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Updates on Mohamed, WikiLeaks and Manning

There are three updates to note about issues I've written about over the last week:

(1) Gulet Mohamed -- the Somali-born American citizen who just turned 19 and who described how he spent a week being interrogated, beaten and tortured by unknown captors -- remains in custody in Kuwait despite not being charged with any crimes or wrongdoing of any kind.  As his lawyer said in an interview with me on Tuesday, it is the Americans, not the Kuwaitis, who are responsible for his ongoing detention by virtue of placing him on the U.S.'s no-fly list -- likely, they believe, in order to enable his ongoing interrogations by the FBI without a lawyer or other legal protections to which he'd be entitled if he returned to the U.S.

Yesterday, Mohamed's lawyer told me that while American officials do nothing to help him (and much to ensure his ongoing detention), Mohamed was visited again by FBI agents and "interrogated aggressively for hours despite repeated requests that the interrogation stop until his counsel is present."  He added that "at one point during the interrogation, the two agents started screaming and yelling at Gulet inches from his person," and that "a Kuwaiti official actually intervened at this point and directed the agents to calm down and not treat Gulet like they were."  As he put it:  "Gulet has to rely on agents of the government that probably executed his torture to protect him from his country of citizenship."  The photograph of Mohamed in detention was taken by his brother yesterday.  A letter sent by Mohamed's lawyer to the Attorney General regarding the details of the FBI's conduct is here.

If Mohamed is guilty of anything, then he ought to be charged and prosecuted.  Forcing this 19-year-old to remain imprisoned and subjected to ongoing interrogations without the slightest explanation -- particularly after the ordeal to which he was subjected -- is a true travesty.  Denying his  constitutional right to return to his own country through a secret, unexplained placement on the no-fly list is even worse.  The American government has the obligation to assist its citizens in these circumstances, but in this case is doing precisely the opposite.   His attorney has written another letter to the Attorney General, but it appears as though legal action is necessary to redress his plight.

 

(2) Jacob Appelbaum -- the WikiLeaks volunteer who was detained and interrogated for hours and had his electronic goods seized the last time he attempted to re-enter the U.S., and who was told that this would happen each time he left the country and came back -- indeed encountered similar treatment on Sunday when he returned home from Iceland.  This time at the Seattle airport, he was again detained, questioned, and had his electronic goods taken -- all without a warrant -- though this time he purposely traveled without a laptop or cellphone (the only item he had with him was a memory stick onto which he embedded the Bill of Rights).  Appelbaum recounted his ordeal yesterday on Twitter, and BoingBoing has collected his narration here.

 

(3) This morning, the Bradley Manning Defense Fund announced that WikiLeaks has given the fund $15,000.  That brings the total raised for Manning's defense to more than $100,000, which guarantees that he will be able to pay for a vigorous defense.  

 

The reflexive call for fewer liberties

(updated below)

William Galston -- former Clinton adviser and current Brookings Institution Senior Fellow -- has a column in The New Republic about the Gabrielle Giffords shooting that illustrates the mentality endlessly eroding basic American liberty:  namely, the belief that every tragedy must lead to new government powers and new restrictions on core liberties.  The lesson of the Arizona tragedy, he argues, is that it's too difficult to force citizens into mental institutions against their will.  This, he says, is the fault of "civil libertarians," who began working in the 1970s on legal reforms to require a higher burden of proof for involuntary commitment (generally: it must be proven that the person is a danger to himself or to others).  As a result, Galston wants strict new laws imposing a litany of legal obligations on the mentally ill, their friends and family, and even acquaintances, as well as dramatically expanded powers to lock away those with mental illness (with broader definitions of what that means).

