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The public needs to know the truth about wars. So why have journalists colluded with governments to hoodwink us?

In the US Army manual on counterinsurgency, the American commander General David Petraeus describes Afghanistan as a “war of perception . . . conducted continuously using the news media”. What really matters is not so much the day-to-day battles against the Taliban as the way the adventure is sold in America where “the media directly influence the attitude of key audiences”. Reading this, I was reminded of the Venezuelan general who led a coup against the democratic government in 2002. “We had a secret weapon,” he boasted. “We had the media, especially TV. You got to have the media.”

Never has so much official energy been expended in ensuring journalists collude with the makers of rapacious wars which, say the media-friendly generals, are now “perpetual”. In echoing the west’s more verbose warlords, such as the waterboarding former US vice-president Dick Cheney, who predicated “50 years of war”, they plan a state of permanent conflict wholly dependent on keeping at bay an enemy whose name they dare not speak: the public.

At Chicksands in Bedfordshire, the Ministry of Defence’s psychological warfare (Psyops) establishment, media trainers devote themselves to the task, immersed in a jargon world of “information dominance”, “asymmetric threats” and “cyberthreats”. They share premises with those who teach the interrogation methods that have led to a public inquiry into British military torture in Iraq. Disinformation and the barbarity of colonial war have much in common.

Of course, only the jargon is new. In the opening sequence of my film, The War You Don’t See, there is reference to a pre-WikiLeaks private conversation in December 1917 between David Lloyd George, Britain’s prime minister during much of the first world war, and CP Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian. “If people really knew the truth,” the prime minister said, “the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don’t know, and can’t know.”

In the wake of this “war to end all wars”, Edward Bernays, a confidante of President Woodrow Wilson, coined the term “public relations” as a euphemism for propaganda “which was given a bad name in the war”. In his book, Propaganda (1928), Bernays described PR as “an invisible government which is the true ruling power in our country” thanks to “the intelligent manipulation of the masses”. This was achieved by “false realities” and their adoption by the media. (One of Bernays’s early successes was persuading women to smoke in public. By associating smoking with women’s liberation, he achieved headlines that lauded cigarettes as “torches of freedom”.)

I began to understand this as a young reporter during the American war in Vietnam. During my first assignment, I saw the results of the bombing of two villages and the use of Napalm B, which continues to burn beneath the skin; many of the victims were children; trees were festooned with body parts. The lament that “these unavoidable tragedies happen in wars” did not explain why virtually the entire population of South Vietnam was at grave risk from the forces of their declared “ally”, the United States. PR terms like “pacification” and “collateral damage” became our currency. Almost no reporter used the word “invasion”. “Involvement” and later “quagmire” became staples of a news vocabulary that recognised the killing of civilians merely as tragic mistakes and seldom questioned the good intentions of the invaders.

On the walls of the Saigon bureaus of major American news organisations were often displayed horrific photographs that were never published and rarely sent because it was said they were would “sensationalise” the war by upsetting readers and viewers and therefore were not “objective”. The My Lai massacre in 1968 was not reported from Vietnam, even though a number of reporters knew about it (and other atrocities like it), but by a freelance in the US, Seymour Hersh. The cover of Newsweek magazine called it an “American tragedy”, implying that the invaders were the victims: a purging theme enthusiastically taken up by Hollywood in movies such as The Deer Hunter and Platoon. The war was flawed and tragic, but the cause was essentially noble. Moreover, it was “lost” thanks to the irresponsibility of a hostile, uncensored media.

Although the opposite of the truth, such false realties became the “lessons” learned by the makers of present-day wars and by much of the media. Following Vietnam, “embedding” journalists became central to war policy on both sides of the Atlantic. With honourable exceptions, this succeeded, especially in the US. In March 2003, some 700 embedded reporters and camera crews accompanied the invading American forces in Iraq. Watch their excited reports, and it is the liberation of Europe all over again. The Iraqi people are distant, fleeting bit players; John Wayne had risen again.

The apogee was the victorious entry into Baghdad, and the TV pictures of crowds cheering the felling of a statue of Saddam Hussein. Behind this façade, an American Psyops team successfully manipulated what an ignored US army report describes as a “media circus [with] almost as many reporters as Iraqis”. Rageh Omaar, who was there for the BBC, reported on the main evening news: “People have come out welcoming [the Americans], holding up V-signs. This is an image taking place across the whole of the Iraqi capital.” In fact, across most of Iraq, largely unreported, the bloody conquest and destruction of a whole society was well under way.

In The War You Don’t See, Omaar speaks with admirable frankness. “I didn’t really do my job properly,” he says. “I’d hold my hand up and say that one didn’t press the most uncomfortable buttons hard enough.” He describes how British military propaganda successfully manipulated coverage of the fall of Basra, which BBC News 24 reported as having fallen “17 times”. This coverage, he says, was “a giant echo chamber”.

The sheer magnitude of Iraqi suffering in the onslaught had little place in the news. Standing outside 10 Downing St, on the night of the invasion, Andrew Marr, then the BBC’s political editor, declared, “[Tony Blair] said that they would be able to take Baghdad without a bloodbath and that in the end the Iraqis would be celebrating, and on both of those points he has been proved conclusively right . . .” I asked Marr for an interview, but received no reply. In studies of the television coverage by the University of Wales, Cardiff, and Media Tenor, the BBC’s coverage was found to reflect overwhelmingly the government line and that reports of civilian suffering were relegated. Media Tenor places the BBC and America’s CBS at the bottom of a league of western broadcasters in the time they allotted to opposition to the invasion. “I am perfectly open to the accusation that we were hoodwinked,” said Jeremy Paxman, talking about Iraq’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction to a group of students last year. “Clearly we were.” As a highly paid professional broadcaster, he omitted to say why he was hoodwinked.

Dan Rather, who was the CBS news anchor for 24 years, was less reticent. “There was a fear in every newsroom in America,” he told me, “a fear of losing your job . . . the fear of being stuck with some label, unpatriotic or otherwise.” Rather says war has made “stenographers out of us” and that had journalists questioned the deceptions that led to the Iraq war, instead of amplifying them, the invasion would not have happened. This is a view now shared by a number of senior journalists I interviewed in the US.

In Britain, David Rose, whose Observer articles played a major part in falsely linking Saddam Hussein to al-Qaida and 9/11, gave me a courageous interview in which he said, “I can make no excuses . . . What happened [in Iraq] was a crime, a crime on a very large scale . . .”

“Does that make journalists accomplices?” I asked him.

“Yes . . . unwitting perhaps, but yes.”

What is the value of journalists speaking like this? The answer is provided by the great reporter James Cameron, whose brave and revealing filmed report, made with Malcolm Aird, of the bombing of civilians in North Vietnam was banned by the BBC. “If we who are meant to find out what the bastards are up to, if we don’t report what we find, if we don’t speak up,” he told me, “who’s going to stop the whole bloody business happening again?”

Cameron could not have imagined a modern phenomenon such as WikiLeaks but he would have surely approved. In the current avalanche of official documents, especially those that describe the secret machinations that lead to war – such as the American mania over Iran – the failure of journalism is rarely noted. And perhaps the reason Julian Assange seems to excite such hostility among journalists serving a variety of “lobbies”, those whom George Bush’s press spokesman once called “complicit enablers”, is that WikiLeaks and its truth-telling shames them. Why has the public had to wait for WikiLeaks to find out how great power really operates? As a leaked 2,000-page Ministry of Defence document reveals, the most effective journalists are those who are regarded in places of power not as embedded or clubbable, but as a “threat”. This is the threat of real democracy, whose “currency”, said Thomas Jefferson, is “free flowing information”.

In my film, I asked Assange how WikiLeaks dealt with the draconian secrecy laws for which Britain is famous. “Well,” he said, “when we look at the Official Secrets Act labelled documents, we see a statement that it is an offence to retain the information and it is an offence to destroy the information, so the only possible outcome is that we have to publish the information.” These are extraordinary times.

By John Pilger

www.johnpilger.com

• The War You Don’t See is in cinemas and on DVD from 13 December, and is broadcast on ITV on 14 December at 10.35pm

An open letter from the Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers and Afghans for Peace

As the Obama administration releases its December Review of U.S. war in Afghanistan, the Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers, along with Afghans for Peace, have issued a review of their experiences. To express support for their letter, follow this link .

We Want You Out: an open letter from the Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers and Afghans for Peace

To all the leaders of our world, the leaders of the US-led coalition, the Afghan government, the ‘Taliban/Al-Qaeda’ and regional countries,

We are intolerably angry.

All our senses are hurting.

Our women, our men and yes shame on you, our children are grieving.

Your Afghan civilian-military strategy is a murderous stench we smell, see, hear and breathe.

President Obama, and all the elite players and people of the world, why?

America’s 250-million-dollar annual communications budget just to scream propaganda on this war of perceptions, with its nauseating rhetoric mimicked by Osama and other warlords, is powerless before the silent wailing of every anaemic mother.

