Ex-Bush official confirms innocents at Gitmo

If it wasn't obvious by now, it should be: most of the people rounded up and jailed without charge at Guantanamo Bay were guilty of nothing more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Retired Army colonel and former chief of staff to the then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, Lawrence B. Wilkerson, told The Associated Press last Thursday that many of the detainees were innocent men, and that there was no meaningful attempt by US forces to distinguish actual terrorists from civilians.

Not only were they unable to separate civilians from fighters, but they had no desire to. Wilkerson revealed that he learned from military commanders that they had determined early on that the men were innocent, but decided to keep them imprisoned regardless: "It did not matter if a detainee were innocent. Indeed, because he lived in Afghanistan and was captured on or near the battle area, he must know something of importance." [Emphasis added.]

Wilkerson wrote, "U.S. leadership became aware of this lack of proper vetting very early on and, thus, of the reality that many of the detainees were innocent of any substantial wrongdoing, had little intelligence value, and should be immediately released." Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney prevented the situation from being addressed, because "to have admitted this reality would have been a black mark on their leadership."

Wilkerson also confirmed that many detainees had no connection to either the Taliban or to al-Qaida, and had been turned in for the $5,000 per head reward money.

Of the 800-odd prisoners at Guantanamo, of which 240 remain, Wilkerson claimed that two dozen are actual terrorists. (That's a ratio of over 32 innocents per terrorist.) He also revealed that the US government couldn't try them even if they wanted to, "because we tortured them and didn't keep an evidence trail."

More here.

This is a good time to remember that while President Obama has promised to close Guantanamo Bay, he has so far refused to do the same for the even more secret Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. Not only has Obama refused to close Bagram, or open it to oversight, or at least to trials, but there are plans to increase the number of people disappeared into the secret prison.

WikiLeaks cracks secret Pentagon documents

News from Wikileaks:

Wikileaks has cracked the encryption to a key document relating to the war in Afghanistan. The document, titled "NATO in Afghanistan: Master Narrative", details the "story" NATO representatives are to give to, and to avoid giving to, journalists.

The news doesn't seem hugely interesting: NATO lies, the Pentagon lies, they try to manage journalists to spread the message they want spread rather than the truth. Well duh. After eight years of Dubyah and his propaganda, anyone surprised by this is terminally stupid.

There are two bits of interest though: the password cracked by Wikinews was... "progress". Yes, that's right, the best and brightest NATO and the Pentagon can hire are utterly clueless about choosing passwords. Ain't it grand?

The other bit of interest is that the documents reveal that Jordan is secretly part of the US occupation forces, the ISAF. I'm sure that won't go down well in the Middle East.

Whatever happened to Osama bin Laden?

Osama bin Laden seems to have gone from Most Wanted Man Alive to Care Factor Zero. President Bush, after swearing to bring bin Laden to justice, admitted some years ago that bin Laden was not a priority. But this interview with the late Benazir Bhutto is very interesting...

On 2nd November 2007, less than two months before she was assassinated, Benito gave an interview with David Frost where she talked about the people wanting to stop the democratic process in Pakistan, and her fear that they were involved in the previous assassination attempt against her and would try again. Six minutes into the video, Bhutto claims that bin Laden has been murdered. Frost didn't bother to question her about this: either he considers the murder of bin Laden old news, unimportant, or he's simply losing his mojo as an interviewer.



Bhutto clearly felt that she was at risk of assassination from Pakistani government forces. It's not clear why al Qaeda would have assassinated the opposition leader, if indeed it was al Qaeda: arguably they could have been motivated by pure misogamy, or perhaps they prefer having an anti-democratic military strong man in power.

Of course, this assumes that al Qaeda really was behind her assassination. It's not clear that al Qaeda is anything more than a convenient bogey-man for the US and Pakistani governments. It wouldn't be the first or the last time that a supposed revolutionary or terrorist group had been infiltrated by so many government agents that in fact there were no revolutionaries left in it. Once a government, or even part of a government, starts defining itself in terms of opposition to shadowy criminal figures, the temptation is very large to create such convenient scapegoats.

Making Communist Yugoslavia look good

It's certainly very special when the Home of the Free makes Communist Yugoslavia under a despotic totalitarian government look good, but the experience of photographers in the USA is doing that.

