Daniel Ellsberg, who famously leaked the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam war, was arrested today after chaining himself to the gates of the White House. He did so to support Wikileaks and Bradley Manning. Bradley Manning, who's being held in inhuman, mind- and body-breaking conditions at the US military prison in Quantico, Virginia, played the whistle-blowing role Ellsberg played in 1971, while Wikileaks has been playing the role played by the New York Times, which published the Pentagon Papers that Ellsberg leaked. After publishing materials last summer that in another time would have done for the US's war in Afghanistan what the publication of the Pentagon Papers did for its war in Vietnam, Wikileaks then began publishing US diplomatic cables to whom three million people have legal access.
Although the US public sphere has been pretty much able to ignore the devastating revelations made last summer, because the diplomatic cables released have contained sexier material that has created personal embarrassment for some US diplomats, it's been getting greater play in the US media, with calls for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange's blood. Since shared secrets are almost never kept, I find it highly unlikely that secrets shared by three million people are anything but "open secrets"-- i.e., information that is the property of elites who prefer that it be concealed from the people who are actually paying the bills in this country (i.e., everyone who makes less than a million or so a year). But are the US media paying much attention to the really significant stuff? I have my doubts. Surely the media's coverage of Cancun should have reflected what we now know of the lengths that the Obama administration went to make a shambles of international steps to address Global Warming at Copenhagen last year.
To take one example of one of the open secrets found in Wikileaks' ongoing release of diplomatic cables: the extent of US military activity throughout the world. Though I may have suspected that the US was waging its Perpetual War on several fronts (besides the officially acknowledged invasions of Afganistan and Iraq), I never imagined in just how many places in the world the US is carrying out military actions. Wikileaks cables have revealed that the Pentagon alone (never mind what the CIA, the DEA, and other intelligence agencies are up to) is waging covert war in 75 countries. Yes, 75. War, war, and more war is where our tax dollars are going. Which explains why we can't have universal health care, as other civilized nations do, and why we are yanking support from the unemployed, and why there's no money for bridges and other infrastructure, or education, or anti-poverty programs. And so on and so forth.)
Ellsberg timed his civil disobedience with the publication today of a letter from Fairness and Accuracy in the Media signed by numerous journalists and writers:
December 14, 2010
As journalists, activists, artists, scholars and citizens, we condemn the array of threats and attacks on the journalist organization WikiLeaks. After the website's decision, in collaboration with several international media organizations, to publish hundreds of classified State Department diplomatic cables, many pundits, commentators and prominent US politicians have called for harsh actions to be taken to shut down WikiLeaks' operations.
Major corporations like Amazon.com, PayPal, MasterCard and Visa have acted to disrupt the group's ability to publish. US legal authorities and others have repeatedly suggested, without providing any evidence, that WikiLeaks' posting of government secrets is a form of criminal behavior--or that at the very least, such activity should be made illegal. "To the extent there are gaps in our laws," Attorney General Eric Holder proclaimed (11/29/10), "we will move to close those gaps."
Throughout this episode, journalists and prominent media outlets have largely refrained from defending WikiLeaks' rights to publish material of considerable news value and obvious public interest. It appears that these media organizations are hesitant to stand up for this particular media outlet's free speech rights because they find the supposed political motivations behind WikiLeaks' revelations objectionable.
But the test for one's commitment to freedom of the press is not whether one agrees with what a media outlet publishes or the manner in which it is published. WikiLeaks is certainly not beyond criticism. But the overarching consideration should be the freedom to publish in a democratic society--including the freedom to publish material that a particular government would prefer be kept secret. When government officials and media outlets declare that attacks on a particular media organization are justified, it sends an unmistakably chilling message about the rights of anyone to publish material that might rattle or offend established powers.
We hereby stand in support of the WikiLeaks media organization, and condemn the attacks on their freedom as an attack on journalistic freedoms for all.
