Dear Minister (Redacted): Assange and FOI

On Thursday, the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade published their answer to a Fairfax Freedom of Information two-fold request on Julian Assange. The first part was for briefings to Foreign Minister Bob Carr about Wikileaks, Assange and Bradley Manning. The second was cable traffic (the kind made freely available by Wikileaks) between the embassy in Washington and the department on Wikileaks, Assange and Manning in the months February to April this year. The aim of the FOI was not to release Assange but to embarrass the government by proving Bob Carr a liar. Fairfax's gotcha today was DFAT’s long-held concern Assange would be extradited to the US was “at odds with Carr's repeated dismissal of such a prospect.” More importanly however, DFAT's heavily redacted response gives much insight into Australian concerns about Assange

The response started with a letter addressed to Carr on March 2. The letter was written by the department’s secretary Dennis Richardson who was also ambassador to the US for four years to 2009.  While this was before the period of Assange’s international infamy, Richardson presumably had some sage advice on how to deal with the Assange dilemma. “Dear Minister” it began followed by five pages all marked “redacted”.  Some tantalising notes were left on the last page. Consider, Stephenson wrote to Carr in note s22.1(a)(ii), on any given day, the department is dealing with around 1500 consular cases. The appendix s22.1(a)(ii) also deals with workload and said consular work was increasingly complex due to the travel behaviour of Australians and the number of cases raised to the media which require ministerial involvement. We don’t know where this was leading as the next page was redacted.

There followed a suggested response to possible questions on Assange lawyer Jennifer Robinson whose name was included on a Heathrow “inhibited travel” list.  This was to confirm events but to deny any Australian involvement or British restrictions on her travel. The problem was caused by “management of Ms Robinson’s check-in” and “inadvertent comments by airport security and other staff”. They said check-in staff eventually cleared Robinson to travel and she boarded the flight as planned. The talking point ended “I hope this will put all the conspiracy theories to rest.”

Those conspiracy theories had to wait for the next page which was redacted. The next point was a problem of Carr's own making. A month prior to becoming Foreign Minister, Carr used his own blog to decry the role of judges as prosecutors in the Swedish legal system as “an outrage by Australian standards”. The possible question was shouldn’t the Government do more to stop him from being extradited there. The answer was whatever his opinions as a blogger, as a representative of the Australian Government, he had to express “confidence in the integrity of judicial processes of Sweden”. 

The matter of a US indictment should only be discussed “if raised”. The response should be that while the US is investigating Wikileaks there was no announcement of any action against Assange and the US has not advised Australia of any such action though “the details of our conversations are confidential”.  Australia refuses to comment on the leaked emails from Stratfor which spoke of the sealed indictment.  Two other issues to discuss only "if raised" were the “temporary surrender” extradition mechanism and the likelihood of Australia extraditing him to the US if he returned here.

The briefing said Assange was welcome home “once international orders preventing his travel have been lifted”. Any extradition from here was a matter for the Attorney-General though Assange could fight such an order in Australian courts. There was also an ambiguous answer to avoid confirming Assange’s eligibility to run as an Australian Senator as “suggested on Twitter”. It was Wikileaks’ own suggestion and while the response was to be handballed to the A-G, Senator Carr’s own opinion was that “Assange has not been charged with an offence in Sweden or elsewhere”.

There follows background on the legal proceedings. British police issued Assange with a European Arrest Warrant in December 2010 which a court found valid two months later. Assange appealed to the High Court which upheld the decision in November 2011. However they allowed an appeal to the Supreme Court on the legal matter of whether a prosecutor was a “judicial authority” who could issue an EAW under UK law. After hearings in February, the Supreme Court has reserved its opinion. If the appeal is successful, Assange is free to walk. If it is unsuccessful, Assange still has one last legal avenue open, the European Court of Human Rights.

The Department said they had spoken to Assange twice by phone, twice in person, facilitated a visit by his mother and had attended all legal proceedings. If he ends up in Sweden, he would probably be kept in detention while any trial was pending. As for the US, there a Grand Jury was deliberating the Wikileaks cablegate affair in secret. Wikileaks was accused of providing a rainbow table to crack passwords in Manning’s pre-trial. After Wikileaks released the Stratfor email, Australia sought clarification on whether there was a sealed indictment for Assange. The request was denied due to the secrecy arrangements of the Grand Jury. 

The secrecy of DFAT files on Assange continued with 10 more redacted pages. There followed a cable from Washington marked “routine, information only”. The cable provided a summary of the Manning case which described in great detail the links to Assange and Wikileaks. These included file-sharing, contact details and on-line chat. Implicit in the cable was that prosecutors were building a case against Assange. 

This possibility was made explicit in another similarly undated “routine” cable which said the US has been investigating Assange for more than 12 months. An unconfirmed grand jury was empanelled in Virginia in 2010 but this has been a Kafkaesque black hole for information with no one involved allowed to talk about it and the US refusing to even confirm its existence. The cable also quotes commentary which suggests a successful US prosecution of Assange would be “challenging and complicated”. Possible charges could include accessing computers without authorisation, theft of US property, disclosing prohibited material or criminal conspiracy to “defraud the US”. Any prosecution would not tackle First Amendment rights even though as a non-American he may not be covered. 

