How dare they reveal these vital, yet completely trivial documents?

There's a special place in hell reserved for people who pretend that the Wikileaks cablegate-situation is somehow uninteresting, that there's nothing new in it, that everybody who follows the news knows these things. This is often paradoxically coupled to the idea that Julian Assange should be killed and that Wikileaks should be shut down, have their assets frozen, put on the terrorist watch list or bombed, possibly all at the same time. (An attitude excellently summed up in this cartoon.)

While a lot of the Wikileaks info has been conjectured already, the fact is that Wikileaks gives us hard evidence of many of these things for the first time. A large number of speculative suggestions have moved into the domain of fact. That's simply incontrovertible. The three last Wikileaks give us a systematic understanding of the workings, actions and sensory apparatus of American empire.

But more to the point, there's tons of new and interesting information. If you really think that there's nothing interesting about this, you're quite simply not understanding what just happened. Or, more likely, being unusually and purposefully obtuse. There's a great comment in The Economist's Democracy in America-blog which is worth reading in its entirety. Here's a quote:

Greg Mitchell's catalogue of reactions to the leaked cables is a trove of substantive information. For example, drawing on the documents made available by WikiLeaks, the ACLU reports that the Bush administration "pressured Germany not to prosecute CIA officers responsible for the kidnapping, extraordinary rendition and torture of German national Khaled El-Masri", a terrorism suspect dumped in Albania once the CIA determined it had nabbed a nobody. I consider kidnapping and torture serious crimes, and I think it's interesting indeed if the United States government applied pressure to foreign governments to ensure complicity in the cover-up of it agents' abuses. In any case, I don't consider this gossip.

But that's really just the beginning. Spying on the UN leadership and Ban Ki-Moon? Funneling hundreds of millions of dollars in cash to transparently corrupt Afghan leaders? Projecting imperial power through Pakistan in the most volatile and nuclear-enabled region in the world? Secretly bombing non-combatants in Yemen? These things are not okay. Has the world become so desensitised to American unilateralism that these completely flagrant violations of international law and standards of good international relations that these things can just breeze on through with a shrug and an oh-whatever?

I'm hoping that the Wikileaks revelations will eventually prove to change our relationship to the US. There's been an unbelievable naivety about Euro-US relations for decades, also here in Norway. Hopefully this will mean that we can finally have some realism about what the United States are and what they do when they act in the world.

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Update: Two other interesting comments I've seen on this. The first is a short blog post by The Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan, who writes about the weirdness of the focus on Assange:

(...) but would arresting Assange really put an end to Wikileaks or something like it? The point, surely, is that Assange is to Wikileaks as bin Laden is to al Qaeda or Mark Zuckerberg is to Facebook.

The "culprit" is the Internet, and how it facilitates asymmetrical power and transparency and removes any individual's responsibility for that transparency and asymmetry. No single editor or newspaper editor had to take the hit for this. No one could stop it. Even if every MSM outlet refused to publish these, the blogosphere would soon swarm over downloads which could be shifted from server to server.

Sullivan is spot on. The ability to keep massive secrets is starting to have higher and higher transaction costs. And massive secrets will necessarily become more and more expensive and short-lived.

The second thing is something buried in this short comment by Matt Yglesias of ThinkProgress:

For the third time in a row, a WikiLeaks document dump has conclusively demonstrated that an awful lot of US government confidentiality is basically about nothing. There’s no scandal here and there’s no legitimate state secret. It’s just routine for the work done by public servants and public expense in the name of the public to be kept semi-hidden from the public for decades.

Obviously I completely disagree about this not being a scandal. But I think Yglesias is absolutely right about the hollowness of the secret parts of the state. The revelations, when they come, are always less threatening or immediate than we think. Outside threats are still a means of dousing political opposition across the industrialised world.

Føre

I'm back from a long weekend cross-country skiing in the mountains. Going beyond cellular coverage and wireless email really is one of the great luxuries of our age. There's something about sitting in a small cabin miles away from anywhere anyone could get a hold of you which helps you focus. Conversation seems to turn naturally towards what is important, and all the noise of the everyday fades into the background.



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Just so you don't think I'm going all luddite on you, I note that the Wikipedia article on "blog" has grown a lot since I saw it last time. It has an interesting history of early blogging-section now.

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I was listening to a part of a lecture series called "Ethics and Public Policy" just now. The lectures, made in 1991 by the funny, insightful, rambling and delightfully Jewish political philosopher Ed Beiser, concern the idea of rights and law in the public sphere. It would probably be immoral of me to suggest that one could download the lecture series from this torrent here. Would it be legal of me to say so? Hard to say.

At one point, Beiser makes an interesting argument about what I suspect are different conceptions of rights between capitalist societies like the US and proto-socialist societies like the USSR*. He says that the conception of rights in the US is a negative conception. You have freedom of the press in the US, but the formulation is "Congress [i.e. the government] shall make no law" abridging freedom of religion, the press &tc. The freedom to assemble is the freedom to not be disassembled by the government.

The formulation of the first Soviet constitution is an entirely different approach.

14. For the purpose of securing freedom of expression to the toiling masses, the Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic abolishes all dependence of the Press upon capital, and turns over to the working people and the poorest peasantry all technical and material means for the publication of newspapers, pamphlets, books, etc., and guarantees their free circulation throughout the country.

15. For the purpose of enabling the workers to hold free meetings, the Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic offers to the working class and to the poorest peasantry furnished halls, and takes care of their heating and lighting appliances.