******
Daniel Ellsberg
Noam Chomsky
Glenn Greenwald (Salon)
Barbara Ehrenreich
Arundhati Roy (author)
Medea Benjamin (Code Pink)
Tom Morello (musician)
John Nichols (The Nation)
Craig Brown (CommonDreams)
Glen Ford (Black Agenda Report)
DeeDee Halleck (Waves of Change, Deep Dish Network)
Norman Solomon (author, War Made Easy)
Tom Hayden
Fatima Bhutto (author)
Viggo Mortensen (actor)
Don Rojas (Free Speech TV)
Robert McChesney
Edward S. Herman (Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania)
Sam Husseini
Jeff Cohen (Park Center for Independent Media)
Joel Bleifuss (In These Times)
Maya Schenwar (Truthout)
Greg Ruggerio (City Lights)
Thom Hartmann
Ben Ehrenreich
Robin Andersen (Fordham University)
Anthony Arnove (author, Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal)
Robert Naiman (Just Foreign Policy)
Dan Gillmor (Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship)
Michael Albert (Z Magazine)
Kate Murphy (The Nation)
Michelangelo Signorile (Sirius XM)
Lisa Lynch (Concordia University)
Rory O'Connor (Media Is a Plural)
Aaron Swartz
Peter Rothberg (The Nation)
Doug Henwood (Left Business Observer)
Barry Crimmins
Bill Fletcher, Jr (Blackcommentator.com)
Bob Harris (writer)
Jonathan Schwartz (A Tiny Revolution)
Alex Kane
Susan Ohanian
Jamie McClelland (May First/People Link)
Alfredo Lopez (May First/People Link)
Antonia Zerbisias (Toronto Star)
Mark Crispin Miller (NYU)
Jonathan Tasini
Antony Loewenstein
(Organizations/institutions listed for identification purposes only)
For more on the FAIR's efforts, visit the group's website at www.fair.org
Posts in the Pleasures of 2010 series will resume shortly.
Showing posts with label Secrets. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Secrets. Show all posts
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Monday, July 19, 2010
This Is Not Science Fiction
"The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work."-- Dana Priest and Will Arkin, The Washington Post, A hidden world, growing beyond control July 19, 2010
Welcome to the 21st-century US: a world in which the state hasn't disappeared (as so many prognosticators in the late 20th-century insisted it would), but in which business has merged with the state, blurring the lines between business and the power and money of the state (BP, anyone? Where BP gets to tell the Coast Guard what to do, where BP has the power to have journalists jailed and fined?), to run our lives and drain our resources (financial, personal, and otherwise). The Washington Post has begun publishing a huge expose by Dana Priest and William Arkin of the development of what they are calling the "Fourth Branch of Government," about which no one has any idea of the size, range, or reach (much less its budget). Almost a million people now have "top secret" security clearances. Imagine that. (I think of the population of the greater metropolitan area of Seattle and am flabbergasted.) You'll want to check out the WA Post articles. A documentary will be coming out in October on PBS's Frontline,as well. Democracy Now's Amy Goodman interviews William Arkin here.
Go find out about "Super Users," the few dozen individuals who have access to all the thousands of programs of the government and have no idea about what's going on, because this untended machinery is too vast too oversee. Go check it all out. It feels like science fiction. How I wish it were.
Welcome to the 21st-century US: a world in which the state hasn't disappeared (as so many prognosticators in the late 20th-century insisted it would), but in which business has merged with the state, blurring the lines between business and the power and money of the state (BP, anyone? Where BP gets to tell the Coast Guard what to do, where BP has the power to have journalists jailed and fined?), to run our lives and drain our resources (financial, personal, and otherwise). The Washington Post has begun publishing a huge expose by Dana Priest and William Arkin of the development of what they are calling the "Fourth Branch of Government," about which no one has any idea of the size, range, or reach (much less its budget). Almost a million people now have "top secret" security clearances. Imagine that. (I think of the population of the greater metropolitan area of Seattle and am flabbergasted.) You'll want to check out the WA Post articles. A documentary will be coming out in October on PBS's Frontline,as well. Democracy Now's Amy Goodman interviews William Arkin here.
WILLIAM ARKIN: Well, really, the most significant thing that we found, Amy, is not that the intelligence agency or the vast homeland security apparatus does work in this field and that is—and that they are engaged in counterterrorism. Really the most significant finding, to me, is the number of private companies in America who have been enlisted in the war on terrorism and who have now become an intrinsic part of government, really where the line is blurred between government and private sector. And the fact that there are almost 2,000 companies that do top-secret work in—for the intelligence community and the military is not only surprising to me as someone who actually put together the data, but it really asks some fundamental questions about the nature of government and the nature of accountability."But there is something fundamentally wrong in America if you have people who are working in a for-profit environment caring for our national security and engaged in what we consider to be the inherent functions of government, " Arkin says, and "I have to say at this point, I feel like the Washington Post has a better understanding of this overall problem than the government does."
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about these 2,000 companies.
