Assange may be trapped in Ecuadorian embassy permanently

It's not really clear how you get out of a water-locked country when the cops can arrest you the second you step foot out of the embassy so long as you're not inside an embassy vehicle.  Assange could be forced to remain in the embassy indefinitely.  Then it's an issue of whether the media and the public care, and which way they care, in terms of what kind of pressure it puts on Ecuador or Britain. Read the rest of this post...

How Wikileaks helped foment a culture of investigative journalism in Brazil

A really neat story from the Nation about how Wikileaks strategically went through classified cables in order to create their own news, and how it ended up inspiring a culture of investigative journalism in Brazil.  This is an excellent story.  I'm posting a snippet, but do read the first part of the article that details "how" Wikileaks coordinated the release of its information in order to maximize the newsiness, and impact, of it.  Really smart.

By Natalia Viana in the Nation:

By the middle of January 2011, it was clear that the two Brazilian partners were losing interest in the cables and were dedicating less and less space to “Cablegate” stories. I started a blog, which attracted a strong readership. That’s how Phase II of the WikiLeaks coverage—engaging the nontraditional media—began.

Rather than deciding myself what to cover, I let the public select issues that were of interest to them. Using the WikiLeaks database of Brazil-related cables, I requested that my readers submit topics to search for in the collection. After conducting a search, I would send the relevant documents to a group of bloggers, who would then publish stories based on them. This generated some interesting articles—revealing, for example, the meetings between US officials and opposition leaders like presidential candidate José Serra, who hinted at a closer relationship with Washington should he win. Neither Folha nor O Globo, who were seen as harsh critics of the Lula government, published any stories about opposition leaders.

As the bloggers’ interest in the cables faded by mid-March, with hundreds of documents yet to be reviewed, I and a group of women journalists decided to create Brazil’s first nonprofit center for investigative journalism, called Publica. Based on similar US media organizations like ProPublica, it would publish stories that could be freely reproduced under a creative-commons license. Our first challenge was to review the remaining WikiLeaks documents and see what stories they held.

Staffing a temporary newsroom with fifteen volunteer journalists, we were able to publish another fifty articles based on the cables. My favorite new revelation was the secret transfer to Brazil by the United States of thirty Drug Enforcement Administration personnel who had previously been expelled from Bolivia for spying and aiding the opposition. The new stories created another stir in the Brazilian press. But more than that, they proved it was possible for an independent investigative group to match the traditional news outlets when it came to producing professional journalism—and to following the story where the mainstream media would not take it.

The impact of WikiLeaks on the Brazilian media community has been unmistakable: within a couple of months, articles based on documents from Brazil’s dictatorship period started popping up in the press. Folha de S. Paulo started its own WikiLeaks-type section, the “FolhaLeaks,” and established an investigative unit in Brasília. More investigative stories are being produced by both the traditional and the independent media. A year later, corporate media outlets such as Globo and Grupo Bandeirantes—major TV networks in Brazil—are fighting to sponsor the annual congress of the Brazilian Association for Investigative Journalism. And Publica is now up and running.

The response to the leaks also demonstrated that, more than twenty-five years after the end of military rule, the Brazilian public is ready and eager to advance toward a more transparent and accountable society. Brazil’s “Cablegate” generated a much-delayed debate about the lack of transparency in government and the need for a Freedom of Access Law. Journalists’ associations ramped up their demands for such a law to be adopted at once. Fernando Rodrigues, who was a director of the Brazilian Association for Investigative Journalism, wrote an article criticizing how slowly the law was being debated in Congress. When the president of the Senate, José Sarney, declared that documents should remain secret because “we cannot do a WikiLeaks of Brazilian history,” he was heavily criticized.

Read the rest of this post...

How the FBI caught LulzSec hacker Sabu, and what that says about the FBI

We wrote recently about the FBI turning a Anonymous-type LulzSec hacker into a mole, a double agent. This mole then worked with the FBI to (among other things) crack into the email server of a top private security firm, Stratfor, and pass 5 million emails to Anonymous, who gave them to WikiLeaks for release.