We will no longer be passive prey to your disrespectful systems of oligarchic, plutocratic war against the people.

Your systems feed the rich and powerful. They are glaringly un-equal, they do not listen, do not think and worst, they do not care.

We choose not to gluttonize with you. We choose not to be trained by you. We choose not to be pawned by you.

We henceforth refuse every weapon you kill us with, every dollar you bait us with and every lie you manipulate us with.

We are not beasts.

We are Afghans, Americans, Europeans, Asians and global citizens.

Yes, you have the false, self-appointed power to arrest us over expressing the public opinion of ordinary folk, students, farmers, shepherds, labourers, teachers, doctors . . . , people who now have nowhere to turn and nowhere to hide. ( Open Letter to our World Leaders )

This world public opinion against the Afghan war has been clearly expressed and is larger than any number of Wikileaks you seek to suppress. So, come arrest us all as we civilly disobey you. Come arrest us all. ( See excerpt below from Wikipedia’s ‘International public opinion on the war in Afghanistan’ )

Yes, you have the army, police and apparatchik to smother us and to bribe those who are Pavlov-reflexed to money, but you cannot stop us from restoring our voice.

We refuse to prostitute our hearts and minds.

We refuse you.

Not you the human person, but you the greedy system of self-interested power.

Again and again here in Afghanistan, we have seen a hope for non-violence light up; every day we see a yearning for humane relationships, and because of this, love is how we now firmly take our stand.

We will listen to the People on December 19th, on the Global Day of Listening to Afghans and we invite every one of you to pick up your phone to call us, to share one another’s pain, and to call our world to urgent reconciliation. We invite the world public opinion to overwhelm us! (email youthpeacevolunteers@gmail.com to arrange a call).

We wish to invite all the people of the world because when the powers are not listening to the people, listening becomes an act of love, it becomes a solidarity of non-violent resistance.

How can we do any less?

14-year-old Abdulai’s father was killed by the ‘Taliban’ and so, like every other human being, he copes with sorrow, hate, fear and anger.

But, he wakes up to the chronic war days in his land sensing that ‘something is very wrong with the world I’m caught up in’, ‘these elders of the world are not getting it…..’.

How does trillion-deficit killing, followed by the strategy of escalated killing and yet another review for more killing, work?

How does it make anyone safer?

How does it solve the incorruptible corruption, unequalled inequality and inviolate violence we face daily?

Your policies, skewed-ly ‘diagnosed’ and ‘reviewed’ in a cold clinical manner divorced from reality, have been deaf to the concerns and needs of the people, thus we endeavour to have a People’s Afghanistan December Review, because that’s what ordinary people can do.

We would try not to ‘throw’ our shoes at you. We would try to recognize the better side of all human beings and thus continue to serve our commoner’s tea and bread to one and all. But we do ask, plead and demand that you stop your unsustainable, superpower militarism.

We want peace.

We want you out.

With singular sincerity,

Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers

Afghans for Peace

Notes :

“My people, the suppressed millions, are my heroes. They are the real source of any positive change in Afghanistan and their power is stronger than anything else. And anti-war protesters around the world, those who are standing against the destructive policies of world powers. There is a superpower in the world besides the US government — world public opinion.” Malalai Joya

Excerpts from Wikipedia :

International public opinion is largely opposed to the war in Afghanistan.

The 25-nation Pew Global Attitudes survey in June 2009 reported that majorities or pluralities in 18 out of 25 countries want U.S. and NATO to remove their military troops from Afghanistan as soon as possible.

Despite American calls for NATO allies to send more troops to Afghanistan, there was majority or plurality opposition to such action in every one of the NATO countries surveyed: Germany (63% opposition), France (62%), Poland (57%), Canada (55%), Britain (51%), Spain (50%), and Turkey (49%).

In Europe, poll after poll in France, Germany and even Britain show that the European public want their troops to be pulled out and less money spent on the war in Afghanistan

ABC News/BBC/ARD/Washington Post poll of 1,691 Afghan adults from Oct. 29-Nov. 13, 2010

Afghans indicated they were more pessimistic about the direction of their country, less confident about U.S.-led coalition troops providing security and more willing to negotiate with the Taliban than a year ago.

More than half of Afghans interviewed said U.S. and NATO forces should begin withdrawing from the country in mid-2011 or sooner.

“There are the occupation forces from the sky, dropping cluster bombs and depleted uranium, and on the ground there are the fundamentalist warlords and the Taliban, with their own guns. If I should die, and you should choose to carry on my work, you are welcome to visit my grave. Pour some water on it and shout three times. I want to hear your voice.” Malalai Joya

By Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers & Afghans for Peace

Guardian Editor Says Most Startling WikiLeaks Cables Still To Be Released

“In the coming days, we are going to see some quite startling disclosures about Russia, the nature of the Russian state, and about bribery and corruption in other countries, particularly in Central Asia,” says Investigations Executive Editor David Leigh at the Guardian, one of the three newspapers given advanced access to the secret U.S. embassy cables by the whistleblower website, WikiLeaks. “We will see a wrath of disclosures about pretty terrible things going on around the world.” Leigh reviews the major WikiLeaks revelations so far, explains how the 250,000 files were downloaded and given to the newspaper on a thumb drive, and confirms the Guardian gave the files to the New York Times. Additional cables will be disclosed throughout the week. [includes rush transcript]

AMY GOODMAN: The Obama Administration is threatening to prosecute the online whistleblower WikiLeaks while scrambling to contain the global fallout from the group’s latest release of secret government documents. A trove of over 250,000 diplomatic cables from 274 American embassies has sent shockwaves worldwide. The revelations include new details of U.S. espionage on foreign and UN officials, the cover-up of U.S. bomb strikes in Yemen, the urging of Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah for a U.S. attack on Iran, and disparaging internal portraits of foreign leaders. New cables released today show Chinese officials have voiced support for the reunification of the Korean peninsula, should North Korea collapse. Also of note is a memo from the U.S. Embassy in Honduras from 2008 that clearly states the military coup that ousted President Manuel Zelaya was illegal and unconstitutional. The cables also reveal Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, privately questioned the mental health of Argentine President Cristina Kirchner and asked U.S. diplomats to investigate whether she takes medication.

On Monday, Attorney General Eric Holder said the Justice Department and Pentagon are conducting an active, ongoing criminal investigation into the leaking and publication of the documents. The Washington Post reports federal authorities are considering charging WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange under the Espionage Act. At the White House, press secretary Robert Gibbs said the Obama Administration is weighing a range of punitive measures.

ROBERT GIBBS: Obviously, there is an ongoing criminal investigation about the stealing of and dissemination of sensitive and classified information. Secondly, under the administration- I should say administration-wide- we are looking at a whole host of things and I wouldn’t rule anything out.

AMY GOODMAN: An Army intelligence analyst, Bradley Manning, has been imprisoned since May when he was arrested on charges of leaking the classified material. In her first public comments since the cables’ publication, Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, denounced WikiLeaks, calling the latest release an attack on the international community.

HILLARY CLINTON: The United States strongly condemns the illegal disclosure of classified information. It puts people’s lives in danger, threatens our national security, and undermines our efforts to work with other countries to solve shared problems. This disclosure is not just an attack on America’s foreign policy interests. It is an attack on the international community. The alliances and partnerships, the conversations and negotiations that safeguard global security and advance economic prosperity. I am confident that the partnerships that the Obama Administration has worked so hard to build, will withstand this challenge. The president and I have made these partnerships a priority and we are proud of the progress that they have helped achieve and they will remain at the center of our efforts. There is nothing laudable about endangering innocent people. And there is nothing brave about sabotaging the peaceful relations between nations on which our common security depends. There have been examples in history in which official conduct has been made public in the name of exposing wrongdoings or misdeeds. This is not one of those cases.

AMY GOODMAN: Clinton herself is implicated in one of the biggest revelations to emerge from the WikiLeaks cables. The documents show both Clinton and her predecessor, Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, issued directives for spying on foreign officials. U.S. diplomats have been asked to obtain information from the foreign dignitaries they meet including frequent flier numbers, credit card details and even DNA material, like finger prints, iris scans. The United Nations is also a target of the espionage with one cable listing information gathering priorities for U.S. officials at the UN headquarters in New York. At the UN, the spokesperson for Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, Farhan Haq, declined to comment directly on the spying.

FARHAN HAQ: The United Nations is not in a position to comment on the authenticity on the document purporting to request information gathering activities on UN officials and activities. The UN is by its very nature a transparent organization that makes a great deal of information about its activities public and member states.

AMY GOODMAN: Despite refusing to directly criticize the U.S., Haq added that the UN relies on member states to adhere to treaties and agreements about respecting the privileges and immunities of the UN and other member states. Senior U.N. officials have reportedly approached the U.S. government about the spying and could soon make a formal complaint. Meanwhile, Ecuador has offered WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange residency in the country.

