More thoughts about Wikileaks and the First Amendment

Glenn Greenwald is one of my most trusted self-critical sources of information. He writes for Salon.com. Check out this post (and explore his other recent writings) and consider viewing the short video interview at CNN, and you’ll see why I’m so cynical about the mainstream media, including host Jessica Yellin of CNN (BTW, the ex-Bush adviser on this clip is really a piece of work). And then check out this post and the following comments, where Yellin tries to redeem herself: The following comment to the video sums up Yellin’s alleged even-handedness nicely:

Jesse Frederik December 28th, 2010 7:33 pm ET Compare the questioning of Fran Townsend: "[After showing a video of Joe Biden calling Assange a high-tech terrorist] Is it fair to call him a terrorist?" "Is there anything good that can come from what Assange is doing?" To the questioning of Glenn Greenwald: "Shouldn't he go to jail in defense of his beliefs?" "Any qualms about that he is essentially profiting of classified information?" [Bob Woodward anyone?] And do you see any irony in the fact that he's making money of a corporate publisher?' "What is his ultimate goal, beyond embarrassing and disrupting the US government? What good do his supporters hope will really come from everything he's doing?" "Do you think [the rape charges] are part of a smear campaign? And beyond that do you think it hurts his credibility?" Is the difference in the questioning not obvious?
My feelings about Wikileaks and the person(s) that leaked the most recent cables are inextricably woven with the many disturbing revelations disclosed by Wikileaks. This is not the sterilized slow drip of information that you get from the mainstream media, such that we only really learn what was going on 30 years after we could have done something about it. Wikileaks has enabled a torrent of important and often disturbing information and it is causing massive embarrassment to the elites that run this country, and they run it far too often in secret. Yes, I live in the U.S., but it is no longer my country. The leaders of the U.S. rarely speak for me anymore because they don’t treasure the First Amendment, they are crushing our children with debt and they are xenophobic and unapologetic warmongers and torturers. [More . . . ]

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What American justice looks like to outsiders

Glenn Greenwald recently wrote about the efforts of Julian Assange to fight extradition to Sweden, including the following paragraph:

And now we have the spectacle of Julian Assange's lawyers citing the Obama administration's policies of rendition and indefinite detention at Guantanamo as a reason why human rights treaties bar his extradition to any country (such as Sweden) which might transfer him to American custody. Indeed, almost every person with whom I've spoken who has or had anything to do with WikiLeaks expresses one fear above all others: the possibility that they will end up in American custody and subjected to its lawless War on Terror "justice system." Americans still like to think of themselves as "leaders of the free world," but in the eyes of many, it's exactly the "free world" to which American policies are so antithetical and threatening.

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Our JFK Moment?

We finally have our Kennedy Moment in the current political climate. Saturday, January 8th, 2011, is likely to go down as exactly that in the “Where were you when?” canon.  On that day, Jared Lee Loughner, age 22, went on a shooting rampage at a supermarket parking lot in Tucson,…

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Scalia’s Problem

Recently, Justice Antonin Scalia shot his mouth off about another bit of “social” judicial opinion and managed to be correct to a fault again. Here is the article. Basically, he is of the opinion that if a specific term or phrase does not appear in the Constitution, then that subject is simply not covered. Most famously, this goes to the continuing argument over privacy. There is, by Scalia’s reasoning (and I must add he is by no means alone in this—it is not merely his private opinion), no Constitutionally-protected right to privacy. As far as it goes, this is correct, but beside the point. The word “private” certainly appears, in the Fifth Amendment, and it would seem absurd to suggest the framers had no thought for what that word meant. It refers here to private property, of course, but just that opens the debate to the fact that there is a concept of privacy underlying it. The modern debate over privacy concerns contraception and the first case where matters of privacy are discussed is Griswold v. Connecticut, 1965. That case concerned the right of a married couple to purchase and use contraception, which was against the law in that state (and others). The Court had to define an arena of privacy within which people enjoy a presumed right of autonomous decision-making and into which the state had no brief to interfere. Prior to this, the Court relied on a “freedom of contract” concept to define protected areas of conduct. Notice, we’re back in the realm of property law here. People who insist that there is no “right to privacy” that is Constitutionally protected seem intent on dismissing any concept of privacy with which they disagree, but no doubt would squeal should their own self-defined concept be violated. Therein lies the problem, one we continue to struggle with. But it does, at least in Court tradition, come down to some variation of ownership rights—which is what has made the abortion debate so difficult, since implicit in it is the question of whether or not a woman “owns” her body and may therefore, in some construction of freedom of contract, determine its use under any and all circumstances. [More . . . ]

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What 2010 Meant

The Lame Duck Congress has ended the year with a Marathon of Epic Legislation.  I can't help being impressed.  Obama said he wanted Congress to do with Don't Ask Don't Tell, to repeal it legislatively, and not have it end up as a court-mandated order.  I can understand this, especially given the rightward shift of the judiciary.  But the way in which he went about it seemed doomed and certainly angered a lot of people who thought he was breaking a campaign promise.  (The puzzling lunacy of his own justice department challenging a court-led effort must have looked like one more instance of Obama backing off from what he'd said he was going to do.)  I am a bit astonished that he got his way. A great deal of the apparent confusion over Obama's actions could stem from his seeming insistence that Congress do the heavy lifting for much of his agenda.  And while there's a lot to be said for going this route, what's troubling is his failure to effectively use the bully pulpit in his own causes.  And the fact that he has fallen short on much.   It would be, perhaps, reassuring to think that his strategy is something well-considered, that things the public knows little about will come to fruition by, say, his second term. (Will he have a second term?  Unless Republicans can front someone with more brains and less novelty than a Sarah Palin and more weight than a Mitt Romney, probably.  I have seen no one among the GOP ranks who looks even remotely electable.  The thing that might snuff Obama's chances would be a challenge from the Democrats themselves, but that would require a show of conviction the party has been unwilling overall to muster.) The Crash of 2008 caused a panic of identity.  Unemployment had been creeping upward prior to that due to a number of factors, not least of which is the chronic outsourcing that has become, hand-in-glove, as derided a practice as CEO compensation packages and "golden parachutes," and just as protected in practice by a persistent nostalgia that refuses to consider practical solutions that might result in actual interventions in the way we do business.  No one wants the jobs to go overseas but no one wants to impose protectionist policies on companies that outsource.  Just as no one likes the fact that top management is absurdly paid for jobs apparently done better 40 years ago by people drawing a tenth the amount, but no one wants to impose corrective policies that might curtail what amounts to corporate pillage.  It is the nostalgia for an America everyone believes once existed that functioned by the good will of its custodians and did not require laws to force people to do the morally right thing.  After a couple decades of hearing the refrain "You can't legislate morality" it has finally sunk in but for the wrong segment of social practice. [More . . . ]

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