(To come up to speed on that story, see here; it's fascinating. There's a Julian Assange angle.)

Now thanks to The Register, we know just how "Sabu" was found (h/t John Byrne via Twitter):

The man named by the FBI as infamous hacktivist Sabu was undone by an embarrassing security blunder, it has emerged. ... "They caught him because just once, he logged onto IRC without going through Tor [an anonymization service], revealing to the FBI his IP address," Graham claims.

And that was all they needed.

According to Robert Graham of Errata Security [Sabu] exposed his IP address, which allowed federal investigators to request records from ISPs and track down his location to a flat shared with his two sons on Manhattan's Lower East Side.

About the FBI, Graham said:

"This reveals a little bit about the FBI, namely that they've infiltrated enough of the popular IRC relays to be able to get people's IP addresses. We've always suspected they could, now we know."

And:

The report said investigators had coerced the unemployed dad [Sabu] into co-operating by threatening him with two years in prison away from his children on the easy-to-prove ID theft charges alone if he failed to turn informant on the rest of the LulzSec crew. The feds also persuaded him to turn over the encryption keys on his battered laptop, allowing them to obtain evidence of Monsegur's "hacking activities".

There's more, including information about the anti-Anonymous hackers the FBI was working with, how some LulzSec members confronted the now-turned Sabu, and how he evaded identification as a mole. It's quite a story.

There's lesson here for non-hackers as well. You have no idea who's peeping at you when you browse or chat. The FBI is apparently watching IRC traffic, and we learned years ago about "NSA telecom closets" that routinely monitor calls and internet traffic.

Anonymization services, on the other hand, are perfectly legal and have a variety of uses, especially in this world of hoped-for–PIPA and government spying.

I've seen Tor in particular recommended a number of times. More here, as well as at the google.

Safe browsing,

GP

(To follow on Twitter or to send links: @Gaius_Publius) Read the rest of this post...

An FBI mole (and FBI equipment) facilitated WikiLeaks release of 5 million hacked Stratfor emails

Here's a new wrinkle to the Anonymous–Stratfor "5 million hacked emails" story.

Background — Recall that, as the story first broke, Anonymous was reported to have broken into the email archive of a big global security firm named Stratfor and hijacked about 5 million emails going back at least six years. Here's how the Telegraph characterized some of the emails released, those dealing with Osama Bin Laden and the Pakistani ISI (my emphasis and some reparagraphing everywhere):

Osama bin Laden was in routine contact with several senior figures from Pakistan's military intelligence agency while in hiding in the country, according to a large cache of secret intelligence files.

The disclosure was contained in e-mails from the private US security firm, Stratfor, which were published by WikiLeaks website on Monday after being obtained by the Anonymous hacking group.

And we've been treated to leaks from that email cache since (for example, here).

But how did Anonymous get the emails? Now we know, from a group called LulzSec.

LulzSec is a very small, skilled group of Anonymous-type hackers, but they are not Anonymous per se. LulzSec as a separate entity (if "entity" can be used to describe amorphous groups). LulzSec was responsible for hacking Sony Pictures in 2011, and they were covered by Rachel Maddow for breaking into Arizona law enforcement files.

And now the news

LulzSec has been hacked, in the old fashioned way. The FBI caught one of their leaders, a man going by the handle "Sabu," arrested and charged him, then "convinced" him to work for their side as a mole, a double-agent. He's been the FBI's man ever since.

From BoingBoing (my emphasis and reparagraphing):

The Guardian has more on the big hacking news which Fox News broke yesterday (as noted in a post by Rob). "Sabu," the trash-talking, self-appointed leader of LulzSec, has been working for the FBI for the last six months.

The FBI says he helped the US and various European governments identify and arrest five alleged LulzSec members charged with participating in defacement, DDOSing, and "doxing" against high-profile government and corporate targets. Sabu ... was charged with 12 criminal counts of conspiracy to engage in "computer hacking and other crimes" last year, pled guilty in August, 2011, then "snitched" on his LulzSec friends.

So that's how they got "Sabu" to switch teams. Here's what they got him to do.