For more, I’m joined now from London by David Leigh, Investigations Editor of the Guardian of London. The Guardian and four other newspapers were provided advanced copies of the documents before WikiLeaks made them public. David Leigh, thanks again for joining us on Democracy Now! why don’t you lay out for us what you think are the most important revelations in these cables and why you decided to release them as well.

DAVID LEIGH: These revelations aren’t over yet. In fact, they’ve barely started. We at the Guardian and the other international news organizations will be making revelations, disclosures from now, day-by-day, for probably the next week or more. So, we haven’t seen anything yet, really. We’ve seen so far seen the surprising intelligence about North Korea, that China is willing to see it collapse, in effect. We’ve seen that the Arab leaders are keen to see the UN or United States bomb Iraq- I’m sorry, bomb Iran. We bombed Iraq already. These are the kinds and level of things we’re getting so far. In the coming days, we’re going to see some quite startling disclosures about Russia, the nature of the Russian state and about bribery and corruption in other countries, particularly in Central Asia. We’re going to see a wrath of disclosures about pretty terrible things going on around the world.

AMY GOODMAN: David Leigh, How did you get the documents?

DAVID LEIGH: We got the documents from WikiLeaks.

AMY GOODMAN: And the New York Times, this time around, though it joined with the Guardian and Der Spiegel and a few other news outlets around the world last time in getting them directly from WikiLeaks, this time they didn’t. Explain what happened.

DAVID LEIGH: We don’t regard that as having much significance. The documents were passed around among the media partners in the usual way. Remember, this is the third time that this group of newspapers has done this. We did the Iraq war logs and the Afghanistan war logs also with Der Spiegel in Berlin and with the New York Times. So, it’s the same deal as before.

AMY GOODMAN: So, did – was it you, The Guardian, that gave the Wikileaks documents over to the New York Times this time?

DAVID LEIGH: We were the ones who physically passed them over. I don’t know what significance you have for that.

AMY GOODMAN: Um, hm. Can you compare the release of these documents, this latest trove of diplomatic cables to what has been released before to the Iraq war logs and Afghanistan before that?

DAVID LEIGH: Well, it’s a different quality of material. Those were logs that were pretty sort of raw snapshots in military jargon of ongoing incidents. They were sort of field reports. “Now this is happening. Now that is happening.” This is a completely different kind of material. It’s essentially diplomatic dispatches. They’re written in English, written as pieces of connected prose, and they are carefully considered analysis of reports back to what ambassadors and their subordinates in all these foreign countries want to tell Washington what is going on.

AMY GOODMAN: One of the pieces you’ve done and you’ve done many of them on all of these leaks, but the latest one, David, how 250,000 U.S. embassy cables were leaked from a fake Lady Gaga city to a thumb drive that is a pocket-sized bombshell, the biggest intelligence leak in history. Take us through it.

DAVID LEIGH: Well, you want me to take you through how the mechanism of the leak?

AMY GOODMAN: Yes.

DAVID LEIGH: Well, as we understand it, all of this starts with the United States itself. What they did was they created this gigantic data base of –an archive of these 250,000 cables. They put them not only on the State Department’s classified embassies’ websites, but on SIPRNET, which is the US Defense Department’s military Internet. That circulated to soldiers all across the world, everywhere the U.S. has got bases. As a result, it was accessible to a junior soldier cleared to the secret level and above, a 22-year-old Bradley Manning, according to the subsequent indictment. According to the chat logs Manning had with somebody else, he went in there with a CD marked Lady Gaga, reported to lips sync to it and nod his head to the time of the non-existing music, while all the while covertly downloading this stuff. He walked out with a CD. By the time the Guardian got it, it was on a thumb drive, a tiny little thumb drive and had 1.6 gigabytes of material, which contains 250 million words.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you believe he is the only source of these documents?

DAVID LEIGH: My personal opinion- which isn’t evidence, is yes- he is the only source.

AMY GOODMAN: Does it astound you that a low-level soldier, a low-level intelligence soldier in Iraq, could have access to this amount of information from so many different sources?

DAVID LEIGH: It seems to me and it seems to British diplomats when you tell them about this, a very dumb thing for the state department to have done, in the name of intelligence sharing and information sharing, to have distributed this stuff in such a way that these junior people could get access to it. If they didn’t want it out, it’s in their hands. Don’t create a data base like this. Don’t circulate it to everybody. I know they said it was in the wake of 9/11 that everyone wants to share intelligence, but I do not think it helps anybody. Although, now that it’s happened, the material in there is of immense the value to historians and journalists. So, I’m glad it’s come out.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, the Obama administration threatens to prosecute WikiLeaks. Some influential lawmakers are calling for even harsher actions. On Monday, the incoming Chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, in the United States, Republican Congress member Peter King of New York, says WikiLeaks should be declared a foreign terrorist organization. King spoke to NBC’s Matt Lauer.

MATT LAUER: You would like to see WikiLeaks, the organization that has really served as the messenger for these leaked documents to be declared an FTO or a foreign terrorist organization. That would put them in the same category as Al Qaeda, basically.

PETER KING: Right.

MATT LAUER: What is the likelihood of that happening?

PETER KING: I was disappointed when Miklaszewski said, “It does not appear the government is going to be taking tough legal action.” If American lives are at risk and every top military official had said that, then we have to be serious. We should go after them for violating the Espionage Act. The reason I say “foreign terrorist organization” is that they are engaged in terrorist activity. Their activity is enabling terrorists to kill Americans.

MATT LAUER: Well, aren’t they—

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to go to break. We just lost David Leigh, the Investigations Editor at The Guardian. We’ll try to get him back on, if we can.

By David Leigh & Amy Goodman

Dear Friends and Colleagues:

In the November 29th issue of The New Yorker, John Cassidy asks in a commentary: ”What good is Wall Street?”  He ends his article with a quote from Paul Woolly: “There was a presumption that financial innovation is socially valuable.  The first thing I discovered is that it wasn’t backed by any empirical evidence.  There’s almost none.”

Wall Street sustained losses of US$42.6 billion in 2008, but made US$55 billion in profits the very next year – when most people were coping, and many coping badly, with recession, unemployment and declining asset prices.  In the first quarter of 2010, traders at Goldman Sachs had their best quarter results ever – US$7.4 billion in net revenue.

In securities trading these days, institutional fund managers and speculative high frequency traders are most of the market.  Rarely do they provide capital for new or expanded business enterprise.  Mostly they take cash out of the economy through the buying and selling of existing securities which represent the present value of past capital investment.

Big trading houses hardly ever have a day when they lose money.  This is not taking a chance on a roll of the dice – this is loading the dice in their favor.  It is moving the chips around among the poker players; total wealth is not increased in a trade of securities; cash just changes hands.

If someone buys at five and sells at six to pocket a one dollar profit, what value have they added?   Some liquidity to the market for that security, to be sure, and there is a social good provided by liquid markets.  But beyond that?

They took the dollar profit in exchange for a legal claim on future income and/or capital – a security.  This is rent extraction, not wealth creation.  Rents are paid for access to legal or political authority – as when we pay rent to a landlord, we buy a share of his or her legal title to real property.  Patents and copyrights provide legal opportunities for rent extraction.  Without legal title and the power of government to enforce those property rights, no rents could be charged.

If prices for securities rise, however, there is what is called a “wealth effect.”  People then feel a rising tide of economic prospects and their psychology encourages consumption and borrowing, which do impact the real economy.

More realistic economic wealth creation through financial intermediation aggregates existing wealth from some to transfer its buying power to others to finance enterprise, innovation and growth.  This is most often done through new loans to business and new equity investment in companies, or through hybrid investments like warrants, preferred stock and convertible bonds and debentures.

Traditional banking, investment banking and venture capital provided these financial services.  Insurance and other forms of risk protection and diversification also add real economic value in encouraging investment in enterprise.

But from 1991 to 2000, some 150 venture capital-backed companies a year took in equity capital through Wall Street.  But since 2000, such annual IPO offerings have averaged only about 50 per year.

Capital markets seem to have lost faith in new enterprises and have become captivated by property, derivatives, bonds and every other asset class.

So where will the growth come from to hire workers and pay down national debts?

Lord Adair Turner, Chairman of the UK’s Financial Services Authority, wrote recently that “It is possible for financial activity to extract rents from the real economy rather than deliver economic value.”

If all financial innovation does is create new forms of rent extraction, what good does it do except to take money from the many and give it to the few?

In the United States, six firms – Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo – have assets of US$9.2 trillion – 63% of national GDP.

John Maynard Keynes famously aligned securities exchanges with casinos in their social utility. Did he have a point?  Casinos make a lot of money on millions of small transactions.  They win every time you lose at their tables.  What wealth do they create?  They just take your money and move it to other pockets.

So does a poker game, or craps.  Money moves among players, but the total pot sees no growth in value.  Some go home winners, but others leave as losers to that extent.

The bets made by many securities traders are calculated by algorithms that measure a price as a deviation (higher or lower) from a statistical norm and plot the odds of deviation associated with that price.  If you bet that the price will converge towards the norm, you can successfully arbitrage and make profits.