WILLIAM ARKIN: Well, you know, it’s funny. We think of the military-industrial complex in a sort of old-fashioned way still. In fact, we don’t even have an appropriate word to describe what this enterprise is today, and we’ve struggled ourselves to try to figure that out. You know, the military-industrial complex of the Eisenhower era was one that produced massive amounts of capital goods for the military—bombers, missiles, nuclear weapons, etc. But today’s national security establishment really values information technology more than it values weapons. And really, one of the things that was most surprising to us, but maybe not so surprising given the nature of society, is that a half of the companies in this particular area are really IT companies, information technology companies, and support companies.
The domination of this world of top-secret contractors over the traditional world of the military-industrial complex is huge. And we see very clearly that the megacorporations which have always been the powerhouses in the defense industry—Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics—they are moving more and more of their business from production to the provision of services—that is, providing staffing for the government. And so, what you see is that we are increasingly a national security establishment that’s producing paper rather than producing weapons. And the question is, with the production of all that paper, whether or not we have either an effective counterterrorism operation or whether or not we’re even safer.
Go find out about "Super Users," the few dozen individuals who have access to all the thousands of programs of the government and have no idea about what's going on, because this untended machinery is too vast too oversee. Go check it all out. It feels like science fiction. How I wish it were.
Saturday, September 12, 2009
Top Secret
Or should that just be, "A Well-Kept Secret at the Top"?
Everyone, I presume, assumes that politicians (also sometimes known as "world leaders") tell one another things they would never willingly reveal to the people who voted them into office. Usually, though, such discrepancies don't come to light. But in Thatcher Told Gorbachev Britain Did Not Want German Reunification in the Times Online (U.K.), Michael Binyon tells a tale that is bound to warm historians' hearts, of
a remarkable cache of official Kremlin records smuggled out of Moscow. After Mr Gorbachev left office in 1991, copies of the state archives went to his personal foundation in Moscow. A few years ago Pavel Stroilov, a young writer doing research at the foundation, understood the huge historical significance of what they recorded.
He copied more than 1,000 transcripts of all the Politburo discussions and brought them with him when he moved to London to continue his research. His copies were made just in time, as all the transcripts of Politburo meetings and talks with foreign leaders have now been sealed. The records detail how the Russians reacted to the tumultuous events of 1989 and reveal the frantic attempts by Britain and France to halt moves to German unification by manoeuvring the Soviet Union into opposing it.
Margaret Thatcher, the documents reveal, told Gorbachev
that she was “deeply impressed” by the courage and patriotism of General Wojciech Jaruzelski, the Polish Communist leader. She noted, approvingly, that Mr Gorbachev had reacted “calmly” to the results of the Polish elections, in which the Communists were defeated for the first time in an open vote in Eastern Europe, and to the other changes in Eastern Europe.
Margaret Thatcher as a Jaruzelski fangirl? Sounds like a Saturday Night Live skit, or something out of a comic book! But
then she launched her bombshell. She asked that her next remarks should not be recorded. Mr Gorbachev agreed — but the Kremlin transcript included them anyway, noting laconically: “The following part of the conversation is reproduced from memory.” She spoke of her deep “concern” at what was going on in East Germany. She said “big changes” could be afoot.
And this led to her fear that it would all eventually lead to German reunification — an official goal of Western policy for more than a generation.
She assured Mr Gorbachev that President Bush also wanted to do nothing that would be seen by the Russians as a threat to their security. The same assurance was later spelt out in person to Mr Gorbachev at the Soviet- American summit off Malta.
Six days before the wall came down, Gorbachev discussed the unrest in East Germany with Vladmir Kryuchkov and Eduard Shvardnadze:
[Eduard] Shevardnadze [Foreign Minister]: We’d better take down the wall ourselves.
Kryuchkov: It will be difficult for them* if we take it down.
Gorbachev: They [East Germany] will be bought up whole . . . And when they reach world prices, living standards will fall immediately. The West doesn’t want German reunification but wants to use us to prevent it, to cause a clash between us and the FRG so as to rule out the possibility of a future “conspiracy” between the USSR and Germany.
Mrs Thatcher was not the only one worried by events in Germany. A month after the Berlin Wall came down, Jacques Attali, the personal adviser to President Mitterrand, met Vadim Zagladin, a senior Gorbachev aide, in Kiev.
Mr Attali said that Moscow’s refusal to intervene in East Germany had “puzzled the French leadership” and questioned whether “the USSR has made peace with the prospect of a united Germany and will not take any steps to prevent it. This has caused a fear approaching panic.”
He then stated bluntly, echoing Mrs Thatcher: “France by no means wants German reunification, although it realises that in the end it is inevitable.”
In April 1990, five months after the wall came down, Mr Attali said that the spectre of reunification was causing nightmares among France’s politicians. The documents quote him telling Mr Mitterrand that he would “fly off to live on Mars” if this happened.