Listen to what he proposes:  "first, those who acquire credible evidence of an individual's mental disturbance should be required to report it to both law enforcement authorities and the courts, and the legal jeopardy for failing to do so should be tough enough to ensure compliance"; those reporting obligations should apply not only to family and friends, but extend to "school authorities and other involved parties."  And "second, the law should no longer require, as a condition of involuntary incarceration, that seriously disturbed individuals constitute a danger to themselves or others"; instead, involuntary commitment should be imposed whenever there is "delusional loss of contact with reality."  He concludes on this melodramatic note:  'How many more mass murders and assassinations do we need before we understand that the rights-based hyper-individualism of our laws governing mental illness is endangering the security of our community and the functioning of our democracy?"

There's so much warped reasoning embedded in this argument that it's hard to know where to begin.  Galston seems to be unaware of this, but what motivated the reforms in this area were the decades of severe, horrifying abuses which those with mental illnesses -- and even those who had none -- suffered as a result of permissive involuntary commitment standards and prolonged forced incarceration.  Those who suffered mental illnesses were locked away for years and sometimes decades despite having done nothing wrong and despite not being a threat to anyone, while countless people who simply exhibited strange or out-of-the-ordinary behavior were deemed mentally ill and similarly consigned.  The psychitaric social worker Alicia Curtis provided just one example:  "There is also a large history of the forced treatment of homosexuality as mental 'illness'."  Indeed, involuntarily committing people in mental hospitals is a time-honored way for stifling any individuality and dissent; see this 2010 New York Times article on how China uses that repressive tactic.

Then there are the factually incoherent claims Galston makes.  He harkens back to some sort of Golden Age of the 1960s when thousands of people were incarcerated against their will who did nothing wrong -- as though that era were relatively free of political assassinations because all the "crazies" were where locked up where they belonged.  Of course, the opposite is true:  there were far more violent attacks on political figures back then (MLK, JFK, RFK, George Wallace, Malcolm X, etc.) than there have been during the relatively peaceful time beginning in the 1980s when involuntary commitment became much more difficult.

Worse, Galston assumes, without offering any evidence, that there is a significant correlation between mental illness and violence, but the reality is the opposite:  the vast, vast majority of people with mental illnesses never hurt anyone.  Writing two days ago in Slate, Vaughn Bell decried "the fact that mental illness is so often used to explain violent acts despite the evidence to the contrary," and documented:

Of course, like the rest of the population, some people with mental illness do become violent, and some may be riskier when they're experiencing delusions and hallucinations. But these infrequent cases do not make "schizophrenia" or "bipolar" a helpful general-purpose explanation for criminal behavior. . . . your chance of being murdered by a stranger with schizophrenia is so vanishingly small that a recent study of four Western countries put the figure at one in 14.3 million. To put it in perspective, statistics show you are about three times more likely to be killed by a lightning strike.

Yet Galston, pointing to Arizona, wants to lock all of them away.  The harm that would come from forcibly consigning thousands and thousands of people have done nothing wrong is so much greater than the harm from the once-every-20-years attack on a political official that the excessiveness of his solution is self-evident.

But that's the key point.  What Galston is doing here is what the American political class reflexively does in the wake of every tragedy:  it immediately seeks to exploit the resulting trauma and emotion to justify all-new restrictions on basic liberties (such as the right not to be locked away against one's will in the absence of a crime or a serious threat to others) and all-new government powers.  Every traumatic event -- in the immediate, emotionally consuming aftermath --  leads to these sorts of knee-jerk responses.  The 9/11 attack immediately gave rise to the Patriot Act, warrantless eavesdropping, a torture regime, due-process-free imprisonment, and ultimately an attack on Iraq.  High-profile, brutal criminal acts have led to repressive measures such as three-strikes-and-out laws and minimum sentencing guidelines, causing the U.S. to maintain the largest Prison State in the world.

