Guantanamo Bay Authorities Ban Solzhenitsyn's 'The Gulag Archipelago'

Some stories, you just couldn't make up. Like this one, reported on the UK site Reprieve, about a failed attempt to pass some reading material to one of the people detained at Guantanamo Bay. Something unsuitable you might guess, perhaps advocating terrorist ways? Well, not exactly:

On Techdirt:

Spot the Porkie Pies

I don't get all this:

On Wednesday, two British judges claimed that the US had threatened to stop sharing intelligence with the UK if it made public details of Mr Mohamed's treatment.

...


The foreign secretary said the UK would "never condone" torture.

And he denied the US threatened to "break off" security cooperation if its secret papers had been made public.

So that nice young Mr Miliband is essentially saying the judges lied? Or he is lying? Or what?

Convincing, not.

Source Code for Civilisation

Simon Phipps points out the centrality of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

This document is one of the most important documents created in the 20th century, delimiting the unarguable rights of every person, and doing it in in cool, clear prose. Flowing out of revulsion at the excesses of the Second World War, it sets a benchmark that is still vibrantly relevant to world society. For example, it makes clear that the Guantanamo concentration camp that the US is still running is abhorrent (see articles 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 - even arguing articles 3 and 28 implicitly allow it is dealt with in article 30). It casts light on the US wiretaps and the UK's surveillance society (article 12 supported by articles 7 and 11), on the TSA (article 13), on internet filtering (articles 18 & 19) and on so many more issues.

The more I look at it, the more convinced I am that this visionary document, born from the lessons humanity wanted to learn after the horrors of 1939-45, is a source text that can guide so much we're all trying to achieve. As we're working on the future, be it Web 2.0, rebuilding our political life in the west or freedom for Tibet, I'm struck that the Declaration is a primary source document against which to measure our intent and action.

Nice to see that Tibet is not forgotten.

Why Stella is a Star

That's Stella Rimington, former head of MI5. Her Guardian interview is so packed with good sense that I'll have to quote it at length:

A former head of MI5 today describes the response to the September 11 2001 attacks on the US as a "huge overreaction" and says the invasion of Iraq influenced young men in Britain who turned to terrorism.

In an interview with the Guardian, Stella Rimington calls al-Qaida's attack on the US "another terrorist incident" but not qualitatively different from any others.

"That's not how it struck me. I suppose I'd lived with terrorist events for a good part of my working life and this was as far as I was concerned another one," she says.

In common with Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, who retired as MI5's director general last year, Rimington, who left 12 years ago, has already made it clear she abhorred "war on terror" rhetoric and the government's abandoned plans to hold terrorism suspects for 42 days without charge.

Today, she goes further by criticising politicians including Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, for trying to outbid each other in their opposition to terrorism and making national security a partisan issue.

It all began, she suggests, with September 11. "National security has become much more of a political issue than it ever was in my day," she says. "Parties are tending to use it as a way of trying to get at the other side. You know, 'We're more tough on terrorism than you are.' I think that's a bad move, quite frankly."

Rimington mentions Guantánamo Bay, the practice of extraordinary rendition, and the invasion of Iraq - three issues which the majority in Britain's security and intelligence establishment opposed privately at the time.

She challenges claims, notably made by Tony Blair, that the war in Iraq was not related to the radicalisation of Muslim youth in Britain.

Read it and weep.

A Tortured Relationship

The US state department today warned that disclosure of secret information in the case of a British resident said to have been tortured before he was sent to Guantánamo Bay would cause "serious and lasting damage" to security relations between the two countries.

Nothing like a good, honest threat to bring a poodle to heel...

Morphic Resonance?

My thoughts, precisely.

Morphic Resonance of Our Times

There’s no question in my mind that the woes of the journalism profession today have been at least partially self-inflicted. At the very historical moment that the news pros faced relentless new scrutiny from a vast army of dedicated amateur watchdogs and expert critics, they offered up a relentless sequence of missteps and disasters. Some were failures of professionalism, from the Jayson Blair meltdown to the Dan Rather screwup. But the biggest — the absence of a stiff media challenge to the Bush administration’s Iraq war misinformation campaign — was a failure of civic responsibility. With that failure, the professionals forfeited their claim to special privilege or unique public role as challengers of official wrongdoing and ferreters of truth. The democracy still needs these roles filled, of course. But after the Iraq bungle, the professional journalists’ claim to own them exclusively became much harder to accept.

What struck me about this insightful comment was that it seems to parallel something at a deeper level. Consider this slight re-write:

But the biggest — the absence of a stiff political challenge to the Bush administration’s use of torture — was a failure of moral responsibility. With that failure, America forfeited its claim to special privilege or unique international role as a challenger of global wrongdoing and champion of justice. The world still needs these roles filled, of course. But after the Guantanamo/Abu Ghraib bungle, America's claim to own them exclusively became much harder to accept.

Wikipedia, Terrorism and the Sunlight of Openness

If this is all true, things are obviously going from bad to worse at Wikipedia:

Controversy has erupted among the encyclopedia's core contributors, after a rogue editor revealed that the site's top administrators are using a secret insider mailing list to crackdown on perceived threats to their power.

Many suspected that such a list was in use, as the Wikipedia "ruling clique" grew increasingly concerned with banning editors for the most petty of reasons. But now that the list's existence is confirmed, the rank and file are on the verge of revolt.

Revealed after an uber-admin called "Durova" used it in an attempt to enforce the quixotic ban of a longtime contributor, this secret mailing list seems to undermine the site's famously egalitarian ethos. At the very least, the list allows the ruling clique to push its agenda without scrutiny from the community at large. But clearly, it has also been used to silence the voice of at least one person who was merely trying to improve the encyclopedia's content.

What struck me particularly was the following passage:

Durova then posted a notice to the site's public forum, insisting the ban was too important for discussion outside the purview of the Arbitration Committee, Wikipedia's Supreme Court. "Due to the nature of this investigation, our normal open discussion isn't really feasible," she said. "Please take to arbitration if you disagree with this decision."

Now, where have I heard that before? "This person is guilty: we can prove it, but doing so would reveal terrible states secrets, so you'll just have to trust us" - oh yes, I remember: it's the standard trope used to justify internment in Guantanamo, "extraordinary rendition" or simple kidnapping; it's the same trick that has been used by totalitarian governments the world over to justify repressive "anti-terror" laws that cannot be questioned, because doing so would aid the "enemy".

Not very good company for Wikipedia, "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit", to be keeping. The sunlight of openness would do a world of good here - and anywhere else power that claims to be democratic refuses to explain its actions to the people.

From Gizmo Manuals to Gitmo Manuals

Nobody reads the manual, right? Well, here's one that people probably will want to read on the fine Wikileaks site: it's for Guantánamo Bay....

Isn't openness a wonderful thing?

The disclosure highlights the internet's usefulness to whistle-blowers in anonymously propagating documents the government and others would rather conceal. The Pentagon has been resisting -- since October 2003 -- a Freedom of Information Act request from the American Civil Liberties Union seeking the very same document.

Poodles, UFOs, Truth, Terror and Microsoft

The facts behind the UK cracker who ill-advisedly decided to break into Pentagon systems just gets more and more bizarre. The main issue is that this poor bloke faces porridge in Guantanamo Bay - with hot and cold running torture (mental and physical), kindly provided by that nice Uncle Sam. But along the way there are issues of jurisdiction, questions about George W. Bush's favourite poodle, UFOs and Microsoft.

Yes, it's actually all Microsoft's fault.