A few more redacted pages occurred before more routine cables.They quoted a Wikileaks press release denouncing UNESCO for banning Wikileaks personnel from a conference about Wikileaks. They pointed out the conference was organised by “Washington insiders, cold war ideological allies (such as Freedom House and the disgraced IAPA) and U.S. mainstream media groups.” When media asked the US State Department, spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said given US’s state of “suspended animation” in UNESCO, she was “not sure we’re going to have much to say about it."

Another cable gave an update on the Manning arraignment. With the complexity of the case of 40,000 documents containing 400,000 pages, it would mean an August start date. Manning would be detained for 800 days by the time it starts. It reported a voice from the gallery shouting “Judge, isn’t a soldier required to report a war crime?” It also reported the president of the Center for Constitutional Rights Michael Ratner’s comment that prosecutors were “bludgeoning Manning to accept a plea where he would then implicate Assange”. 

Then it was back to the leaked Stratfor emails. On 27 February Wikileaks began publishing the Global Intelligence Files based on five million emails from a company called Stratfor which provides subscription-based analysis of geo-political issues. It was a private sector Cablegate which Wikileaks publicised with newspaper partners. The cable did not mention the “sealed indictment” but did say Australia was mentioned twice. The first, an East Asia Monitor Guidance, talked about Australia’s submarine crisis and the second from a “well connected former Senator” discussed Chinese mining interests. 

A cable followed that explicitly mentioned the Stratfor “sealed indictment” email. The email’s author Fred Burton was an ex-deputy chief of US counter-terrorism with “close ties” to the intelligence and government network. The email was not official confirmation and the cable author said Burton might be mistaken due to a draft indictment “commonly used by prosecutors to ‘game out’ possible charges.” Either way the silence of the Grand Jury made everything just speculation.

There was a long explanation why Grand Juries operate in secrecy. It was imported from English law, it protected witnesses, it would lessen the risk someone indicted would flee, and lastly it would prevent someone tried but exonerated from “being held up to public ridicule”. While Assange might have coped with the indignity, it is also designed to prevent “satellite litigation in advance of judgement”. 

More cables discussed new allegations in the Manning case. Firstly, that he provided material assistance to the enemy, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). It discussed in detail the legal arguments and the media commentary with many saying the case was weak and questioned the benefits to AQAP.  Another cable followed that talked about the “rainbow table” allegation. 

Another one discussed the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture’s report to the UN on Manning (Manning data starts page 74). Juan Mendez said Manning’s detention was punitive but he did not accept monitored access to the prisoner. It had a letter from the Department of Defense to Mendez saying they were satisfied with the detention and had placed him on death watch. 

The last significant cable was about Wikileaks’ request for the US to publicise details of Manning’s court martial. The Center for Constitutional Rights' Michael Ratner said the public had First Amendment and common law rights to access to criminal trials. Ratner quoted Circuit Judge Damon Keith’s dictum “democracies die behind closed doors”. He noted Mendez’s objections and said the public had a “compelling interest” in the Manning case. Particularly Assange had a “unique and obvious interest” and “it appears” federal prosecutors had a sealed indictment against him. 

The last cable in the document about Jennifer Robinson’s flight difficulty was completely redacted. By my counting 39 pages out of 125 were redacted showing Assange has been a major topic of discussion and concern for DFAT. Yet there is much revealing about what is left in. Australia almost certainly knows about the sealed indictment but is content to hide behind legal niceties from confirming it.  This was certainly the take of today’s Fairfax report on the material. The Department as ever played a straight bat. Fairfax concluded with DFAT’s non-response. “A spokesperson for Senator Carr said yesterday Assange's circumstances remained a matter for the UK, Ecuador and Sweden, with Australia's role limited to that of a consular observer.” Carr hopes the convenience of consular observation will keep Australia off the hook as this high-stakes game heads towards a spectacular climax.

Assange and Correa: Welcome to the Club of the Persecuted

For hints on whether Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa would give Julian Assange asylum, I took a look at the May 22 interview between the men for Assange’s self-titled show on Russia Today. Russia Today is a strange beast that will analyse anything in depth except Putin. Its series of Julian Assange Show episodes of interviews with many world leaders who don't get easy access to the western newsrooms, is passable telly.


“Correa is a left wing populist who has changed the face of Ecuador,” Assange announced in his introduction. “But unlike his predecessors he has a PhD in economics.”

Correa is a significant president and Assange quotes US embassy cables released by his own Wikileaks project that say Correa is the most popular president in Ecuadorian history. He was also taken hostage in a 2010 coup d’etat. Assange said Correa blamed the coup on corrupt media and launched a counter-offensive on the grounds the media define what reforms are possible.

Assange asked Correa Ecuador’s relationship with the US. Correa quoted Bolivian president Evo Morales who said the US is the only country in the Americas safe from a coup because it doesn’t have a US embassy. Assange admitted to Correa he liked his jokes. Correa suddenly got serious and said the only way he could eliminate funding US provided to Ecuadorian police was by increasing their salary.  "I'm not anti-American, I got two degrees there but Iwould never allow Ecuadorian sovereignty to bcompromised by the US".  Correa said he wanted Wikileaks to release all the cables as they had nothing to hide.

Assange asked about kicking out the US ambassador after the release of the cables. Correa said Heather Hodges was right wing with 1960s cold war attitudes. Hodges accused Correa of deliberately appointing a corrupt police commissioner. She didn't like the government and her main contacts were leaders of the opposition. The cables confirmed what they already knew. As Hodges was shown the exit door, Correa grew relationships with China, Russia and Brazil in her stead. 

