The Ecuadorian Library

Bruce Sterling has popped up at Medium with a great essay (following up on an older one called "The Blast Shack") on Manning, Assange and Snowden - The Ecuadorian Library.

First let’s consider Bradley Manning, who is not at all close to the NSA. Bradley was a bored and upset minor military technician who burned a zillion US documents onto a DVD, and labeled that “Lady Gaga.”

The authorities finally got around to convicting Bradley this week, of some randomized set of largely irrelevant charges. But the damage there is already done; some to Bradley himself, but mostly grave, lasting damage to the authorities. By maltreating Bradley as their Guantanamo voodoo creature, their mystic hacker terror beast from AlQaedaville, Oklahoma, they made Bradley Manning fifty feet high.

At least they didn’t manage to kill him. Bradley’s visibly still on his feet, and was not so maddened by the torment of his solitary confinement that he’s reduced to paste. So he’s going to jail as an anti-war martyr, but time will pass. Someday, some new entity, someone in power who’s not directly embarrassed by Cablegate, can pardon him.

Some future Administration can amnesty him, once they get around to admitting that Bradley’s War on Terror is history. The War on Terror has failed as conclusively as Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations failed. There’s terror all over the sands now, terror from Mali to Xinjiang, and a billion tender-hearted Bradleys couldn’t stop that bleeding, no matter how much they leak.

Thanks to the modern miracle of fracking, though, the mayhem in the oil patch means a lot less to K Street. Someday, Bradley Manning will be as forgotten to them as Monica Lewinsky is. Then they’ll yield to the hornet-like, persistent buzz of the leftie peaceniks, and let Bradley go. He’s not dangerous. Bradley Manning will never do anything of similar consequence again. He’s not a power player. He’s a prisoner of conscience.

However, unlike poor Monica Lewinsky, Bradley Manning will never lack for passionate adherents who admire him and love him. Before Bradley went into his ugly maelstrom, he didn’t have that. Nowadays, he does. Maybe it’s worth it.

Then there’s Julian Assange. Yeah, him, the silver-haired devil, the Mycroft Holmes of the Ecuadorian Embassy. Bradley Manning’s not at all NSA material, he’s just a leaky clerk with a thumb-drive. But Julian’s quite a lot closer to the NSA — because he’s a career cypherpunk.

If you’re a typical NSA geek, and you stare in all due horror at Julian, it’s impossible not to recognize him as one of your own breed. He’s got the math fixation, the stilted speech, the thousand-yard-stare, and even the private idiolect that somehow allows NSA guys to make up their own vocabulary whenever addressing Congress (who don’t matter) and haranguing black-hat hacker security conventions (who obviously do).

Julian has turned out to be a Tim Leary at the NSA’s psychiatric convention. He’s a lasting embarrassment who also spiked their Kool-Aid. Crushing Julian, cutting his funding, that stuff didn’t help one bit. He’s still got a roof and a keyboard. That’s all he ever seems to need.

There’s nothing quite like a besieged embassy from which to mock the empty machinations of the vengeful yet hapless State Department. House arrest has also helped Julian with this obscure struggle he has, not to fling himself headlong onto Swedish feminists. The ruthless confinement has calmed him; it’s helped him to focus. He’s grown and matured through ardent political struggle.

Julian Assange is still a cranky extremist with a wacky digital ideology, but he doesn’t have to talk raw craziness any more, because the authorities are busy doing that for him. They can’t begin to discuss PRISM and XKeyScore without admitting that their alleged democratic process is a neon façade from LaLaLand. Instead, they’re forced to wander into a dizzying area of discourse where Julian staked out all the high points ten years ago.

More astonishing yet: this guy Assange, and his tiny corps of hacker myrmidons, actually managed to keep Edward Snowden out of US custody. Not only did Assange find an effective bolthole for himself, he also faked one up on the fly for this younger guy.

Assange liberated Snowden, who really is NSA, or rather a civilian outsourced contractor for the NSA, like there’s any practical difference.

It’s incredible to me that, among the eight zillion civil society groups on the planet that hate and fear spooks and police spies, not one of them could offer Snowden one shred of practical help, except for Wikileaks. This valiant service came from Julian Assange, a dude who can’t even pack his own suitcase without having a fit. ...

