced legislation that proposes to make the publication of an intelligence source a federal crime. Already, U.S. law allows the shutting down of some Internet domains managed in that country on grounds of infringement of copyright. The threat to the publication of inconvenient material, even with responsible redactions, is all too real.

Desperate and Dangerous Backlash over WikiLeaks

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) today condemned the political backlash being mounted against the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks and accused the United States of attacking free speech after it put pressure on the website's host server to shut down the site yesterday.

The website's host Amazon.com blocked access to WikiLeaks after United States officials condemned the torrent of revelations about political, business and diplomatic affairs that has given people around the world unprecedented access to detailed information from United States sources, much of it embarrassing to leading public figures.

"It is unacceptable to try to deny people the right to know," said Aidan White, IFJ General Secretary. "These revelations may be embarrassing in their detail, but they also expose corruption and double-dealing in public life that is worthy of public scrutiny. The response of the United States is desperate and dangerous because it goes against fundamental principles of free speech and democracy."

The IFJ has taken no position on the justification for the release of hundreds of thousands of internal documents which have made headlines around the world in the last few days, but it has welcomed the decision of WikiLeaks to use respected channels of journalism including Der Spiegel, The Guardian, the New York Times, Le Monde and El Pais to filter the information.

"This information is being processed by serious, professional journalists who are well aware of their responsibilities both to the public and to people implicated in these revelations," said White. "It is simply untenable to allege as some people have that lives are being put at risk here. The only casualty here is the culture of secrecy that has for too long drawn a curtain around the unsavory side of public life."

The IFJ is also concerned about the welfare and well-being of Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder and Bradley Manning, the United States soldier in Iraq who is under arrest and suspected of leaking the information. Both men are the target of a growing political campaign mounted by government officials and right-wing politicians.

Assange has been forced into hiding and is the subject of an international police investigation over allegations concerning sexual offences in Sweden. The IFJ says that calls by right wing commentators for Manning to be executed and that Assange be hunted down as a spy, as demanded by former Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin, show a mood of intolerance and persecution that is dangerous not just for the two men but for all journalists engaged in investigating public affairs.

"The IFJ and its members support the rights of whistle-blowers and the responsible reporting of information in the public interest," said White. "This over-reaction by politicians and their allies illustrates that they have not understood the historical significance of these events. The people's right to know is not something that can any longer be willfully ignored. They have to adjust to the fact journalists have a duty to report, fairly and accurately and with due respect for the rights of all parties in the public interest."

For more information, please contact IFJ on + 32 2 235 22 07

The IFJ represents more than 600.000 members in 125 countries

November 15, 2010

Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Venezuela declare: “Nature is our home and is the system of which we form a part, and therefore it has infinite value, but it does not have a price and is not for sale.”

Ministers, Authorities of the Ministerial Committee for the Defense of Nature of the Plurinational State of Bolivia, Republic of Cuba, Republic of Ecuador, Republic of Nicaragua, Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, members of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas – Treaty of Commerce of the People (ALBA-TCP), gathered in the city of La Paz in the Plurinational State of Bolivia, from November 3rd to 5th, 2010.

Considering that:

1. There is within the United Nations is a push to promote the concept of a “green economy” or a “Global Green New Deal”[1] in order to extend capitalism in the economic, social and environmental arenas, in which nature is seen as “capital” for producing tradable environmental goods and services that should then be valued in monetary terms and assigned a price so that they can be commercialized with the purpose of obtaining profits.

2. Studies are being carried out and manipulated, such as the Stern Report on the Economics of Climate Change and the study on the Economy of Ecosystems and Biodiversity,[2] among others, in order to promote the privatization and the mercantilization of nature through the development of markets for environmental services, among other instruments.

3. Those who promote this new form of privatization and mercantilization of nature wish to develop a new kind of property rights which are not exercised over a natural resource in itself, but rather, over the functions offered by particular ecosystems, thus opening up the possibility of commercializing them in the market through certificates, bonds, credits, etc.

4. Under this capitalist conception that seeks only to guarantee benefit for those few who wield economic power: water should be privatized and distributed only to those that can afford to pay for it, forests are only good for capturing emissions and for selling on the carbon market that allows rich countries to avoid reducing emissions within their own territories, and genetic resources must be appropriated and patented for the enjoyment of those who possess modern technology.