Assange brought the subject back to freedom of information as he reminded Correa why he was 500 days of house arrest. Were Correa’s reforms were a step in the wrong direction for release of information?
Correa replied he was all for release of information. He mentioned an Argentinean book about Wikileaks which said Ecuadorian media did not publish.  He has long supported Wikileaks. “We believe, my dear Julian, that only things that should be protected against freedom of speech are those set in the international treaties,” Correa said. Correa said media power is greater than political power in Ecuador. “They usually have self-serving political, economic, social and above all informative power,” he said. He claimed the government were persecuted by journalists using insults and slander – mass media serving private interests.

With most TV stations owned by bankers and no public station in Ecuador, he faced merciless opposition to any banking reforms. “These people disguised as journalists are doing politics for fear of losing the power they always had,”  Assange said he agreed with his market description of the media which had censored Wikileaks material for political reasons. However he said the correct way to deal with monopolies or cartels to break them up. He asked could Correa have made it easier for new entrants. Correa said that was what they were trying to do was making one third of TV stations for the community and non-profit, one third commercial and the final third state owned by governments and councils. He said his 2008 law has been systematically blocked by big media and their lobbyists. 

Correa said Ecuador and Latin America are moving from the Washington Consensus.  “The policies dictated by the US had nothing to do with our needs in Latin America,” Correa told Assange.  Correa said governments had to put people before economic politics. He told Assange it was a pleasure to meet him in this way,
“Cheer up, welcome to the club of the persecuted,” Correa said.
“Thank you,” Assange replied. “Take care and don’t get assassinated.”
“That’s something we have to avoid every day," Correa replied.

Noble Mendaxity: Assange and Wikileaks win a Walkley

Julian Assange has won the Most Outstanding Contribution to Journalism at this year’s Australian journalism Walkley awards – a win that labels him a journalist of the first rank. Assange won for his site Wikileaks which organisers said had a courageous and controversial commitment to the finest tradition of investigative journalism: “justice through transparency.” Walkley judges said Wikileaks applied new technology to “penetrate the inner workings of government". The payback was a global publishing coup and an avalanche of inconvenient truths.

Assange’s victory at a traditional media awards night may be a surprise, as is the fact is he is listed as a journalist at all. He has never worked for a newspaper, broadcaster or major media proprietor. Apart from the occasional contribution as a columnist or blog post, he is not even a curator of editorial content. Prior to Wikileaks, he was most famous as the underground computer hacker “Mendax”. Yet he deserves the award. As Glenn Greenwald says, Wikileaks produced more newsworthy scoops over the last year than every other media outlet combined.

It remains "Assange’s Wikileaks" as Greenwald called it and the man himself never stopped reminding people. Particularly his former co-conspirator Daniel Domscheit-Berg. Assange’s biggest fear was that Domscheit-Berg, who was effectively the other half of a two-man operation, would claim to be co-founder. Assange’s towering ego made him insufferably vain and uncaring but his steadfastness to a single great idea was undeniable. Wikileaks changed the relationship of whistle blowers to media forever by deliberately breaking the link between them. The reason disenchanted staff from Julius Bär bank or escapees from Scientology trusted Wikileaks, was that Wikileaks was deliberately set up so they could never track the whistle blower. This guaranteed anonymity set it apart from all classical forms of investigative journalism.

It was a shock to Assange when Bradley Manning was exposed as the Collateral Murder and Cablegate contributor. Manning was exposed not by Wikileaks, but by injudicious conversations with former hacker Adrian Lamo. Manning has always been provocative so it was inevitable he would eventually fall foul of authorities. That does not excuse his shameful treatment by the US authorities or calls from Congressman Mike Rogers (R-MI) for his execution.

It was the depth and scale of the information Manning donated to Wikileaks that astounded. A quarter of a million US diplomatic cables with a quarter of a billion words. Released from almost every embassy of the world, they were a snapshot of international relations at a point in time. They show what decision makers were really thinking and occasionally what they really did. The embarrassed Americans hit back by making it difficult for the non-profit to receive donations.

With such a large hoard of data at their disposal, it was natural Wikileaks would want to share it with trusted media brands. The New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel (the latter with Domscheit-Berg connections) began to publish their own spin on selected cables. The media that missed out were jealous of the chosen few and the few did not want to share with the many. The relationship quickly soured.

Assange could never fully trust anyone nor be trusted in return. His full hacker nickname “splendide mendax” means nobly untruthful and Assange felt he could get away with anything due to his higher calling. His acceptance speech to the Walkleys (delivered by video) shows he still has plenty of stomach for the fights ahead. “An unprecedented banking blockade has shown us that Visa, Mastercard, the Bank of American and Western Union are mere instruments of Washington foreign policy,” he said. “Censorship has been privatised".

Assange is paranoid but he has offended many powerful people so he has much to be paranoid about. He has also much to be proud of. Wikileaks may collapse under its own internal contradictions but the idea a whistle blower can anonymously pass their information to a wider public is extremely powerful. Big media could have developed this technology but didn’t. Yet the open slather of Cablegate ultimately ruined Wikileaks’s ability to pass on more mundane but equally vital information about banks and private companies. Assange’s former offsider Domscheit-Berg is developing Openleaks in the same mould, but more cautiously.