The algorithms that now control most trading in securities began as attempts to beat the odds in casinos.  Our financial system’s major profit seeking mechanism owes its life and its profits to the techniques of gambling.

Maybe Keynes had a point after all.

Gambling, I would suggest, is a form of extracting rents from the real economy.  Gamblers seek rents associated with their legal rights.  Gambling is all about getting power according to the rules.  The rules of gambling – poker, black-jack, craps, chemin de fer, bridge, if you will – create legal rights in players.  Two of a kind in poker beats any single high card, etc.  If the rules come down in your favor, you have a right to collect.  You suddenly have a valuable property in how the cards or the dice fell.  You can therefore trade in your property for some of the cash money put up by the other players, including the house.

Or, if you gain nothing to trade from the fall of cards or dice, you lose whatever price you paid to join the game.  That entrance fee is also a form of rent, paid to those who “own” the game for access to their assets.

All the money that changes hands in gambling is brought into the casino or the game from the outside – from the real economy.

Rent extraction in gambling brings about a kind of “irrational exuberance” on the part of many players that does not exist in normal market transactions where pricing future returns is more realistic.

The more rent extraction is at work, the less market mechanisms can do their job of providing economically efficient outcomes.  Where rent extraction is at work, the elasticity of supply and demand curves tightens; free market checks and balances have less effect; prices don’t signal true levels of demand or possible supply, and they are artificially high.  It is easier to make money through rent extraction than to be subject to market forces.

Monopolies and cartels create opportunities for rent extraction.  Adam Smith, in his book Wealth of Nations, noted that business owners and managers love to get together and conspire against the public by setting up rigged markets to increase the returns to rent.

Corruption by officials and politicians is another form of rent extraction: use of state power for selfish gain comes at a price paid to those in charge of state authority.  Here, too, market forces are too weak to control prices and economic outcomes.

If it is correct that financial intermediation has more and more become rent extraction, than it should also be correct that we need to give it less and less deference and government advantages.

The profits of financial houses should move back down in proportion to all profits roughly to the proportion that the financial industry contributes real wealth to national GDP.

Disproportionate rent extraction would appear to be highly unethical, in any industry.

Sincerely yours,

Stephen B. Young

Global Executive Director

Caux Round Table

Despite the fact that it was the seventh demolition since last July, this time the destruction of the Bedouin village Al-Arakib in the Israeli Negev was different. The difference is not because the homeless residents have to deal this time with the harsh desert winter; nor in the fact that the bulldozers began razing the homes just minutes before the forty children left for school, thus engraving another violent scene in their memory. Rather, the demolition was different because this time Christian evangelists from the United States and England were involved.

I know this for a fact because right next to the demolished homes, the Jewish National Fund put up a big sign that reads: “GOD-TV FOREST, A Generous donation by God-TV made 1,000,000 tree saplings available to be planted in the land of Israel and also provided for the creation of water projects throughout the Negev.” GOD-TV justifies this contribution by citing the book of Isaiah: “I will turn the desert into pools of water and the parched ground into springs.”

The Jewish National Fund’s objective, however, is not altruistic, but rather to plant a pine or eucalyptus forest on the desert land so that the Bedouins cannot return to their ancestral homes. The practice of planting forests in an attempt to Judaize more territory is by no means new. Right after Israel’s establishment in 1948, the JNF planted millions of trees to cover up the remains of Palestinian villages that had been destroyed during or after the war. The objective was to help ensure that the 750,000 Palestinian residents who either fled or were expelled during the war would never return to their villages and to suppress the fact that they had been the rightful owners of the land before the State of Israel was created. Scores of Palestinian villages disappeared from the landscape in this way, and the grounds were converted into picnic parks, thus helping engender a national amnesia regarding the Palestinian Nakba.

For several years, I thought this practice had been discontinued, but thanks to the JNF’s new bedfellows and the generous donation of Rory and Wendy Alec, who established the international evangelical television channel GOD-TV, within the next few months a million saplings will be planted on land belonging to uprooted Bedouins.

God-TV can afford such lavish gifts, since it boasts a viewership of nearly half a billion people, with 20 million in the United States and 14 million in Britain. The television channel regularly features evangelical leaders such as Joyce Meyer, Creflo Dollar, Benny Hinn, Kenneth Copeland and John Hagee, at least some of whom espouse Christian Dispensationalism and believe that all Jews must convert to Christianity before the Second Coming.

The viewers are asked to open their wallets in order to “sow a seed for God.” In this case, the donations seem to have actually been allocated toward sowing seeds, but these seeds are ones of hate and strife. They are antithetical to Isaiah’s prophecy about the people beating their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks. Indeed, if Isaiah were alive today, he would probably be among the first to lie in front of the bulldozers in an effort to stop the destruction of the Bedouin homes.

By Neve Gordon

Neve Gordon can be contacted through his website www.israelsoccupation.info

In 1958 a young Rupert Murdoch, then owner and editor of Adelaide’s The News, wrote: “In the race between secrecy and truth, it seems inevitable that truth will always win.”

His observation perhaps reflected his father Keith Murdoch’s expose that Australian troops were being needlessly sacrificed by incompetent British commanders on the shores of Gallipoli. The British tried to shut him up but Keith Murdoch would not be silenced and his efforts led to the termination of the disastrous Gallipoli campaign.

Nearly a century later, WikiLeaks is also fearlessly publishing facts that need to be made public.

I grew up in a Queensland country town where people spoke their minds bluntly. They distrusted big government as something that could be corrupted if not watched carefully. The dark days of corruption in the Queensland government before the Fitzgerald inquiry are testimony to what happens when the politicians gag the media from reporting the truth.

These things have stayed with me. WikiLeaks was created around these core values. The idea, conceived in Australia, was to use internet technologies in new ways to report the truth.

WikiLeaks coined a new type of journalism: scientific journalism. We work with other media outlets to bring people the news, but also to prove it is true. Scientific journalism allows you to read a news story, then to click online to see the original document it is based on. That way you can judge for yourself: Is the story true? Did the journalist report it accurately?

Democratic societies need a strong media and WikiLeaks is part of that media. The media helps keep government honest. WikiLeaks has revealed some hard truths about the Iraq and Afghan wars, and broken stories about corporate corruption.

People have said I am anti-war: for the record, I am not. Sometimes nations need to go to war, and there are just wars. But there is nothing more wrong than a government lying to its people about those wars, then asking these same citizens to put their lives and their taxes on the line for those lies. If a war is justified, then tell the truth and the people will decide whether to support it.

If you have read any of the Afghan or Iraq war logs, any of the US embassy cables or any of the stories about the things WikiLeaks has reported, consider how important it is for all media to be able to report these things freely.

WikiLeaks is not the only publisher of the US embassy cables. Other media outlets, including Britain ‘s The Guardian, The New York Times, El Pais in Spain and Der Spiegel in Germany have published the same redacted cables.

Yet it is WikiLeaks, as the co-ordinator of these other groups, that has copped the most vicious attacks and accusations from the US government and its acolytes. I have been accused of treason, even though I am an Australian, not a US, citizen. There have been dozens of serious calls in the US for me to be “taken out” by US special forces. Sarah Palin says I should be “hunted down like Osama bin Laden”, a Republican bill sits before the US Senate seeking to have me declared a “transnational threat” and disposed of accordingly. An adviser to the Canadian Prime Minister’s office has called on national television for me to be assassinated. An American blogger has called for my 20-year-old son, here in Australia, to be kidnapped and harmed for no other reason than to get at me.

And Australians should observe with no pride the disgraceful pandering to these sentiments by Prime Minister Gillard and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have not had a word of criticism for the other media organisations. That is because The Guardian, The New York Times and Der Spiegel are old and large, while WikiLeaks is as yet young and small.

We are the underdogs. The Gillard government is trying to shoot the messenger because it doesn’t want the truth revealed, including information about its own diplomatic and political dealings.

Has there been any response from the Australian government to the numerous public threats of violence against me and other WikiLeaks personnel? One might have thought an Australian prime minister would be defending her citizens against such things, but there have only been wholly unsubstantiated claims of illegality. The Prime Minister and especially the Attorney-General are meant to carry out their duties with dignity and above the fray. Rest assured, these two mean to save their own skins. They will not.

Every time WikiLeaks publishes the truth about abuses committed by US agencies, Australian politicians chant a provably false chorus with the State Department: “You’ll risk lives! National security! You’ll endanger troops!” Then they say there is nothing of importance in what WikiLeaks publishes. It can’t be both. Which is it?

It is neither. WikiLeaks has a four-year publishing history. During that time we have changed whole governments, but not a single person, as far as anyone is aware, has been harmed. But the US , with Australian government connivance, has killed thousands in the past few months alone.

US Secretary of Defence Robert Gates admitted in a letter to the US congress that no sensitive intelligence sources or methods had been compromised by the Afghan war logs disclosure. The Pentagon stated there was no evidence the WikiLeaks reports had led to anyone being harmed in Afghanistan. NATO in Kabul told CNN it couldn’t find a single person who needed protecting. The Australian Department of Defence said the same. No Australian troops or sources have been hurt by anything we have published.

