what you get here

This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.
So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020
Showing posts with label Julian Assange. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Julian Assange. Show all posts

Thursday, August 23, 2012

Open Government as terrorism

I had wanted to say something about the Swedish context of the Assange extradition process. But two major contributions persuade me to postpone that for the moment and focus instead on the wider reasons for the demonisation of Assange. First an academic colloquium on Wikileaks which sets the scene thus -
every allegation that WikiLeaks and Assange have come up against thus far are just that, allegations. The juridical principle of presumed innocence has been repeatedly ignored, and the closing of accounts based on a “crime” being committed appears prejudicial – in the double sense of both prejudice and prior to law.Since the cables began leaking in November 2010, the violent reaction to WikiLeaks evidenced by the numerous political pundits that have called for Assange’s assassination or execution, and the movement within the US to have WikiLeaks designated a “foreign terrorist organization” (even Assange's London legal adviser has been put on a terrorist watch list), amount to a profound showing of authoritarianism, thereby signalling the underlying logic of the state. If you listen to the fear mongering that pervades conservative media outlets in the US,WikiLeaks is rendered in the national imagination as a “threat to America”. This notion actually has some resonance of validity if we consider “America” as a cipher for systemic covert dealings and organised impunity rooted in an entrenched system of privilege then indeed WikiLeaks represents a threat as it challenges the parameters of liberalism, the ideology upon which the American state is founded.
The “Wikigate” scandal thus marks a watershed moment for the future of both liberalism and the state. Consequently, it also represents an important occasion to think critically about what this case tells us about the limits of democracy, freedom of information, transparency, and accountability, and as anarchist critiques have long suggested, the violence of the state when it cannot control these limits.
And, today, the Guardian has a long piece exploring the reasons for the venom of the attacks on Assange from the media
The personalized nature of this contempt from self-styled sober journalists often borders on the creepy. On the very same day WikiLeaks released over 400,000 classified documents showing genuinely horrific facts about massive civilian deaths in the Iraq war and US complicity in torture by Iraqi forces, the New York Times front-paged an article purporting to diagnose Assange with a variety of psychological afflictions and concealed, malicious motives, based on its own pop-psychology observations and those of Assange's enemies ("erratic and imperious behavior", "a nearly delusional grandeur", "he is not in his right mind", "pursuing a vendetta against the United States").
There are several obvious reasons why Assange provokes such unhinged media contempt. The most obvious among them is competition: the resentment generated by watching someone outside their profession generate more critical scoops in a year than all other media outlets combined.
Other causes are more subtle though substantive. Many journalists (and liberals) like to wear the costume of outsider-insurgent, but are, at their core, devoted institutionalists, faithful believers in the goodness of their society's power centres, and thus resent those (like Assange) who actually and deliberately place themselves outside of it. By putting his own liberty and security at risk to oppose the world's most powerful factions, Assange has clearly demonstrated what happens to real adversarial dissidents and insurgents – they're persecuted, demonized, and threatened, not befriended by and invited to parties within the halls of imperial power – and he thus causes many journalists to stand revealed as posers, servants to power, and courtiers.
Those impatient to get a  blow-by-blow account of how the Swedish authorities have handled the Assange case can do not better than read this 57 page briefing put together by Nordic News Network. This post by Craig Murray deals with the strength of the case against him. 
And those impatient to get a more detailed analysis of the legal peculiarities should consult Naomi Wolf’s paper

Saturday, August 18, 2012

Rule of Law

In commenting on the Pussy Riot “witchtrial” in Moscow, I broke my general rule not to comment on ongoing events. My blood boiled, however, as I read the live coverage yesterday of the judge’s justification of the two-year sentence she inflicted on the band’s young members for their brief act of defiance in a Moscow church earlier this year. “Conspiracy driven by hatred of religion” indeed! Judges (and priests) in so many of the countries in which I have lived in the past 22 years are so illiterate and craven that they probably cannot even begin to understand the meaning of civil disobedience (see the late 1990s book - Why Angels Fall).

Amidst all the rhetoric in the past 2 decades about democracy one thing is clear. Without the semblance of “rule of law” it is meaningless. That means a system in which the judiciary owes no favours to the political executive. And Russia and China have made it clear that such a system is not for them. I was, two years ago, tempted to China to head up a project which purported to advise the authorities on how to bring such a system into existence (along with lots of other fashionable things such as performance management). After 6 weeks I could see what a nonsense it was – and got out.

The only bright light here in Romania is the independent spirit being shown by prosecutors and judges – one of the probable reasons for the high-handed actions being taken by the new Prime Minister. Hopefully the genie will not go back in the bottle.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, European governments tear up what was left of “rule of law”. The UK, for example, is tearing up the Vienna Convention of 1961 which has allowed people to take refuge in foreign Embassies. This is an excerpt from an ex-British Ambassador’s post on the matter -
The UK government has decided – after immense pressure from the Obama administration – to enter the Ecuadorean Embassy and seize Julian Assange. This will be, beyond any argument, a blatant breach of the Vienna Convention of 1961, to which the UK is one of the original parties and which encodes the centuries – arguably millennia – of practice which have enabled diplomatic relations to function. The Vienna Convention is the most subscribed single international treaty in the world.
The provisions of the Vienna Convention on the status of diplomatic premises are expressed in deliberately absolute terms. There is no modification or qualification elsewhere in the treaty.
Article 22 - 
1.The premises of the mission shall be inviolable. The agents of the receiving State may not enter them, except with the consent of the head of the mission.
2.The receiving State is under a special duty to take all appropriate steps to protect the premises of the mission against any intrusion or damage and to prevent any disturbance of the peace of the mission or impairment of its dignity.
3.The premises of the mission, their furnishings and other property thereon and the means of transport of the mission shall be immune from search, requisition, attachment or execution. 
Not even the Chinese government tried to enter the US Embassy to arrest the Chinese dissident Chen Guangchen. Even during the decades of the Cold War, defectors or dissidents were never seized from each other’s embassies. This terrible breach of international law will result in British Embassies being subject to raids and harassment worldwide.The British Government bases its argument on domestic British legislation. But the domestic legislation of a country cannot counter its obligations in international law, unless it chooses to withdraw from them. If the government does not wish to follow the obligations imposed on it by the Vienna Convention, it has the right to resile from it – which would leave British diplomats with no protection worldwide.