Recognizing that:

The right to safe drinking water and sanitation is a human right that is essential for the full enjoyment of life, which has been endorsed by the United Nations and can only be guaranteed through the recognition and defense of the rights of Mother Earth.

Convinced that:

States are responsible for guaranteeing the sovereignty of the peoples over their natural patrimony and natural resources.

We declare:

1. That nature is our home and is the system of which we form a part, and that therefore it has infinite value, but does not have a price and is not for sale.

2. Our commitment to preventing capitalism from continuing to expand in the spheres that are essential to life and nature, being that this is one of the greatest challenges confronting humanity.

3. Our absolute rejection of the privatization, monetization and mercantilization of nature, for it leads to a greater imbalance in the environment and goes against our ethical principles.

4. Our condemnation of unsustainable models of economic growth that are created at the expense of our resources and the sovereignty of our peoples.

5. Only a humanity that is conscious of its present and future responsibilities, and states with the political will to carry out their role, can change the course of history and restore equilibrium in nature and life as a whole.

6. That instead of promoting the privatization of goods and services that come from nature, it is essential to recognize that these have a collective character, and, as such, should be conserved as public goods, respecting the sovereignty of states.

7. It is not the invisible hand of the market that will allow for the recuperation of equilibrium on Mother Earth. Only with the conscious intervention of state and society through policies, public regulations, and the strengthening of public services can the equilibrium of nature be restored.

8. Cancun cannot be another Copenhagen; we hope that accords will be reached in which developed countries truly act according to the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities, and effectively assume their obligation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, without making climate change into a business through the promotion and creation of carbon market mechanisms.

9. That, committed to life, the countries present at this meeting agree to include in our permanent agenda, among other actions, the realization of a referendum on climate change and the promotion of the participation of the peoples of the world.

10. That it is urgent to adopt at the United Nations a Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth.

The west has fiscalised its basic power relationships through a web of contracts, loans, shareholdings, bank holdings and so on. In such an environment it is easy for speech to be "free" because a change in political will rarely leads to any change in these basic instruments. Western speech, as something that rarely has any effect on power, is, like badgers and birds, free. In states like China, there is pervasive censorship, because speech still has power and power is scared of it. We should always look at censorship as an economic signal that reveals the potential power of speech in that jurisdiction. The attacks against us by the US point to a great hope, speech powerful enough to break the fiscal blockade. - Julian Assange, Wikileaks

Hosting services have been removing Wikileaks as they experience government pressures or hacker attacks (same thing?). Wherever it moves, and it does, you should be able to reach it using its raw ip address: http://88.80.13.160/.

This post has two parts. The first is a 20 minute Al Jazeera interview video freaturing Julian Assange.

The second is a long and profound analysis of Wikileaks motivation and manner including extensive quotes by Assange. It was written under the name of a Tanzanian term, Zunguzungu, and posted 29 November 2010 on a blog titled the same. That is linked here

Both bear value in watching and reading, respectively, if one is to develop some understanding of what mainstream media has been rushing to garble.

Julian Assange and the Computer Conspiracy;
“To destroy this invisible government”

“To radically shift regime behavior we must think clearly and boldly for if we have learned anything, it is that regimes do not want to be changed. We must think beyond those who have gone before us, and discover technological changes that embolden us with ways to act in which our forebears could not. Firstly we must understand what aspect of government or neocorporatist behavior we wish to change or remove. Secondly we must develop a way of thinking about this behavior that is strong enough carry us through the mire of politically distorted language, and into a position of clarity. Finally must use these insights to inspire within us and others a course of ennobling, and effective action.”

Julian Assange, “State and Terrorist Conspiracies”

The piece of writing (via) which that quote introduces is intellectually substantial, but not all that difficult to read, so you might as well take a look at it yourself. Most of the news media seems to be losing their minds over Wikileaks without actually reading these essays, even though he describes the function and aims of an organization like Wikileaks in pretty straightforward terms. But, to summarize, he begins by describing a state like the US as essentially an authoritarian conspiracy, and then reasons that the practical strategy for combating that conspiracy is to degrade its ability to conspire, to hinder its ability to “think” as a conspiratorial mind. The metaphor of a computing network is mostly implicit, but utterly crucial: he seeks to oppose the power of the state by treating it like a computer and tossing sand in its diodes.