But our publications have been far from unimportant. The US diplomatic cables reveal some startling facts:

The US asked its diplomats to steal personal human material and information from UN officials and human rights groups, including DNA, fingerprints, iris scans, credit card numbers, internet passwords and ID photos, in violation of international treaties. Presumably Australian UN diplomats may be targeted, too.

King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia asked the US Officials in Jordan and Bahrain want Iran ‘s nuclear program stopped by any means available.

Britain’s Iraq inquiry was fixed to protect “US interests”.

Sweden is a covert member of NATO and US intelligence sharing is kept from parliament.

The US is playing hardball to get other countries to take freed detainees from Guantanamo Bay . Barack Obama agreed to meet the Slovenian President only if Slovenia took a prisoner. Our Pacific neighbour Kiribati was offered millions of dollars to accept detainees.

In its landmark ruling in the Pentagon Papers case, the US Supreme Court said “only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government”. The swirling storm around WikiLeaks today reinforces the need to defend the right of all media to reveal the truth.

By Julian Assange

Julian Assange is the editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks.

Copyright 2010 News Limited

When one thinks of trees and the benefit they have for us as humans, the obvious comes to mind: Trees help reduce the effects of global warming by reducing carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere. The photosynthetic process provides the trees with nutrients, and humans with the primary element required to sustain life – oxygen. Trees are often referred to as the “lungs of the world.”

All of the above is mainstream knowledge. It is the basic information we learn as children in grade school. But what if I told you it’s only the tip of the iceberg? Trees are more than just the “lungs of the world”. Their role on this earth is pervasive, yet so often taken for granted.

The tree as a cooperative

A tree stands tall with its stem and crown. This is visible to you as you admire it. The common mental representation of a tree is made of up of just those ‘above ground’ parts.

The parts of the tree that we often do not think about are the humus and detritus collected at the soil surface boundary, and the root and root associates under our feet. These are equally, if not more, essential to the existence of the tree than the more visibly pronounced parts. In essence, a tree is perpetually standing in its own decomposition. Much of the tree, as it sheds its weight many times over to earth and air, eventually becomes grass, fungus, insect life, birds and mammals. It is the cooperation of these many ‘by-products’ that make a tree so rich – they exist because of the tree, belong with it and function as part of it. Birds nest, squirrels burrow and eat fungus, and insects prune and assist in decomposing the surplus leaves and activate essential soil bacteria. Animals are messengers to the tree and trees act as a garden for animals. This is a pure example of life depending on life. It is a total being that involves minerals, plants, animals, debris (detritus) and life. All of these elements make up the ‘tree cooperative’.

The tree as a protector

Trees protect us from many elements. Forest edges are the strongest collection of trees and should never be cut down. Trees adapt to withstand high winds by spreading their root mats to rely on their weight or anchoring their roots deep in rock crevices. They create special wood cells to bear the tension and compression from wind. With the wind come many particles of dust, ice, sand and other small particles. Within a few hundred meters, a forest of trees can remove fine dusts and industrial aerosols. Therefore, trees protect of from wind that could be damaging to our habitats and small air particles that could be damaging to our lungs.

The tree as a moderator

Trees moderate temperature due to two distinct processes – evaporation and condensation. Evaporation causes local heat loss during the day which cools the air in hot weather. Condensation causes local heat gain which warms the air at night. Additionally, leaves have twice the specific heat (the heat capacity per unit mass of a body) than soil, meaning plants can be up at 15 degrees warmer than their surrounding environment. In certain climates, trees even act as dehumidifiers by directly absorbing moisture in the air. If dry hot air enters a forest, it is shaded, cooled, and humidified. If cold humid air enters the forest, it is warmed, dehumidified and slow released through the leaves of the trees. As humans, we can strategically place trees and plants to moderate temperature. Reddish and white coloured leaves reflect light (up to 85%). This reflection can be used to cool down areas in warm summer months. Dark green leaves only reflect about 2% of light; the rest is absorbed and radiated as heat. This absorption and radiation of heat can be used to provide heat during cold winter months. The trees moderate extreme temperatures and humidity so it is tolerable enough to accommodate life.

Not only do trees moderate temperature, they moderate and conserve incoming energy. Every tree or plant species intercepts raindrops, decreasing the impact of the raindrops to prevent erosion. The leaves catch the rain, some of which is absorbed through them as required, and the remainder is left to return to the air through evaporation. Any rain that falls through the canopy (throughfall) has, on its way down, collected plant cells and nutrients and is much richer than regular rainwater. This throughfall is then directed in patters to peripheral roots, and serve all the needs of growth in that forest. Therefore trees use, collect, enrich and properly direct water so it can be optimized in the forest system naturally with no human intervention.

The tree as a creator

Trees play a key role in the creation of soil by producing root pressure and humic acid to breakdown the rock underground. Trees also contribute to the creation of the atmosphere through gaseous exchange (the production of oxygen) and the establishment and maintenance of the water -vapour cycle.

Furthermore, trees create precipitation through compression, condensation, evapo-transpiration and melting:

Wind blowing at a forest edge will be compressed. This compression causes more water vapour which, in turn, cools the ascending air. This phenomenon, referred to as an “Ekman Spiral”, can produce rainfall in the right conditions. Therefore, lines of trees impact the air moving over them which can affect the climate and rainfall in the local area. This upward spiral of humid air coming up from the forest carries insects, pollen, and bacteria. These organic particles create the nuclei for rain. Materials given up by vegetation may be a critical factor for rainfall inland from forests.

Along coastline, warmer land surface causes cool in-land air flow. When this air is humid, it can fall on leaves as condensation (droplets of water). In this situation, condensation precipitation can be higher than rainfall precipitation. Examples can be found as rain forest along the coasts of Hawaii, Washington and Oregon as well as the redwood forests of California. A large tree can increase the available surface for condensation due to the large surface area given by leaves. Bigger trees intercept more moist air, thus creating more condensation. Fog also increases the precipitation through condensation over that of clear air.

Forests create clouds. Clouds are made through evaporation off the leaves by day and water transpiration as part of life process. Trees can return up to 75% of their water to air – which can be enough to form new rain clouds. The 25% water that is not returned to the air from trees is sent down into the soil and eventually reaches the streams and rivers. Forested areas return ten times as much moisture as bear ground and twice as much as grasslands. It is highly likely that the deforestation of an area is directly related to downwind drought. It is important to note that the forest is continually recycling water to air and rain whilst producing 50% of its own rain.

Trees also slow the melting of snow and prevent the snow sublimation directly to air. The benefits of trees are not limited to coast line, but can be seen on any high slope. Even a small belt of trees entraps large quantities of drifting snow, and the release of this snowmelt is a more gradual process.

The tree as a teacher

Trees indicate local wind direction and intensity and from these indicators we can place windbreaks to reduce heat loss in homes, avoid damage from catastrophic winds and to steer the winds to well-placed wind turbines. They are biologically equipped to protect us from strong winds that could be damaging to our habitats. Trees also teach us about nature – through observing the ‘tree cooperative’, we can identify key behaviours and patterns of animals, bacteria and fungi, insects, water, sun and shade.

By Julia Mitchell

Editorial Notes

From the author’s blog: Southern Alberta Permaculture (SAP) is a Lethbridge-based organization seeking to engage its local community through educational opportunities and consulting expertise.

The SAP founders Jason Baranec and Julia Mitchell were recently inspired by Rob & Michelle Avis of Verge Permaculture in Calgary, AB. “When looking at the systems we engage every day, we need to consider the relationship that they hold with us, and use that as a design starting point,” says Baranec. “Permaculture values the marginal and looks at needs and yields all around us to discover hidden opportunity. It is often said that it’s not the solar panel, the rain barrel, or the garden that Permaculture is concerned with; it’s how they can be interconnected through design.”

Bradley Manning, the 22-year-old U.S. Army Private accused of leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks, has never been convicted of that crime, nor of any other crime. Despite that, he has been detained at the U.S. Marine brig in Quantico, Virginia for five months — and for two months before that in a military jail in Kuwait — under conditions that constitute cruel and inhumane treatment and, by the standards of many nations, even torture. Interviews with several people directly familiar with the conditions of Manning’s detention, ultimately including a Quantico brig official (Lt. Brian Villiard) who confirmed much of what they conveyed, establishes that the accused leaker is subjected to detention conditions likely to create long-term psychological injuries.

Since his arrest in May, Manning has been a model detainee, without any episodes of violence or disciplinary problems. He nonetheless was declared from the start to be a “Maximum Custody Detainee,” the highest and most repressive level of military detention, which then became the basis for the series of inhumane measures imposed on him.

