Tucked away in the latest batch of high-minded WikiLeaks revelations in today's Guardian is a perfect example of the triumph of cock-up over conspiracy, of the lowbrow over the lofty. I refer to the popularity of US sitcoms like Friends and Desperate Housewives in steering impressionable Saudi youth away from jihad and into the arms of David Letterman.WikiLeaks and Assange arrest a testing time for rule of law
What is always entertaining in these causes celebres is the flexibility – hypocrisy if you prefer – on display in all quarters
Who says? Well, another of the familiar crop of American diplomats whose cable traffic to Washington was downloaded and given to the media via WikiLeaks. So, they would say that, wouldn't they?
Except that the US had blown $500m – say £300m – in funding the al-Hurra Arabic TV news channel, only to find that popular cable channels like MCB4 and Rotana were actually doing the biz with subtitled sitcoms and movies that embody heroic American virtues like honesty over greed or hypocrisy and respect for the rule of law.
It's going to be a testing time for honesty over hypocrisy and the rule of law now that Julian Assange is detained in custody awaiting extradition proceedings to Sweden with a possible rival bid lodged by the US, where prosecutors are scratching their heads for some way of being able to charge him for the damage they say he's done.
The Guardian's editorial grapples manfully with the issue today and – after some on "the one hand, on the other hand" discussion in the paper's familiar tradition – ends by warning that, whatever excesses WikiLeaks may have committed, the US government must not follow authoritarian regimes like China or Iran in the covert use of cyber-attacks to curb its activities. Freedom of speech is never an unqualified right, but if the US wants to act it should do so openly via the law.
That seems an unanswerable conclusion, one worth restating as allegations surface – unsupported by much evidence so far – that the US state department, Pentagon or even White House must be co-ordinating the "patriotic hacker" attacks on internet companies and sites that have been helping keep the WikiLeaks operation airborne after the likes of Amazon and eBay pulled their own plugs.
The US has never been an easy place to keep too much secret for long – remember how the Reagan administration's illegal sale of weapons to Iran to fund the Nicaraguan Contras was exposed? – which is why the 9/11 conspiracy theorists have been wasting their time.
So whatever has been going on will probably surface in due course. Fortunately, the Obama administration has been pretty level-headed so far, leaving the "hang 'em high" nonsense to the Republican right, plus Joe Lieberman. In any case, whatever Assange did, he didn't do it on US soil, so they will have a problem with any extradition proceedings which look overtly political.
That would be true even in Britain, whose much-criticised extradition treaty with the US is deemed too favourable to American requests on flimsy grounds. Hence the powerful defence made again by today's Daily Mail on behalf of Gary McKinnon, the geeky London computer hacker whom the Pentagon wants jailed for exposing the weaknesses of their security codes. Whatever McKinnon may – may – have done is trivial in comparison to the embarrassment caused by Assange.
It is the Mail that makes another interesting point I have not seen elsewhere, namely that US attempts to extradite Assange may be much harder from Sweden, whose US extradition treaty is more favourable to defendants than would be the case here, especially where there are allegations of political motive.
So Assange's lawyers, who usually sound a bit naïve on radio and TV, might yet conclude their client would be safer in Stockholm than appealing against his detention and the European extradition warrant all the way to the UK supreme court. By the same token US government lawyers might realise that they had better get their rival bid in quickly.
The Swedish dimension adds piquancy to an otherwise relentlessly high-minded, policy-orientated public controversy. It is the Desperate Housewives or the Friends side of the story that pulls in punters who might otherwise not be watching the BBC News Channel or al-Hurra.
Reading Esther Addley's account of the sexual allegations made by two Swedish women against Assange – and the Mail's lengthier investigation yesterday – will lead to doubts about the idea that the CIA is manipulating their complaints.
What is always entertaining in these causes celebres is the flexibility – hypocrisy if you prefer – on display in all quarters. Some progressives who might normally be expected to express alarm over rape allegations are happy to dismiss these as politically motivated.
Assange himself emerges as distinctly untransparent by the standards he sets others. Newspapers like the Times, which initially condemned the leaks, rushed on Monday to print the one about key US global infrastructure targets, which papers like the Guardian had long since decided could not be justified in the public interest.
It was ever thus and hypocrisy is a charge easily levelled against most of us. The more secretive and autocratic a regime (it's Libya's turn this morning) the uglier its two-faced diplomatic manoeuvrings, as reported to US diplomats.
By this test, the US has emerged fairly well from the Wiki deluge, its public positions less divergent than most from what it turns out to have been saying in private. As with the banking crisis the damage done is to its reliability and credibility as a secure repository of valuable information (or dollar holdings).
That Britain was fearful of what Libya's Muammar Gaddafi might do to UK interests – notably oil and gas – if Abdelbaset-al-Megrahi, the convicted Lockerbie bomber, was not released seemed pretty obvious at the time, though the waters were muddied by the Whitehall-Holyrood dimension and outraged US public opinion to which Washington had to pander.
The row should serve as a useful reminder – though it won't – that Britain sometimes asserts its national interest despite certain US displeasure and that sometimes governments have to cut deals with awful people to keep their own citizens safe and warm. They rarely enjoy it.
Both in the law courts and the wider public arena this controversy will run on, less for what significant information the leaks have revealed but for the processes involved and the role/functioning/regulating of the global internet in our fragile, wired world.
The Wiki row shows – yet again – how vulnerable modern society is to disruption through information networks, both from those who seek to promote dissemination at all costs and those who seek to deny it.
Are officials who shared their thoughts with US diplomats in repressive societies now being hunted down? Unlike the fate of Julian Assange, that is one thing we are unlikely ever to learn. Will the glorious freedoms the internet both provides and enhances be better entrenched or weakened as a result?
That we will discover. What we know already is that the internet is like the proverbially priceless Ming vase being carried across a slippery floor.
This is the journey of a victim of felony fraud and embezzlement left homeless by builder, Robert M. Huckins who was given 27 years in jail,suspended,on the proviso he return $82,200, in $114 per week payments. Sometimes sad, sometimes pensive, sometimes with sarcastic humor, it chronicles the apathy within the New Mexico Judicial system and New Mexico State Government towards victims of white collar crime and the sheer audacity of the criminals who believe that the world owes them something.
Friday, December 10, 2010
Ron Paul : Lying is Not Patriotic
