17 Jun 11 | Uncategorized
National Security Agency whistleblower Thomas Drake was supposed to stand trial this week in the United States in an Espionage Act case that seemed to say even more about the Obama Administration than its handling of WikiLeaks has. Drake had watched the agency sideline an intelligence-gathering computer program called ThinThread that insiders believe could have prevented 11 September. And he had early concerns about the legality of what became the NSA’s infamous domestic warrantless wiretapping programme (exposed by the New York Times in 2005), which looked an awful lot like ThinThread with all of its privacy protections deleted. (more…)
12 Apr 11 | Index Index, Middle East and North Africa, minipost, News and features
Zainab Alkhawaja, daughter of human rights activist and former president of the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights, Abdulhadi Alkhawaja, has gone on hunger strike demanding that authorities release her father and three other members of her immediate family.
Security forces are alleged to have used excessive and violent force in apprehending the suspects in their private residence without any search or arrest warrants. Zainab has also written an open letter to US president Barack Obama urging him to help free her family. Meanwhile on Twitter, seven other activists have vowed to join in the hunger strike.
05 Apr 11 | Uncategorized
President Karzai of Afghanistan has called for the Obama administration to condemn the recent Koran-burning in Florida by Pastor Wayne Sapp. The symbolic immolation of the book led to riots that left 22 dead. Obama has obliged by describing it as an act of “extreme intolerance and bigotry”. But Karzai wants Obama to go further and “bring those responsible to justice”.
It is not clear what that would mean in the US. First Amendment free speech protection doesn’t discriminate on the basis of the content of speech short of its posing a direct threat to others. Offensive expression, including symbolic flag- or Koran-burning, is just as protected as liberal political speech-making.
To take the most famous example, the neo-Nazis who wanted to march through Skokie in Illinois in 1977, where many Holocaust survivors lived, had as much right to express their views as anyone else. Controversially, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sprang to the their defence.
In that case the marchers, having secured their free speech rights in court, were persuaded to protest elsewhere. Only last year Pastor Terry Jones also backed down from this threat to burn Korans on the 9/11 anniversary, though most experts agreed that if he had gone ahead with the burning on private property he would have been unlikely to have committed any crime.
But sometimes offensive protestors follow through and make their point as threatened in a way that triggers strong reactions. In the case of Pastor Wayne Sapp, that’s what happened, and with fatal consequences thousands of miles away in Afghanistan, where another group of intolerant people took violent and utterly inexcusable “revenge” on 22 people.
Free speech issues are rarely straightforward. Some people would like to think they are, but they aren’t. The key question is always where a society wants to draw the line, not whether there should be a line at all. But I believe strongly that explosive reactions on the part of the offended shouldn’t determine where that line is drawn.
Such a reaction would give the power to circumscribe the limits of everyone’s freedom to those who have the angriest voices, and are swiftest to resort to violence. Instead we need to protect the freedom to criticise religion and religions, both in words and symbolic actions, as a fundamental right.
Put simply, no idea or object should be sacrosanct from criticism or ridicule, and we should be clear that we condemn violence far more than we condemn the expression of offensive views. We do not want to go back to the Dark Ages of blasphemy laws, or modern equivalents of them.
14 Mar 11 | Uncategorized
US State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley was forced to resign on Sunday over candid remarks he made about the Department of Defense’s treatment of Army private Bradley Manning, who is being held – under daily stretches of forced nudity – on suspicion of leaking thousands of classified documents to Wikileaks.
Speaking to a small group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (for a talk otherwise billed about “the benefits of new media as it relates to foreign policy”), Crowley called Manning’s treatment “ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid.” His comments were first reported by BBC blogger Phillipa Thomas, who was present at the talk, and then quickly spread throughout the media as evidence of internal administration controversy over the handling of Manning’s detention.
Crowley was asked his opinion about the situation after a series of damning articles appeared in the press detailing Manning’s conditions at the military brig where he is being held in Virginia. Defense officials admitted to stripping him of his clothes on a nightly basis for his own “safety,” although when pressed to explain how such treatment protects Manning rather than humiliate him, one official told The New York Times that discussing the details “would be a violation of Manning’s privacy.”
Liberal commentators have excoriated the government (and its subsequent justifications about Manning’s safety and privacy). President Obama directly rebutted Crowley’s assessment of the situation – a sign that boded badly for Crowley heading into the weekend – in a press conference on Friday, when he said he had been assured by the Pentagon that the “procedures that have been taken in terms of his confinement are appropriate and are meeting our basic standards.”
Those comments only further enraged many liberals who’ve long since grown disillusioned with the president who campaigned in 2008 on restoring America’s integrity around the world after years of infamous Bush-era detention abuses. In his resignation announcement Sunday, Crowley appeared to allude to the risk Manning’s highly publicized detention now poses to America’s standing abroad.
“The unauthorized disclosure of classified information is a serious crime under U.S. law,” Crowley said in a statement. “My recent comments regarding the conditions of the pre-trial detention of Private First Class Bradley Manning were intended to highlight the broader, even strategic impact of discrete actions undertaken by national security agencies every day and their impact on our global standing and leadership. The exercise of power in today’s challenging times and relentless media environment must be prudent and consistent with our laws and values.”
By signaling his approval of Manning’s detention conditions, and then forcing Crowley, a longtime public servant, from the State Department, many U.S. commentators now say Obama is cementing his surprising status as a particularly hard-line opponent of government leakers and whistleblowers.
TIME magazine wrote last week that Obama is “rapidly establishing a record as the most aggressive prosecutor of alleged government leakers in U.S. history.” Salon’s Glenn Greenwald wrote Monday that Crowley’s resignation “has apparently proven to be a clarifying moment for many commentators about what the President is and how he functions in these areas.”
Summed up The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates: “I think this is wrong. And it’s very hard for me to believe that, circa 2006, Senator Obama wouldn’t say as much.”
