Protest

Some even say Afghans are people of color too.
Farzana Wahidy/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

I promised notorious Zoroastrofascist Trita Parsi (right-wingers say he's an agent of Ayatollah Khamenei but the truth is even worse: plotting to restore the ancient Media, which is not the mainstream one) that I would register my protest against the mistreatment by UK authorities of David Miranda, who was detained and harrassed for nine hours at Heathrow Airport, London, en route between Berlin and Rio de Janeiro.

I had noted to Trita that what happened to Miranda was not exactly the same as what happened to Anna Politkovskaya, and he had replied, more or less, that [jump]

Privacy and the Private

Image from PlanetPOV.

I guess I have to say a couple of words about PFC Manning and his conviction on theft and espionage charges, but I'd rather wait until the sentencing to make it anything final. It's only today, as that phase begins, that we learn that the disclosure of the Afghan War Logs failed to produce any of the ghastly harm that was predicted, of identifying the Friends of America so that the Terrorists would be able to murder them all (there was one guy the Taliban killed, because, they said, of Wikileaks, but they were lying—he wasn't mentioned in the files). The worst General Robert Carr could say was:

Discussing the Guantanamo Bay Detainee Assessment Briefs (DABs), Carr suggested that the release of these documents was detrimental to the United States’ efforts to close the detention center, though he explained on cross-examination that the DABs could reveal that what the U.S. says publicly to some countries regarding transferring detainees back to their home countries and what we say to them privately could differ, obstructing that process. He testified, though, that he couldn’t speak to whether transferring the detainees was an administration priority.

Thanks, General Carr, for revealing to the opponents of closing Guantánamo what they need to do to slow that process down, if there's any way it could be any slower than it already is, because Manning and the Guardian didn't really make it clear. Now because of you Senator McConnell will be poring through the Guardian's database looking for evidence that he can use, and then calling the president of Yemen: "Mr. President, do you realize that what President Obama says in public about repatriating Yemeni prisoners is somewhat different than what he tells you in private?" What a massacre! We're putting you away for life, kid!

I just realized, if being detrimental to US efforts to close Guantánamo is harming our national interests, Senator McConnell must be one of the secret enemies that Manning allegedly helped out. Curiously enough, he's one of my enemies too. May I arrest him, please?

Image by TheSkunk.

Anyway, I'm in an awkward position, as I believe on the one hand that Manning performed a service to the country that, while it broke the law, deserved to be punished a whole lot less than it already has been and doesn't need to be punished any further; and on the other that this doesn't make Obama a war criminal. I'm starting to feel a little like one of those Evan Bayh types with the "Now just stop that, both of you!" Also I'm pretty sure that the whole discussion is a lot less important than poverty and injustice, and yet I feel like being in it all the time. Huh.

The new party is the Surprise Party

Via The Inspiration Room.

News from Bernard Sanders (I-VT):

Sen. Bernie Sanders on Friday provided suggestions for tax reform to the Senate Finance Committee, Politico reported. Chairman Max Baucus and ranking member Orrin Hatch had asked for member input and offered to keep any suggestions secret for 50 years. Sanders declined the offer of secrecy, The Hill reported online. “Given the fact that my suggestions represent the interests of the middle class of this country and not powerful corporate special interests, I have no problem with making them public,” he said. LINK, LINK

 This is kind of amazing. As Bloomberg Businessweek remarks,

Tax negotiations, then—Congress’s basic constitutional responsibility—are to be held to the same standard of secrecy as the investigation of the Warren Commission.... [jump]

The curious case of the penitent president. I

I have the funniest feeling President Obama has suddenly remembered us—the loyal imposition, you know, who don't have any objection to a bit of socialism, or to Reverend Wright and Bill Ayres (in his post-terrorist aspect), or to spending a few years per century without a war being on—and is sending us faint signals from his Fortress of Solitude, if we listen carefully.

Playground superhero. From Whiskywords.

One of these was last Wednesday's Times article (by Scott Shane and Charlie Savage) trying to explain how the Obama administration found itself prosecuting six different cases of leaks under the Espionage Act, which, as you've heard, is twice as many as the number of prosecutions under all previous US presidents put together. In the first place Obama is said to have had nothing to do with it: [jump]

Hoist on their own canard

It's a sign that you're getting a little too concerned with secrecy when you start hiding things from yourself. From Politico via Jesselyn Radack at Kos:

At a hearing last month, prosecutors in the case against Pfc. Bradley Manning noted that they didn't receive [important emails from the judge and defense] but could not explain why. Chief prosecutor Capt. Ashden Fein said at a hearing Thursday that the messages had been "blocked by a spam filter for security." However, it fell to defense attorney David Coombs to explain precisely why the e-mails about evidence issues in the Manning case never made it.

"Apparently, they were blocked because the word 'WikiLeaks' was somewhere in the e-mail," Coombs said.

Because they didn't get the emails, they didn't turn over documents to the defense that they were supposed to turn over, or explain why they didn't want to turn them over. The fail is bad enough, according to Radack, that Coombs feels entitled to move for dismissal of all the charges.

From The City of Secrets: Nashville's Temple Code Unveiled.

Call for signatures

You can sign an official WhiteHouse.gov petition here (h/t m50bing0 at Kos) asking the administration to pardon Bradley Manning of any and all crimes he may have committed in the course of liberating extremely important facts about the conduct of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—and subsequently to back Manning's nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Before you start giggling, just step back a minute, and think. It's true that Manning is a somewhat comic figure, bewildered where Daniel Ellsberg was dashing, and especially after that third WikiLeaks dump, which was more about amusing gossip than information being held back to deceive the American people. It's partly the fault of the press, because that was the batch of documents that got them really excited. They quickly lost interest in the horrifying Collateral Murder video, showing our troops in Iraq murdering a Reuters employee from a helicopter like Sarah Palin after a wolf, and in the Afghan War Diary, 92,000 documents unveiling the criminality and the hopelessness of our situation in Afghanistan, but it was the quarter of a million US embassy cables that really got their attention, with their stories about high life around the dictators in Baku and Grozny, and news of European politicians saying nasty things about one another.

It is the first two items that really count, and if you think of the risks he knowingly ran, and the skill he brought to the job, and the more-or-less torture he has undergone since his capture, he really is indisputably a hero, and it's not that funny. Again, sign here.

From The Cult of the Dead Fish.