And when the so-called Underwear Bomber unsuccessfully attempted to detonate a bomb in an airplane over Detroit at the end of 2009, there were immediate calls -- including from the DOJ -- for loosening Miranda requirements and the right to be brought before a judge, and even a bipartisan bill to deny legal rights even to U.S. citizens arrested on U.S. soil and accused of Terrorism:  all because of that one episode.  In response to that reaction, I wrote:  "Even now, every new attempted attack causes the Government to devise a new proposal for increasing its own powers still further and reducing rights even more, while the media cheer it on.  It never goes in the other direction. . . . every new incident becomes a pretext for a fresh wave of fear-mongering and still new ways to erode core Constitutional protections even further. . . . We never reach the point where we decide that we have already retracted enough rights."  It's Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine applied to non-economic matters.

What lies at the core of this mindset is desperate pursuit of a total illusion:  Absolute Safety.  People like William Galston believe that every time there is a violent or tragic act, it means that the Government should have done something -- or should have had more powers -- in order to stop it.  But that is the reasoning process of a child.  Even if we were to create an absolute Police State -- the most extreme Police State we could conjure -- acts like the Arizona shooting would still happen.  There are more than 300 million people in the U.S. and, inevitably, some of them are going to do very bad and very violent things.  Thus has it always been and always will be.  The mere existence of bad events is not evidence that the Government needs to be more empowered and liberties further restricted.  Just as there are serious costs to things like the Arizona shootings, there are serious costs to enacting the kinds of repressive systems Galston envisions, yet people like him never weigh those costs.

Having people do bad things is the price we pay for freedom.  There is a cost to all liberty.  Having to hear upsetting or toxic views is the price we pay for free speech; having propaganada spewed by large media outlets is the price we pay for a free press; and having some horrible, dangerous criminals go free is the price we pay for banning the Police from searching our homes without a warrant (the Fourth Amendment) and mandating due process before people can be imprisoned (the Fifth Amendment).  The whole American political system is predicated on the idea that we are unwilling to accept large-scale abridgments of freedom in the name of safety, and that Absolute Safety is a dangerous illusion.  There is a new report today that a police officer in Tuscon stopped Jared Loughner's car for speeding shortly before his rampage, but was unable to search his car because he lacked probable cause to do so.  Obviously, that's regrettable -- if you're a family member of one of his victims, it's horrifying -- but the alternative (allowing Police the power to search whomever they want without cause) is worse:  that's the judgment we made in the Bill of Rights.

It may very well be that it's too difficult in some states to have a person involuntarily committed even when they're a threat to themselves or others.  That's a fair debate to have.  But that's not the case Galston is making.  Instead, he's just drowning in his own TV-generated emotions -- or trying to exploit those who are -- to usher in an amazingly oppressive scheme whereby citizens are required to inform on one another if they suspect someone is a bit mentally off, and the Government is empowered to put them away for a long time even in the absence of any threat they pose.  That's neither rational nor sober; it's hysterical fear-mongering of the kind we see after every incident like this.  It's why American liberties have inexorably eroded.  At the very least, there ought to be a voluntary moratorium on calling for new government powers in the wake of tragedies like this until the emotional intensity dies down and rational discourse can prevail.

 

UPDATE:  Several people made the point in comments that even had the police been able to search Loughner's car, that would likely not have changed anything, since the firearm he was carrying was legal.

How propaganda poisons the mind - and our discourse

(updated below - Update II)

Last week, on January 3, The Guardian published a scathing Op-Ed by James Richardson blaming WikiLeaks for endangering the life of Morgan Tsvangirai, the leader of the democratic opposition in Zimbabwe.  Richardson -- a GOP operative, contributor to RedState.com, and a for-hire corporate spokesman -- pointed to a cable published by WikiLeaks in which American diplomats revealed that Tsvangirai, while publicly opposing American sanctions on his country, had privately urged their continuation as a means of weakening the Mugabe regime:  an act likely to be deemed to be treasonous in that country, for obvious reasons.  By publishing this cable, "WikiLeaks may have committed its own collateral murder," Richardson wrote.  He added:  "WikiLeaks ought to leave international relations to those who understand it – at least to those who understand the value of a life."

