Category: Justice

I’m rather more interested in the Canadian election, which is also rather more important than Bin Laden’s death, but let’s run through this. First, however, insert obligatory “he’s a mass murderer who deserved death” statement here. OBL was an evil man and I’m not sorry he’s dead. I’m even kind of glad they killed him rather than capturing him, if only for the purely selfish reason that I didn’t really want to have to defend OBL when they tortured him, as, of course, they would.

Bin Laden still won: Yeah, sorry, but Bin Laden’s goal was to push the US into imperial overreach, causing economic collapse. He succeeded, with a lot of help from Bush and Obama’s stupidity, and there was nothing in Obama’s little speech that indicated he intended to seize this opportunity to pull out of Iraq, Afghanistan and end the security state. If anything, the security state will go into even further overdrive. Enjoy being groped.

No Drawdown, No End to Destruction of Civil Liberties And yeah, if Bin Laden hated America because of America’s freedoms (he didn’t) well he still won. The 4th amendment is dead, the 1st is on life support, and the TSA freely humiliates you or denies you freedom to travel at their whim.

No, it doesn’t mean Obama has won in 2012 The election isn’t going to be about national security, per se, it’s going to be about the economy. Hating Osama is great’n’all, but it doesn’t put a chicken in a pot, give you a place to live, or a job. It doesn’t reduce the price of gasoline one cent. The election is still well out, this euphoria will fade. That doesn’t mean Obama will lose 2012 either. It just means it isn’t as big a factor as most people seem to think it is.

Terror Networks: Doubt it makes all that much difference here, either, honestly. Most al-Q’aeda groups are essentially franchises, and the main one isn’t that important. I’m sure CIA agents stationed in Afghanistan in charge of drone attacks are breathing a sigh of relief, however. More to the point, it’s not clear to me that Osama is less dangerous as a martyr than as a living old man attached to a dialysis machine.

Bin Laden deserved to die, but when the euphoria dies down, his death doesn’t change much, if anything. He still accomplished his goal, a goal he was willing to die for. The Muslim world, Afghanistan and Iraq (and I’m sure, to his dying day, Bin Laden thought the Iraq invasion was a gift from Allah), are still going to be the graveyard of empire, this time the US empire. Oh, it’s not dead yet, but historians will look back to the invasion of Iraq and the continued occupation of Afghanistan as massive contributing factors.

So, whatever. Celebrate and have a good time, but the wars will go on, the 4th amendment is still a dead letter, the 1st amendment is on life support, the economy is in the toilet, gas is over$4 a gallon, Democrats and Republicans are still negotiating how fast to cut your SS and Medicare, unions are still being gutted, schools are still being turned into profit centers, and TSA agents will still touch your junk.

Why Assange and Wikileaks have won this round

By Ian Welsh

On December 8, 2010

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The odd thing about Wikileaks is that their success has been assured, not by what they leaked, though there is some important information there, but by their enemies.

The massive and indiscriminant overreaction by both government and powerful corporate actors has ensured this, and includes but is not nearly limited to:

Wikileaks and Assange have now been made in to cause celebres. If corporations and governments can destroy someone’s access to the modern economy as they have Wikileaks, without even pretending due process of the law (Paypal, VISA, Mastercard, Amazon, etc… were not ordered by any court to cut Wikileaks) then we simply do not live in a free society of law, let alone a society of justice.

Ironically the Wikileaks files reveal that the British fixed their inquiry into the war, and that the US pressured the Spanish government to stop a war crimes court case against ex-members of the Bush administration. Assange and Wikileaks are subject to extreme judicial and extrajudicial sanctions, but people who engaged in aggressive war based on lies, tortured people and are responsible for deaths well into the six figures, walk free.

To be just, law must be applied to both the big and the small. Thousands of executives at banks who engaged in systematic fraud were never charged, out and out war criminals are actively protected, and Wikileaks and Assange are hunted like animals?

This has enraged, in particular, the Hacktivist community, with Anonymous forming Operation Payback and shutting down both Mastercard servers and the Swiss Bank PostFinance’s website. As they themselves say, what enraged them was multiple companies attempting to shut Wikileaks down, both on the web, and financially.