While Julian Assange, to do him credit, has the street smarts to behave as if he’s in a situation of feral realpolitik. Because he is. And how.

However, Assange now knows that. He’s a hardened veteran of it. And he’s gonna stay imperiled for the immediate future, because the upshot of this is pretty easy to see.

The inconvenient truth about the NSA is lying there on a table in the Ecuadorian Embassy, as stark as a poisoned crow. But it’ll join our planet’s many other inconvenient truths.

Snowden told the truth to the public — but then again, so did Solzhenitsyn, and even Al Gore lets on sometimes. The truth doesn’t do the trick for anybody, the truth is just a complicating factor. The present geopolitical situation is absolutely cluttered with amazing lies that didn’t work out for their owners.

The Iraqi weapons of mass destruction never existed. Climate change does exist, and could drown Wall Street any day now. The abject state of global finance is obvious, yet it makes no difference to the ongoing depredations. Drones are stark assassination machines, and they don’t stay classified. Anyone could go on.

And, yeah, by the way, Microsoft, Apple, Cisco, Google et al, they are all the blood brothers of Huawei in China — because they are intelligence assets posing as commercial operations. They are surveillance marketers. They give you free stuff in order to spy on you and pass that info along the value chain. Personal computers can have users, but social media has livestock.

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As We Near the 10th Anniversary of the Iraq War

James Fallows at The Atlantic has a look back at the Iraq war - As We Near the 10th Anniversary of the Iraq War.

Here is something other than The Sequester to think about at the beginning of March:

This month marks ten years since the U.S. launched its invasion of Iraq. In my view this was the biggest strategic error by the United States since at least the end of World War II and perhaps over a much longer period. Vietnam was costlier and more damaging, but also more understandable. As many people have chronicled, the decision to fight in Vietnam was a years-long accretion of step-by-step choices, each of which could be rationalized at the time. Invading Iraq was an unforced, unnecessary decision to risk everything on a "war of choice" whose costs we are still paying.

My reasons for bringing this up:

1) Reckoning. Anyone now age 30 or above should probably reflect on what he or she got right and wrong ten years ago.

I feel I was right in arguing, six months before the war in "The Fifty-First State," that invading Iraq would bring on a slew of complications and ramifications that would take at least a decade to unwind.

I feel not "wrong" but regretful for having resigned myself even by that point to the certainty that war was coming. We know, now, that within a few days of the 9/11 attacks many members of the Bush Administration had resolved to "go to the source," in Iraq. Here at the magazine, it was because of our resigned certainty about the war that Cullen Murphy, then serving as editor, encouraged me in early 2002 to begin an examination of what invading and occupying Iraq would mean. The resulting article was in our November, 2002 issue; we put it on line in late August in hopes of influencing the debate.

My article didn't come out and say as bluntly as it could have: we are about to make a terrible mistake we will regret and should avoid. Instead I couched the argument as cautionary advice. We know this is coming, and when it does, the results are going to be costly, damaging, and self-defeating. So we should prepare and try to diminish the worst effects (for Iraq and for us). This form of argument reflected my conclusion that the wheels were turning and that there was no way to stop them. Analytically, that was correct: Tony Blair or Colin Powell might conceivably have slowed the momentum, if either of them had turned anti-war in time, but few other people could have. Still, I'd feel better now if I had pushed the argument even harder at the time.

Crikey reports that after 1000 days of harsh treatment, Bradley Manning has admitted to leaking vast swathes of data to Wikileaks - Bradley Manning, succumbing to human frailty, pleads guilty.

Bradley Manning has pleaded guilty to the illegal possession and communication of government documents, and he is facing a sentence of 20 years. New revelations paint a sadder picture.

Bradley Manning, the US soldier long supposed to be the source of Wikileaks “collateral murder’ video and massive document drops, has pleaded guilty in a military court to the illegal possession and communication of government documents — some of the lesser charges against him.

The charges were a series of “sample” charges relating to documents within each of the main WikiLeaks releases — the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs, the Guantanamo prisoner files, the “collateral murder” video itself and other isolated documents. That added up to 10 counts, at two years per count, for a maximum sentence of 20 years. But that’s only on the charges Manning has pleaded guilty to.

