Substitute NYT for Wikileaks and substitute Iran for the United States

Wikileaks continues to be punished for being one of the few organizations brash enough to inform us what our governments are really doing and why. This is intolerable, of course, because the U.S. government is being run by big corporations and wealthy people who, for the most part, are driven by greed--so sorry to break this to the kids who are studying civics in grade school, where they don't tell you about armies of lobbyists, and they don't tell you that the banks own Congress. The true powers that be are running the federal government in secret and they are, regrettably, running it into the ground. That's what one should expect when there is no sunshine to keep powerful people accountable. What we have is a needlessly warmongering, debt-ridden secret and personally invasive brave new government.   I truly wish I didn't believe these things. Consider that our government first attacked Wikileaks by starving it financially, despite the lack of any charges filed against it. They did this by harassing Amazon and various financial organizations to make sure that Wikileaks had no funds to fight in Round II, which is underway. We now know that there are secret subpoenas being issued by the US, and thank goodness that Twitter had the decency to inform its users that their privacy is being invaded, unlike the big U.S. telecoms, who have a long documented track record for turning over our private information without informing us (encouraged very much by President Obama's agreement to grant them retroactive immunity for past invasions of our privacy.  Julian Assange sums up the current grand jury proceedings like this, and we know of this only because the U.K. Guardian has continually refused to be the lapdog of the U.S.:

The emergence of the Twitter subpoena – which was unsealed after a legal challenge by the company – was revealed after WikiLeaks announced it believed other US Internet companies had also been ordered to hand over information about its members' activities. WikiLeaks condemned the court order, saying it amounted to harassment. "If the Iranian government was to attempt to coercively obtain this information from journalists and activists of foreign nations, human rights groups around the world would speak out," Assange said in a statement.
Glenn Greenwald comments further:
It's worth recalling -- and I hope journalists writing about this story remind themselves -- that all of this extraordinary probing and "criminal" investigating is stemming from WikiLeaks' doing nothing more than publishing classified information showing what the U.S. Government is doing: something investigative journalists, by definition, do all the time. And the key question now is this: did other Internet and social network companies (Google, Facebook, etc.) receive similar Orders and then quietly comply? It's difficult to imagine why the DOJ would want information only from Twitter; if anything, given the limited information it has about users, Twitter would seem one of the least fruitful avenues to pursue. But if other companies did receive and quietly comply with these orders, it will be a long time before we know, if we ever do, given the prohibition in these orders on disclosing even its existence to anyone. UPDATE III: Iceland's Interior Minister, Ögmundur Jónasson, described the DOJ's efforts to obtain the Twitter information of a member of that country's Parliament as "grave and odd." While suggesting some criticisms of WikiLeaks, he added: "if we manage to make government transparent and give all of us some insight into what is happening in countries involved in warfare it can only be for the good."

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Our JFK Moment?

We finally have our Kennedy Moment in the current political climate. Saturday, January 8th, 2011, is likely to go down as exactly that in the “Where were you when?” canon.  On that day, Jared Lee Loughner, age 22, went on a shooting rampage at a supermarket parking lot in Tucson,…

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Scalia’s Problem

Recently, Justice Antonin Scalia shot his mouth off about another bit of “social” judicial opinion and managed to be correct to a fault again. Here is the article. Basically, he is of the opinion that if a specific term or phrase does not appear in the Constitution, then that subject is simply not covered. Most famously, this goes to the continuing argument over privacy. There is, by Scalia’s reasoning (and I must add he is by no means alone in this—it is not merely his private opinion), no Constitutionally-protected right to privacy. As far as it goes, this is correct, but beside the point. The word “private” certainly appears, in the Fifth Amendment, and it would seem absurd to suggest the framers had no thought for what that word meant. It refers here to private property, of course, but just that opens the debate to the fact that there is a concept of privacy underlying it. The modern debate over privacy concerns contraception and the first case where matters of privacy are discussed is Griswold v. Connecticut, 1965. That case concerned the right of a married couple to purchase and use contraception, which was against the law in that state (and others). The Court had to define an arena of privacy within which people enjoy a presumed right of autonomous decision-making and into which the state had no brief to interfere. Prior to this, the Court relied on a “freedom of contract” concept to define protected areas of conduct. Notice, we’re back in the realm of property law here. People who insist that there is no “right to privacy” that is Constitutionally protected seem intent on dismissing any concept of privacy with which they disagree, but no doubt would squeal should their own self-defined concept be violated. Therein lies the problem, one we continue to struggle with. But it does, at least in Court tradition, come down to some variation of ownership rights—which is what has made the abortion debate so difficult, since implicit in it is the question of whether or not a woman “owns” her body and may therefore, in some construction of freedom of contract, determine its use under any and all circumstances. [More . . . ]