In his book Inside Wikileaks, Domscheit-Berg says Assange tried to do too much, too soon. “The sources uploaded the documents, members erased the metadata, verified the submissions and provided context,” Domscheit-Berg said. “At some point it became impossible to do all these jobs adequately.” That has never stopped Assange from trying. He is now immersed in a court case which will eat up considerable energies but he will continue to be a freakish force of nature. The Walkley Trustees said Wikileaks was not without flaws. But by constructing a means to encourage whistleblowers, they said, "WikiLeaks and editor-in-chief Julian Assange took a brave, determined and independent stand for freedom of speech and transparency that has empowered people all over the world.”
Hail to the editor-in-chief.

Julian Assange - media personality 2010

The Woolly Days media personality of 2010 is Julian Assange. Last year I called it the Australian media personality of the year and gave it to ABC boss Mark Scott. Assange is also Australian but his impact has gone well beyond his native shores and his name and reputation are now household names across the world.

With the possible exception of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, no other person has dominated and indeed changed the media landscape with such effect this year. Assange’s choice of media weaponry, Wikileaks, has been in operation for four years scouring the underbelly of dodgy political and business dealings across the world and putting embarrassing documents onto the Internet for all to see and study. The resulting database was whistleblowing journalism blown out into international proportions and it and Assange were the centrepiece of Iceland’s plans to turn itself into a haven of investigative journalism.

Iceland’s plans revealed in February were the first hint that 2010 was to be a breakthrough year for Assange. Wikileaks took a quantum leap forward in international consciousness when it posted a video in April of US helicopter gunships killing civilian targets in Iraq. The helicopter pilots casually swap conversation before opening fire on what they believed to be military insurgents and who were in fact Reuters photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen and his driver Saeed Chmagh.

The footage entitled collateral murder was an overnight sensation and has received over 10 million hits via Youtube alone. Inscribed with the George Orwell dictum “political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and give the appearance of solidity to pure wind”, it immediately put the Pentagon on the back foot who launched a massive investigation to find the source of the leak while condemning Wikileaks in awkward language that tried to convey the heinousness of the crime while also reassuring it had no discernable impact.

On 6 July, the US charged 22-year-old private Bradley Manning with disclosing the video. By then, Manning had gotten his hands on even more devastating information. Manning was an intelligence agent for eight months in Baghdad where he got hold of 250,000 secret state department cables from more than 250 US embassies and consulates. Manning told a friend how he did it: "I would come in with music on a CD-RW labelled with something like 'Lady Gaga' … erase the music … then write a compressed split file. No one suspected a thing ... [I] listened and lip-synched to Lady Gaga's Telephone while exfiltrating possibly the largest data spillage in American history." Manning uploaded the copies to Wikileaks where Assange now had to determine what to do with them. They decided on staged disclosure aimed at maximising political impact. They entered agreements with The Guardian, the New York Times, Le Monde, El Pais and Der Spiegel to spread the data in reputable newspapers.

The release was compared to Daniel Ellsberg’s Pentagon Papers to the New York Times and Washington Post in 1971 which outlines the US’s secret wars in Cambodia and Laos. Just as the then-Nixon administration was outraged by what it saw as a gross breach of national security, Barack Obama and his officials led the condemnation of the Wikileaks’ disclosures. Once again the denunciations had an implausible mixture of saying they were irresponsible while claiming they revealed nothing new.

Right-wing hardheads in the US called for Assange’s execution while Pentagon officials searched for criminal offences he may have committed. Assange’s own paranoid lifestyle helped turn him into media darling with his sex life getting as many column inches in the redtops as his whistleblowing. His sex life indeed is proving a weak link as he faces extradition charges to Sweden for rape. The issues his supporters face over these charges has led to an extraordinary campaign called “mooreandme” in which feminists are angry with Michael Moore and Keith Olbermann for the way they have downplayed the charges against Assange.

Meanwhile the US, its allies and sympathetic non-state actors has taken elaborate steps to try to take Wikileaks off the air. There have been denial of service attacks which forced Wikileaks to change its address. In reply, companies such as Paypal and Amazon have themselves been victim of hacking attacks in retaliation for suspending micropayments to the organisation. Yet Wikileaks has survived with multiple mirror sites and a grassroots campaign that has struck a chord with people across the world concerned about freedom of information.

Freedom of Information is a relatively new concept and it is not yet clear how much we want information to be free. As Clay Shirky notes human systems can’t stand pure transparency. In releasing all this information into the wild, Assange is challenge powerful notions of what it means to have secrets. He has turned the read-write-web into a powerful democratic tool though to what ends no-one can really tell yet.

Most importantly of all he has spawned a host of imitators that will ensure the work lives on even if Assange is incarcerated or worse. Copycat sites such as Indolinks (Indonesia), BrusselsLeaks (EU) and Balkanleaks (old Yugoslavia) have sprung up using modern technology to give muscle to the ancient grievance of the beans spiller. The biggest rival site Openleaks       c           wants to be exactly the same as Wikileaks but without Assange's autocratic behaviour, and the rival site "will be more democratically governed.”     They make not like Assange personally but imitation remains the sincerest form of flattery.

Media miss the news in first Aussie Wikileak

Oblivious to the fact that one of the dreaded new media was providing the scoop, the Australian newspaper reported on its front page today the first Wikileaks document to mention Australian officials was “Rudd’s plan to contain Beijing”. It’s hardly surprising The Australian would go data-mining for the thing that would most embarrass the Federal Government. But it’s hardly surprising too they got it wrong.

