from digby:
"Wikileaks is working with partners in the press to release these documents, which are being reviewed and redacted before they are uploaded on to the web and published in newspapers. Right now the only people besides Wikileaks who have access to all the cables are the newspapers they've partnered with.
I imagine that many of the people who are threatening to imprison and assassinate Assange do know this and also understand that they are threatening not just him but the publishers of newspapers all over the world who also have these documents.
Is everyone comfortable with that? "
shooting the messenger(s)
something to do with class
Paul Krugman:
"But why Social Security? There was a telling moment in 2004, during one of the presidential campaign debates. Tim Russert, the moderator, asked eight or nine questions about Social Security, trying to put the candidates on the spot, while asking not once about Medicare, which serious people – as opposed to Serious People – know is the real heart of the story. Why the focus on Social Security?
The answer, I suspect, has to do with class.
When medical expenses are big, they’re big; even the very affluent are grateful when Medicare pays the bills for their mother-in-laws bypass or dialysis. The importance of Medicare, in short, is obvious to all but the very rich.
Social Security, by contrast, is something that matters enormously to the bottom half of the income distribution, but no so much to people in the 250K-plus club. A 30 percent cut in benefits would represent disaster for tens of millions of Americans, but a barely noticeable inconvenience for VSPs* and everyone they know. A rise in the retirement age would be a vast hardship for people who do manual labor, but if anything a gift to VSPs, who don’t want to step aside in any case. And so on down the line.
So going after Social Security is a way to seem tough and serious — but entirely at the expense of people you don’t know."
* VSP: Very Serious Person
update from Krugman:
Not Crass, Class
via digby:
Village Ethos
fallout
digby writes:
"It is a hideous set of choices before us, caused not by the group of people who are revealing secrets, but by what has been revealed to be inept, corrupt and malevolent leadership across the spectrum of the governing class, whose purpose in keeping these secrets seems to have more often than not been to thwart democratic norms, cover their massive mistakes or enrich themselves.
- - - - -
People feel very strongly about this on all sides and that's fine. But I do think that there is one thing we should all agree on: the appalling open calls for Julian Assange's assassination are barbaric authoritarianism at its worst. (The obvious attempt to smear him as a sexual predator for alleged condom failure fall into the same category.) The man put some documents on the internet and there is a vigorous global debate going on about it. If there was ever a case for public servants and the media (which should all clearly be on the side of Wikileaks, in my opinion) to be circumspect in their language it's in this case. I'm astonished that these calls for murder are so casually accepted. (But then, we are living in a country in which torture is accepted, so I'm probably foolish to keep clinging to these silly notions about civilized, democratic behavior.)"
MORE
more linkage from digby
a wall of secrecy
The Economist
W.W. @Democracy in America
29 November 2010
In defence of WikiLeaks
"I think we all understand that the work of even the most decent governments is made more difficult when they cannot be sure their communications will be read by those for whom they were not intended. That said, there is no reason to assume that the United States government is always up to good. To get at the value of WikiLeaks, I think it's important to distinguish between the government—the temporary, elected authors of national policy—and the state—the permanent bureaucratic and military apparatus superficially but not fully controlled by the reigning government. The careerists scattered about the world in America's intelligence agencies, military, and consular offices largely operate behind a veil of secrecy executing policy which is itself largely secret. American citizens mostly have no idea what they are doing, or whether what they are doing is working out well. The actually-existing structure and strategy of the American empire remains a near-total mystery to those who foot the bill and whose children fight its wars. And that is the way the elite of America's unelected permanent state, perhaps the most powerful class of people on Earth, like it.
- - - - -
I suspect that there is no scheme of government oversight that will not eventually come under the indirect control of the generals, spies, and foreign-service officers it is meant to oversee. Organisations such as WikiLeaks, which are philosophically opposed to state secrecy and which operate as much as is possible outside the global nation-state system, may be the best we can hope for in the way of promoting the climate of transparency and accountability necessary for authentically liberal democracy. Some folks ask, "Who elected Julian Assange?" The answer is nobody did, which is, ironically, why WikiLeaks is able to improve the quality of our democracy."