This accusation against WikiLeaks was repeated far and wide.  In The Wall Street Journal, Jamie Kirchick -- the long-time assistant of The New Republic's Marty Peretz -- wrote under this headline:  "Julian Assange's reckless behavior could cost Zimbabwe's leading democrat his life."  Kirchick explained that "the crusading 'anti-secrecy' website released a diplomatic cable from the U.S. Embassy in Harare" which exposed Tsvangirai's support for sanctions.  As "a result of the WikiLeaks revelations," Kirchick wrote, the reform leader would likely be charged with treason, and "Mr. Tsvangirai will have someone additional to blame: Julian Assange of WikiLeaks."  The Atlantic's Chris Albon, in his piece entitled "How WikiLeaks Just Set Back Democracy in Zimbabwe," echoed the same accusation, claiming "WikiLeaks released [this cable] to the world" and that Assange has thus "provided a tyrant with the ammunition to wound, and perhaps kill, any chance for multiparty democracy."  Numerous other outlets predictably mimicked these claims.

There was just one small problem with all of this:  it was totally false.  It wasn't WikiLeaks which chose that cable to be placed into the public domain, nor was it WikiLeaks which first published it.  It was The Guardian that did that.  In early December, that newspaper -- not WikiLeaks -- selected and then published the cable in question.  This fact led The Guardian -- more than a full week after they published Richardson's accusatory column -- to sheepishly add this obscured though extremely embarrassing "clarification" at the end of his column:

• This article was amended on 11 January 2011 to clarify the fact that the 2009 cable referred to in this article was placed in the public domain by the Guardian, and not as originally implied by WikiLeaks. The photo caption was also amended to reflect this fact.

The way this "clarification" was done was bizarre.  The misleading headline still remains ("If Morgan Tsvangirai is charged with treason, WikiLeaks will have earned the ignominy of Robert Mugabe's gratitude").  So do numerous sentences attributing publication to WikiLeaks ("WikiLeaks may have committed its own collateral murder . . . . in the wake of  WikiLeaks' release . . . where Mugabe's strong-arming, torture and assassination attempts have failed to eliminate the leading figure of Zimbabwe's democratic opposition, WikiLeaks may yet succeed").  Meanwhile, other sentences originally in the piece were changed without notice:  for instance, the claim that "WikiLeaks released last week a classified US state department cable relating to a 2009 meeting between Tsvangirai and American and European ambassadors" was changed to read:  "The Guardian released . . . ."  And the photo caption was changed from "Zimbabwe's PM Morgan Tsvangirai faces a treason inquiry after WikiLeaks's publication of a US embassy cable" to "after the Guardian's publication."

[There are other strange aspects to The Guardian's behavior here.  If a newspaper publishes an accusation this serious and gets it this wrong, isn't more required than the quiet addition of two short sentences at the end of the column, eight days later without any announcement?  Moreover, Guardian's Editor-in-Chief Alan Rusbridger objected last night to my attributing Richardson's piece to "The Guardian," insisting that the section where it appeared was comparable to an open forum such as Salon's Open Salon; but that comparison is quite inaccurate, since columns published in The Guardian's "Comment is Free" section are reserved for pieces solicited or accepted by Guardian Editors and published only with their prior approval, whereas "Open Salon" is open to anyone without editorial approval, i.e., like a blog's comment section.   Beyond that, while The Guardian disclosed that Richardson is a GOP operative and works for "Hynes Communications," it doesn't reveal that this organization is the self-proclaimed "nation's leading social media public affairs agency" representing the online communications strategies of "leading companies and trade associations in the health care; telecommunications; pharmaceutical; finance; defense; energy; aerospace; manufacturing; travel; and retail industries."  In other words, Richardson, like so many people posing as pundits, is a paid communications hack, not some independent commentator.