From the beginning of his detention, Manning has been held in intensive solitary confinement. For 23 out of 24 hours every day — for seven straight months and counting — he sits completely alone in his cell. Even inside his cell, his activities are heavily restricted; he’s barred even from exercising and is under constant surveillance to enforce those restrictions. For reasons that appear completely punitive, he’s being denied many of the most basic attributes of civilized imprisonment, including even a pillow or sheets for his bed (he is not and never has been on suicide watch). For the one hour per day when he is freed from this isolation, he is barred from accessing any news or current events programs. Lt. Villiard protested that the conditions are not “like jail movies where someone gets thrown into the hole,” but confirmed that he is in solitary confinement, entirely alone in his cell except for the one hour per day he is taken out.

In sum, Manning has been subjected for many months without pause to inhumane, personality-erasing, soul-destroying, insanity-inducing conditions of isolation similar to those perfected at America’s Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado: all without so much as having been convicted of anything. And as is true of many prisoners subjected to warped treatment of this sort, the brig’s medical personnel now administer regular doses of anti-depressants to Manning to prevent his brain from snapping from the effects of this isolation.

Just by itself, the type of prolonged solitary confinement to which Manning has been subjected for many months is widely viewed around the world as highly injurious, inhumane, punitive, and arguably even a form of torture. In his widely praised March, 2009 New Yorker article — entitled “Is Long-Term Solitary Confinement Torture?” — the surgeon and journalist Atul Gawande assembled expert opinion and personal anecdotes to demonstrate that, as he put it, “all human beings experience isolation as torture.” By itself, prolonged solitary confinement routinely destroys a person’s mind and drives them into insanity. A March, 2010 article in The Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law explains that “solitary confinement is recognized as difficult to withstand; indeed, psychological stressors such as isolation can be as clinically distressing as physical torture.”

For that reason, many Western nations — and even some non-Western nations notorious for human rights abuses — refuse to employ prolonged solitary confinement except in the most extreme cases of prisoner violence. “It’s an awful thing, solitary,” John McCain wrote of his experience in isolated confinement in Vietnam. “It crushes your spirit.” As Gawande documented: “A U.S. military study of almost a hundred and fifty naval aviators returned from imprisonment in Vietnam . . . reported that they found social isolation to be as torturous and agonizing as any physical abuse they suffered.” Gawande explained that America’s application of this form of torture to its own citizens is what spawned the torture regime which President Obama vowed to end:

This past year, both the Republican and the Democratic Presidential candidates came out firmly for banning torture and closing the facility in Guantánamo Bay, where hundreds of prisoners have been held in years-long isolation. Neither Barack Obama nor John McCain, however, addressed the question of whether prolonged solitary confinement is torture. . . .

This is the dark side of American exceptionalism. . . . Our willingness to discard these standards for American prisoners made it easy to discard the Geneva Conventions prohibiting similar treatment of foreign prisoners of war, to the detriment of America’s moral stature in the world. In much the same way that a previous generation of Americans countenanced legalized segregation, ours has countenanced legalized torture. And there is no clearer manifestation of this than our routine use of solitary confinement . . . .

It’s one thing to impose such punitive, barbaric measures on convicts who have proven to be violent when around other prisoners; at the Supermax in Florence, inmates convicted of the most heinous crimes and who pose a threat to prison order and the safety of others are subjected to worse treatment than what Manning experiences. But it’s another thing entirely to impose such conditions on individuals, like Manning, who have been convicted of nothing and have never demonstrated an iota of physical threat or disorder.

In 2006, a bipartisan National Commission on America’s Prisons was created and it called for the elimination of prolonged solitary confinement. Its Report documented that conditions whereby “prisoners end up locked in their cells 23 hours a day, every day. . . is so severe that people end up completely isolated, living in what can only be described as torturous conditions.” The Report documented numerous psychiatric studies of individuals held in prolonged isolation which demonstrate “a constellation of symptoms that includes overwhelming anxiety, confusion and hallucination, and sudden violent and self-destructive outbursts.” The above-referenced article from the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law states: “Psychological effects can include anxiety, depression, anger, cognitive disturbances, perceptual distortions, obsessive thoughts, paranoia, and psychosis.”

When one exacerbates the harms of prolonged isolation with the other deprivations to which Manning is being subjected, long-term psychiatric and even physical impairment is likely. Gawande documents that “EEG studies going back to the nineteen-sixties have shown diffuse slowing of brain waves in prisoners after a week or more of solitary confinement.” Medical tests conducted in 1992 on Yugoslavian prisoners subjected to an average of six months of isolation — roughly the amount to which Manning has now been subjected — “revealed brain abnormalities months afterward; the most severe were found in prisoners who had endured either head trauma sufficient to render them unconscious or, yes, solitary confinement. Without sustained social interaction, the human brain may become as impaired as one that has incurred a traumatic injury.” Gawande’s article is filled with horrifying stories of individuals subjected to isolation similar to or even less enduring than Manning’s who have succumbed to extreme long-term psychological breakdown.

Manning is barred from communicating with any reporters, even indirectly, so nothing he has said can be quoted here. But David House, a 23-year-old MIT researcher who befriended Manning after his detention (and then had his laptops, camera and cellphone seized by Homeland Security when entering the U.S.) is one of the few people to have visited Manning several times at Quantico. He describes palpable changes in Manning’s physical appearance and behavior just over the course of the several months that he’s been visiting him. Like most individuals held in severe isolation, Manning sleeps much of the day, is particularly frustrated by the petty, vindictive denial of a pillow or sheets, and suffers from less and less outdoor time as part of his one-hour daily removal from his cage.

This is why the conditions under which Manning is being detained were once recognized in the U.S. — and are still recognized in many Western nations — as not only cruel and inhumane, but torture. More than a century ago, U.S. courts understood that solitary confinement was a barbaric punishment that severely harmed the mental and physical health of those subjected to it. The Supreme Court’s 1890 decision in In re Medley noted that as a result of solitary confinement as practiced in the early days of the United States, many “prisoners fell, after even a short confinement, into a semi-fatuous condition . . . and others became violently insane; others still, committed suicide; while those who stood the ordeal better . . . [often] did not recover sufficient mental activity to be of any subsequent service to the community.” And in its 1940 decision in Chambers v. Florida, the Court characterized prolonged solitary confinement as “torture” and compared it to “[t]he rack, the thumbscrew, [and] the wheel.”

The inhumane treatment of Manning may have international implications as well. There are multiple proceedings now pending in the European Union Human Rights Court, brought by “War on Terror” detainees contesting their extradition to the U.S. on the ground that the conditions under which they likely will be held — particularly prolonged solitary confinement — violate the European Convention on Human Rights, which (along with the Convention Against Torture) bars EU states from extraditing anyone to any nation where there is a real risk of inhumane and degrading treatment. The European Court of Human Rights has in the past found detention conditions violative of those rights (in Bulgaria) where “the [detainee] spent 23 hours a day alone in his cell; had limited interaction with other prisoners; and was only allowed two visits per month.” From the Journal article referenced above:

International treaty bodies and human rights experts, including the Human Rights Committee, the Committee against Torture, and the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture, have concluded that solitary confinement may amount to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment in violation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Convention against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman, and Degrading Treatment or Punishment. They have specifically criticized supermax confinement in the United States because of the mental suffering it inflicts.

Subjecting a detainee like Manning to this level of prolonged cruel and inhumane detention can thus jeopardize the ability of the U.S. to secure extradition for other prisoners, as these conditions are viewed in much of the civilized world as barbaric. Moreover, because Manning holds dual American and U.K. citizenship (his mother is British), it is possible for British agencies and human rights organizations to assert his consular rights against these oppressive conditions. At least some preliminary efforts are underway in Britain to explore that mechanism as a means of securing more humane treatment for Manning. Whatever else is true, all of this illustrates what a profound departure from international norms is the treatment to which the U.S. Government is subjecting him.

* * * * *

The plight of Manning has largely been overshadowed by the intense media fixation on WikiLeaks, so it’s worth underscoring what it is that he’s accused of doing and what he said in his own reputed words about these acts. If one believes the authenticity of the highly edited chat logs of Manning’s online conversations with Adrian Lamo that have been released by Wired (that magazine inexcusably continues to conceal large portions of those logs), Manning clearly believed that he was a whistle-blower acting with the noblest of motives, and probably was exactly that. If, for instance, he really is the leaker of the Apache helicopter attack video — a video which sparked very rare and much-needed realization about the visceral truth of what American wars actually entail — as well as the war and diplomatic cables revealing substantial government deceit, brutality, illegality and corruption, then he’s quite similar to Daniel Ellsberg. Indeed, Ellsberg himself said the very same thing about Manning in June on Democracy Now in explaining why he considers the Army Private to be a “hero”:

The fact is that what Lamo reports Manning is saying has a very familiar and persuasive ring to me. He reports Manning as having said that what he had read and what he was passing on were horrible — evidence of horrible machinations by the US backdoor dealings throughout the Middle East and, in many cases, as he put it, almost crimes. And let me guess that — he’s not a lawyer, but I’ll guess that what looked to him like crimes are crimes, that he was putting out. We know that he put out, or at least it’s very plausible that he put out, the videos that he claimed to Lamo. And that’s enough to go on to get them interested in pursuing both him and the other.