Avram Grumer explains:

Back in the ’80s, my parents (who are Balkan folk dance enthusiasts) visited what was then the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, a Communist nation. While there, my father photographed a picturesque lake. He snapped off a shot or two, and was interrupted by a government official who told him that photographing that lake was forbidden, due to the presence of some militarily sensitive facility (I forget what; a power plant or something). My father put the camera away, and that was it. They didn’t confiscate the camera or the film, didn’t make him expose the roll to the light, didn’t haul my parents off for an interrogation. A print of the photo hung on my parents’ wall for years; no sort of industrial facility is visible in it. It’s just a photo of a pretty lake.

Compare that with the treatment this Japanese tourist got at the hands of Amtrak and the New Haven police:

The Japanese tourist was ordered by a conductor on an Amtrak train from New York to Boston to stop taking photos of the scenery "in the interests of national security", and threatened to confiscate his camera. The tourist, who spoke little English, complied with the order and put the camera away in his bag. Nevertheless, at the next stop, the train was bordered by police, who threatened to remove him with force:

The police speak through the interpreter, with the impatience of authority. [...] The officers explain, “After we remove him from the train, when we are through our investigation, we will put him on the next train.” The woman translates. The passenger replies, “I’m meeting relatives in Boston. They cannot be reached by phone. They expect me and will be worried when I do not arrive on schedule.” “Our task,” the police repeat, "is to remove you from this train. If necessary, we will do so by force. After we have finished the investigation, we’ll put you on another train.” The woman translates. The traveler gathers his belongings and departs.

To add insult to injury, it turns out that Amtrak has no such policy prohibiting photography on their trains.

The witness to these events wrote:

It doesn't take more than five minutes, in any airport in this country, before I hear the loudspeaker, "The current terror threat is elevated." We hear “terror” endlessly – traveling, at home, on television, in the news. Recent political campaigns have reminded – no, badgered – us, to be very afraid. What did Franklin Roosevelt say, that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Terror. Paranoia. We can no longer differentiate between terrors. Is this our generation’s enlightened contribution to American culture?

Watching police escort a visitor off the train, I felt anger, not comfort. This action was beyond irritating. It is intolerable, unacceptable. If it bothered me, it paled in comparison to the way it inconvenienced, and will long trouble, this visitor to our country. We disrupted his travel plans and family reunion. Even greater than the psychological damage we inflicted is the harm we’ve done to ourselves. We missed an opportunity to show kindness, to be ambassadors of goodwill. The visitor will return home. He will indeed impress many people – not with pleasant memories and pictures of a quiet morning trip along the New England coast, but with a story of being removed and detained by American police for taking pictures. Do we imagine we’ve gained anything because a single visitor returns home with stories of mistreatment?

Such blatant attempts to intimidate photographers aren't limited to tourists or Arabs. Avram Grumer links to a number of sites documenting these incidents. At one of these sites, "C.E." explains that he's been a professional photographer for thirty years, been taking photos all over the world, during martial law, before and after military coups and terrorist bombings, and even once accidentally inside a military base, and he's never been subject to as much harassment as he receives in the USA. And he is an American.

I think the best, or at least the most amusing, comment explaining why these events are becoming more common came from Chris Waller, talking about the similar situation in the UK:

Increasingly in Britain a lot of overweight young men of low intelligence who are otherwise unemployable are being stuffed into ill-fitting uniforms and given the idea that they are saving the Western world from sinking into chaos as a result of terrorism.

Secrecy is like a weed

Unless you take steps to keep it under control, it spreads and takes over everything.

The Bush government has been one of the most secretive ever, for less reason than ever before. This stain has started spreading to even scientific organisations like NASA, which has refused to release the results of a survey into airline safety.

Anxious to avoid upsetting air travelers, NASA is withholding results from an unprecedented national survey of pilots that found safety problems like near collisions and runway interference occur far more frequently than the government previously recognized.

NASA gathered the information under an $8.5 million safety project, through telephone interviews with roughly 24,000 commercial and general aviation pilots over nearly four years. Since ending the interviews at the beginning of 2005 and shutting down the project completely more than one year ago, the space agency has refused to divulge the results publicly.

Just last week, NASA ordered the contractor that conducted the survey to purge all related data from its computers.

The Associated Press learned about the NASA results from one person familiar with the survey who spoke on condition of anonymity because this person was not authorized to discuss them.

A senior NASA official, associate administrator Thomas S. Luedtke, said revealing the findings could damage the public's confidence in airlines and affect airline profits [emphasis added].

Heaven forbid if the airlines profits were hurt because people could make informed decisions. That's not the capitalist way!

Petrol price insanity

On the radio this morning, I heard perhaps one of the stupidest, most arbitrary, craziest rules ever enacted in a commercial setting.

