21 Mar 11 | Index Index, minipost
Around 30 demonstrators were arrested at a protest demanding the release of Private Bradley Manning on Sunday. The demonstration was held at the Quantico marine base in Virginia, where Manning is being held in solitary confinement.
Another US protest held this weekend resulted in the arrest of 113 anti-war activists. The man who leaked the Pentagon Papers was among those detained. They were protesting near the White House to commemorate the eighth anniversary of the Iraq war. Police made the arrests after warning activists to stop marching round the White House.
16 Mar 11 | Uncategorized
Speaking publicly for the first time in four months, Julian Assange addressed the Cambridge Union on Tuesday. Members waited for hours in a queue around the building; many did not make it inside and watched it on screens elsewhere in the Union.
For legal reasons, the boundaries of Assange’s talk were clearly defined before he began. He would talk only of the leaked cables and not sexual assault allegations.
He barely acknowledged the rapturous applause and seemed drained by his experiences. He began by drawing on Orwell:
“He who controls the present controls the past. He who controls the past controls the future.”
This was the first of a number of lofty allusions which peppered Assange’s rhetoric. He referred to the radical publishers stifled by the licensing system of the 1640s; and Soviet attempts to alter encyclopaedia entries. He described his theme as “the privatisation of censorship”.
His speech focused on political events surrounding the publication of Wikileaks cables. He quoted figures revealed in the Iraq War logs and the Tunisian cables about Ben Ali. Assange praised the online resurrection of Al Akbhar, an Arabic newspaper which had published several Wikileaks cables. It was subjected to Denial of Service attacks and banned by the Tunisian government. Assange described a period where visitors to the newspaper’s website were redirected to a Saudi “sex site”. The publication returned to the internet earlier in the day.
He claimed Wikileaks prevented Joe Biden from maintaining that Mubarak was not a dictator and was critical of America’s relations with the Middle East. He was disparaging about Hillary Clinton’s comments on the role of the internet. Whilst he acknowledged that Twitter and Facebook had played a part in the uprisings, he said that Al Jazeera had been far more influential.
The Egyptian revolutionaries’ handbook explicitly and repeatedly warned against using Facebook and Twitter, he said, following a brutal lesson when previous revolution attempts used these media. He claimed that officials used Facebook to “round up all the principal participants” who “were then beaten, interrogated and incarcerated”. He used this to support his opinion that the internet is “the greatest spying machine the world has ever seen.”
Answering questions following the speech, he said he recognised the importance of the rule of law, but said that there were certain situations where he believed citizens must break the law. The most contentious question concerned the detention of Private Bradley Manning. The Cambridge Union’s president intervened as this did not fall within the strict remit of the talk, but Assange answered anyway.
He explained that Wikileaks operated a technological system whereby sources were unknown, as “the best way to keep a secret is not to have it in the first place”. He expressed his sadness at Manning’s plight and accepted that Wikileaks would have some responsibility if he actually had been a source. He claimed that Manning was arrested following revelations to Wired magazine.
16 Mar 11 | Uncategorized
Speaking publicly for the first time in four months, Julian Assange addressed the Cambridge Union on Tuesday. Members waited for hours in a queue around the building; many did not make it inside and watched it on screens elsewhere in the Union.
For legal reasons, the boundaries of Assange’s talk were clearly defined before he began. He would talk only of the leaked cables and not sexual assault allegations.
He barely acknowledged the rapturous applause and seemed drained by his experiences. He began by drawing on Orwell:
“He who controls the present controls the past. He who controls the past controls the future.”
This was the first of a number of lofty allusions which peppered Assange’s rhetoric. He referred to the radical publishers stifled by the licensing system of the 1640s; and Soviet attempts to alter encyclopaedia entries. He described his theme as “the privatisation of censorship”.
His speech focused on political events surrounding the publication of Wikileaks cables. He quoted figures revealed in the Iraq War logs and the Tunisian cables about Ben Ali. Assange praised the online resurrection of Al Akbhar, an Arabic newspaper which had published several Wikileaks cables. It was subjected to Denial of Service attacks and banned by the Tunisian government. Assange described a period where visitors to the newspaper’s website were redirected to a Saudi “sex site”. The publication returned to the internet earlier in the day.
He claimed Wikileaks prevented Joe Biden from maintaining that Mubarak was not a dictator and was critical of America’s relations with the Middle East. He was disparaging about Hillary Clinton’s comments on the role of the internet. Whilst he acknowledged that Twitter and Facebook had played a part in the uprisings, he said that Al Jazeera had been far more influential.
The Egyptian revolutionaries’ handbook explicitly and repeatedly warned against using Facebook and Twitter, he said, following a brutal lesson when previous revolution attempts used these media. He claimed that officials used Facebook to “round up all the principal participants” who “were then beaten, interrogated and incarcerated”. He used this to support his opinion that the internet is “the greatest spying machine the world has ever seen.”
Answering questions following the speech, he said he recognised the importance of the rule of law, but said that there were certain situations where he believed citizens must break the law. The most contentious question concerned the detention of Private Bradley Manning. The Cambridge Union’s president intervened as this did not fall within the strict remit of the talk, but Assange answered anyway.
He explained that Wikileaks operated a technological system whereby sources were unknown, as “the best way to keep a secret is not to have it in the first place”. He expressed his sadness at Manning’s plight and accepted that Wikileaks would have some responsibility if he actually had been a source. He claimed that Manning was arrested following revelations to Wired magazine.
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.”