But far worse, The Guardian published a news article on December 27 -- headlined:  "Morgan Tsvangirai faces possible Zimbabwe treason charge" -- which also attributed publication of this cable to WikiLeaks, and never once mentioned that it was actually The Guardian which did so.  The article's headline states:  "Lawyers to examine PM's comments on sanctions after WikiLeaks reveals talks with US diplomats," while the body of the article reports:  "Zimbabwe is to investigate bringing treason charges . . . over confidential talks with US diplomats revealed by WikiLeaks."  That news story remains uncorrected by The Guardian.]

But at least The Guardian -- for which I have high journalistic regard -- published some sort of correction, woefully inadequate though it may be.  Why hasn't The Wall Street Journal, or The Atlantic, or Politico?   While The Guardian appended this correction yesterday, WikiLeaks on Twitter -- a full week ago -- made clear the falsehood driving all these stories:  "It is not acceptable [for] the Guardian to blame us for a cable the Guardian selected and published on Dec 8."  WikiLeaks then immediately pointed to this post thoroughly documenting that it was The Guardian that first published this cable as part of a December 8 news article it published regarding revelations about Zimbabwe.  So this glaring, serious error has been publicly known and amplified for a full week (through WikiLeaks' Twitter account, followed by 650,000 people, which presumably is followed by anyone writing about WikiLeaks, at least I'd hope so).  Yet these Beacons of Journalistic Responsibility have still failed to acknowledge that the very serious accusation they published about WikiLeaks was based in a wholesale fabrication.

* * * * *

This is not an isolated instance.  The reason I've been so repetitively vigilant about pointing out the falsehood that WikiLeaks indiscriminately published 250,000 diplomatic cables is because there is a full-scale government/media campaign to demonize the group through outright fiction of the type that sold the nation on Iraq's WMD stockpiles and Al Qaeda alliance.  The undeniable truth from the start is that, with very few exceptions, WikiLeaks has only been publishing those cables which its newspaper partners first publish (and WikiLeaks thereafter publishes the cables with the redactions applied by those papers).  This judicious editorial process -- in which WikiLeaks largely relies on the editorial judgment of these newspapers for what to release -- was detailed more than a month ago by the Associated Press.  That's the process that explains why The Guardian -- not WikiLeaks -- was who first published the Zimbabwe cable.  Yet the false accusations that WikiLeaks indiscriminately dumped 250,000 cables went on for weeks before it finally (mostly) stopped (once it was lodged forever in the minds of most Americans) -- and now we have the false claim that WikiLeaks injected this harmful Zimbabwe cable into the public domain, even though it simply didn't.

This is the propaganda campaign -- created by the U.S. Government and (as always) bolstered by the American media -- which is being used to justify WikiLeaks' destruction (and, with it, the repression of some of the most promising avenues for transparency and investigative journalism we've seen in many years).  Just consider this self-satire of a speech given yesterday by U.S. State Department Spokesman P.J. Crowley, in which he sets out to rebut the notion that the U.S. is acting hypocritically by touting Internet freedom for the world while simultaneously attempting to obliterate WikiLeaks.  He says:

A free and vibrant press plays an important role around the world in the development of civil society and accountable governments. As a general rule, the freer the press, the more transparent and more democratic the government is likely to be. . . . No one is a greater advocate for a vibrant independent and responsible press, committed to the promotion of freedom of expression and development of a true global civil society, than the United States. Every day, we express concern about the plight of journalists (or bloggers) around the world who are intimidated, jailed or even killed by governments that are afraid of their people, and afraid of the empowerment that comes with the free flow of information within a civil society. . . .We remain arguably the most transparent society in the world.

Let's leave to the side all the Bush-era assaults on press freedom (including imprisoning numerous foreign journalists for years without charges).  Leave aside that Freedom House ranked the U.S. 24th in the world in press freedoms for 2009 (tied with Lithuania and the Czech Republic) and that Reporters Without Borders ranked it 20th.  Leave to the side that those rankings were issued before the Obama administration -- by all accounts -- became vastly more aggressive about prosecuting whistleblowers than any prior administration (even subpoenaing reporters to do it). 