A cashier of a petrol station rang the radio station for some competition, and the DJ asked him "What will I pay for petrol at your station today?". The cashier answered that he was forbidden to tell people the price of petrol over the phone.

Not the cost price, or the wholesale price, but the retail price.

It isn't like this was a commercially sensitive piece of information. It is public knowledge: the petrol station, like all the other petrol stations in the country, put their prices up on display in numerals three feet high. There is no conceivable reason for secrecy that withstands more than two seconds of thought.

Maybe, just maybe, if petrol stations were all independently owned, and prices were extremely competitive, and mobile phones didn't exist, a petrol station could delay -- not prevent -- their competitors from finding out what their price was by forcing them to send out "spies" onto the road rather than just make phone calls.

But none of those things are true: the vast bulk of stations are operated by the big oil companies (Shell, Mobile, Caltex and BP). Prices are set by the oil companies, and for the most part are the same all over the city. Like many businesses, petrol stations tend to clump in an area: many are literally across the road or next door to a competitor, so finding out the competition's price is a matter of looking out the window.

Doctrine of Ignorance

The Seattle Times has a powerful piece about the Bush Doctrine of Ignorance. The Bush administration is perhaps the most pointlessly secretive administration the US has ever seen, to the point of "locking the barn after the horse has escaped -- and died of old age", as the editorial describes the re-censoring of fifty-year old public documents dealing with the Cold War, documents which were innoculous enough to have been made available even to the Soviet Union, and which have been openly cited in government heaings, reported on by the media, and even written up in history books.

Anyone who doesn't see a pattern here has not been paying attention. From its 18-hour blackout of news that the vice president had shot a man, to its paying a newspaper columnist to write favorable pieces, to its habit of putting out video press releases disguised as TV news, to its penchant for stamping top secret on anything that doesn't move fast enough, this administration has repeatedly shown contempt for the right of the people to know what's going on. At a time when information is more readily available than ever, this government is working like 1952 to enforce ignorance.

And the people, too many of them, shrug and say okey-dokey. As if we learned nothing from Abscam, Iran-contra, Vietnam and Watergate. As if it's OK for an arrogant and paternalistic government to decide for us what we get to know.

Well, it's not. An informed electorate is the lifeblood of democracy, the ultimate check on despotic ambitions.

Downer tried to bury WMD letter

Yesterday the Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer responded to allegations that he had tried to suppress a damning letter by Dr John Gee of the Iraq Survey Group, which stated that Iraq didn't have weapons of mass destruction and that Canberra and Washington were reluctant to accept the facts.

Mr Downer, naturally enough, denied trying to bury the letter, saying:

"Of course not. Why would I?"

and admitting that the government's confidence in the WMD threat had gradually declined after the March 2003 invasion.

Well, for starters, there was the timing of the letter: not long before the 2004 Australian Federal elections. Criticism of the government's WMD fantasies could have hurt the Liberal Party's standing in the election.

And then there are these quotes by Mr Downer in February 2004:

• "The government stands by its presentation of the case for disarming Iraq of its WMD capabilities"


• [Evidence collected since the conflict began showed Saddam Hussein] "was pursuing WMD programs and that his regime was concealing these activities from U.N. inspectors"

They don't look like the words of a man starting to have doubt about the existence of WMD in Iraq. They look like the words of a man lying through his teeth, because as we now know, there was no such evidence in February 2004. It isn't as if there was evidence in February, and then, oops, somebody lost it and now nobody can find it. There is no evidence now, and there was no evidence back then.

More on the allegations here.

I don't expect these revelations to have any lasting effect on the Australian political scene. I see no evidence that anything more than a minority of Australians actually care whether the government ministers lie to the public and cover-up inconvenient facts. Past revelations of Prime Minister "Honest John" Howard and his cabinet lying to the public have lead to a brouhaha for a few days or weeks, then back to business as usual. I don't imagine this will be any different.

No photos please, we're Australian

Melbourne's Southbank shopping centre wants to ban tourists and shoppers from taking photos in the shopping centre -- and even Australia's conservative Prime Minister, John Howard, thinks they're going too far.

But unfortunately there are no laws laying out freedom in privately-owned but public spaces like shopping centres. Because they are privately owned, the centre management is legally permitted to demand virtually any conditions they choose, regardless of whether they are reasonable or not.

The problem (apart from the stupidity of thinking that taking photographs of public buildings is a terrorism threat) is that the law doesn't distinguish between truly private property, like your house and office, and public property that just happens to be privately owned. Once a property owner issues a general invitation for anyone and everyone to enter his property, common sense tells us that the property takes on the characteristics of public property.