Sabu-LulzSec hacked an FBI conference call with Scotland Yard. The Guardian:

In a US court document, the FBI's informant [Sabu] – there described as CW – "acting under the direction of the FBI" helped facilitate the publication of what was thought to be an embarrassing leak of conference call between the FBI and the UK's Serious and Organised Crime Agency in February [where] both sides of the Atlantic were heard discussing the progress of various hacking investigations[.]

For more on that conference call story, see our report here. If the Guardian is right, the FBI set itself up for the intercept. I wonder if they let the other side of the conference call (Scotland Yard) in on the secret.

But the other story that Sabu was involved in, post his arrest and squealage, is the story mentioned at the top, the hacking of that 50-million-email cache from Stratfor Forecasting, the one that WikiLeaks is now releasing. The Guardian again:

A second document shows that Monsegur [Sabu] – styled this time as CW-1 – provided an FBI-owned computer to facilitate the release of 5m emails taken from US security consultancy Stratfor and which are now being published by WikiLeaks.

That suggests the FBI may have had an inside track on discussions between Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, and Anonymous, another hacking group, about the leaking of thousands of confidential emails and documents.

Now we know how WikiLeaks and Anonymous got the emails — from Sabu and LulzSec. Which mean ... from the FBI.

What does this add up to?

This is a lot of interesting data to absorb. For example:

(1) The FBI got its own mole to use LulzSec to hack its own conference call. Just that makes you pause.

(2) The FBI also got its mole to get LulzSec to hack 5 million badly protected emails — covering a six year span — from Stratfor, a global security consulting firm that was described thus by Bloomberg in 2008:

Strategic Forecasting in Austin, Texas ... consults for companies and governments around the world, was described in a 2001 Barron's article as "the shadow CIA."

What? What top global security company advises its clients to keep six years of emails, much less does it themselves? And what is the FBI doing hacking such a company?

(3) Did Stratfor know it was being set up? One of Stratfor's clients could easily be the U.S. government, through any one of its spook-like agencies (DHS comes to mind, for starters).

This is a many-handed game. You could get very John LeCarré as you think about this stuff — but you'd have to imagine very bad villains. After all, here's a "global intelligence company" with Fortune 500 clients, along with who-knows-from-where government agencies — yet they keep years of emails on an Internet-accessible server. These are rank amateurs; circus clowns.

So let's ask a few more questions — or let others do it — to dig a few layers deeper:

■ "tas" (a working "IT professional" writing at the Agonist) offers this thought:

So a FBI computer was used to help the Stratfor leaks. It makes me wonder if the American intelligence community decided to let the private emails of a private intelligence company leak as some sort of warning to them.

■ Marcy Wheeler adds:

One other neat detail about the suggestion, of course, is that the CIA went around claiming to be FBI agents while they tortured people. Was this Sabu preparing to go around hacking for the FBI while hinting he was CIA?

Be sure to click through to the text exchange she references between a Guardian writer and someone the writer takes to be Sabu. It contains some intriguing implications.

■ And finally, Wheeler again, in an allegation I think is dead-on:

Sabu, the head of LulzSec, offered an FBI computer to facilitate the publication of Stratfor (no doubt [to] set up a LulzSec-assisted indictment of Julian Assange in the future)

Of course. Watch your back, Julian — also your front and sides. (And if "Sabu" really is helping to bring down Assange, he better watch is own back; that's a betrayal.)

Very John LeCarré, but with casting by Austin Powers. Our world, in their hands — I feel safer already.

GP

(To follow on Twitter: @Gaius_Publius) Read the rest of this post...

Wikileaks: IMF austerity caused Balkan wars

The GOP's favorite economic policy has been trashing economies for years. Balkan Insight:

In the document from 2009, titled Europe Analytical Guidance, Stratfor alerts its analysts to watch out for any possible riots occurring due to economic crises, since the current situation in Balkans is complex and multifaceted. “Do not forget, the IMF austerity measures imposed on Yugoslavia were in part to blame for the start of the war there. We need to be aware of any economically motivated social discontent,” document states. Analysts should pay attention to any possible protest and union activity since, according to Stratfor, the protests by Albanian unions inflamed further conflicts. “Remember, it was the strikes by the Albanian miners in Kosovo back in the 1980s that in a way moved the region towards conflagration,” states the document.

