One of the big political questions this year is whether the US government will be able to get their hands on Julius Assange. The brutal treatment given to Bradley Manning, the alleged source of the leaked US material, is a likely template for the way Assange will also be treated should he fall into US government hands. These actions by the US government are meant to frighten and thus deter any future potential unauthorized leakers. What they want is to return to the system whereby only selected people in government get to leak secrets to selected reporters to advance their own agendas.

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The January/February 2011 issue of the New Humanist has an article (not online) by Sharon Shalev on the Supermax prisons in the US where hardened criminals are kept. Here is part of her description of conditions inside.

Prisoners in a typical supermax will spend their days confined alone in a windowless seven-square-foot cell which contains only a concrete slab and a thin mattress for a bed, a small table and stool made of tamperproof materials, and a metal combo unit of a wash basin and an unscreened toilet, located at the cell front within full sight of prison guards.

Prisoners are confined to their cells for 22 and a half to 24 hours a day. They will only leave it for an hour’s solitary exercise in a barren concrete yard or for a 15-minute shower on alternate days. Technology and design allow for these two activities to take place with a flick of a switch and without direct staff contact. Food, medication, post and any other provisions will be delivered to them through a hatch in their cell door, with little communication or time wasting.

The regime of relentless solitary confinement and tight prisoner control in a typical supermax is made possible by prison architects. Without their professional knowledge and careful calculation and assessment of every design detail, it would not have been possible to hold hundreds of prisoners in complete isolation from each other within a single, relatively small, building for prolonged periods.

And it is this extreme functionality, calculated to design out human contact and enable maximum prisoner isolation and control, that makes supermax prisons so chilling… This control of every aspect of prisoners’ daily lives extends beyond the control of their bodies and movement across time and space.

You may recognize that these are the conditions under which Bradley Manning is being held. This is how the US treats its political prisoners, just the way that ruthless authoritarian regimes do in order to suppress any dissent.

If you ask anyone how the last two years have been, the answer would be “Terrible!” Unemployment rocketed up to nearly 10% officially and probably about 20% unofficially and shows no sign of coming down soon. Homes are being foreclosed left and right, throwing people onto the street. Food banks are reporting difficulties in meeting the increased demand for their services.

But not everyone has been hard hit. As Bloomberg news points out:

The last two years have been the best ever for combined investment-banking and trading revenue at Bank of America Corp., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Citigroup, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, 56, and his top deputies are in line to collect more than $100 million in delayed 2007 bonuses — six months after paying $550 million to settle a fraud lawsuit related to the firm’s behavior that year. Citigroup, the bank that needed more taxpayer support than any other, has a balance sheet 14 percent bigger than it was four years ago.

The very institutions that created so much distress for so many people were able to get the government to not only bail them out but to gut many of the new regulations that would have prevented the kind of reckless actions that might cause a repeat of the crisis.

The U.S. government, promising to make the system safer, buckled under many of the financial industry’s protests. Lawmakers spurned changes that would wall off deposit-taking banks from riskier trading. They declined to limit the size of lenders or ban any form of derivatives. Higher capital and liquidity requirements agreed to by regulators worldwide have been delayed for years to aid economic recovery.

Can anyone doubt that we have an oligarchy?

In fact, corporate America has been amassing huge amounts of cash by firing workers and squeezing the remaining ones to take on the increased workload. This ‘business strategy’ goes under the euphemism of ‘increasing productivity’. As a result, they increased their profits that have been used to pay huge bonuses to their top executives and raise their stock prices. Look at the Dow Jones index over the past two years.

Does the index bear any resemblance to the conditions of actual people?

Ted Rall’s animation succinctly captures what is going on. (Cartoonist Tom Tomorrow taps into a similar vein.)

It serves both their interests to pretend that they are antagonistic towards each other.

In all the fuss over WikiLeaks, what people seem to be ignoring (and this distortion has to be deliberate on the part of the mainstream media and the governments who must know better) is that (1) only a tiny fraction (about 1%) of the 251,287 cables have been released so far (the WikiLeaks website keeps a running total); (2) rather than being ‘indiscriminately dumped’ by WikiLeaks (as its critics are fond of saying), the cables are being vetted by mainstream media outlets in England (The Guardian), Germany (Der Spiegel), France (Le Monde), Spain (El Pais), and the US (The New York Times), though that last paper was not given access directly and instead had to beg The Guardian for them. As far as I can tell, the cables available on the WikiLeaks site are the ones that these publications have revealed.

So the charges that WikiLeaks is some kind of rogue organization that does things that no ‘responsible’ media (whatever that means) would do, that Assange is not a ‘real’ journalist, and that WikiLeaks is not a ‘real media organization’ are simply false. There is no reason why any charge brought against WikiLeaks should not apply equally to all these media.