In the haste to follow a narrow political agenda, the Oz skipped over far more substantive elements to the story. Not only that, they also misquoted Rudd. The first line of Paul Maley’s front page story said Rudd had warned the world "must be prepared to deploy force” if China didn’t co-operate with the international community.

Compare this to what the cable actually said:
Rudd argued for “multilateral engagement with bilateral vigour” - integrating China effectively into the international community and allowing it to demonstrate greater responsibility, all while also preparing to deploy force if everything goes wrong.

Suggesting the world has a Plan Z for China that involves force is a long way from advocating it and certainly doesn't make it “Rudd’s plan”. It wasn’t just The Australian that took this slanted approach. The ABC took a similar tack with the material saying it was Rudd's "suggestion that the US use force against China in a worst case scenario”.

It was nothing of the sort and a poor way of using what was remarkable information put out in the public domain. The ABC added insult to injury by turning it into a petty domestic squabble by harvesting a meaningless quote from Julie Bishop about “disturbing reading”. Don't read it Julie, if it disturbs you.

Beyond this dross, the reportage ignores some major issues discussed when US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met Australian PM Kevin Rudd in Washington on 24 March 2009. Private Bradley Manning, Julian Assange and his army of Wikileaks helpers deserve praise for putting the material in the public domain nine years ahead of schedule. The cable about the meeting 09STATE30049 was marked “confidential” which is a mid-level security due to be released into the public domain in 2019.

The meeting talked about problems in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Russia, China was the biggest topic. Some of it was just polite platitudes with Rudd buttering up a valued friend but most of it was extremely useful and informative sharing of intel among allies.

Rudd told the Americans one possibility was the little-known philosophy of Kang Youwei which he said provided China’s idea of a harmonious world and could potentially fit in well with the West’s concept of responsible stakeholders. He also said Hu Jintao did not have the same level of power as former leader Jiang Zemin.
“No one person dominated Chinese leadership currently, although Hu’s likely replacement, Xi Jinping, had family ties to the military and might be able to rise above his colleagues,” Rudd told Clinton.

He also noticed an important distinction between China’s attitude to Taiwan and Tibet. With the former it was purely “sub-rational and deeply emotional” (because China has no intention of disturbing the status quo on Taiwan) while the more concrete hardline policies against the latter were designed not only to show who was boss in Llasa but to send a message to other minorities within mainland China.

Rudd also told Clinton the Standing Committee of the Politburo was the real decision-making body in China which then passed decisions to the State Council for implementation. He saw the new Asia Pacific Community initiative as a bulwark against any Chinese plans to issue an Asian Monroe Doctrine, but understood American reluctance to get involved in another international initiative. Rudd did say the 2009 Australian Defence White Paper was a response to Chinese power, something most people assumed but he could never admit publicly at the time.

In return for this information, Rudd wanted Washington’s intelligence on Russia so he could prepare for an upcoming meeting in Moscow. Conversation centred on the power struggle between Medvedev and Putin with both sides agreeing the President’s desire for “status and respect” could drive him closer to western thinking. But it was an outside chance.

On the AfPak situation, both parties agreed there was no point in “total success” in Afghanistan if Pakistan fell apart. Pakistan needed to drop its obsessive focus on India and attend to its western border problems.

What comes across in the cables I have read is not so much the “brutality and venality of US foreign policy” as its growing impotence. This is the reason the US is after Assange. It is the embarrassment he has caused them rather than the exposing of any international secrets that angers them so much.

The one phrase that sums up the problem was uttered by Hillary Clinton to Rudd in relation to China: “how do you deal toughly with your banker?” A damn good question and given China is our banker too, one Australian media should be asking. “Rudd’s embarrassment” has nothing on our media’s for missing the real news.

Wikileaks cable reveals Syria's price for US support

Syrian is ready to cooperate with America again over Iraq but only at a price and flatly refuses to link an Israeli deal with Iran’s nuclear capability. These are the key messages revealed in one of the top secret cables published by Wikileaks this weekend. The cable “10Damascus8, Codel Gregg’s December 30 meeting with President” discusses “a frank one hour meeting” between Syrian President Bashar Al-Asad and six visiting US Senators Judd Gregg, Evan Bayh, Arlen Specter, Mike Enzi, John Cornyn and Amy Klobuchar on 30 December 2009. (Photo credit not known, sourced here)

Asad began the talks by saying he wanted a return of Turkish-facilitated indirect talks with Israel but said Syria's relationship with Iran should not be linked to Israeli peace negotiations. Syria's ties with Hamas and Hezbollah could be “satisfactorily resolved” only after peace was achieved. Asad said he wanted to see better relationships with the US but his foreign minister Walid al-Muallim said the ball was in the Americans’ court for taking the next positive step.

Asad called Iran the region’s most important country and said the West should acknowledged Iran's NPT-protected right to enrich uranium under IAEA monitoring. Instead of insisting Iran ship all of its Low Enriched Uranium at once as the West demands, Asad said Iran’s counter-offer to ship several batches of LEU for enrichment abroad was "reasonable". Asad said Iran was not interested in pursuing a nuclear weapon, but warned an Israeli military strike on its nuclear infrastructure would fail to end the program and would only increase Iran's determination.