There’s also a range of more serious charges of espionage and aiding the enemy, which potentially carry life in military prison without parole. Manning has pleaded not guilty to these, and the full court martial for that will begin in early June. Originally slated to run for several months, the trial could be somewhat shorter now that Manning has admitted handling the documents in question. Despite that, the government has lined up more than 140 potential witnesses for the prosecution.

Manning and his team have elected not to go with a military jury, presenting their case to a judge only and placing a great deal of emphasis on the draconian treatment that Manning has suffered during three years of incarceration, including four months of “suicide watch”, when he was stripped naked and subject to sleep deprivation.

Making a guilty plea gave Manning a chance to make an extended statement to the court, and it was this 35-page document that really set things on their ear. Acknowledging that he had leaked the documents — an admission of an open secret, since his confession of such to fellow hacker Adrian Lamo is what had got him arrested in the first place — Manning made a bold defense of his won autonomy, saying that he did not believe himself to be communicating with the enemy, simply presenting the American people with the things that were being done in their name.

He noted his horror at the obvious dehumanisation of the US soldiers responsible for the massacre of Iraqi civilians in the “collateral murder” video and of the various massacres featured in the Afghanistan documents. He said that he had leaked the documents of his own volition after logging onto the WikiLeaks chat site and communicating with someone who presented himself as “XO” — someone he assumed was Julian Assange (Assange has neither confirmed nor denied).

Manning says there was no enticement, coercion or gaming of him by “XO” — he uploaded the files of his own volition. Most spectacularly, he revealed that WikiLeaks had not been his first port of call — he had previously tried The New York Times, The Washington Post and the website Politico. Manning says he called the tips line at the NYT and got a recorded message. More indicatively, he spoke to a Washington Post junior reporter, who gave him the brush off (and lost a Pulitzer in the process). ...

Some have tried to turn this moment of personal crisis into a purely psychological explanation of his actions; others have tried to ignore it altogether. The truth, most likely, is that such personal crises will sometimes compel us to higher ethical action, and that what Manning did was, in the final analysis, an act of love: love of truth, love of the people he had been asked to defend through the transmission of lies, and an ultimate finding of self-respect in rising out of the ruins and the loss. His statement today confirms that he is, and was, lucid and purposeful.

He was the originator of a process whose ultimate result, I believe, was the decisive and final discrediting of the decade of war and projected imperial power that began in the wake of 9/11. He is that most overapplied of adjectives, heroic. We are in his debt, and we must hope that he lands as gently as possible on the hard earth in the days and years to come.

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The Assange Saga Continues

Guy Rundle at Crikey has an update on the Julian Assange saga, following Ecuador's decision to grant him asylum and his recent press conference - Rundle: Assange as Poppins meets HR Pufnstuff. It was interesting to see that Wikileaks' recent publishing of an email archive from Stratfor prompted a concerted denial of service attack on the site (along with a flurry of articles about a surveillance system called Trapwire) - which probably just gave the release more publicity.

Thus began the return of Julian Assange to public appearance, after a two-month enforced absence, hunkered down in the embassy — and by agreement with the Ecuadorians, refraining from overt political statements and appearances. It had been announced late last week, when it was suggested that Assange would appear “in front” of the embassy, a few hours after it had been announced that he had been granted diplomatic asylum. This led to renewed speculation as to his possible arrest, etc — the topic of feverish debate around town. Would he allow himself to be arrested, having made his point? Would a fast motorbike etc? Or, by contrast, would he address everyone by video link, having already escaped to Quito?

We waited to see, but first there were the warm-up acts — Assange’s international lawyer Baltasar Garzon, who spoke mostly in Spanish, venerable street-fighting man Tariq Ali, and then Craig Murray, former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, who gave a roaring denunciation of large sections of the UK diplomatic apparatus, while also pointing out that he had used the UK embassy to harbour Uzbek dissidents, so the UK’s huffing and puffing about “no diplomatic asylum” came and went a bit.

Then there was a bit of faffing around with a microphone on the small corner balcony, and through the crowd, distributing red, yellow and blue (colours of Ecuador) helium balloons, “to be released when Julian finishes speaking”. It’s stuff like this that makes you cringe a little in matters Assange, although it was quickly defeated by the balloons clumping together and people losing hold of them anyway. Then there was a highly engineered roar, and Assange appeared, in clipped white hair, blue shirt, a maroon tie and a sheaf of papers, all the world like he was about to process your home loan.