Read the rest of this post...

Wikileaks: Pakistan intelligence was in regular contact with bin Laden

The Wikileaks Stratfor email dump is telling us what most (if not all) suspected all along. The US is in a bad position if they're counting on any cooperation from Pakistan. The Telegraph:

According to one of the e-mails, the firm was shown the information papers collected from bin Laden's Abbotabad compound after the US special forces attack last May that resulted in his death. The e-mail, from a Stratfor analyst, suggested that up to 12 officials in Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency knew of the al-Qaeda leader's safe house. The internal email did not name the Pakistani officials involved but said the US could use the information as a bargaining chip in post raid negotiations with Islamabad.

Read the rest of this post...

A major Julian Assange–WikiLeaks interview in Rolling Stone

I wanted to point you to this, in case you haven't seen it yet. The estimable Michael Hastings has a major interview with Julian Assange in Rolling Stone, and it's a great read.

It's also long; abstracting and commenting on its twists and angles would make a very complicated post. So maybe it's best just to bring it to your attention and let you have at. I may come back to it later, picking at the bits.

Here's the start, a terrific piece of writing in its own right. Note the visuals, note the conclusion (sorry, my asterisk):

It's a few days before Christmas, and Julian Assange has just finished moving to a new hide-out deep in the English countryside. The two-bedroom house, on loan from a WikiLeaks supporter, is comfortable enough, with a big stone fireplace and a porch out back, but it's not as grand as the country estate where he spent the past 363 days under house arrest, waiting for a British court to decide whether he will be extradited to Sweden to face allegations that he sexually molested two women he was briefly involved with in August 2010.

Assange sits on a tattered couch, wearing a wool sweater, dark pants and an electronic manacle around his right ankle, visible only when he crosses his legs. At 40, the WikiLeaks founder comes across more like an embattled rebel commander than a hacker or journalist. He's become better at handling the media – more willing to answer questions than he used to be, less likely to storm off during interviews – but the protracted legal battle has left him isolated, broke and vulnerable. Assange recently spoke to someone he calls a Western "intelligence source," and he asked the official about his fate. Will he ever be a free man again, allowed to return to his native Australia, to come and go as he pleases? "He told me I was f*cked," Assange says.

I've been calling Assange a classic case of "stain on the pavement" material. But maybe they've gotten more sophisticated — death-by-miserable-life, a fate Assange may well share with Bradley Manning. After all, it saves on all that "pressure-washing the concrete" money, and it's more fun for the torturer if the victim lingers, broken.

Anyway, please go read. It's engrossing and thought-provoking. This fight will not get less messy — it's widening as we speak.

GP Read the rest of this post...

Wired: Feds accused of withholding evidence favorable to Bradley Manning

Is it Ted Stevens all over again?

The civilian lawyer for Bradley Manning, the Army private who allegedly leaked tens of thousands of classified U.S. government documents to WikiLeaks, is seeking to question the severity of the leak by requesting the government’s own internal damage assessments that reportedly contradict statements that Manning irreparably damaged national security.

Manning’s defense attorney, David E. Coombs, is attempting to get evidence from the government to defend Manning in his upcoming pre-trial hearing on Dec. 16, but says the government is stonewalling him.

“The defense has repeatedly requested the below discovery in this case, but the government has consistently responded with a blanket denial of the defense request,” Coombs wrote in the partially redacted filing.

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Wikileaks founder must face rape charges

Julian Assange's appeal against an order extraditing him to Sweden to face Rape and Sexual Assault charges has failed. Assange has been the public face of Wikileaks. His oft-repeated concern is that the prosecution is motivated by political considerations and that it may be a step towards extraditing him to the US. He has spoken of his concern that he might end up in Guantanamo or, worse, being executed by the US administration.