He begins by positing that conspiracy and authoritarianism go hand in hand, arguing that since authoritarianism produces resistance to itself — to the extent that its authoritarianism becomes generally known — it can only continue to exist and function by preventing its intentions (the authorship of its authority?) from being generally known. It inevitably becomes, he argues, a conspiracy:

Authoritarian regimes give rise to forces which oppose them by pushing against the individual and collective will to freedom, truth and self realization. Plans which assist authoritarian rule, once discovered, induce resistance. Hence these plans are concealed by successful authoritarian powers. This is enough to define their behavior as conspiratorial.

The problem this creates for the government conspiracy then becomes the organizational problem it must solve: if the conspiracy must operate in secrecy, how is it to communicate, plan, make decisions, discipline itself, and transform itself to meet new challenges? The answer is: by controlling information flows. After all, if the organization has goals that can be articulated, articulating them openly exposes them to resistance. But at the same time, failing to articulate those goals to itself deprives the organization of its ability to process and advance them. Somewhere in the middle, for the authoritarian conspiracy, is the right balance of authority and conspiracy.

His model for imagining the conspiracy, then, is not at all the cliché that people mean when they sneer at someone for being a “conspiracy theorist.” After all, most the “conspiracies” we’re familiar with are pure fantasies, and because the “Elders of Zion” or James Bond’s SPECTRE have never existed, their nonexistence becomes a cudgel for beating on people that would ever use the term or the concept. For Assange, by contrast, a conspiracy is something fairly banal, simply any network of associates who act in concert by hiding their concerted association from outsiders, an authority that proceeds by preventing its activities from being visible enough to provoke counter-reaction. It might be something as dramatic as a loose coalition of conspirators working to start a war with Iraq/n, or it might simply be the banal, everyday deceptions and conspiracies of normal diplomatic procedure.

He illustrates this theoretical model by the analogy of a board with nails hammered into it and then tied together with twine:

First take some nails (“conspirators”) and hammer them into a board at random. Then take twine (“communication”) and loop it from nail to nail without breaking. Call the twine connecting two nails a link. Unbroken twine means it is possible to travel from any nail to any other nail via twine and intermediary nails…Information flows from conspirator to conspirator. Not every conspirator trusts or knows every other conspirator even though all are connected. Some are on the fringe of the conspiracy, others are central and communicate with many conspirators and others still may know only two conspirators but be a bridge between important sections or groupings of the conspiracy…

Conspirators are often discerning, for some trust and depend each other, while others say little. Important information flows frequently through some links, trivial information through others. So we expand our simple connected graph model to include not only links, but their “importance.”

Return to our board-and-nails analogy. Imagine a thick heavy cord between some nails and fine light thread between others. Call the importance, thickness or heaviness of a link its weight. Between conspirators that never communicate the weight is zero. The “importance” of communication passing through a link is difficult to evaluate apriori, since its true value depends on the outcome of the conspiracy. We simply say that the “importance” of communication contributes to the weight of a link in the most obvious way; the weight of a link is proportional to the amount of important communication flowing across it. Questions about conspiracies in general won’t require us to know the weight of any link, since that changes from conspiracy to conspiracy.

Such a network will not be organized by a flow chart, nor would it ever produce a single coherent map of itself (without thereby hastening its own collapse). It is probably fairly acephalous, as a matter of course: if it had a single head (or a singular organizing mind which could survey and map the entirety), then every conspirator would be one step from the boss and a short two steps away from every other member of the conspiracy. A certain amount of centralization is necessary, in other words (otherwise there is no conspiracy), but too much centralization makes the system vulnerable.

To use The Wire as a ready-to-hand example, imagine if Avon Barksdale was communicating directly with Bodie. All you would ever have to do is turn one person — any person — and you would be one step away from the boss, whose direct connection to everyone else in the conspiracy would allow you to sweep them all up at once. Obviously, no effective conspiracy would ever function this way. Remember Stringer Bell’s “is you taking notes on a criminal fucking conspiracy?” To function effectively, the primary authority has to be disassociated from all other members of the conspiracy, layers of mediation which have to be as opaque as possible to everyone concerned (which a paper trail unhelpfully clarifies). But while the complexity of these linkages shield the directing authority from exposure, they also limit Avon Barksdale’s ability to control what’s going on around him. Businesses run on their paperwork! And the more walls you build around him, the less he might be able to trust his lieutenants, and the less they’ll require (or tolerate) him.