Leave to the side the administration's demand that it have "backdoors" to all Internet encryption and its impeding of the whistleblower protections promised by candidate Obama.  Leave to the side how the Obama administration shields virtually every controversial executive branch action in the national security realm -- including plainly illegal ones -- from judicial review by invoking radically broad versions of secrecy privileges pioneered by the Bush DOJ.  And leave to the side the fact that many of the documents released by WikiLeaks are rather banal and uninformative, yet have been marked "SECRET":  showing how reflexively the U.S. Government hides most of what it does from its citizenry behind a wall of secrecy.

Instead, just look at what the U.S. Government is doing to WikiLeaks.  It just caused an international incident by demanding the Twitter data of numerous individuals including a sitting member of Iceland's Parliament.  American officials bullied private corporations and banks to cut off all ties with WikiLeaks.  And it's openly boasting of its intent to criminally prosecute the group for doing nothing more than what newspapers do all the time.  Crowley justified all that by saying this:

We can debate whether there are too many secrets, but no one should doubt that there has been substantial damage in the unauthorized release of a database containing, among other things, 251,000 State Department cables, many of them classified. . . .We are a nation of laws, and the laws of our country have been violated. Since we function under the rule of law, it is appropriate and necessary that we investigate and prosecute those who have violated U.S law. Some have suggested that the ongoing investigation marks a retreat from our commitment to freedom of expression, freedom of the press and Internet freedom. Nonsense.

Anyone passingly familiar with the Obama administration's justifications for refusing to investigate Bush-era crimes will be sickened by that bolded part, but leave to the side, too.  The key point here is that WikiLeaks didn't steal anything.  They didn't break any laws.  They did what newspapers do every day, what investigative journalism does at its core:  expose secret, corrupt actions of those in power.  And the attempt to criminalize WikiLeaks is thus nothing less than a full frontal assault on press and Internet freedoms.

That's where this propaganda comes in to play.  To justify this assault, the U.S. Government needs to claim that WikiLeaks is somehow distinct from what other press outlets do.  So it invents outright falsehoods to do so:  unlike newspapers, WikiLeaks indiscriminately dumps diplomatic cables without editorial judgment; unlike newspapers, they refuse to be transparent about their methods (nobody is less transparent about what they do than large newspapers); and now, WikiLeaks endangers people's lives by recklessly publishing a cable which leaves democratic leaders in Zimbabwe vulnerable to attack, even though it wasn't published by them at all, but by The Guardian.   

People devoted to a corrupt cause necessarily rely on falsehoods to advance it.  And what we're seeing here is not only the government doing that, but The Watchdog Media -- as usual -- serving as its most valuable ally.  At the very least, the outlets that published this serious -- and seriously false -- accusation owe their readers a prominent, clear retraction.

 

UPDATE:  Beyond the falsehood documented here, Aaron Bady of Berkeley's PhD program describes how Albon, Richardson and others are completely simplifying -- distorting -- the situation in Zimbabwe in order to demonize WikiLeaks over this cable. 

And Politico's Keach Hagey -- who wrote one of the above-referenced pieces repeating this falsehood -- has emailed me to say that she's now working to directly address these matters.  So credit where it's due.  We'll see if The Atlantic's Albon and The Wall Street Journal are similarly willing to acknowledge their serious errors.

 

UPDATE II:  Both Politico and The Atlantic have now issued a "correction" and an "update," respectively, by tacking on a paragraph to the end of their old article.  I'll leave it to readers to assess for themselves if that's adequate in light of the magnitude of the error made.  The Wall Street Journal Op-Ed page and Kirchick have still said nothing, reflecting what they do and what they are.   About all of this, this person asks the key question:  "Would [these media outlets]  have written the exact same article, substituting Guardian for WL? I doubt it."  I doubt it, too -- highly -- and that's the point:  the political and media class is obsessed with demonizing WikiLeaks and painting them as fundamentally different than "respectable" media outlets, even if -- as happened here -- that's accomplished by blaming them for things they manifestly did not do.  That, of course, is the same strategy as the government is pursuing to justify the prosecution of WikiLeaks, so whether intended or not, attacks like these serve a vital enabling role.