via Glenn Greenwald: The moral standards of WikiLeaks critics
"Now, everything the Government does is presumptively secret; only the most ceremonial and empty gestures are made public. That abuse of secrecy powers is vast, deliberate, pervasive, dangerous and destructive. That's the abuse that WikiLeaks is devoted to destroying, and which its harshest critics -- whether intended or not -- are helping to preserve. There are people who eagerly want that secrecy regime to continue: namely, (a) Washington politicians, Permanent State functionaries, and media figures whose status, power and sense of self-importance are established by their access and devotion to that world of secrecy, and (b) those who actually believe that -- despite (or because of) all the above acts -- the U.S. Government somehow uses this extreme secrecy for the Good. Having surveyed the vast suffering and violence they have wreaked behind that wall, those are exactly the people whom WikiLeaks is devoted to undermining."
this invisible government
from Glenn Greenwald:
"If there's nothing new in these documents, can Jonathan Capehart (or any other "journalist" claiming this) please point to where The Washington Post previously reported on these facts, all revealed by the WikiLeaks disclosures:
(1) the U.S. military formally adopted a policy of turning a blind eye to systematic, pervasive torture and other abuses by Iraqi forces;
(2) the State Department threatened Germany not to criminally investigate the CIA's kidnapping of one of its citizens who turned out to be completely innocent;
(3) the State Department under Bush and Obama applied continuous pressure on the Spanish Government to suppress investigations of the CIA's torture of its citizens and the 2003 killing of a Spanish photojournalist when the U.S. military fired on the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad;
(4) the British Government privately promised to shield Bush officials from embarrassment as part of its Iraq War "investigation";
(5) there were at least 15,000 people killed in Iraq that were previously uncounted;
(6) "American leaders lied, knowingly, to the American public, to American troops, and to the world" about the Iraq war as it was prosecuted, a conclusion the Post's own former Baghdad Bureau Chief wrote was proven by the WikiLeaks documents;
(7) the U.S.'s own Ambassador concluded that the July, 2009 removal of the Honduran President was illegal -- a coup -- but the State Department did not want to conclude that and thus ignored it until it was too late to matter;
(8) U.S. and British officials colluded to allow the U.S. to keep cluster bombs on British soil even though Britain had signed the treaty banning such weapons, and,
(9) Hillary Clinton's State Department ordered diplomats to collect passwords, emails, and biometric data on U.N. and other foreign officials, almost certainly in violation of the Vienna Treaty of 1961.
That's just a sampling."
MORE
"Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul this unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of today.”
~ Theodore Roosevelt, 1906
public secrets
from zunguzungu:
"Wikileaks does not leak something like the “Collateral Murder” video as a way of putting an end to that particular military tactic; that would be to target a specific leg of the hydra even as it grows two more. Instead, the idea is that increasing the porousness of the conspiracy’s information system will impede its functioning, that the conspiracy will turn against itself in self-defense, clamping down on its own information flows in ways that will then impede its own cognitive function. You destroy the conspiracy, in other words, by making it so paranoid of itself that it can no longer conspire.
- - - - -
. . . The leak, in other words, is only the catalyst for the desired counter-overreaction; Wikileaks wants to provoke the conspiracy into turning off its own brain in response to the threat. As it tries to plug its own holes and find the leakers, [Assange] reasons, its component elements will de-synchronize from and turn against each other, de-link from the central processing network, and come undone. Even if all the elements of the conspiracy still exist, in this sense, depriving themselves of a vigorous flow of information to connect them all together as a conspiracy prevents them from acting as a conspiracy."
Julian Assange and the Computer Conspiracy...
from Glenn Greenwald:
". . . there are few countries in the world with citizenries and especially media outlets more devoted to serving, protecting and venerating government authorities than the U.S. Indeed, I don't quite recall any entity producing as much bipartisan contempt across the American political spectrum as WikiLeaks has..."
h/t digby:
"Regardless of where you come down on Wikileaks, it's important to at least consider what they are actually trying to do-— because they're doing it whether you like it or not."
tactical advantage of orthodoxy
How to attack a scientific theory and get away with it (usually): the attempt to destroy an origin-of-AIDS hypothesis
Brian Martin
Published in Science as Culture, Vol. 19, No. 2, June 2010, pp. 215-239
Abstract Supporters of dominant scientific theories sometimes attack competing, less favoured theories in ways that conflict with expectations of proper scientific behaviour, for example by using double standards. To reduce concern about their actions, supporters can use a variety of techniques: cover up the violation of expectations; devalue the competing theory and its advocates; interpret the process as proper; use expert panels, meetings and other formal processes to give a stamp of approval to the dominant view; and intimidate opponents. These are the same five methods used regularly by perpetrators of actions widely seen as unjust, such as violent attacks on peaceful protesters. When these methods fail, the attack can backfire on the attackers. Orthodox scientists' treatment of the theory that AIDS originated from contaminated polio vaccines used in Africa in the 1950s illustrates how this framework can be applied to science. Opponents of this theory have used all five methods of inhibiting concern about violations of expected scientific behaviour. This analysis shows why supporters of orthodoxy have a tactical advantage over challengers.