While there is no comparison between what Assange has done and what happened on 9/11 (his actions are those of a free press), the rabid and indiscrimant overreaction of the the US in particular and the West in general is similar. And what it has done is make Assange into a martyr, an icon for freedom of speech and a symbol of politically motivated repression. It has done the same for Wikileaks and made Wikileaks a cause celebre.

It has proved that the West is run by authoritarian thugs with completely twisted priorities. Kill hundreds of thousands of people and engage in aggressive war? No big deal. Cause the greatest economic collapse of the post-war period sending millions into poverty? We couldn’t possibly prosecute the people who did that, but we will give them trillions! Reveal our petty secrets and lies, and that we know the war in Afghanistan is lost, have known for years and continue to kill both Afghanis and our own soldiers pointlessly? We WILL destroy you, no matter what we have to do.

Which leads us to the rape charges against Assange. Given what we know right now about the case against him, it appears that is going to come down to he said/she said. Unless the Swedish prosecutors have a smoking gun, even if Assange is convicted, most of his supporters will never believe the case wasn’t at the least heavily tainted by political pressure, and at worst, a set up. And if he is extradited from Sweden to the US to face some sort of charges, the howling will reach the high heavens. He will be a martyr for the cause. The more he is persecuted, the more many will rally around both him, and his child, Wikileaks.

Because of the massive overreaction to Wikileaks, the case against him is completely tainted. He might be guilty as sin, but justice can no longer be seen to be done, because it is far too evident that too many powerful people, corporations and governments want him taken out.

And so he has won. Whether he winds up free, in prison in Sweden or the US, or winds up dead, he has won this round. He will be a martyr and an icon, and his child, Wikileaks, whether it lives or dies, will become a rallying point and a symbol of how corrupt and unjust western society is.

What is legal and what is just are two different things

By Ian Welsh

On December 7, 2010

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Just saying. A lot of people seem to have forgotten that.

While we’re at it, you either believe that human rights should be inalienable, or you don’t. That doesn’t mean they can’t be taken away, it means that any time they are taken away it is automatically unjust.

Next: governments exist to serve the interests of their citizens. Any government which exists for any other reason is illegitimate, and defacto tyrannical, no matter how many or how few kneecaps they are breaking. The relationship is similiar to a fiduciary relationship, where the government has its powers only in order, and so long, as it is acting in the interests of of its citizens.

Next: governments and individuals are different types of entities. The presumption is that an individual has the right to privacy unless there is reasonable cause to believe the individual has committed a crime. The presumption for government is that its proceedings and actions should be transparent to its citizens because it exists to serve its citizens, and they can only know that it is doing so, and doing so in ways they would approve of, if they know what it is doing.

Governments which do act in the interests of their citizens and do so transparently and justly, respecting inalienable rights, are legitimate governments. Because such governments are how humans organize to meet needs which cannot be met by individuals or smaller groups, citizens owe those governments their support, but only to the extent that they are just, transparent, respect inalienable rights and act in the interests of the whole body of the citizenry. When they fail in this it is the duty of citizens to oppose those failures.

Mindless obedience to bad law is what makes tyranny of any kind possible.

Justice and law are not synonyms.

Khadr sentenced to 40 years

By Ian Welsh

On October 31, 2010

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8 years more served at most, under the plea bargain, though at that point he’d have been in custody for 16 years.

Others have covered this more than I have, but to me the initial charges were always absurd. He killed a soldier in a firefight in a country that the US invaded. The idea that doing so qualifies as murder is ridiculous, unless we also want to charge everyone who kills an invading soldier with murder? And, I suppose, charge every American soldier in Iraq (a clear case of aggressive war, illegal under the Geneva conventions and exactly what Americans hung Germans for at Nuremburg) with murder?

Kangaroo court justice, the victors punishing the losers, for “crimes” far more minor than those the victors have committed. Get back to me when George Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Colin Powell are in the dock, and we’ll talk.

(Aside: I added a new category, Justice, for this post. I did not put it under Law Enforcement, an already existing category, since the two seem to have less and less to do with each other, especially in the US. I should add, of course, that it’s not clear that Khadr did throw a grenade, though I don’t think that’s particularly relevant.)

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Justice

Osama’s Death Changes Almost Nothing

Why Assange and Wikileaks have won this round

What is legal and what is just are two different things

Khadr sentenced to 40 years