The full text of the judgment is available here. There is a one tier of appeal left to him: The UK Supreme Court. His legal team has announced that they intend to appeal. You can follow his solicitor (or attorney) on twitter (@markslarks). Read the rest of this post...

Wikileaks leaks unredacted cables

Well I guess it had to happen, the full text of the Wikileaks cables has leaked.

Wikileaks and the Guardian are trading claims as to who is at fault. The fact is that the situation does neither of them much credit for their security. The gist is that Wikileaks sent the Guardian a password to decrypt a file that was loaded onto a server for a short length of time and then removed.

The Guardian believed the password to be a temporary password unique to them and published it in their Wikileaks book. The same file with the same password had been shared over BitTorrent.

In a somewhat surreal twist, Wikileaks announced that it has "commenced pre-litigation action".

Strong cryptography does not mean strong security. The human element is almost always the weakest link. Read the rest of this post...

WikiLeaks: Saudis think speculators helped cause oil bubble

Matt Taibbi writing in Rolling Stone (my emphasis):

When oil prices surged to a ridiculous $147 a barrel in the summer of 2008, conventional wisdom held that normal supply and demand issues were the cause. ... [T]hanks to Wikileaks, we now know that when the Bush administration reached out to the Saudis in the summer of '08 to ask them to increase oil production to lower prices, the Saudis responded by saying they were having a hard time finding buyers for their oil as it was, and instead asked the Bush administration to rein in Wall Street speculators.

"Speculators" means the so-called "Global Pool of Money", the monster pile that global investor were trying to find a home for after the crash of the derivatives market, the Global Pool's previous home. (Click that link and listen; you won't be sorry.)

Where do Goldman and DeutscheBank and Paribas put billion- and trillion-dollar investors after the housing crash? Treasuries (which are safe but pay nothing) and commodities.

The issue here, which I covered somewhat in Griftopia and in "The Great American Bubble Machine," revolves around the influx of speculative money into the commodities markets. Because of various changes to the way commodities were traded -- including a series of semi-secret exemptions handed out to commodities speculators, allowing companies like Goldman Sachs to popularize commodities speculation -- there was, by the summer of 2008, a cascade of investor money pouring into commodities, mostly all betting on a rise of commodity prices. ... The Wiki documents show that the Saudis had long ago concluded that this increased investor flow was a threat to disrupt the markets. An embassy cable from 2007 recounted a meeting U.S. officials had with Yasser Mufti, an Aramco planner. "The Saudi analysts indicated a link between higher oil prices and the influx of investor funds into the oil markets," it read.

The cables also show that the Saudis urged the Americans to enact reforms to rein in Wall Street, calling for speculative limits and other changes. It also showed that some Saudi officials believed that speculation added as much as $40 to the oil price during the height of the bubble.

Some economists have argued that commodities like oil aren't subject to price shocks due to speculation. Clearly the Saudis, whose business it (literally) is to know, disagree. Looks like the problem is back.

GP Read the rest of this post...

Julian Assange: Media coverage of accused Wikileaks leaker Bradley Manning is appalling

From Huff Post:

The WikiLeaks founder also described how the prosecution of Manning -- and potentially his own organization -- under the Espionage Act of 1917 could have a chilling effect on investigative journalism. [...]

Assange, responding to a question from The Huffington Post, described much of the media coverage of Manning's situation as "appalling." He continued:

There have been some good journalists that are starting to break through that. I see that the Washington Post has been improving its coverage. Glenn Greenwald, from Salon, has always been on this issue, dealing with it in a comprehensive and robust manner.

That we saw, for example, with Frontline last night -- once again a concentration on salacious and really quite irrelevant personal factors. There are many, indeed, perhaps most, people in the United States from divorced parents. But how many have spent the last year without conviction in a military prison. The answer is one. ...

Read the rest of this post...

Amnesty International praises WikiLeaks for spring uprisings in Arab world

Deservedly so. It's a pity we haven't seen more about the banks in the western world though. Wouldn't that be nice as well?

The rights group singles out WikiLeaks and the newspapers that pored over its previously confidential government files, among them the Guardian, as a catalyst in a series of uprisings against repressive regimes, notably the overthrow of Tunisia's long-serving president, Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali.

