Around 8pmest everyday
Don't watch this with the kids around!(yes, I posted this days ago, but it is x-mas eve and Santa is busy):
What is new to Informationthread 16?
Jay Rosen at Press Think writes "From Judith Miller to Julian Assange" - Our press somehow got itself on the wrong side of secrecy after September 11th.
For the portion of the American press that still looks to Watergate and the Pentagon Papers for inspiration, and that considers itself a check on state power, the hour of its greatest humiliation can, I think, be located with some precision: it happened on Sunday, September 8, 2002.
On that morning the New York Times published a now notorious story, reported by Michael R. Gordon and Judith Miller, in which nameless Bush Administration officials claimed that Iraq was trying to buy the kind of aluminum tubes necessary to build a nuclear centrifuge. Press critic Michael Massing, who in 2004 reviewed these events, describes what happened:
Gordon and Miller argue that the information about the aluminum tubes was not a leak. "The administration wasn’t really ready to make its case publicly at the time," Gordon told me. "Somebody mentioned to me this tubes thing. It took a lot to check it out." Perhaps so, but administration officials were clearly delighted with the story. On that morning’s talk shows, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, and Condoleezza Rice all referred to the information in the Times story. "It’s now public," Cheney said on Meet the Press, that Saddam Hussein "has been seeking to acquire" the "kind of tubes" needed to build a centrifuge to produce highly enriched uranium, "which is what you have to have in order to build a bomb." On CNN’s Late Edition, Rice said the tubes "are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs." She added: "We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud"—a phrase lifted directly from the Times.
We know from retrospective accounts that the Bush White House had already decided to go to war. We know from the Downing Street Memo that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." We know that the Bush forces had decided to rev up their sales campaign that week because ''from a marketing point of view you don't introduce new products in August," as chief of staff Andrew Card brazenly put it. We know that the appearance of the tubes story in the Times is what allowed Cheney, Powell, Rumsfeld and Rice to run with it on the Sunday shows, because without that they would have been divulging classified information and flouting their own rules. We also know that the tubes story was wrong: they weren't for centrifuges. And yet it was coming from the very top of the professional pyramid, the New York Times. Massing again: #
The performance of the Times was especially deficient. While occasionally running articles that questioned administration claims, it more often deferred to them. (The Times‘s editorial page was consistently much more skeptical.) Compared to other major papers, the Times placed more credence in defectors, expressed less confidence in inspectors, and paid less attention to dissenters. The September 8 story on the aluminum tubes was especially significant. Not only did it put the Times‘s imprimatur on one of the administration’s chief claims, but it also established a position at the paper that apparently discouraged further investigation into this and related topics.
The reporters working on the story strongly disagree. That the tubes were intended for centrifuges "was the dominant view of the US intelligence community," Michael Gordon told me. "It looks like it’s the wrong view. But the story captured what was and still is the majority view of the intelligence community—whether right or wrong"...
Asked about this, Miller said that as an investigative reporter in the intelligence area, "my job isn’t to assess the government’s information and be an independent intelligence analyst myself. My job is to tell readers of The New York Times what the government thought about Iraq’s arsenal."
That's not getting the story wrong. That's redefining the job as: reflecting what the government thinks.
...
In its look back the Times declared itself insufficiently skeptical, especially about Iraqi defectors. True enough. But the look back was itself insufficiently skeptical. Radical doubt, which is basic to understanding what drives Julian Assange, was impermissible then. One of the consequences of that is the appeal of radical transparency today.
Simon Jenkins got at some of this in a Guardian column on Wikileaks: "Accountability can only default to disclosure. As Jefferson remarked, the press is the last best hope when democratic oversight fails." But at the nadir the last best hope failed, too. When that happens accountability defaults to extreme disclosure, which is where we are today. The institutional press isn't driving it; the wilds of the Internet are. To understand Julian Assange and the weird reactions to him in the American press we need to tell a story that starts with Judy Miller and ends with Wikileaks.