So the negative conception of rights says "we won't stop you from printing whatever you like". The positive conception of rights says "here, have a printing press. The paper is over there by the ink barrels." (And in the Soviet model follows this with "here, have an oppressive military dictatorship complete with total censorship.")

It occurred to me that both these notions of freedom of the press are obsolete in their own way. The negative version is obsolete because the oppression these days comes through entirely different channels (Clear Channel & Fox News, for instance), and takes the form of oligarchic capitalism, neo-imperialism and cultural hegemony instead.

The positive version is obsolete simply because the technological revolutions made in the 17 years which have passed since the early 90s have made mass syndication and distribution available to everyone with a PC. Technology solved the problem of scarcity of mass distribution. The problem now is more the perennial one of getting people's attention. Am I right, guys? Guys?

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The Norwegian word "Føre" is untranslatable, but is indicative of how good the snow is for skiing. Good føre is good for skiing, bad is not. It is the condition of the snow which dictates whether you are gliding in a zen-like trance across soft, light, fluffy perfection or skating roughly across an icy shell roughly the constistency of a slush puppie, which drags you backwards on uphill treks and makes you go too fast and lose all control downhill - yet somehow seems to solidify into head-crackingly hard ice when you fall. We had almost perfect føre this weekend. Føre, like weather, is also a great metaphor for conditions which dictate your actions and your possibilities, like parental mental health or world capitalism or whatever.

To belabour the metaphor: going into the wild gives your thoughts great føre, until you run out of food, at which point you start thinking more and more about the ethics of cannibalism. Fortunately, Mikkel B's cooking skills don't decrease just because he is working on a propane stove in the middle of nowhere.

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Arthur C. Clarke died. Between him and Gary Gygax going last week, two of the central pillars of 20th century nerdhood have suddenly disappeared.

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I made brussel sprouts poached in cider with apples and onions last night. It tastes amazing and you should try it. This recipe is totally copied from the book I used. They just changed a sentence here and there.

I detect the aroma of rattus norvegicus

Some excellent reporting in the NY Times today:

WASHINGTON, Dec. 6 — The Central Intelligence Agency in 2005 destroyed at least two videotapes documenting the interrogation of two Al Qaeda operatives in the agency’s custody, a step it took in the midst of Congressional and legal scrutiny about the C.I.A’s secret detention program, according to current and former government officials.

The videotapes showed agency operatives in 2002 subjecting terror suspects — including Abu Zubaydah, the first detainee in C.I.A. custody — to severe interrogation techniques. They were destroyed in part because officers were concerned that tapes documenting controversial interrogation methods could expose agency officials to greater risk of legal jeopardy, several officials said.

Isn't that weird, though? That they destroyed the tapes because it could "expose agency officials to greater risk of legal jeopardy"? Why it's... it's almost as if they knew they were doing something wrong. Or even illegal.

From the Dept. of You Can't Make This Stuff Up

My friend M, the visa applicant, informs me of this wonderful form:

38. IMPORTANT: ALL APPLICANTS MUST READ AND CHECK THE APPROPRIATE BOX FOR EACH ITEM.
A visa may not be issued to persons who are within specific categories defined by law as inadmissible to the United States (except when a waiver is obtained in advance). Is any of the following applicable to you?

* Have you ever been arrested or convicted for any offense or crime, even though subject of a pardon, amnesty or other similar legal action? Have you ever unlawfully distributed or sold a controlled substance(drug), or been a prostitute or procurer for prostitutes?

Yes No

* Have you ever been refused admission to the U.S., or been the subject of a deportation hearing or sought to obtain or assist others to obtain a visa, entry into the U.S., or any other U.S. immigration benefit by fraud or willful misrepresentation or other unlawful means? Have you attended a U.S. public elementary school on student (F) status or a public secondary school after November 30, 1996 without reimbursing the school?

Yes No

* Do you seek to enter the United States to engage in export control violations, subversive or terrorist activities, or any other unlawful purpose? Are you a member or representative of a terrorist organization as currently designated by the U.S. Secretary of State? Have you ever participated in persecutions directed by the Nazi government of Germany; or have you ever participated in genocide?

[This one is my favourite. Ed.]

Yes No

* Have you ever violated the terms of a U.S. visa, or been unlawfully present in, or deported from, the United States?

Yes No

* Have you ever withheld custody of a U.S. citizen child outside the United States from a person granted legal custody by a U.S. court, voted in the United States in violation of any law or regulation, or renounced U.S. citizenship for the purpose of avoiding taxation?

Yes No

* Have you ever been afflicted with a communicable disease of public health significance or a dangerous physical or mental disorder, or ever been a drug abuser or addict?

[although this one is pretty good, too.]

Yes No
While a YES answer does not automatically signify ineligibility for a visa, if you answered YES you may be required to personally appear before a consular officer.

Waterboarders & Freeloaders

Here's a couple of resources on the totally humane non-torture or at the very least kinder, gentler torture that our allies are doing: Waterboarding.org and the blogpost "Waterboarding is torture... period."

What's the definition of terrorism again? Wanting to subvert democratic values through killing and inflicting pain and suffering?

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Data on the sales record of In Rainbows is now available online. It turns out there was a far higher percentage of freeloaders than expected. Being a senseless optimist, I feel that I should point out that Radiohead is a huge band with a huge following. If they were a small, local band doing the same thing, I suspect the number of people who would pay would go up dramatically. But then again, I also believe that mankind is not born inherently evil, so what do I know?