Government and media sleight-of-hand

Blog reader Mark made a good catch and sent me a link to this Reuters news report about a CIA official arrested for passing secrets to a New York Times reporter. The report says:

The arrest marked the latest case brought by the Obama administration charging current or former U.S. officials with leaking classified information to the news media.

It also has been investigating the founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, for leaking hundreds of classified U.S. diplomatic cables that have embarrassed the White House.

Mark noticed the sleight-of-hand by the government and the Reuters reporter, observing that, “Neither the Times or the reporters are being prosecuted for leaking information. Then it compares Julian Assange to the leakers and why the government is seeking him. But they are so wrong. Julian is not the leaker he is the equivalent to the reporter or the Times.”

Exactly.

The Democratic Party’s con game

My social circle tends to be people who call themselves liberal and vote Democratic. Whenever we discuss politics, I am always struck by how their sources of information are restricted to the mainstream media and how much they reflect the thinking of the commentators in them. Their idea of a ‘liberal’ is someone like Thomas Friedman and someone on the ‘far left’ is Keith Olberman. They will proudly say that they subscribe to the New York Times and will express contempt for Fox News and its stable of propagandists. These are taken as signs of their impeccable liberal credentials,
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How the case against the MMR vaccine was fixed

Some of you may be aware that many parents are not giving their children the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine out of fears that it may cause autism. These fears were generated by a paper published in 1998 by the British medical journal Lancet by Andrew Wakefield and others suggesting such a link. The findings were challenged but the journal only withdrew the paper in 2010.

The British Medical Journal has now published a detailed investigation and concludes that all of the twelve original cases reported had had their data misreported or altered in order to make the link.
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Your government may not protect you

If you, as a US citizen traveling abroad perfectly legally, are suddenly taken into custody by a foreign government and tortured, wouldn’t you expect your government to express outrage and take steps to protect you? You would be wrong, if that government is a client state of the US.

Glenn Greenwald tells us of the appalling treatment meted out to18-year old Gulet Mohammed by Kuwait and the limbo he has been placed in.

This silence implies that either the Kuwaiti government is acting on orders of the US or that Obama and Clinton only care if US citizens are detained by countries like North Korea and Iran, even though the treatment of captives by those governments does not come even close to the levels of barbarity that Kuwait has demonstrated with Mohammed.

Blasphemy

Laws against blasphemy constitute the ultimate concession by religious people that their god does not exist. I think religious leaders secretly realize that the non-existence of god is such an obvious fact that allowing people to publicly say so might cause the whole religious house of cards to topple, and so they have to resort to legal measures to prevent people from pointing out the absurdity of their beliefs.

But blasphemy laws are not only stupid, they are evil. We currently have the terrible situation of a Pakistani Christian woman who is under a death sentence for blasphemy and two days ago a Pakistan provincial governor was shot to death by his own bodyguard because the governor had opposed this blasphemy law. What is particularly disgusting is that mainstream religious organizations in Pakistan are lauding the murder and militant clerics in Pakistan have been protesting any changes to this barbaric law.

The Islamic countries seem to be the worst perpetrators of this blasphemy evil. What is worse is that they are trying to gain international acceptance for their medieval ideas, using the United Nations as a vehicle. In November 2010, the Social, Humanitarian and Cultural Affairs Committee of the 192-member General Assembly voted 76-64 (42 abstentions) in favor of a resolution condemning the ‘vilification of religion’. While this is a smaller margin than last year (81 to 55 with 43 abstentions) and is non-binding, it is still disturbing that so many countries would support it.

How the case against Julian Assange came about

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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Bradley manning and Supermax prisons

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.