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Big wasted money

I know I've quite recently written about the immense amount of money the United States is pouring into Afghanistan, but this terrible waste of money simply must stop. It occurred to me that the huge amount of money we are spending to fight poor people in Afghanistan needs to be described in terms that make it more understandable to the average American. Imagine that the federal government made a big announcement tomorrow that it would start funding large-scale improvements for each of America's largest 100 cities. In accordance with this new program to build bridges, hire teachers, convert buildings to high energy efficiency and retrain workers (in addition to other things), the federal government would pay each of America's biggest 100 cities $20 million. Imagine this celebration! The citizens of each of these cities would be treated to ribbon-cutting ceremonies complete with large replicas of checks, each of which contains the number $20 million. The mayors of these cities would tell their citizens about all the great things they will be able to do with $20 million. Now imagine that while this celebration is going on, a 10-year-old child walks up to a reporter on the street, tugs at his sleeve, and tells him that something is wrong. The cameras keep rolling as the surprised reporter asks the child what could possibly be wrong with each of America's 100 biggest cities getting a grant of $20 million. The child pulls out a calculator and explains that $20 million times 100 equals only $2 billion. The reporter asked the child what could possibly be wrong with this. The child explains:

$2 billion is what America spends in Afghanistan each and every week. In order to spend a big amount of money on America's 100 biggest cities, an amount equal to the amount we waste in Afghanistan each year, we would need to pay each of America's biggest 100 cities $20 million every week for a year.
The reporter blurts out, "Think of the huge number of teachers and police officers we could hire for that kind of money. $20 million times 50 weeks means that each of American's biggest cities would get $1 Billion. Think of the crumbling bridges we could fix with that. Think of the improve schools, the improved health care and the collective relief we would feel knowing that our hard-earned tax dollars are being used wisely. At that point, the child would again tug at the reporters sleeve and remind him, "We are not spending tax dollars in Afghanistan. It is all borrowed money we are blowing over there. In fact, 42 cents of every dollar spent by the federal government in 2010 is borrowed money. " At that point, the reporter might look at the camera and say something like, "That's it from here tonight. I'm speechless."

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Unchecked secret power

The December 27, 2010 issue of The Nation comments on a noteworthy piece of reporting by The Washington Post:

In July the Washington Post published 'Top-Secret America,' a series of articles based on a two-year investigation by Dana Priest and William Arkin. The report meticulously documented the growth of a vast secret government in the wake of September 11, encompassing at least 1,271 government organizations, 1,931 private companies and an estimated 854,000 individuals with top-secret security clearance. Secret America, Priest and Arkin wrote, has become 'so large, so unwieldy and so secretive' that it is not only unaccountable, it is practically unknowable--even to the officials charged with administering it. The series elicited much praise from fellow journalists, but from the government there was-- nothing. The Posts report generated not one congressional hearing, subpoena or reform. As far as we know, Secret America continues its work unchecked and unchastised. . . The Post didn't tell secrets so much as outline the contours of the shadow world from which they originate; WikiLeaks rips off the veil. It's the exposure of the secrets that has the world's power elite so rattled.

Here's a link to the Washington Post's articles and introductory video--the secret network of government agencies is so extensive that the authors of Secret American describe it as America's "fourth branch of government, which emerged subsequent to 9/11." Amy Goodman of Democracy Now recently discussed Secret America with Julian Assange. Here's what Assange had to say:

Dana Priest’s article on the CIA black sites had all the names of the countries removed from it after a request by the White House to the editors of the Post. Similarly, it is standard Washington Post practice, whenever Dana Priest is to reveal a new story showing significant allegations of abuse, say, by the CIA, to call up the press office the night before to give them the heads-up, as a courtesy move. That doesn’t seem like independent journalism to us. It seems to us that a journalist’s relationship should be with the public, on the one hand, and with their sources, on the other hand, who are providing them with information to give to the public. It seems that the Post is engaging in a sort of an unclear cooperation with the very organizations that it’s meant to be policing. So we’re a little bit hesitant about dealing with them.

But the recent Dana Priest article covering the extensive expanse of money going into the top-secret industry in the United States is encouraging. So perhaps, if that’s a sign of the movement by the Washington Post to a more combative form of journalism, then we would be happy to work with them.

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