On Dec 3rd, David Samuels of The Atlantic calls out "The Shameful Attacks on Julian Assange":
But the truly scandalous and shocking response to the Wikileaks documents has been that of other journalists, who make the Obama Administration sound like the ACLU. In a recent article in The New Yorker, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Steve Coll sniffed that "the archives that WikiLeaks has published are much less significant than the Pentagon Papers were in their day" while depicting Assange as a "self-aggrandizing control-freak" whose website "lacks an ethical culture that is consonant with the ideals of free media." Channeling Richard Nixon, Coll labeled Wikileaks' activities - formerly known as journalism - by his newly preferred terms of "vandalism" and "First Amendment-inspired subversion."
Coll's invective is hardly unique, In fact, it was only a pale echo of the language used earlier this year by a columnist at his former employer, The Washington Post. In a column titled "WikiLeaks Must Be Stopped," Mark Thiessen wrote that "WikiLeaks is not a news organization; it is a criminal enterprise," and urged that the site should be shut down "and its leadership brought to justice." The dean of American foreign correspondents, John Burns of The New York Times, with two Pulitzer Prizes to his credit, contributed a profile of Assange which used terms like "nearly delusional grandeur" to describe Wikileaks' founder. The Times' normally mild-mannered David Brooks asserted in his column this week that "Assange seems to be an old-fashioned anarchist" and worried that Wikileaks will "damage the global conversation."
For his part, Assange has not been shy about expressing his contempt for the failure of traditional reporting to inform the public, and his belief in the utility of his own methods. "How is it that a team of five people has managed to release to the public more suppressed information, at that level, than the rest of the world press combined?" he told The Sydney Morning Herald. "It's disgraceful."
digby breaks down a conversation :
People have varying beliefs about Wikileaks, obviously, and it's fair that your mileage may vary. But it's unacceptable that we still have people out there spreading falsehoods about it as Jeffrey Toobin did on last night's Spitzer Parker (with Naomi Wolf and Clay Shirky.)
TOOBIN: If you intend to simply blow out 250,000 documents that are at tremendous -- putting individuals at risk, the United States government employees at risk, people who cooperate with the United States government at risk, that is not up to Julian Assange. That is up to the United States government.
WOLF: Scooter Libby did that.
SHIRKY: But Assange went with -- went with "Guardian," went through "Spiegel." In this case, the "Times" by proxy and they redacted some of the documents and held some of the documents back.
TOOBIN: Some of it. They redacted some of it.
I don't know why people persist in saying this, but it reveals either bad faith or just sheer journalistic malpractice at this point. And I think it's at the heart of much of the dispute because it seems to have been believed quite widely at the time the diplomatic cables were first released, and it has colored the reaction to it.
Glenn Greenwald does a great visual post with "What WikiLeaks revealed to the world in 2010" You should click now. :
As revealing as the disclosures themselves are, the reactions to them have been equally revealing. The vast bulk of the outrage has been devoted not to the crimes that have been exposed but rather to those who exposed them: WikiLeaks and (allegedly) Bradley Manning. A consensus quickly emerged in the political and media class that they are Evil Villains who must be severely punished, while those responsible for the acts they revealed are guilty of nothing. That reaction has not been weakened at all even by the Pentagon's own admission that, in stark contrast to its own actions, there is no evidence -- zero -- that any of WikiLeaks' actions has caused even a single death. Meanwhile, the American establishment media -- even in the face of all these revelations -- continues to insist on the contradictory, Orwellian platitudes that (a) there is Nothing New™ in anything disclosed by WikiLeaks and (b) WikiLeaks has done Grave Harm to American National Security™ through its disclosures.
UPI reports that "Cuba publishes some Wikileaks cables" :
HAVANA, Dec. 24 (UPI) -- While some governments have been trying to keep their people from reading leaked U.S. diplomatic cables, Cuba has begun running them on a Web site.
"Las Razones de Cuba" or "Cuba's Reasons" has translated and posted seven documents so far, CNN reported.
Bored tonight?
