The Silenced Majority: Stories of Uprisings, Occupations, Resistance, and Hope (32 page)

In this case, the attack failed. While ACORN was ultimately exonerated by a congressional investigation, the attack took its toll, and the organization lost its funding and collapsed. President Barack Obama and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack apologized to Shirley Sherrod, and Vilsack begged her to return to work. Sherrod has a book coming out and a lawsuit pending against Breitbart.

Let’s hope this is a sign that deception, intimidation, and the influence of the rightwing echo chamber are on the decline.

July 6, 2011

WikiLeaks, Wimbledon, and War

Last Saturday was sunny in London, and the crowds were flocking to Wimbledon and to the annual Henley Regatta. Julian Assange, the founder of the whistle-blower website WikiLeaks.org, was making his way by train from house arrest in Norfolk, three hours away, to join me and Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek for a public conversation about WikiLeaks, the power of information, and the importance of transparency in democracies. The event was hosted by the Frontline Club, an organization started by war correspondents in part to memorialize their many colleagues killed covering war. Frontline Club co-founder Vaughan Smith looked at the rare sunny sky fretfully, saying, “Londoners never come out to an indoor event on a day like this.” Despite years of accurate reporting from Afghanistan to Kosovo, Smith was, in this case, completely wrong.

Close to 1,800 people showed up, evidence of the profound impact WikiLeaks has had, from exposing torture and corruption to toppling governments.

Assange is in England awaiting a July 12 extradition hearing, as he is wanted for questioning in Sweden related to allegations of sexual misconduct. He has not been charged. He has been under house arrest for more than six months, wears an electronic ankle bracelet, and is required to check in daily at the Norfolk police station.

WikiLeaks was officially launched in 2007 in order to receive leaked information from whistle-blowers, using the latest technology to protect the anonymity of the sources. The organization has increasingly gained global recognition with the successive publication of massive troves of classified documents from the U.S. government relating to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and thousands of cables from the U.S. embassies around the world.

Of the logs from the two wars, Assange said that they “provided a picture of the everyday squalor of war. From children being killed at roadside blocks to over a thousand people being handed over to the Iraqi police for torture, to the reality of close air support and how modern military combat is done . . . men surrendering, being attacked.”

The State Department cables are being released over time, creating a steady stream of embarrassment for the U.S. government and inspiring outrage and protests globally, as the classified cables reveal the secret, cynical operations behind U.S. diplomacy. “Cablegate,” as the largest State Department document release in U.S. history has been dubbed, has been one of the sparks of the Arab Spring. People living under repressive regimes in Tunisia and Yemen, for example, knew their governments were corrupt and brutal. But to read the details, and see the extent of U.S. government support for these dictators, helped ignite a firestorm.

Likewise, thousands of Haiti-related cables analyzed by independent newspaper
Haïti Liberté
and the
Nation
magazine revealed extensive U.S. manipulation of the politics and the economy of that country. (This column was mentioned in one of the Haiti cables, referencing our reporting on those critical of the Obama administration’s post-earthquake denial of visas to 70,000 Haitians who had already been approved.) One series of cables details U.S. efforts to derail delivery of subsidized petroleum from Venezuela in order to protect the business interests of Chevron and ExxonMobil. Other cables show U.S. pressure to prevent an increase in Haiti’s minimum wage at the behest of U.S. apparel companies. This, in the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.

For his role as editor in chief of WikiLeaks, Assange has faced numerous threats, including calls for his assassination. U.S. Vice President Joe Biden called him a “high-tech terrorist,” while Newt Gingrich said: “Julian Assange is engaged in terrorism. . . . He should be treated as an enemy combatant, and WikiLeaks should be closed down permanently and decisively.”

Indeed, efforts to shut down WikiLeaks to date have failed. Bank of America has reportedly hired several private intelligence firms to coordinate an attack on the organization, which is said to hold a large cache of documents revealing the bank’s potentially fraudulent activities. WikiLeaks has also just sued MasterCard and Visa, which have stopped processing credit-card donations to the website.

The extradition proceedings hold a deeper threat to Assange: He fears Sweden could then extradite him to the U.S. Given the treatment of Pvt. Bradley Manning, accused of leaking many of the documents to WikiLeaks, he has good reason to be afraid. Manning has been kept in solitary confinement for close to a year, under conditions many say are tantamount to torture.

At the London event, support for WikiLeaks ran high. Afterward, Julian Assange couldn’t linger to talk. He had just enough time to get back to Norfolk to continue his house arrest. No matter what happens to Assange, WikiLeaks has changed the world forever.

August 17, 2011

San Francisco Bay Area’s BART Pulls a Mubarak

What does the police killing of a homeless man in San Francisco have to do with the Arab Spring uprisings from Tunisia to Syria? The attempt to suppress the protests that followed. In our digitally networked world, the ability to communicate is increasingly viewed as a basic right. Open communication fuels revolutions—it can take down dictators. When governments fear the power of their people, they repress, intimidate, and try to silence them, whether in Tahrir Square or downtown San Francisco.

Charles Blair Hill was shot and killed on the platform of the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system’s Civic Center platform on July 3, by BART police officer James Crowell. BART police reportedly responded to calls about a man drinking on the underground subway platform. According to police, Hill threw a vodka bottle at the two officers and then threatened them with a knife, at which point Crowell shot him. Hill was pronounced dead at the hospital.

Hill’s killing sparked immediate and vigorous protests against the BART police, similar to those that followed the BART police killing of Oscar Grant on New Year’s Day 2009. Grant was handcuffed, facedown on a subway platform, and restrained by one officer when another shot and killed him with a point-blank shot to the back. The execution was caught on at least two cell phone videos. The shooter, BART officer Johannes Mehserle, served just over seven months in jail for the killing.