Yummy stuff, no?
Lamenting the wall and the separation of East and West Germany was a frequently invoked mantra from 1961, when the wall went up, to late 1989, when the wall came down. By the time I was an adult, I'd come to hear the lament as crocodile tears, just more of the constant stream of Cold War rhetoric that permeated life in the US. After the wall came down, quite a few analysts expressed anxiety about the possible consequences, of course. But never, of course, the people at the top: they were always jubilant. But now we know...
_______________________
*"Them" = the East German government
Everyone, I presume, assumes that politicians (also sometimes known as "world leaders") tell one another things they would never willingly reveal to the people who voted them into office. Usually, though, such discrepancies don't come to light. But in Thatcher Told Gorbachev Britain Did Not Want German Reunification in the Times Online (U.K.), Michael Binyon tells a tale that is bound to warm historians' hearts, of
a remarkable cache of official Kremlin records smuggled out of Moscow. After Mr Gorbachev left office in 1991, copies of the state archives went to his personal foundation in Moscow. A few years ago Pavel Stroilov, a young writer doing research at the foundation, understood the huge historical significance of what they recorded.
He copied more than 1,000 transcripts of all the Politburo discussions and brought them with him when he moved to London to continue his research. His copies were made just in time, as all the transcripts of Politburo meetings and talks with foreign leaders have now been sealed. The records detail how the Russians reacted to the tumultuous events of 1989 and reveal the frantic attempts by Britain and France to halt moves to German unification by manoeuvring the Soviet Union into opposing it.
Margaret Thatcher, the documents reveal, told Gorbachev
that she was “deeply impressed” by the courage and patriotism of General Wojciech Jaruzelski, the Polish Communist leader. She noted, approvingly, that Mr Gorbachev had reacted “calmly” to the results of the Polish elections, in which the Communists were defeated for the first time in an open vote in Eastern Europe, and to the other changes in Eastern Europe.
Margaret Thatcher as a Jaruzelski fangirl? Sounds like a Saturday Night Live skit, or something out of a comic book! But
then she launched her bombshell. She asked that her next remarks should not be recorded. Mr Gorbachev agreed — but the Kremlin transcript included them anyway, noting laconically: “The following part of the conversation is reproduced from memory.” She spoke of her deep “concern” at what was going on in East Germany. She said “big changes” could be afoot.
And this led to her fear that it would all eventually lead to German reunification — an official goal of Western policy for more than a generation.
She assured Mr Gorbachev that President Bush also wanted to do nothing that would be seen by the Russians as a threat to their security. The same assurance was later spelt out in person to Mr Gorbachev at the Soviet- American summit off Malta.
Six days before the wall came down, Gorbachev discussed the unrest in East Germany with Vladmir Kryuchkov and Eduard Shvardnadze:
[Eduard] Shevardnadze [Foreign Minister]: We’d better take down the wall ourselves.
Kryuchkov: It will be difficult for them* if we take it down.
Gorbachev: They [East Germany] will be bought up whole . . . And when they reach world prices, living standards will fall immediately. The West doesn’t want German reunification but wants to use us to prevent it, to cause a clash between us and the FRG so as to rule out the possibility of a future “conspiracy” between the USSR and Germany.
Mrs Thatcher was not the only one worried by events in Germany. A month after the Berlin Wall came down, Jacques Attali, the personal adviser to President Mitterrand, met Vadim Zagladin, a senior Gorbachev aide, in Kiev.
Mr Attali said that Moscow’s refusal to intervene in East Germany had “puzzled the French leadership” and questioned whether “the USSR has made peace with the prospect of a united Germany and will not take any steps to prevent it. This has caused a fear approaching panic.”
He then stated bluntly, echoing Mrs Thatcher: “France by no means wants German reunification, although it realises that in the end it is inevitable.”
In April 1990, five months after the wall came down, Mr Attali said that the spectre of reunification was causing nightmares among France’s politicians. The documents quote him telling Mr Mitterrand that he would “fly off to live on Mars” if this happened.
Yummy stuff, no?
Lamenting the wall and the separation of East and West Germany was a frequently invoked mantra from 1961, when the wall went up, to late 1989, when the wall came down. By the time I was an adult, I'd come to hear the lament as crocodile tears, just more of the constant stream of Cold War rhetoric that permeated life in the US. After the wall came down, quite a few analysts expressed anxiety about the possible consequences, of course. But never, of course, the people at the top: they were always jubilant. But now we know...
_______________________
*"Them" = the East German government
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