This, Assange reasons, is a way to turn a feature into a bug. And his underlying insight is simple and, I think, compelling: while an organization structured by direct and open lines of communication will be much more vulnerable to outside penetration, the more opaque it becomes to itself (as a defense against the outside gaze), the less able it will be to “think” as a system, to communicate with itself. The more conspiratorial it becomes, in a certain sense, the less effective it will be as a conspiracy. The more closed the network is to outside intrusion, the less able it is to engage with that which is outside itself (true hacker theorizing).

His thinking is not quite as abstract as all that, of course; as he quite explicitly notes, he is also understanding the functioning of the US state by analogy with successful terrorist organizations. If you’ve seen The Battle of Algiers, for example, think of how the French counter-terrorist people work to produce an organizational flow chart of the Algerian resistance movement: since they had overwhelming military superiority, their inability to crush the FLN resided in their inability to find it, an inability which the FLN strategically works to impede by decentralizing itself. Cutting off one leg of the octopus, the FLN realized, wouldn’t degrade the system as a whole if the legs all operated independently. The links between the units were the vulnerable spots for the system as a whole, so those were most closely and carefully guarded and most hotly pursued by the French. And while the French won the battle of Algiers, they lost the war, because they adopted the tactics Assange briefly mentions only to put aside:

How can we reduce the ability of a conspiracy to act?…We can split the conspiracy, reduce or eliminating important communication between a few high weight links or many low weight links. Traditional attacks on conspiratorial power groupings, such as assassination, have cut high weight links by killing, kidnapping, blackmailing or otherwise marginalizing or isolating some of the conspirators they were connected to.

This is the US’s counterterrorism strategy — find the men in charge and get ’em — but it’s not what Assange wants to do: such a program would isolate a specific version of the conspiracy and attempt to destroy the form of it that already exists, which he argues will have two important limitations. For one thing, by the time such a conspiracy has a form which can be targeted, its ability to function will be quite advanced. As he notes:

“A man in chains knows he should have acted sooner for his ability to influence the actions of the state is near its end. To deal with powerful conspiratorial actions we must think ahead and attack the process that leads to them since the actions themselves can not be dealt with.”

By the time a cancer has metastasized, in other words, antioxidents are no longer effective, and even violent chemotherapy is difficult. It’s better, then, to think about how conspiracies come into existence so as to prevent them from forming in the first place (whereas if you isolate the carcinogen early enough, you don’t need to remove the tumor after the fact). Instead, he wants to address the aggregative process itself, by impeding the principle of its reproduction: rather than trying to expose and cut particular links between particular conspirators (which does little to prevent new links from forming and may not disturb the actual functioning of the system as a whole), he wants to attack the “total conspiratorial power” of the entire system by figuring out how to reduce its total ability to share and exchange information among itself, in effect, to slow down its processing power. As he puts it:

Conspiracies are cognitive devices. They are able to outthink the same group of individuals acting alone Conspiracies take information about the world in which they operate (the conspiratorial environment), pass through the conspirators and then act on the result. We can see conspiracies as a type of device that has inputs (information about the environment), a computational network (the conspirators and their links to each other) and outputs (actions intending to change or maintain the environment).

Because he thinks of the conspiracy as a computational network, he notes in an aside that one way to weaken its cognitive ability would be to degrade the quality of its information:

Since a conspiracy is a type of cognitive device that acts on information acquired from its environment, distorting or restricting these inputs means acts based on them are likely to be misplaced. Programmers call this effect garbage in, garbage out. Usually the effect runs the other way; it is conspiracy that is the agent of deception and information restriction. In the US, the programmer’s aphorism is sometimes called “the Fox News effect”.