"The year 2010 may well be remembered as a watershed year when activists and journalists used new technology to speak truth to power and, in so doing, pushed for greater respect for human rights," Amnesty's secretary general, Salil Shetty, says in an introduction to the document. "It is also the year when repressive governments faced the real possibility that their days were numbered."

But, Shetty adds, the situation in the Middle East and North Africa, and elsewhere, remains unpredictable: "There is a serious fightback from the forces of repression. The international community must seize the opportunity for change and ensure that 2011 is not a false dawn for human rights."

Read the rest of this post...

WikiLeaks: 700 new Gitmo documents released

Charlie Savage at the New York Times has a good article about a new release of documents acquired by WikiLeaks:

A trove of more than 700 classified military documents provides new and detailed accounts of the men who have done time at the Guantánamo Bay prison in Cuba, and offers new insight into the evidence against the 172 men still locked up there.

Military intelligence officials, in assessments of detainees written between February 2002 and January 2009, evaluated their histories and provided glimpses of the tensions between captors and captives. ... The secret documents, made available to The New York Times and several other news organizations, reveal that most of the 172 remaining prisoners have been rated as a “high risk” of posing a threat to the United States and its allies if released without adequate rehabilitation and supervision. But they also show that an even larger number of the prisoners who have left Cuba — about a third of the 600 already transferred to other countries — were also designated “high risk” before they were freed or passed to the custody of other governments.

The document dump is a hodge-podge of everything from proof that some detainees really are dangerous (or were), to proof that some were nobodies caught up in the American tsunami. For example:

The dossiers also show the seat-of-the-pants intelligence gathering in war zones that led to the incarcerations of innocent men for years in cases of mistaken identity or simple misfortune. In May 2003, for example, Afghan forces captured Prisoner 1051, an Afghan named Sharbat, near the scene of a roadside bomb explosion, the documents show. He denied any involvement, saying he was a shepherd. Guantánamo debriefers and analysts agreed, citing his consistent story, his knowledge of herding animals and his ignorance of “simple military and political concepts,” according to his assessment. Yet a military tribunal declared him an “enemy combatant” anyway, and he was not sent home until 2006.

And there are quite a few instances of innocent men made so angry at their captors and their captivity that if they weren't dangerous before, they are now:

While some detainees are described in the documents as “mostly compliant and rarely hostile to guard force and staff,” others spoke of violence. One detainee said “he would like to tell his friends in Iraq to find the interrogator, slice him up, and make a shwarma (a type of sandwich) out of him, with the interrogator’s head sticking out of the end of the shwarma.” Another “threatened to kill a U.S. service member by chopping off his head and hands when he gets out,” and informed a guard that “he will murder him and drink his blood for lunch. Detainee also stated he would fly planes into houses and prayed that President Bush would die.”

There's nothing like creating your own opposition to keep a war interesting, a sort of political version of impedance.

Like most WikiLeaks document troves, this one is more interesting for the nuggets it reveals (such as the "shwarma" comment above) than for any big-picture artwork. Still, it is interesting; and still, it may well be a war-crime to hold someone illegally for the sole reason that he's angry about being held illegally. I would be angry as well.

GP Read the rest of this post...

US ambassador to Mexico resigns over WikiLeaks report

His criticisms hardly sounded unreasonable but there's also plenty of blame to go around in the so-called drug war on both sides of the border. The Guardian:

Hillary Clinton said Carlos Pascual's decision to step down was "based upon his personal desire to ensure the strong relationship between our two countries and to avert issues" raised by the Mexican president, Felipe Calderón.

The US secretary of state was not specific, but a furious Calderón has publicly criticised Pascual's criticisms, divulged as part of the US embassy cables by WikiLeaks.

Pascual's resignation appears to be the biggest fallout yet from the release of thousands of sensitive US diplomatic cables from around the world. It is the first such public departure by a US ambassador during the Obama administration.

Read the rest of this post...

