Editorial 12.11, December 2010. by Deirdre Helfferich The WikiLeaks Tilt-A-Whirl House of Horror The WikiLeaks debacle has revealed many foul things beneath the rocks of modern propaganda, shaming the United States, Sweden, England, Germany, and many other supposed bastions of freedom and democracy. An ugly, rotten core at the heart of US policymaking has been exposed to the world: incredible political weakness and an unwillingness to tolerate the domestic freedoms that our country’s founders deemed the inalienable rights of all. Here are just a few of the issues revealed: Flimsy cybersecurity: The apparent ease with which US state secrets were smuggled out reveals gaping holes in our security. (This parallels the mess in our transportation security as well, with a detection failure rate at airports ranging from 70 percent or higher.) Excessive secrecy: It’s hard to take US security classification of documents seriously, however, when something like 2.5 to 3.2 million people (the actual number is unknown) have “secret” clearance or higher. Overclassification or classification of documents that really should be declassified and publicly available is a serious problem, one that President Obama attempted to address, ironically, by creating the National Declassification Center in 2009. Due process and summary justice: WikiLeaks and Julian Assange have not been charged with any crime related to the leaks, yet are being punished—and the newspapers that WikiLeaks is working with are not, nor are the other news organizations, websites, or bloggers that are reprinting these cables. (Well, the Air Force is trying to prevent viewing these sites.) The US is scrambling to come up with something, anything, that it can prosecute WikiLeaks for, even to the point of trying to change the law expressly for the purpose. Bradley Manning has been charged but not convicted, and despite being a model prisoner has been held in extended solitary confinement for seven months. Solitary confinement: The conditions of Manning’s imprisonment have highlighted the abominable and casual use of solitary confinement in this country. Solitary confinement is not like a “time out” for children. Extended solitary confinement quickly drives one-third of all persons subjected to it insane, and causes physical brain abnormalities. An article in the March 2009 New Yorker concludes that extended solitary confinement is torture, and describes the infamous isolation experiments on baby rhesus monkeys by psychologist Harry Harlow and prison studies by psychology professor Craig Haney and by psychiatrist Stuart Grassian, one of the world’s leading experts on the psychiatric effects of solitary confinement. The blog Solitary Watch reports that “on any given day, as many as 100,000 people are living in solitary confinement in America’s prisons.” Muzzling the press: Despite the fact that WikiLeaks is working carefully with several reputable news organizations with long histories of investigative journalism to redact the diplomatic cables and select carefully among the quarter-million or so in its possession, the US government is reacting as though the sky is falling. Reporters Without Borders and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, among others, have expressed their grave reservations to the Obama Administration about the wisdom of attempting to prosecute WikiLeaks. From Columbia’s letter:
Yet, judging by the increasingly histrionic tone from Congress and the White House on the affair, it seems unlikely that our government officials are able to distinguish between journalism and spying. The powerful are never very fond of being caught out in lies, war crimes, corruption, or even mere embarrassments. The ironically named SHIELD Act (Securing Human Intelligence and Enforcing Lawful Dissemination), sponsored by Sens. Joe Lieberman, John Ensign, and Scott Brown, would run roughshod over the freedom of the press, and, as has been pointed out by several legal scholars and other writers, is clearly unconstitutional. Thought crime: Federal employees and contractors are now prohibited from reading the released cables, and the Air Force has gone one better, blocking web access to publications that reprint them (a good twenty-five news organizations are on their list, now). The cat is out of the bag, but the Obama Administration, eager to prove itself worthy of China, is all for intellectual repression at this obvious and insidious level. Appallingly, the Library of Congress has blocked access to WikiLeaks on its computers entirely. Aside from being a screechingly blatant violation of free speech rights and the freedom to read, it is really, really stupid: our government employees should be deliberately ignorant of our own policies and actions? Our civil servants should be less informed than the employees of other governments? That puts us at a distinct disadvantage diplomatically, to say the least, nonsensically elevating “security” over actually doing a good job. Everybody else gets to be in the know, but not us, oh no. Well, that will certainly help the rest of the world to deal with us as they please. The White House’s Office of Management and Budget prohibition is inspired by WikiLeaks, and although it has broad implications, is very narrowly aimed. For example, The Pentagon Papers documents are still classified Top Secret. Never mind whether they were released in 1971, have been reprinted just about everywhere and are now in the public domain, they should be a big no-no to look at because, according to the OMB’s recent memo, “unauthorized disclosures of classified documents (whether in print, on a blog, or on websites) do not alter the documents’ classified status or automatically result in declassification of the documents.” Yet, I don’t see the Library of Congress blocking access to those. Look at the little birdie: While jumping up and down energetically about the wicked Mr. Assange, various members of US officialdom seem to be fighting a losing battle to direct the public’s attention away from the actual content of the released diplomatic cables, which reveal everything from embarrassingly frank personal observations about the character of various dignitaries (not unlike what you’d hear in any political discussion at the Golden Eagle, although the diplomats are more informed on particulars) to revelations of political bullying, war crimes, and American desperation to keep the dollar afloat and the oil coming, at seemingly any cost. Corporate dominion: Ominously, in the corporate world, the privatization of injustice has become clearer than ever before: Amazon, Bank of America, MasterCard World, PayPal, VISA Europe, and now Apple have blocked payments or the means to donate to WikiLeaks. When corporations, against the express wishes of and the contracts with their clients, start determining what political speech or reading material is appropriate for their customers, then we are in big trouble. Freedom of speech for users of the Internet? Forget it, folks. Other issues, such as domestic surveillance, Sweden’s shameful failure to adequately address sexual assault (until, for some reason, the particular case against Assange), the incitements to violence against Assange and Manning, cyberwar and cyberprotest, etc., are also making the world’s news pot boil and steam. The reaction to the publication of these cablegrams points to a teetering American empire that is in danger of abandoning completely the origins of its strength: the fundamental respect and support for the rule of law and the right—the necessity—of the citizens to be well informed. For a democracy without these will surely topple. | ||
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