I’m not sure this is what he means, but it’s worth reflecting that the conspiracy’s ability to deceive others through propaganda can also be the conspiracy’s tendency to deceive itself by its own propaganda. So many people genuinely drink the Kool-Aid, after all. Would our super-spies in Afghanistan ever have been so taken in by the imposter Taliban guy if they didn’t, basically, believe their own line of propaganda, if they didn’t convince themselves — even provisionally — that we actually are winning the war against Talibothra? The same is true of WMD; while no one in possession of the facts could rationally conclude that Saddam Hussein then (or Iran now) are actually, positively in pursuit of WMD’s, this doesn’t mean that the people talking about ticking time bombs don’t actually believe that they are. It just means they are operating with bad information about the environment. Sometimes this works in their favor, but sometimes it does not: if Obama thinks Afghanistan is winnable, it may sink his presidency, for example, while the belief of his advisors that the economy would recover if the government rescued only the banks almost certainly lost the midterm elections for the Democrats (and was the death-knell for so many of the Blue Dogs who were driving that particular policy choice). Whether this actually hurts the conspiracy is unclear; those Blue Dogs might have lost their seats, but most of them will retire from public service to cushy jobs supported by the sectors they supported while they were in public service. And lots of successful politicians do nothing but fail.

This is however, not where Assange’s reasoning leads him. He decides, instead, that the most effective way to attack this kind of organization would be to make “leaks” a fundamental part of the conspiracy’s information environment. Which is why the point is not that particular leaks are specifically effective. Wikileaks does not leak something like the “Collateral Murder” video as a way of putting an end to that particular military tactic; that would be to target a specific leg of the hydra even as it grows two more. Instead, the idea is that increasing the porousness of the conspiracy’s information system will impede its functioning, that the conspiracy will turn against itself in self-defense, clamping down on its own information flows in ways that will then impede its own cognitive function. You destroy the conspiracy, in other words, by making it so paranoid of itself that it can no longer conspire:

The more secretive or unjust an organization is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in its leadership and planning coterie. This must result in minimization of efficient internal communications mechanisms (an increase in cognitive “secrecy tax”) and consequent system-wide cognitive decline resulting in decreased ability to hold onto power as the environment demands adaption. Hence in a world where leaking is easy, secretive or unjust systems are nonlinearly hit relative to open, just systems. Since unjust systems, by their nature induce opponents, and in many places barely have the upper hand, mass leaking leaves them exquisitely vulnerable to those who seek to replace them with more open forms of governance.

The leak, in other words, is only the catalyst for the desired counter-overreaction; Wikileaks wants to provoke the conspiracy into turning off its own brain in response to the threat. As it tries to plug its own holes and find the leakers, he reasons, its component elements will de-synchronize from and turn against each other, de-link from the central processing network, and come undone. Even if all the elements of the conspiracy still exist, in this sense, depriving themselves of a vigorous flow of information to connect them all together as a conspiracy prevents them from acting as a conspiracy. As he puts it:

If total conspiratorial power is zero, then clearly there is no information flow between the conspirators and hence no conspiracy. A substantial increase or decrease in total conspiratorial power almost always means what we expect it to mean; an increase or decrease in the ability of the conspiracy to think, act and adapt…An authoritarian conspiracy that cannot think is powerless to preserve itself against the opponents it induces.

In this sense, most of the media commentary on the latest round of leaks has totally missed the point. After all, why are diplomatic cables being leaked? These leaks are not specifically about the war(s) at all, and most seem to simply be a broad swath of the everyday normal secrets that a security state keeps from all but its most trusted hundreds of thousands of people who have the right clearance. Which is the point: Assange is completely right that our government has conspiratorial functions. What else would you call the fact that a small percentage of our governing class governs and acts in our name according to information which is freely shared amongst them but which cannot be shared amongst their constituency? And we all probably knew that this was more or less the case; anyone who was surprised that our embassies are doing dirty, secretive, and disingenuous political work as a matter of course is naïve. But Assange is not trying to produce a journalistic scandal which will then provoke red-faced government reforms or something, precisely because no one is all that scandalized by such things any more. Instead, he is trying to strangle the links that make the conspiracy possible, to expose the necessary porousness of the American state’s conspiratorial network in hopes that the security state will then try to shrink its computational network in response, thereby making itself dumber and slower and smaller.

