krebscycle

Assange should go to Sweden to face rape charges, but he should be guaranteed no hooded departure to face espionage charges in the United States – as Ecuador has requested. I’m not a fan of WikiLeaks and think their publication of Bradley Manning’s leaks was irresponsible, but US law is not world law and the Espionage act was aimed at US citizens/residents. The theory that powerful nations should be able to export their law worldwide is a dangerous one – as is the disgusting UK threat to send cops into the Ecuador embassy. I don’t think China should be able to extradite dissidents or critics from other countries or pluck applicants for political asylum from embassies. I don’t think the UK should be imposing its repressive libel law on what people say in the United States.  I don’t think the UK should be able to intervene in financial disputes between vulture capitalists and poor countries either. I don’t want Russia to extradite Europeans or Russian exiles for mocking the Russian Orthodox Church.  US domestic law is domestic.  Extradition should be reserved for fugitives (people who fled domestic jurisdiction  for what are crimes in both countries) and war criminals.

While I’m at it, the prosecution of Bradley Manning seems to me to be more of a coverup than anything else. Manning is as much a diabolical plotter as he is a heroic truthteller. Both those stories are transparent nonsense. Manning is clearly a deeply confused young man who is mixed up about what he did and why. I don’t have any objection to him receiving legal consequences for what he did: he is a US Soldier who violated laws and irresponsibly put US diplomats at risk. But someone decided to put secret and sensitive US documents on a computer network open to millions of military and other government personnel.  Someone decided that it was ok to connect the network to PCs with DVD burners and to not monitor and control that access. Someone decided to give Manning access to this data even though he was so distraught and so unstable he punched his commanding officer in the face. Here’s Manning describing the work environment at the ironically named Secure Compartmented Information Facility (Scif):

everyone just sat at their workstations … watching music videos/car chases/buildings exploding … and writing more stuff to CD/ DVD … the culture fed opportunities … funny thing is … we transferred so much data on unmarked CDs … everyone did … videos … movies … music … all out in the open.

and

Security at the military unit in Iraq where alleged WikiLeaks source Bradley Manning worked was so lax that soldiers could watch pirated movies on army intelligence computers, it has been revealed.

Speaking on day three of the preliminary hearing regarding Private Manning, a senior officer in his “sensitive compartmented information facility” (SCIF)said it was common for analysts to bring in DVDs bought from Iraqis.

They also stored music and played games on computers used for handling classified information.

The disclosure, by Captain Casey Fulton, is the latest to indicate loose controls within the unit where Manning, 24, served as an intelligence analyst.

It has previously emerged that passwords to secure computers were left on Post-it notes stuck on terminals and that there was no system for checking that classified information was not removed from the building. [Guardian]

Pretending this guy was a criminal superspy is merely an attempt to cover up the irresponsibility of his chain of command – part of the dysfunctional US culture in which high level management never has consequences for failure.

As usual, the function of the “left” and the so-called “civil libertarians” has been to obscure the operation of power. Instead of confronting, for example, the brutal reality of the US prison system, the “civil libertarians” want to pretend that Manning’s incarceration conditions violate a fictional norm. Instead of making a case for why domestic spy laws should not be enforceable on foreigners in foreign countries, the US “left” has minimized the seriousness of the charges in Sweden against Assange.   The reason that some many  “civil libertarians” have had to shilly-shally about the Swedish rape charges is that they are already on record making a stupid argument that US law should apply internationally. The argument that overseas US military operations against Al Qaeda should be civil law enforcement implies that US domestic law is internationally applicable. You cannot logically demand that Al-Alwaqi and even Bin Laden should have been indicted and tried without all that icky military action and then turn around and question why US domestic law should not apply to Assange. So what they are left with is quibbling about when sex is consensual.