Asad also refused to link Iran’s nuclear program with Israeli talks, arguing it would complicate both issues. Asad said eight months of indirect peace talks in May 2008 with Israel under Turkish auspices had achieved more than several years of direct negotiations with Israel in the 1990s. Direct talks failed because of the lack of "rules of negotiation." He said indirect talks represented the best way to establish terms of reference similar to those reached by James Baker in 1991. Asad urged the US and EU to support the Turkish initiative. “Israel's military superiority would not secure it from attack against missiles and other technologies,” he said.

Asad then bristled at suggestions Syria was allowing extremists across its borders into Iraq. Asad blamed the situation on the absence of political cooperation with the US. The Americans possessed a "huge information apparatus" but lacked the ability to analyse this information successfully. "You're failing in the fight against extremism,” he told the Senators. “While we lack your intelligence capabilities, we succeed in fighting extremists because we have better analysts.”

Asad said Syria had refused to cooperate with President Bush because it did not trust him and because his administration had wrongly accused Syria of supporting foreign fighters. When President Obama assumed office, Syria tried to be positive. Asad said he had shared the idea with Special Envoy Mitchell of a border security cooperation initiative with Iraq as a first step (the CIA analyst disputed this saying it was an American suggestion to which Syria reluctantly agreed).

Asad also compared the difficulty of patrolling the large Iraqi border with similar issues on US-Mexico border. "In the US you like to shoot (terrorists),” he said. “Suffocating their networks is far more effective.” Asad blamed “US mistakes in Iraq" for trouble in the region. The report said despite a shared interest with the US in ensuring Iraqi stability, Syria would not immediately jump to intelligence cooperation without ensuring its own interests would be respected. "I won't give it (intelligence cooperation) to you for free," Asad told the Senators.

The Senators had two other agenda items they wanted Syria to address: to facilitate the release of three detained Americans in Iran, and re-open the Damascus Community School. Asad said he was unfamiliar with the detained Americans issue but was “ready” to reopen the school after he shut it down in response to a US military attack in 2008 that killed seven Syrian civilians.

The cable went into a great more detail of the discussions than was revealed by Senator Specter’s account of the CODEL in the February congressional record. While Specter mentioned the Turkish solution and the "decoupling" of Iran he made no mention of the LEU offer or what Asad requested of the US in exchange for intelligence support.

The report is one of 15,000 Top Secret classified documents released by Wikileaks on the weekend. On Sunday they began the painstaking task of publishing over a quarter of a million leaked US embassy cables. The cables date from 1966 to February 2010 and contain confidential communications between the State Department and 274 embassies in countries throughout the world.

Wikileaks and the War in Afghanistan

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange told us he released all his documents to get people talking about Afghanistan. The US has charged 22-year-old Pfc Bradley Manning with releasing the files and has demanded Assange take them down from his site, but Assange said he and Bradley were not the problem. "The most dangerous men are those who are in charge of war. And they need to be stopped," he said. Assange is right to question the intent of the war which is showing no signs of success after 9 years. So far however, all people are talking about is the tool itself: Wikileaks.

For several years Assange has been acting in the best tradition of news: revealing something someone wants hidden. People sent him electronic files under the cloak of anonymity and he published them on his European-based servers. Many governments including Australia’s have been embarrassed by his findings. But the Afghan documents were his biggest coup yet. On Sunday 26 July, Wikileaks released 75,000 detailed secret US military reports covering the war in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2010.

But Wikileaks weren’t flying solo. Aware in advance Assange had access to something extraordinary, a Guardian editor convinced him the files needed the sense-making capabilities and resources of journalism. Assange was not immediately convinced but compromised by giving the information to three newspapers to do what they wanted with them. He knew the three papers would add perspective and attention. The Guardian with its links to both Manchester and London and its ownership locked in trusts, is one of the few genuinely left of centre broadsheets in the English speaking world. Germany’s Der Spiegel is a weekly newsmagazine mostly owned by its Hamburg workforce – it would give a non-Anglosphere view.

The third is still generally regarded as the best newspaper in the world, despite many failings. The New York Times under the old family money of Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr added the ultimate prestige to Assange’s enterprise. Although the NYT’s motto is “All the News That's Fit to Print” even it had to condense down the narrative to a few thousand words. All three news angles were similar in that they said the release of the data itself was the biggest story.

With so much data still left to go round, Assange encouraged the crowdsharing potential of the Internet. The reports described the majority of lethal military actions the US military were involved in. They were categorised by the type of mission or engagement. Between them enemy action (27,000) and explosive hazard (23,000) accounted for over half the files. They showed the number of people killed, wounded, or detained during each action, together with the precise geographical location of each event, and what military units involved and major weapon systems were used. In the one and only file marked “counter terrorism”, the data states:

“Weapons seized in Herat City, Injil District, Herat Province 15 Jan 08: Counter Terrorism Department reported Anti-Terrorism Directorate personnel located and seized 1x 82 mm mortar launcher and 1 x PK machine gun from local Herat City (41S MU 25688 01079) residence (Source ARSIC-West ROC)”.

While the data are pure intelligence reports which are terse and difficult to interpret, Wikileaks provided a reading guide to help out but it not very exciting stuff.