Early responses seem to indicate that Wikileaks is well on its way to accomplishing some of its goals. As Simon Jenkins put it (in a great piece in its own right) “The leaks have blown a hole in the framework by which states guard their secrets.” And if the diplomats quoted by Le Monde are right that, “we will never again be able to practice diplomacy like before,” this is exactly what Wikileaks was trying to do. It’s sort of pathetic hearing diplomats and government shills lament that the normal work of “diplomacy” will now be impossible, like complaining that that the guy boxing you out is making it hard to get rebounds. Poor dears. If Assange is right to point out that his organization has accomplished more state scrutiny than the entire rest of the journalistic apparatus combined, he’s right but he’s also deflecting the issue: if Wikileaks does some of the things that journalists do, it also does some very different things. Assange, as his introductory remarks indicate quite clearly, is in the business of “radically shift[ing] regime behavior.”

If Wikileaks is a different kind of organization than anything we’ve ever seen before, it’s interesting to see him put himself in line with more conventional progressivism. Assange isn’t off base, after all, when he quotes Theodore Roosevelt’s words from his 1912 Progressive party presidential platform as the epigraph to the first essay; Roosevelt realized a hundred years ago that “Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people,” and it was true, then too, that “To destroy this invisible government, to befoul this unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of statesmanship.” Assange is trying to shit all over this unholy alliance in ways that the later and more radical Roosevelt would likely have commended.

It’s worth closing, then, by recalling that Roosevelt also coined the term “muckraker,” and that he did so as a term of disparagement. Quoting from Pilgrim’s Progress, he cited the example of the “Muck-Raker” who could only look down, whose perspective was so totally limited to the “muck” that it was his job to rake, he had lost all ability to see anything higher. Roosevelt, as always, is worth quoting:

In Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress you may recall the description of the Man with the Muck-rake, the man who could look no way but downward, with the muckrake in his hand; who was offered a celestial crown for his muck-rake, but who would neither look up nor regard the crown he was offered, but continued to rake to himself the filth of the floor…the Man with the Muck-rake is set forth as the example of him whose vision is fixed on carnal instead of on spiritual things. Yet he also typifies the man who in this life consistently refuses to see aught that is lofty, and fixes his eyes with solemn intentness only on that which is vile and debasing. Now, it is very necessary that we should not flinch from seeing what is s vile and debasing. There is filth on the floor, and it must be scraped up with the muck-rake; and there are times and places where this service is the most needed of all the services that can be performed. But the man who never does anything else, who never thinks or speaks or writes save of his feats with the muck-rake, speedily becomes, not a help to society, not an incitement to good, but one of the most potent forces for evil. There are, in the body politic, economic, and social, many and grave evils, and there is urgent necessity for the sternest war upon them. There should be relentless exposure of and attack upon every evil man, whether politician or business man, every evil practice, whether in politics, in business, or in social life. I hail as a benefactor every writer or speaker, every man who, on the platform, or in book, magazine, or newspaper, with merciless severity makes such attack, provided always that he in his turn remembers that the attack is of use only if it is absolutely truthful…

Roosevelt was many things when he uttered those words, but he was not wrong. There is a certain vicious amorality about the Mark Zuckerberg-ian philosophy that all transparency is always and everywhere a good thing, particularly when it’s uttered by the guy who’s busily monetizing your radical transparency. And the way most journalists “expose” secrets as a professional practice — to the extent that they do — is just as narrowly selfish: because they publicize privacy only when there is profit to be made in doing so, they keep their eyes on the valuable muck they are raking, and learn to pledge their future professional existence on a continuing and steady flow of it. In muck they trust.

According to his essay, Julian Assange is trying to do something else. Because we all basically know that the US state — like all states — is basically doing a lot of basically shady things basically all the time, simply revealing the specific ways they are doing these shady things will not be, in and of itself, a necessarily good thing. In some cases, it may be a bad thing, and in many cases, the provisional good it may do will be limited in scope. The question for an ethical human being — and Assange always emphasizes his ethics — has to be the question of what exposing secrets will actually accomplish, what good it will do, what better state of affairs it will bring about. And whether you buy his argument or not, Assange has a clearly articulated vision for how Wikileaks’ activities will “carry us through the mire of politically distorted language, and into a position of clarity,” a strategy for how exposing secrets will ultimately impede the production of future secrets. The point of Wikileaks — as Assange argues — is simply to make Wikileaks unnecessary.