The shopping centres want to have their cake and eat it too: they claim that there is no expectation of privacy in the shopping centre because it is a public space, and therefore they can photograph and film visitors, but then turn around and declare that for "privacy reasons" shoppers aren't allowed to take photos. That's just nonsense, but unfortunately it is legally-protected nonsense.

Recently, employees at Flinders Street train station were criticised for abusing Japanese tourists who took photos of the famous Flinders Street clock. The train company defended the practice by playing the terrorism card: what if terrorists took photos of the famous landmark?

Well, what if they did? It's not like the clock is a secret. It's on maps and in books and everything. In any case, these imaginary terrorists could simply walk less than 100 metres down the street to a tourist souvenire shop and buy postcards showing photos of Flinders Street station.

Don't take that camera to town

Neftaly Cruz was arrested by Philadelphia police for taking a picture of police arresting a drug dealer with his mobile phone camera.

"[The police officer] opened up the gate and Neffy was coming down and he went up to Neffy, pulled him down, had Neffy on the car and was telling him, 'You should have just went in the house and minded your own business instead of trying to take pictures off your picture phone,'" said [neighbour] Gerrell Martin.

Cruz said police told him that he broke a new law that prohibits people from taking pictures of police with cell phones.

"They threatened to charge me with conspiracy, impeding an investigation, obstruction of a investigation. ... They said, 'You were impeding this investigation.' (I asked,) "By doing what?' (The officer said,) 'By taking a picture of the police officers with a camera phone,'" Cruz said.

[...]

"There is no law that prevents people from taking pictures of what anybody can see on the street," said Larry Frankel of the American Civil Liberties Union. "I think it's rather scary that in this country you could actually be taken down to police headquarters for taking a picture on your cell phone of activities that are clearly visible on the street."

Cruz was not charged. After being held for an hour, he was told by the police that he was being released because their supervisor wasn't on duty.

Judge rejects dismissal motion on EFF case

Glenn Greenwald, author of How Would A Patriot Act?, reports that the Bush administration's motion to dismiss the lawsuit by the EFF against AT&T has been rejected.

Underscoring how courts virtually always accept the government's claim of state secrets, the court began by discussing the long line of cases in which, in almost every instance, courts deferred to the Government's assertion that state secrets would be jeopardized by ongoing litigation. Indeed, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals -- the appellate court which is above this district court -- previously directed that "utmost deference" be given to the government's invocation of this claim.

After looking at the government's claim, the court rejected the argument that allowing the case to proceed would put essential state secrets at risk, since the US government itself has already admitted the existence of the NSA warrantless eavesdropping program.

This seems to be a common tactic of the American right: the government proudly announces some program or event, third parties investigate and discover that it is illegal or otherwise harmful, and the government and/or right-wing pundits immediately start hollering State Secret!. Fortunately, the courts are starting to wise up to that game.

Why hide the security lesson of Mumbai?

Bruce Schneier points out there is a serious, if minor, security lesson to be learnt from the Mumbai train bombings:

Two quotes:

Authorities had also severely limited the cellular network for fear it could be used to trigger more attacks.

And:

Some of the injured were seen frantically dialing their cell phones. The mobile phone network collapsed adding to the sense of panic.

(Note: The story was changed online, and the second quote was deleted.)

Cell phones are useful to terrorists, but they're more useful to the rest of us.

This is an important lesson. There is a tendency amongst certain "authorities" to distrust and be condescending to the public. Honesty and transparency is alien to their way of thinking, and it shouldn't be. The fear of a mobile phone signal triggering more attacks is ridiculous -- as far as I know, such an attack has never taken place, ever. Mobile phones are frequently used as timers to trigger bombs, but they don't need to be connected to the cellular network for that. Cutting off the network has zero benefit: it doesn't prevent further bombings (they can run off a timer, just like the original bombs). But it does have significant costs: not just the human cost of preventing the dying, injured and merely worried victims from calling their loved ones, but the more serious costs to first responders like ambulance. After Sept 11, the private networks used by police and fire departments broke down under the load, and the first responders relied on their personal mobile phones to communicate. Cutting off the cellular network imposes a significant burden on the already-struggling first responders.

Zero benefit, significant cost -- I'm not surprised that the clueless authorities would be in love with the idea of shutting off the mobile network. But I am surprised that the New Zealand "Stuff" website is a party in hiding that lesson by censoring their report.

China criminalises journalism

Seems that China is about to criminalise the reporting of news without government permission.

Didn't the Soviet Union try that? How did it go for them?