When releasing the documents, Wikileaks said they hoped it would lead to “a comprehensive understanding of the war in Afghanistan and provide the raw ingredients necessary to change its course”. But what they forgot was that the rest of the media which did not get the exclusives might have a different slant. Murdoch's papers expressed mock outrage over their release. The Washington Post were also so annoyed at not being chosen, they got Mark Thiessen from neo-conservative think-tank American Enterprise Institute to write an op-ed calling Wikileaks a criminal enterprise which had to be shut down. He also wanted the US to arrest Assange regardless of whether jurisdiction he is living under gives its consent. Thiessen may be living in a forgotten Bush-Cheney fantasy world but he is not alone in wanting Assange eliminated.

The New Yorker called Assange a “trafficker” which made him sound like a drug dealer. But it did make the useful point Assange has made diverse enemies including failed British bank Northern Rock, Kenyan President Daniel Arap Moi and the “Church” of Scientology. Assange sent back a lovely letter to demands from the Scientologists’ lawyers: [We] will not comply with legally abusive requests from Scientology any more than Wikileaks has complied with similar demands from Swiss banks, Russian offshore stem-cell centres, former African kleptocrats, or the Pentagon.”

While perhaps nettled by being listed next to kleptocrats, The White House response merely expressed its annoyance about what Assange’s “irresponsible leaks” wouldn’t do. “[They] will not impact our ongoing commitment to deepen our partnerships with Afghanistan and Pakistan; to defeat our common enemies; and to support the aspirations of the Afghan and Pakistani people”. Otherwise National Security Advisor General James Jones was agreeing with everything leaked because he said they had already acted on its problems.

That leaves most of the case against Assange about consequences. “Innocents will die” is a short summation of it. Under this argument it does not matter what good can come from the documents in the public domain, because the possible death of Afghans identified as helpers is too high a price to pay. The right to kill innocents is an option the armed forces wants to keep exclusively for itself.

Noticeably this argument has not been used against the three newspapers each of which used the data for their stories. They are part of the social responsible press who are also answerable to laws both at home and wherever they publish. Wikileaks does not have these constraints. Jay Rosen calls Wikileaks the world’s first stateless news organisation. Wikileaks releases information onto the Internet without regard for national interest. Rosen said that up to now, the press was free to report on secret matters only so far as their local law protected them. “Wikileaks is able to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the logic of the Internet permits it,” Rosen said. “This is new. Just as the Internet has no terrestrial address or central office, neither does Wikileaks.”

This spatial elasticity means Wikileaks gets to be play by multiple sets of rules. Assistant Professor of Media Culture at the College of Staten Island CW Anderson sees it as asymmetric journalism which can either go it alone or else perform a dance between two informational cultures “one of hackers and one of reporters”.

With so much information in the public sphere, Jeff Jarvis asks where the line should be drawn. His conclusion is that “the line has to move so that our default, especially in government, is transparency.” Jarvis said the “sane response” to leaks was to open up as much as possible. “Then there’s nothing to leak except the things that shouldn’t be leaked,” he said.

Good. Now that we’ve got that straight we can move beyond the infatuation with the stateless tool and get back to Assange’s question, which is simple and grounded in geographical reality. Why are we in Afghanistan?

Has the Australian Government banned Wikileaks?

Australia’s descent into authoritarian censorship seems to be taking a new draconian turn with its treatment of the international whistleblower site Wikileaks. The British tech site The Register claimed overnight “some pages of Wikileaks have been added to the blacklist of websites which Australians are not allowed to look at.” It said some pages were blocked after Wikileaks published a list of websites banned by the Danish government. It is impossible to confirm or deny this and The Register offers no proof of their allegation. However on the same day that the secret Australian version of the list was also leaked, the entire Wikileaks site is unavailable in Australia at the time of writing.

I am reluctant to say it has been banned outright – and it appears it is not just an Australian issue. Following the issue on Twitter, it seems Wikileaks is currently unavailable in Germany also. Both @Jase88 and @Sam6 claim that Wikileaks is not blocked but has crashed due to high traffic, presumably due to the Australian censorship controversy. @drylight said it may be as simple a matter to fix as someone rebooting the Wikileaks server. But whatever has happened, this is not the first time Wikileaks has offended a jurisdiction. A Californian court ordered it be taken down in February last year after the site posted documents revealed that a bank was involved with money laundering and tax evasion.

Wikileaks survived that episode and should bounce back from its bout with the Australian Government too. Earlier today Communications Minister Stephen Conroy condemned the publication of the Australian banned list as “grossly irresponsible”. This was despite the fact that he also claims the list was not the actual ACMA blacklist. Conroy muddied the water by claiming the list undermined efforts to improve cyber-safety and create a safe online environment for children. He also warned chillingly that anyone involved in making this content publicly available would be at serious risk of criminal prosecution. I rang the media contact on Conroy’s press release for a comment on whether Wikileaks (or parts of it) has now been banned but he has not yet returned my call.

The banned list of 2,000 websites showed up some glaring inconsistencies. While there are a large number of child pornography sites and other illegal material, most of the websites listed have no obvious connection to criminal activity. There are online gambling sites, Christian and other religious sites, satanic sites, euthanasia supporters, and straight and gay pornography. Bizarrely the list also includes such recidivists as a Queensland dentist, a tour operator, a firm of “Tuckshop and Canteen Management Consultants" and a Maroochydore kennel boarding company.