NYT editorial: The abuse of Private Manning

NYT editorial:

Philip Crowley, a State Department spokesman, committed the classic mistake of a Washington mouthpiece by telling the truth about Private Manning to a small group (including a blogger): that the military’s treatment of Private Manning was “ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid.” He resigned on Sunday.

Far more troubling is why President Obama, who has forcefully denounced prisoner abuse, is condoning this treatment. Last week, at a news conference, he said the Pentagon had assured him that the terms of the private’s confinement “are appropriate and are meeting our basic standards.” He said he could not go into details, but details are precisely what is needed to explain and correct an abuse that should never have begun.

Read the rest of this post...

Obama: Treatment of alleged WikiLeaks leaker Bradley Manning is 'appropriate and meeting our basic standards'

So much for that pesky torture thing; Obama says we're not doing it.

For me, that's the story. The story that prompted the story is this (h/t John Cole):

P.J. Crowley, the state department spokesman, stepped down Sunday after saying publicly that treatment of Wikileaks suspect Pfc. Bradley Manning in military detention has been “ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid.”

In a statement, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wrote that she accepted his resignation with regret. ...

The remark by Mr. Crowley last week to a small audience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, first reported by the blogger Philippa Thomas, was rejected by none other than President Obama at a press conference on Friday. Mr. Obama said that he had been assured the treatment of Private Manning was “appropriate and are meeting our basic standards.”

Amnesty International begs to differ:

[T]he conditions inflicted on Bradley Manning . . . amount to inhumane treatment by the US authorities [and] appear to breach the USA’s human rights obligations.

Did you notice the weasel by Obama? Go back to the last sentence in the first quote and read carefully.

Yep — "Obama said that he had been assured ..." As in, "Well, shucks, I don't personally know, you understand; but what I hear is, it's all good. And me, just passing that on."

I won't dignify the weasel by the Times writer, who "under-characterizes" Manning's condition, with a quote. Feel free to find it yourself. The writer is Michael D. Shear, and he probably needed to get his Access Pass re-stamped.

Obama's weasel is the tell — he knows. To which I say, one of us has a conscience, sir, and a line in the sand. See you in ... you know.

GP Read the rest of this post...

Military will keep stripping accused WikiLeaks leaker Bradley Manning naked every night as ongoing policy

That headline is culled from Twitter and Greg Mitchell, whose WikiLeaks blog is the go-to place for WikiLeaky news. The full tweet:

Now military says it will keep stripping Bradley Manning naked every night, indefinitely, as ongoing policy. http://bit.ly/eCunqy

Mitchell points us to this, from Glenn Greenwald:

The treatment of Manning is now so repulsive that it even lies beyond what at least some of the most devoted Obama admirers are willing to defend.

Punishment for whistle-blowers. Don't forget; that's Manning's alleged crime. Greenwald has more; he's our other go-to guy and his piece is well worth your time.

I'll say again, as others have said: The purpose of torture is to elicit a false confession. If this were Team Bush at the helm, the whole left world would be in arms.

At what point is the price of power too great?

GP Read the rest of this post...

PFC Manning reportedly forced to strip naked for 7 hours last night

Is this really necessary? And as Glenn Greenwald notes, they seriously want to put him to death? Even if it turns out he was the WikiLeaks source, isn't the death penalty a tad overkill? Read the rest of this post...

Spielberg's DreamWorks buys rights to WikiLeaks movie

UPDATE: WikiLeaks and Assange are opposed to the film referring to the DreamWorks story as "bullsh**."

The legal bills for Assange won't pay themselves.

Steven Spielberg looks set to oversee WikiLeaks: the Movie after securing the screen rights to WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy, the book by Guardian journalists David Leigh and Luke Harding.

Reportedly conceived as an investigative thriller in the mould of All the President's Men, the film will be backed by DreamWorks – the studio founded in 1994 by Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen.

Leigh and Harding's book charts Julian Assange's life and times, from his itinerant childhood through to the creation of the WikiLeaks website in 2006. It also provides the inside story of Assange's explosive partnership with the Guardian and the release, last December, of more than 250,000 secret diplomatic cables.

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