And so, what it comes down, to me, is — and I say throwing caution to the winds here — is that what I’ve heard so far of Assange and Manning — and I haven’t met either of them — is that they are two new heroes of mine.

To see why that’s so, just recall some of what Manning purportedly said about why he chose to leak, at least as reflected in the edited chat logs published by Wired:

Lamo: what’s your endgame plan, then?. . .

Manning: well, it was forwarded to [WikiLeaks] – and god knows what happens now – hopefully worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms – if not, than [sic] we’re doomed – as a species – i will officially give up on the society we have if nothing happens – the reaction to the video gave me immense hope; CNN’s iReport was overwhelmed; Twitter exploded – people who saw, knew there was something wrong . . . Washington Post sat on the video… David Finkel acquired a copy while embedded out here. . . . – i want people to see the truth… regardless of who they are… because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public.

if i knew then, what i knew now – kind of thing, or maybe im just young, naive, and stupid . . . im hoping for the former – it cant be the latter – because if it is… were fucking screwed (as a society) – and i dont want to believe that we’re screwed.

Manning described the incident which first made him seriously question the U.S. Government: when he was instructed to work on the case of Iraqi “insurgents” who had been detained for distributing so-called “insurgent” literature which, when Manning had it translated, turned out to be nothing more than “a scholarly critique against PM Maliki”:

i had an interpreter read it for me… and when i found out that it was a benign political critique titled “Where did the money go?” and following the corruption trail within the PM’s cabinet… i immediately took that information and *ran* to the officer to explain what was going on… he didn’t want to hear any of it… he told me to shut up and explain how we could assist the FPs in finding *MORE* detainees…

i had always questioned the things worked, and investigated to find the truth… but that was a point where i was a *part* of something… i was actively involved in something that i was completely against…

And Manning explained why he never considered the thought of selling this classified information to a foreign nation for substantial profit or even just secretly transmitting it to foreign powers, as he easily could have done:

Manning: i mean what if i were someone more malicious- i could’ve sold to russia or china, and made bank?

Lamo: why didn’t you?

Manning: because it’s public data

Lamo: i mean, the cables

Manning: it belongs in the public domain -information should be free – it belongs in the public domain – because another state would just take advantage of the information… try and get some edge – if its out in the open… it should be a public good.

That’s a whistleblower in the purest and most noble form: discovering government secrets of criminal and corrupt acts and then publicizing them to the world not for profit, not to give other nations an edge, but to trigger “worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms.” Given how much Manning has been demonized — at the same time that he’s been rendered silent by the ban on his communication with any media — it’s worthwhile to keep all of that in mind.

But ultimately, what one thinks of Manning’s alleged acts is irrelevant to the issue here. The U.S. ought at least to abide by minimal standards of humane treatment in how it detains him. That’s true for every prisoner, at all times. But departures from such standards are particularly egregious where, as here, the detainee has merely been accused, but never convicted, of wrongdoing. These inhumane conditions make a mockery of Barack Obama’s repeated pledge to end detainee abuse and torture, as prolonged isolation — exacerbated by these other deprivations — is at least as damaging, as violative of international legal standards, and almost as reviled around the world, as the waterboard, hypothermia and other Bush-era tactics that caused so much controversy.

What all of this achieves is clear. Having it known that the U.S. could and would disappear people at will to “black sites,” assassinate them with unseen drones, imprison them for years without a shred of due process even while knowing they were innocent, torture them mercilessly, and in general acts as a lawless and rogue imperial power created a climate of severe intimidation and fear. Who would want to challenge the U.S. Government in any way — even in legitimate ways — knowing that it could and would engage in such lawless, violent conduct without any restraints or repercussions?

That is plainly what is going on here. Anyone remotely affiliated with WikiLeaks, including American citizens (and plenty of other government critics), has their property seized and communications stored at the border without so much as a warrant. Julian Assange — despite never having been charged with, let alone convicted of, any crime — has now spent more than a week in solitary confinement with severe restrictions under what his lawyer calls “Dickensian conditions.” But Bradley Manning has suffered much worse, and not for a week, but for seven months, with no end in sight. If you became aware of secret information revealing serious wrongdoing, deceit and/or criminality on the part of the U.S. Government, would you — knowing that you could and likely would be imprisoned under these kinds of repressive, torturous conditions for months on end without so much as a trial: just locked away by yourself 23 hours a day without recourse — be willing to expose it? That’s the climate of fear and intimidation which these inhumane detention conditions are intended to create.

* * * * *

Those wishing to contribute to Bradley Manning’s defense fund can do so here. All of those means are reputable, but everyone should carefully read the various options presented in order to decide which one seems best.

UPDATE: I was contacted by Lt. Villiard, who claims there is one factual inaccuracy in what I wrote: specifically, he claims that Manning is not restricted from accessing news or current events during the proscribed time he is permitted to watch television. That is squarely inconsistent with reports from those with first-hand knowledge of Manning’s detention, but it’s a fairly minor dispute in the scheme of things.

By Glenn Greenwald

The Gaza massacre, which Israel launched two years ago today, did not end on 18 January 2009, but continues. It was not only a massacre of human bodies, but of the truth and of justice. Only our actions can help bring it to an end.

The UN-commissioned Goldstone Report documented evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in an attack aimed at the very “foundations of civilian life in Gaza” — schools, industrial infrastructure, water, sanitation, flour mills, mosques, universities, police stations, government ministries, agriculture and thousands of homes. Yet like so many other inquiries documenting Israeli crimes, the Goldstone Report sits gathering dust as the United States, the European Union, the Palestinian Authority and certain Arab governments colluded to ensure it would not translate into action.

Israel launched the attack, after breaking the ceasefire it had negotiated with Hamas the previous June, under the bogus pretext of stopping rocket firing from Gaza.

During those horrifying weeks from 27 December 2008 to 18 January 2009, Israel’s merciless bombardment killed 1,417 people according to the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights in Gaza.

They were infants like Farah Ammar al-Helu, one-year-old, killed in al-Zaytoun. They were schoolgirls or schoolboys, like Islam Khalil Abu Amsha, 12, of Shajaiyeh and Mahmoud Khaled al-Mashharawi, 13, of al-Daraj. They were elders like Kamla Ali al-Attar, 82 of Beit Lahiya and Madallah Ahmed Abu Rukba, 81, of Jabaliya; They were fathers and husbands like Dr. Ehab Jasir al-Shaer. They were police officers like Younis Muhammad al-Ghandour, aged 24. They were ambulance drivers and civil defense workers. They were homemakers, school teachers, farmers, sanitation workers and builders. And yes, some of them were fighters, battling as any other people would to defend their communities with light and primitive weapons against Israel’s onslaught using the most advanced weaponry the United States and European Union could provide.

The names of the dead fill 100 pages, but nothing can fill the void they left in their families and communities (“The Dead in the course of the Israeli recent military offensive on the Gaza strip between 27 December 2008 and 18 January 2009,” [PDF] Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, 18 March 2009).

These were not the first to die in Israeli massacres and they have not been the last. Dozens of people have been killed since the end of Israel’s “Operation Cast Lead,” the latest Salameh Abu Hashish last week, a 20-year old shepherd shot by Israeli occupation forces as he tended his animals in northern Gaza.

But the tragedy does not end with those who were killed. Along with thousands permanently injured, there is the incalculable psychological cost of children growing up without parents, of parents burying their children, and the mental trauma that Israel’s offensive and the ongoing siege has done to almost everyone in Gaza. There are the as yet unknown consequences of subjecting Gaza’s 700,000 children to a toxic water supply for years on end.

The siege robs 1.5 million people not just of basic goods, reconstruction supplies (virtually nothing has been rebuilt in Gaza), and access to medical care but of their basic rights and freedoms to travel, to study, to be part of the world. It robs promising young people of their ambitions and futures. It deprives the planet of all that they would have been able to create and offer. By cutting Gaza off from the outside world, Israel hopes to make us forget that the those inside are human.

Two years after the crime, Gaza remains a giant prison for a population whose unforgivable sin in the eyes of Israel and its allies is to be refugees from lands that Israel took by ethnic cleansing.

Israel’s violence against Gaza, like its violence against Palestinians everywhere, is the logical outcome of the racism that forms the inseparable core of Zionist ideology and practice: Palestinians are merely a nuisance, like brush or rocks to be cleared away in Zionism’s relentless conquest of the land. This is what all Palestinians are struggling against, as an open letter today from dozens of civil society organizations in Gaza reminds us:

“We Palestinians of Gaza want to live at liberty to meet Palestinian friends or family from Tulkarem, Jerusalem or Nazareth; we want to have the right to travel and move freely. We want to live without fear of another bombing campaign that leaves hundreds of our children dead and many more injured or with cancers from the contamination of Israel’s white phosphorous and chemical warfare. We want to live without the humiliations at Israeli checkpoints or the indignity of not providing for our families because of the unemployment brought about by the economic control and the illegal siege. We are calling for an end to the racism that underpins all this oppression.”

