Category: Law Enforcement

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.

The Gates Conundrum: Racism or Police “Authority”

By Ian Welsh

On July 23, 2009

7 Comments

Whenever I read about an incident such as the one which happened with Henry Louis Gates Jr, in which a police officer arrests someone for, essentially, not paying them enough respect, the old Cartman line “respect my authoritae!” floats through my mind.

After reading the officer’s account and Gates account, I have no idea whether racism was at the core of Gates being arrested. But I will lay long odds that if Gates had done everything Sergeant Crowley had told him to do and done it snappish, well, he wouldn’t have been arrested. My interactions with police in the US have all reinforced to me that even something as simple as a question is interpreted by many policy as a direct assault on their authority, and that they have no tolerance for any such thing. If a policeman in the US asks you to do something, or tells you, you’d best do it, right now, whether he has the right to order you around or not. And if you don’t, be ready to deal with the consequences.

Which is to say, I agree with lawyer Scott Greenfield, when he writes:

But there is similarly a possibility, based upon a larger experience by those who follow the conduct of police officers, that this was unrelated to Henry Louis Gates’ race. This encounter could have, and has, happened to whites as well as black, to Hispanics as well as Asians. To old women and young men.

Henry Louis Gates was arrested for engaging in “tumultuous” behavior. Only in Cambridge would the complaint use the word “tumultuous”. But many a man forced from his castle upon the command of a police officer who refused to accept that he was at home would have been outraged. Tumult seems an appropriate way to act. The crime was Gates’ hurling words at Sgt. Crowley at a time when the sergeant commanded him to be obsequious and compliant. Gates would not calm down. There is no law that requires him to be calm because a police officer ordered him to do so. Other than the expectation that we do what an officer tells us to do, no matter what.

It may well be that what happened to Henry Louis Gates reflects, as he is accused of screaming at Sgt. Crowley, “what happens to a black man in America.” Because the black man happens to be the director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard, perhaps the pre-eminent black scholar, it will open a discussion that we still need to have, black president notwithstanding.

It is also possible, however, that what happened to Henry Louis Gates is the outgrowth of the conflict between law and order, order represented by police who have been empowered, in our post 9/11 age, to believe that their every command is the law, that our blind obedience is mandatory. Other than a few old-timers on the Supreme Court who live in a fantasy world where ordinary people can assert their rights and refuse to comply with the command of a police officer with impunity, this encounter between a distinguished scholar, within his own home, and a police sergeant who believes that his command is sufficient to create the divide between citizen and criminal, may offer the chance to question who commands whom in our society.

The counter to this is that “cops everywhere are cops”. Now there’s certainly some truth to that. But I will say this. I don’t fear Canadian police the way I do American ones. My sample size isn’t large, but I’ve found that unless there’s a real crisis or threat (ie. not an unarmed 60 year old man), most of them don’t demand instant obseqious obedience to their every demand and are willing to answer reasonable questions.

In the US my experience has been that unless I want things to get unpleasant, I’d better click my heels, cringe and do as commanded.

So, racism? I don’t know. Could well be. But I don’t think it’s necessary to invoke racism to explain officer Crowley’s behaviour. He was disrespected by someone who didn’t obey his every command. To his mind he was even lenient, he gave his orders multiple times. Gates stepped out of line and needed to be put in his place, not because he was black, but because he was a civilian who wasn’t doing what a police officer told him.

The real dividing line may not be black and white, the real dividing line may be the blue line. You either wear the blue, or you don’t, and Gates didn’t.

(Addendum: I read the police report when it was released. When I went looking for it today, it had been taken down both by the Boston Globe and the NY Daily News. How… interesting. Fortunately someone saved a copy. I’m so glad the press has an adversarial relationship with authority.)

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

Category: Law Enforcement

Why Assange and Wikileaks have won this round

The Gates Conundrum: Racism or Police “Authority”