Why head on over to the Bradblog and listen to him filling in for Mike Malloy last Friday where he interviewed Coleen Rowley and played clips of his interview with Daniel Ellsberg. Well worth it. Here is just one quote:
Ellsberg: I'm very impressed that Bradley Manning, the suspect in this, who has not been proven to be the source yet by the Army but if the Army's --I should say the Pentagon and Army's suspicions are correct then I admire what he did and I feel a great affinity for it, because he did say, allegedly, to the person who turned him in, Adrian Lamo, in a chatlog, that he was prepared, he was ready to go to prison for life or even be executed, he said, in order to share this information with the American people who needed to have it. And that's the statement I said I've waited, in a way, for 40 years to hear someone make. I think it's an appropriate choice for somebody to make. It's not that they're obliged to be willing to do that so much. That's something a person has to decide for themselves very much. But I certainly think that when so many lives are at stake as in these wars or the new wars that may be coming at us, as in Yemen or even Pakistan, that to try to avert those is appropriate and to shorten them when they're clearly hopeless and dangerous, as in Afghanistan.
FRIEDMAN: Well, Dan, is there a difference ...
ELLSBERG: It's worth one's own life to try to avert that.
Wikirebels documentary
Rep. Conyers hearing on Wikileaks - Over three hours. So if you are wrapping or drinking, this one is for you!!
Thanks to KateCrashes, we have this earlier documentary from Australia KateCrashes has all three parts linked at this comment
That should keep you all busy for now.....but.....We have some more stuff:
User MPetrelis has a great blog post(and diary) Please, if you have not, take some time, sip that eggnog(is that two words?) and read.
And.....
User Troubadour writes "Implications of Wikileaks: Philanthropic Espionage = The New 4th Estate"
By the time of the Reagan administration, the media was reporting more information than the general public cared to know. The revelations surrounding Iran-Contra were met with a collective yawn. A President of the United States had deliberately broken the law, sold missiles to America's enemies, and used the money to illegally fund right-wing foreign terrorist groups he supported - in other words, he committed treason as an entrepreneurial gambit on Cold War control of Central America. But...what does that have to do with Cyndi Lauper? I'm bored, change the channel! The people no longer felt their interests so intimately tied to knowing what was going on.
By the time George W. Bush took (and I do mean took) power, Americans knew practically nothing about the national or international situation. And as things stand today, our people know less than nothing - they "know" things that are the opposite of reality, because the news media has gone through the looking glass. Far from defining itself to be a separate institution from the political and economic elites - or even a subordinate one that allows them to veto potentially damaging stories - it has become their direct servant: A "private sector" simulacrum of a totalitarian propaganda machine, operating through parallel interest rather than direct command.
The professional journalists have mostly fled or been fired from institutional news, and America has wandered in the wilderness - the most informed people knowing the least, because the best we can generally do is know what isn't true. The usurpation of the Fourth Estate has blinded us, making politics and business (especially business) an opaque Iron Curtained world whose internal machinations we can only guess at based on the actions and claims it chooses to reveal.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
US Constitution Article 1, Section 9, Clause 3 No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed.
Near v. Minnesota
Near v. Minnesota, 283 U.S. 697 (1931), was a United States Supreme Court decision that recognized the freedom of the press by roundly rejecting prior restraints on publication, a principle that was applied to free speech generally in subsequent jurisprudence. The Court ruled that a Minnesota law that targeted publishers of "malicious" or "scandalous" newspapers violated the First Amendment to the United States Constitution (as applied through the Fourteenth Amendment). Legal scholar and columnist Anthony Lewis called Near the Court's "first great press case."[1]
It was later a key precedent in New York Times Co. v. United States (1971), in which the Court ruled against the Nixon administration's attempt to enjoin publication of the Pentagon Papers.
New York Times Co. v. United States
New York Times Co. v. United States, 403 U.S. 713 (1971), was a United States Supreme Court per curiam decision. The ruling made it possible for the New York Times and Washington Post newspapers to publish the then-classified Pentagon Papers without risk of government censure.
President Richard Nixon had claimed executive authority to force the Times to suspend publication of classified information in its possession. The question before the court was whether the constitutional freedom of the press under the First Amendment was subordinate to a claimed Executive need to maintain the secrecy of information. The Supreme Court ruled that First Amendment did protect the New York Times' right to print said materials.
As Assange told Time: "It is not our goal to achieve a more transparent society; it's our goal to achieve a more just society."
A little light tonight. Sigh. Tell me what I missed!
shenderson does his usual great Wikileaks related diaries from the past 24 hours