[excerpt]
"In summary, how can scientists attack a theory and get away with it? There are lots of ways of attacking, such as withholding evidence, blocking publications, demanding an excessive level of proof, making disparaging comments about ideas and individuals, publishing spurious refutations, ignoring evidence, not responding to arguments, denying research grants, threatening careers and taking legal action. The trouble with most of these methods is that they seem to be unfair: they violate common expectations of how science is supposed to work.
So how do scientists get away with attacks? Partly by hiding them, reinterpreting the attacks as normal behaviour, and by using expert forums such as panels, conferences and journal editorials to give the stamp of authority to rejection of the theory. And partly through the effects of the attack itself: disparaging comments lower the credibility of targets and intimidation scares many into silence.
- - - - -
In many public policy disputes, scientific theories are attacked as part of a wider struggle involving politics, economics and ethics. In such situations, it is naive to assume that scientific theories will be evaluated neutrally and fairly."
MORE
World AIDS: Origins
watch at FreeDocumentaries.org
from Edward Hooper at AIDSOrigins.com:
"...the "oral polio vaccine" or "OPV" theory, proposes that AIDS began after batches of an experimental OPV called CHAT, which had been cultured in chimpanzee cells, were given to up to a million Africans from the DRC, Rwanda and Burundi in the latter half of the 1950s. This hypothesis is controversial, and is rejected by many medical scientists, including those who prepared and administered CHAT vaccine in Africa, and those whose articles and letters are published in Nature and Science, the world's two leading scientific journals.
The OPV theory is also rejected by many (though by no means all) of those involved in present-day public health programmes. Sadly, many of the latter seem to believe that questioning the safety of one particular experimental vaccine prepared fifty years ago is dangerous, because it might diminish public confidence in the efficacy and safety of modern-day vaccines. I believe this view is inherently wrong. There have indeed been occasional vaccine disasters down the years, but few who have examined the history of vaccination would argue with the view that the cost-benefit ratio is heavily in favour of vaccination, which technique has saved many millions of lives. However, I would argue that it is risky, and indeed profoundly wrong, to whitewash the history of CHAT vaccine in Africa in an attempt to protect the reputation of vaccination per se. Those who do this are not only guilty of sloppy scientific thinking, but also of convenient moral compromise. At the end of the day, they are more concerned with avoiding the perceived potential risks of multi-billion dollar law suits, and of protecting the reputations of colleagues, than of doing what they are supposed to do - which is to pursue the truth with clear and unbiased eyes."
from November 2010 Update by Edward Hooper:
"For what it's worth, my own theory - which is based on the earliest observed instances of HIV-1 infection and AIDS - is that by 1960 there were between ten and a few dozen people infected by HIV-1. I believe that these were not links in a chain of human infection affecting "thousands" of people and stretching back 50 years, but rather some of the first few unfortunate infectees with a recombined chimpanzee SIV that had contaminated different batches of a live [oral polio] vaccine grown in chimpanzee cells, and administered to hundreds of thousands of Africans in the last three years of the 1950s. Only a small proportion of those vaccinees (including those who were already immuno-compromised, or who had cuts in their mouths or bleeding gums) would have become infected by the chimpanzee SIV that contaminated the vaccine, and it is these persons who became the index infectees with the different clades of HIV-1(M) that are now called subtype A, subtype C and so on. The 12% genetic difference that Worobey observed between the 1959 and 1960 HIV-1 sequences does not represent 50 years of HIV-1 evolution, but rather the difference between two viral variants, the index cases of two clades of HIV-1, emerging from two different soups of recombined chimpanzee SIVs. Of course, there is no way for a molecular clock to be able to model an iatrogenic catastrophe such as that one. All a molecular clock can do in this instance is to fabricate a false prehistory for HIV, one that consciously or unconsciously fits with the preconceptions of the scientists calibrating the clock."
See also:
Polio vaccines and the origin of AIDS: some key writings
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