Those of us who live outside Gaza can look to the people there for inspiration and strength; even after all this deliberate cruelty, they have not surrendered. But we cannot expect them to bear this burden alone or ignore the appalling cost Israel’s unrelenting persecution has on the minds and bodies of people in Gaza or on society itself. We must also heed their calls to action.

One year ago, I joined more than a thousand people from dozens of countries on the Gaza Freedom March in an attempt to reach Gaza to commemorate the first anniversary of the massacre. We found our way blocked by the Egyptian government which remains complicit, with US backing, in the Israeli siege. And although we did not reach Gaza, other convoys before, and after, such as Viva Palestina did, only after severe obstruction and limitations by Egypt.

Yesterday, the Mavi Marmara returned to Istanbul where it was met dockside by thousands of people. In May the ship was part of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla which set out to break the siege by sea, only to be attacked and hijacked in international waters by Israeli commandos who killed nine people and injured dozens. Even that massacre has not deterred more people from seeking to break the siege; the Asian Convoy to Gaza is on its way, and several other efforts are being planned.

We may look at all these initiatives and say that despite their enormous cost — including in human lives — the siege remains unbroken, as world governments — the so-called “international community” — continue to ensure Israeli impunity. Two years later, Gaza remains in rubble, and Israel keeps the population always on the edge of a deliberately-induced humanitarian catastrophe while allowing just enough supplies to appease international opinion. It would be easy to be discouraged.

However, we must remember that the Palestinian people in Gaza are not objects of an isolated humanitarian cause, but partners in the struggle for justice and freedom throughout Palestine. Breaking the siege of Gaza would be a milestone on that march.

Haneen Zoabi, a Palestinian member of the Israeli parliament and a passenger on the Mavi Marmara explained last October in an interview with The Electronic Intifada that Israeli society and government do not view their conflict with the Palestinians as one that must be resolved by providing justice and equality to victims, but merely as a “security” problem. Zoabi observed that the vast majority of Israelis believe Israel has largely “solved” the security problem: in the West Bank with the apartheid wall and “security coordination” between Israeli occupation forces and the collaborationist Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, and in Gaza with the siege.

Israeli society, Zoabi concluded, “doesn’t feel the need for peace. They don’t perceive occupation as a problem. They don’t perceive the siege as a problem. They don’t perceive oppressing the Palestinians as a problem, and they don’t pay the price of occupation or the price of [the] siege [of Gaza].”

Thus the convoys and flotillas are an essential part of a larger effort to make Israel understand that it does have a problem and it can never be treated as a normal state until it ends its oppression and occupation of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and fully respects the rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinian refugees. And even if governments continue to stand by and do nothing, global civil society is showing the way with these efforts to break the siege, and with the broader Palestinian-led campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS).

Amid all the suffering, Palestinians have not celebrated many victories in the two years since the Gaza massacre. But there are signs that things are moving in the right direction. Israel begs for US-endorsed “peace negotiations” precisely because it knows that while the “peace process” provides cover for its ongoing crimes, it will never be required to give up anything or grant any rights to Palestinians in such a “process.”

Yet Israel is mobilizing all its resources to fight the global movement for justice, especially BDS, that has gained so much momentum since the Gaza massacre. There can be no greater confirmation that this movement brings justice within our grasp. Our memorial to all the victims must not be just an annual commemoration, but the work we do every day to make the ranks of this movement grow.

By Ali Abunimah

Ali Abunimah is co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse and is a contributor to The Goldstone Report: The Legacy of the Landmark Investigation of the Gaza Conflict (Nation Books).

1. Since the earth is finite in size both economic and population growth must cease. No power on earth or in the heavens will permit infinite growth on the finite earth. Nothing humanity can do or say will permit infinite growth on the finite earth. New technology, recycling, environmentalism, and even a possible second or third green revolution will not permit either the economy or the human population to continue to grow. Any person who advocates economic growth or economic stimulation may be causing the short term destruction of humanity as no person knows the level of economic activity which will cause the that to happen. In addition, no person knows the level of economic activity which will permit the long term survival of our species.

2. For the last several hundreds of years, and probably, at least, since the start of agriculture and civilization every aspect of society has been designed for “more” and designed for “growth”. Since growth will cease and “more” cannot continue, every aspect of society must be reevaluated and reconsidered. There is a strong probability that every aspect of society will have to be drastically modified to conform to the new paradigm. Every aspect of society includes, but is not limited to, religion, government, charity, justice, morality, life, and death.

3. Both the economy of the world and the human population grow in a compound/geometric/exponential manner and not in an arithmetic manner. Compound/geometric/exponential growth is the most powerful force in the universe, it overwhelms everything. Nothing can withstand the power of that type of growth. At a compound growth rate of one-half of one percent (0.005) per year something will double about every 140 years; at one percent(0.01) it will double about every 70 years; at two percent (0.02) it will double about every 35 years; and at three percent (0.03) it will double in slightly less than 24 years–for the purpose of simplicity I will use 24 years.

Number of years at the percentages set forth above

……………………………………………..0.005…….0.01………… 0.02 ………..0.03

Two times as large………. ………140 ………..70 …………….35……………….. 24

Four times as large………..,,,,,,,,, 280……….140…………… 70………………. 48

Eight times as large………………… 420………… 210………… 105 ………………72

Sixteen times as large………………. 560 ………….280…………. 140…………… 96

Thirty-two times as large…………… 700…………… 350………. 175…………… 120

One thousand times as large………….. 1,400……….. 700…………. 350………….. 240

One million times as large………………. 2,800………… 1,400…………. 700…………… 480

One billion times as large…………………… 4,200…………… 2,100………… 1,050 ……….720

While the following statement cannot be proven with absolute certainty, it is as close to an absolute certainty as any statement ever made by any human being—humanity will destroy itself before the economy or the human population grew by a factor of 32 and that would take between 120 and 700 years depending on the annual growth rate. A very strong argument can be made that the resources of the earth cannot and will not support the current human population for a period of 500 years at the current usage by humanity of the earth’s finite resources. Choose any growth rate you desire and you can easily determine when humanity will destroy itself, if either economic or population were to continue to grow.

4. Ultimately the level of the human population will be determined by level of the renewable resources the earth can provide to humanity on an annual basis for an extended period of time as modified by the energy received from the sun. Humanity can use its collective intelligence to increase the efficiency of usage of the resources provided by the earth and humanity can increase the resources provided by the earth by using the energy received from the sun. However, neither of these will permit infinite economic or population growth on the finite earth and ultimately humanity must realize that its population level will be determined by the annual amount of resources the earth can provide for an extended period of time. In my opinion (and I am stating it very clearly to be my opinion) the earth cannot support more than 300-500 million human beings for any period of time greater than 500 years. I want to make it absolutely clear that my opinion is not based on any mathematical calculation. Rather my opinion is based upon a review of the problems presently facing our species.

5. Population growth can be reduced to zero or made negative by three and only three ways–a) By violence, starvation, rape, disease, ethnic cleansing and other horrors after humanity has exceeded the carrying capacity of the earth; b) By the voluntary action of all of humanity (and by all of humanity I mean every group, nation, race, religion, and even every family and person) for as long as humanity inhabits the earth; and c) By coercive population control. Since population growth will cease humanity must choose the method it will use to reduce population growth to zero or make it negative, either by making a choice or nature will make that choice and that choice will be by “a” set forth at the beginning of this paragraph

6. Population growth will not be reduced to zero or made negative by each male fathering only one child and each female giving birth to one child. Rather, population growth will be reduced by humanity being divided into two groups– a) Those that reproduce and b) Those that die before reproducing or are not permitted to reproduce. Never once since life began on the earth has population been controlled by each male fathering only one child and each female giving birth to one child. In every single case, without even one exception, over the last 3.6-4.0 billion years population growth for every living species has been reduced by dividing the population into the two groups described in this paragraph. The only choice humanity has is to determine how the division into two groups will be made. If humanity does not use its collective intelligence to make that division, nature will make it by violence and the other ways described in “a” in paragraph 5 above.

7. There are two and only two times at which population growth can be reduced–a) After birth; and b) Before birth. Population growth will be reduced after birth when humanity exceeds the carrying capacity of the planet and at that time it will be reduced by the horrors described in”a” in paragraph 5 above. Population growth can be reduced before birth by artificial birth control and abortion. Abortion is required, since even the best methods of birth control sometimes fail and/or are not used properly. The rhythm method demanded by the Catholic Church is not birth control. It is called Vatican Roulette for a very good reason–its failure rate.

8. In the event that population growth is reduced by the horrors set forth in “a” in paragraph 5 (violence, starvation, rape, disease, ethnic cleansing, and other horrors), in all probability humanity will be unable to ever, or at least for thousands of years, restart civilization. This will be caused by the fact that humanity has used up all of the resources necessary to restart civilization prior to the violence or as part of the violence. Humanity will return to the animal state—-born, eat, reproduce, defecate, and die.