The reaction of the US government and the mainstream media to the release has been incoherent, a sure sign that at least some of the speakers are lying. Some have argued that such leaks have damaged US foreign policy and put the lives of many people in danger, even though no evidence has been produced to that effect and even the Pentagon says that there is not a single documented case of a person being harmed by earlier WikiLeaks revelations, even though the same kinds of alarms were raised then. Even the Secretary of Defense Robert Gates says that alarmist rhetoric over the current leaks are ‘significantly overwrought’.

Other people have taken the opposite tack and tried to minimize the importance of the latest WikiLeaks release of documents, saying that they contain nothing new, even though only a tiny fraction of the cables have so far been published. Others have claimed that the leaks actually show US diplomacy in a flattering light, despite obvious facts to the contrary.

In reality, we have already learned a lot, not just about the US government’s lying but also that so many countries in the world are colluding with it in deceiving their own people, either voluntarily or under pressure. Here are some more examples, in addition to the ones I posted yesterday.

• Barack Obama, despite his fine words, continues the torture practices of his predecessor at the Bagram base in Afghanistan under conditions so brutal that, according to one military prosecutor, it makes Guantanamo look like a ‘nice hotel’ in comparison.
• Also, the cables reveal that US Special Forces are conducting operations within Pakistan even though both governments deny it. In other words, the US is currently engaged in yet another war, a ‘secret’ one in Pakistan, in addition to the other ‘secret’ war in Yemen, and the open ones in Iraq and Afghanistan.
• Scott Horton reports on the WikiLeaks revelations about how the US exerted pressure on Spain’s justice system in order to obstruct torture investigations.
• The US also interefered in the legal system in Germany, exerting pressure to not enforce arrest warrants against CIA operatives who kidnapped a German citizen Khaled el-Masri who was mistakenly identified as a terrorist and then brutally tortured.
• The WikiLeaks cables show that there is no problem at all in getting that much ballyhooed bipartisanship when it comes to stopping any investigation of torture by US officials.

What you can be sure of is that as more of the cables get published, there will be more revelations, a lot more.

In fact, I am beginning to suspect that the reason for the hysterical response to the WikiLeaks revelations is the dread that the US government has of what might yet be revealed in the remaining 99% of cables and of any future revelations of other material. I also wonder if the hostility of the US mainstream media to WikiLeaks, when they should be defending its right to publish, is due to their suspicions that the cables might reveal their own collusion with the US government to suppress this and other information that the American people have a right to know about the secret and open wars and torture conducted by their government.

For example, you may recall that in 2004 after the scandal of Abu Ghraib prison, there were allegations of the existence of far more damaging photos and videos that showed horrific acts of rape and torture and murder of women and even children in US custody. Even Donald Rumsfeld and Lindsay Graham acknowledged that this evidence was out there and warned of the consequences if it were released.

But that story quietly disappeared. I used to wonder what happened. Maybe the cables will reveal the truth.

Here’s a question. Suppose that a reporter for (say) the New York Times obtained top-secret documents from within North Korean government revealing its inner workings and secret deals and strategies. And let us assume (because I don’t know) that, unlike the US, that country has no equivalent of the First Amendment but does have something like the Official Secrets Act that exists in England and some other countries that makes it a crime for anyone to disclose secret government information.

Would we condemn the reporter and the newspaper for publishing the secret documents and let the reporter be extradited to North Korea to be tried by them for violating their laws?

That’s an easy one. The answer is no, and someone who merely gave such an option serious consideration would be treated with derision. Not only that, the reporter and the paper would be lauded for landing such a scoop and given all manner of awards, including the Pulitzer.

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One of the amusing things about the WikiLeaks saga is to watch people try to wriggle around the fact that what WikiLeaks did is what journalists for the ‘respectable’ media do every day, which is get top secret leaks from their sources and publish them. In fact, this is the entirety of Bob Woodward’s career.

In this episode of CNN’s Parker/Spitzer, watch Jeffrey Toobin squirm while he tries to find the difference between WikiLeaks’ actions and Woodward’s.

Greenwald is doing heroic work defending WikiLeaks all over the place. In this segment, he demolishes alleged CNN journalist Jessica Yellin and former Homeland Security advisor to George W. Bush (and now CNN employee) Fran Townsend. The authoritarian mindset of these people and their willingness to ignore the facts is astonishing (via Balloon Juice)

Greenwald provides some background to the program.

The video highlights two things: (1) that WikiLeaks is not only about the US but exposes secrets of governments the world over; and (2) that I suspect that most ordinary people (like those in the audience) have an instinctive sympathy for WikiLeaks as fighting for what is right. (via Norm)

Glenn Greenwald highlights [link fixed] an under-reported but strange and important aspect of the Bradley Manning case.