On July 11, major protests shut down the Civic Center BART station. As another planned protest neared on August 11, BART officials took a measure unprecedented in U.S. history: They shut down cell phone towers in the subway system.

“It’s the first known incident that we’ve heard of where the government has shut down a cell phone network in order to prevent people from engaging in political protest,” Catherine Crump of the ACLU told me. “Cellphone networks are something we’ve all come to rely on. People use them for all sorts of communication that have nothing to do with protest. And this is really a sweeping and overbroad reaction by the police.”

The cellular-service shutdown, which was defended by BART authorities who claimed it was done to protect public safety, immediately drew fire from free-speech activists around the globe. On Twitter, those opposed to BART’s censorship started using the hashtag #muBARTak to make the link to Egypt.

When the embattled Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak shut down cell service and the Internet, those in Tahrir Square innovated workarounds to get the word out. An activist group called Telecomix, a volunteer organization that supports free speech and an open Internet, organized 300 dial-up phone accounts that allowed Egyptian activists and journalists to access the Internet to post tweets, photos, and videos of the revolution in progress.

“We were very active—Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria—trying to keep the Internet running in these countries in the face of really almost overwhelming efforts by governments to shut them down,” Telecomix activist Peter Fein told me. “Telecomix believes that the best way to support free speech and free communication is by building, by building tools that we can use to provide ourselves with those rights, rather than relying on governments to respect them.”

Expect hacktivist groups to support revolutions abroad, but also to assist protest movements here at home. In retaliation for BART’s cell phone shutdown, a decentralized hacker collective called Anonymous shut down BART’s website. In a controversial move, Anonymous also released the information of more than 2,000 BART passengers, to expose the shoddy computer security standards maintained by BART.

The BART police say the FBI is investigating Anonymous’ attack. I interviewed an Anonymous member who calls himself “Commander X” on the
Democracy Now!
news hour. His voice disguised to protect his anonymity, he told me over the phone: “We’re filled with indignation, when a little organization like BART . . . kills innocent people, two or three of them in the last few years, and then has the nerve to also cut off the cell phone service and act exactly like a dictator in the Mideast. How dare they do this in the United States of America.”

March 1, 2012

WikiLeaks vs. Stratfor: Pursue the Truth, Not Its Messenger

WikiLeaks, the whistle-blower website, has again published a massive trove of documents, this time from a private intelligence firm known as Stratfor. The source of the leak was the hacker group “Anonymous,” which took credit for obtaining more than 5 million emails from Stratfor’s servers. Anonymous obtained the material on December 24, 2011, and provided it to WikiLeaks, which in turn partnered with twenty-five media organizations globally to analyze the emails and publish them.

Among the emails was a short one-liner that suggested the U.S. government has produced, through a secret grand jury, a sealed indictment against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. In addition to painting a picture of Stratfor as a runaway, rogue private intelligence firm with close ties to government-intelligence agencies serving both corporate and U.S. military clients, the emails support the growing awareness that the Obama administration, far from diverging from the secrecy of the Bush/Cheney era, is obsessed with secrecy, and is aggressively opposed to transparency.

I traveled to London last Independence Day weekend to interview Assange. When I asked him about the grand-jury investigation, he responded: “There is no judge, there is no defense counsel, and there are four prosecutors. So, that is why people that are familiar with grand-jury inquiries in the United States say that a grand jury would not only indict a ham sandwich, it would indict the ham and the sandwich.”

As I left London, the
Guardian
newspaper exposed more of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. phone-hacking scandal, which prompted the closing of his tabloid newspaper, the largest circulation Sunday newspaper in the U.K.,
News of the World
. The coincidence is relevant, as
News of the World
reported anything but what its title claimed, focusing instead on salacious details of the private lives of celebrities, sensational crimes, and photos of scantily clad women. For this and his other endeavors, Murdoch amassed a reported personal fortune of $7.6 billion.

Meanwhile, Assange—who, like Murdoch, was born in Australia (Murdoch abandoned his nationality for U.S. citizenship in order to purchase more U.S. broadcast licenses)—had engaged in one of largest and most courageous acts of publishing in history by founding WikiLeaks.org, which allows people to safely and securely deliver documents using the Internet in ways that make it almost impossible to trace. He and his colleagues at WikiLeaks had published millions of leaked documents, most notably about the U.S. wars and occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and thousands of U.S. diplomatic cables, true “news of the world.” The Sydney Peace Foundation awarded Assange a gold medal for “exceptional courage and initiative in pursuit of human rights.” In contrast, the U.S. government targeted him, possibly under the Espionage Act. Murdoch is hailed as a pioneering newsman, while pundits on Murdoch-owned cable-television outlets openly call for Assange’s murder.

The Stratfor emails will be released over time, along with context provided by WikiLeaks’ media partners. Already revealed by the documents are the close, and potentially illegal, connections between Stratfor employees and government-intelligence and law-enforcement officials.
Rolling Stone
magazine reports that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security was monitoring Occupy Wall Street protests nationally, and the Texas Department of Public Safety has an undercover agent at Occupy Austin who was disclosing information to contacts at Stratfor. Stratfor also is hired by multinational corporations to glean “intelligence” about critics. Among companies using Stratfor were Dow Chemical, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, and Coca-Cola.

Fred Burton, Stratfor’s vice president of intelligence, and a former head of counterintelligence at the U.S. State Department’s diplomatic corps, wrote in an email, “Not for Pub—We have a sealed indictment on Assange. Pls protect.” Burton and others at Stratfor showed intense interest in WikiLeaks starting in 2010, showing intense dislike for Assange personally. Burton wrote: “Assange is going to make a nice bride in prison. Screw the terrorist. He’ll be eating cat food forever.” Another Stratfor employee wanted Assange waterboarded.