The original offending Wikileaks article (now probably banned) from yesterday was a secret censorship list for Denmark. The case is a bit artificial as it was sent to the Australian Communications body ACMA as bait by an anti-censorship group in order to test the "slippery slope" theory. When a commenter posted a link to an anti-abortion website from the list on the discussion forum Whirlpool, ACMA threatened them with an $11,000 a day fine because the site also appeared on the list of websites banned in Australia. Whirlpool promptly deleted the link. It would now appear the slippery slope has turned into a black downhill run. It is no coincidence that the first line in the Wikileaks article is: "The first rule of censorship is that you cannot talk about censorship."

Libertus.net says preventing information flow, communication or the exchange of art, film and writing on the internet is “a task only King Canute would attempt”. Yet, stopping the internet tide is exactly what the Australian Government seems to want to do. Most people are aware of the ongoing “clean feed” controversy however Australia has had Internet censorship laws since 2000. The laws were strengthened in January 2008 to enable a broader range of content unsuitable for children to be ordered taken down from Australian hosted sites. Similar overseas hosted content are added to ACMA's blacklist of prohibited content. And because the list is secret no one knows what is on it. There is no accountability.

QUT academic and privacy expert Anthony Sherratt told Woolly Days there was "some absolutely terrible stuff out there" but the problem lies in who gets to define what is unacceptable. "Putting it under a catch-all of illegal is certainly not the way as society needs to be able to challenge and debate laws," he said. "Life is organic and changes by definition." Meanwhile Guy Rundle says there is no bigger issue than net censorship as it is a fundamental attack on free speech. I agree totally. Rundle concludes his impassioned article thus; “And now someone will tell me that the proposed filter won't be able to blacklist pages like Wikileaks, or whatever. But I won't believe them ... who would...?”

UPDATE (20/03/09): Wikileaks has not yet been censored. It is back on the air and the Australian list can be viewed here.

Judge orders Wikileaks off the air

A Californian court has ordered a whistle-blowing website to be taken down in a controversial ruling last Friday. Wikileaks.org was ordered off the air by Judge Jeffrey S. White of the Federal District Court following a case brought by Swiss banking group Julius Baer. Lawyers for Julius Baer brought the case to trial after several documents posted on the site allegedly revealed that the bank was involved with money laundering and tax evasion. The bank alleges the documents were stolen.

After an ex-parte hearing, the court ordered the controller of the sites domain name, Dynadot, should "prevent the domain name from resolving to the wikileaks.org website or any other website or server other than a blank park page, until further order of this Court." Wikileaks did not have the chance to address the issue in court. They claim that the order was unconstitutional and said that the site had been forcibly censored. The judge ordered Dynadot to delete Wikileaks.org deleted from the DNS (domain name server) but clearly does not understand how the internet works. Despite the order, the site can still be accessed via the IP address "http://88.80.13.160" at its Swedish hosting site and through mirror sites in Europe that replicate its contents.

The take-down decision has caused uproar and derision in the online community. Writing in the Guardian, Charles Arthur says the decision is a prima facie infringement of the US First Amendment prohibiting the abridging of free speech. Arthur says Wikileaks has annoyed many people with its determination to publish leaked documents. “Finally,” he says, "it properly annoyed someone who had the money for lawyers”.

Duncan Riley at Techcrunch points out that because the material is still available in the public domain, the likelihood is that more people will read the documents as a result of the publicity of the trial than would ever have bothered otherwise. Richard Stiennon at ZDNet says it is an outrageous move by a US court to attempt to destroy a website because of a complaint about a particular set of files. “I wonder how they justify that?” he asked. “Luckily the Internet is made of a series of tubes and the DNS is only a small part of the plumbing”.

Over at their Swedish home, Wikileaks released the trail of correspondence between themselves and Julius Baer’s solicitors. On 15 January, Baer’s solicitors charged Wikileaks of posting content that constituted “violation of trade secrets, conversion and stolen documents by former employee in violation of a written
Confidentiality agreement and copyright infringement” but consistently refused to reveal the name of their client nor would they identify what documents were causing the trouble. After several more days of fruitless exchanges between Wikileaks and the bank’s lawyers, it all went quiet until the ex-parte hearing last week.

Wikileaks was founded in 2006 by Chinese dissidents and by journalists, mathematicians and computer specialists in the United States, Taiwan, Europe, Australia and South Africa. It has published 1.2 million documents and says its goal, is to develop “an uncensorable Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis.” It has published important leaked material from across the world, including the top secret US Rules of Engagement in Iraq and news about Guantanamo Bay officials conducting covert propaganda attacks on the internet.

The Julius Baer story began in 2005 when the bank’s former Chief Operating Officer on the Cayman Islands was suspected of leaking information to the press. Rudolf Elmer is accused of being the source of the information that the bank specialized in hiding and laundering the money of the ultra rich through anonymising offshore trust structures. Wikileaks obtained and published documents related to the Caymans issue. The bank tried to stop Wikileaks publishing the information because of a court case related to the problem in Switzerland which commenced in December last year.

Julie Turner, a Californian attorney who has represented Wikileaks in previous litigation, told Wired she is surprised that the San Francisco court sanctioned such a broad agreement to remove the site. She had been speaking with the bank last month on Wikileaks' behalf when the negotiations fell through. “It’s like saying that Time magazine published one page of sensitive material so (someone can) seize the entire magazine and put a lock on their presses," she says. With Wikileaks making comparisons to the Pentagon Papers and invoking the First Amendment, this judgement is a certainty to be thrown out in a higher court. In the meantime, the Internet makes the law look like an ass.