His speech was brief and circumspect — apparently there were still agreements with Ecuador that he wouldn’t call for the overthrow of all governments. He referred to the solidarity of South American nations, in resisting the UK government’s blundering threat of invading an embassy, expressed gratitude to his supporters, and most importantly called on President Obama to “end the witch-hunt against WikiLeaks” and persecution of all whistleblowers. He gave a shout-out to Pussy Riot, the recently convicted Russian punk band, defying those who thought that his alliance with the state-controlled Russia Today channel would preclude any sort of mention. There was no account of the Swedish accusations, his view of them or the rationale for taking asylum.

It was a dignified speech, and he avoided the inevitable Evita comparisons with the whole Italianate balcony thing, but it was a close run.

Assange’s getting of asylum has coincided with a further backlash against Assange — one curiously, which did not emerge when he spent two years fighting extradition through the courts. Centre-left figures have always lined themselves up against Assange and the WikiLeaks project, which they find to be a disruption to business as usual. ...

Assange’s genius, from WikiLeaks to here, has been to use small interruptions in power processes to create major conflicts, which expose power relations, and alter them. Given that he set all this out in a couple of short papers at the beginning of the WikiLeaks project — that by releasing secret information in large amounts, one causes states and suprastates to lose their advantage and unity as conspiracies — it is surprising that people are surprised at every new twist.

His response to the extradition request has seen the European Arrest Warrant — the linchpin of a post-democratic EU, more so than the euro — subject to its most fundamental challenge in the UK courts to date, the case itself has shattered the easy “cultural left” refusal to examine the politics of sex, and sexual coercion. Now, his asylum request has done the same thing. It was inevitable that the UK would make secret threats to a smaller, “Third World” nation, and that Ecuador, in the WikiLeaks spirit, would release the memo, thus exposing implicit power relations and assumptions.

Now, that process is in play. Ecuador has appealed to leftist South America — through the OAS, and the smaller UNASUR (a South American nations group, which thus excludes Canada and the US) — to condemn the UK’s implicitly colonialist mindset.

The OAS will be meeting on August 24, in DC of all places, to consider a motion to censure the UK’s blatant disregard of diplomatic principles, and UNASUR agreed one today, with the foreign ministers of the continent linking hands as the resolution was met with cheers. In a sense, Assange’s initiative and British blundering has put the facade of international political equality right up front.

Whether that helps Assange get out of 3 Hans Crescent, remains to be seen. We await the next move. To add to my previous suggestions, the balcony speech gave me another idea. Helicopters can fly to 152 metres (500 feet) in London, with a general authorisation. Diplomatic vehicles are exempt under the Vienna Convention, and nothing in it says they can’t fly. So — a helicopter, a winch, and then a flight outside the 12-mile coastal waters limit. By the time it had happened, Assange would be on a yacht in the Channel.

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UK court upholds Assange extradition

Crikey's Guy Rundle has a report on the Assange extradition case - Court upholds Assange
extradition.

WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange has lost his appeal against extradition to Sweden for further questioning on four allegations of sexual misconduct and third degree rape.

Sitting at the royal courts of justice the appeals court dismissed all four separate arguments made by Assange’s legal team, thus committing him to extradition to Sweden, should the Supreme Court refuse to review the appeal.

Assange’s team has fourteen days to request a review. Assange’s bail conditions requiring him to live at Ellingham hall, home of Captain Vaughn Smith, owner of the Front Line Club, has been continued.

Assange’s team argued that the law that triggered the extradition process was not issued by a competent authority in Sweden, that three of the four accusations were not crimes in the UK, hence not subject to double criminality, and that the fourth, third degree rape/indecent assault was not a ‘framework’ offence, that the law (ie a European arrest warrant) was being used as a fishing expedition without a crime, and that the issuing of the law was disproportionate when questioning could have occurred by phone or in the UK. ...

By the end of November, Assange will have spent a year either in remand or bailed to house curfew, with an electronic tag – the maximum amount of time he could have been jailed were he to be charged and convicted on the accusations made.

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