Interview with Gulet Mohamed's lawyer

Last Thursday, I wrote about and interviewed Gulet Mohamed, the 18-year-old Somali-born American citizen who described how he was abducted in Kuwait by unknown authorities, blindfolded and taken to an unknown location, and then interrogated, beaten and tortured for the next week (he has since turned 19).  After he was moved to a new facility to be deported, he was able to speak with the outside world, including me, only by virtue of a cellphone which a fellow detainee had illicitly smuggled in and allowed him to use; if not for that, it's quite possible that nobody, including his family, would be aware of his detention.

Mohamed -- who has been charged with no crime -- remains in a deportation facility in Kuwait without any idea of when, how or where he will be released.  The Kuwaitis are perfectly willing to release him back to the U.S., but the U.S. has prevented this by placing him on a no-fly list, and both his family and his lawyer insist that it is American authorities responsible for his detention, due to a desire to interrogate him.  I spoke today by video to Mohamed's lawyer, Gadeir Abbas of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, about the current status of this case, the strange, emphatic refusal of the U.S. Government to help in any way, and what Abbas plans next in the way of legal action if Mohamed's release is not promptly secured.

The interview is 15 minutes and can be viewed on the player below (I used a new recording program for which the sync is a bit off and which reversed what should have been the place for his image and mine, though the audio is quite good).  As I note at the end, following this case is imperative not only to shed light on Mohamed's plight, but also because numerous Muslim Americans have suspicion baselessly cast upon them in the same way and are subjected to similar and even worse treatment -- treatment which, because of people like this being empowered, is likely to get worse still:

What U.S. "justice" signifies around the world

In London this morning, a British court held a procedural hearing regarding Sweden's attempt to extradite Julian Assange in order to question him about sex crimes accusations.  Afterward, Assange's lawyers released an outline of the arguments they intend to make in opposition to extradition.  Most of them centered around the impermissibility of extraditing someone who has not been charged with a crime -- i.e., merely to interrogate them -- but one of the featured arguments focused on the danger that if Assange were sent to Sweden, that country would then extradite him to the U.S., where Assange would be subjected to grave injustices:

Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, could be at "real risk" of the death penalty or detention in Guantánamo Bay if he is extradited to Sweden on accusations of rape and sexual assault, his lawyers claim.

In a skeleton summary of their defence against attempts by the Swedish director of public prosecutions to extradite him, released today, Assange's legal team argue that there is a similar likelihood that the US would subsequently seek his extradition "and/or illegal rendition", "where there will be a real risk of him being detained at Guantánamo Bay or elsewhere".

Paragraphs 92-99 of the outline detail Sweden's history of violating the Convention Against Torture by rendering War on Terror suspects to Egypt to be tortured, and concludes:  "based on its record as condemned by the United Nations Committee against Torture and the Human Rights Committee, Sweden would bow to US pressure and/or rely naively on diplomatic assurances from the USA that Mr. Assange would not be mistreated, with the consequence that he would be deported/expelled to the USA, where he would suffer serious ill-treatment."  This danger is legally relevant because the governing Extradition Act bars the expulsion of a prisoner where "extradition would be [in]compatible with the Convention rights within the meaning of the Human Rights Act 1998."  The outline also cited vigilante calls from leading right-wing figures for Assange's murder (yesterday, it was discovered that a prominent right-wing blogger, Melissa Clouthier, had registered the website JulianAssangeMustDie.com). 

It's quite notable that the mere threat of ending up in American custody is considered (at least by Assange's lawyers) to be a viable basis for contesting extradition on human rights grounds. Indeed, this argument is not unusual.  Numerous countries often demand, as a condition for extradition to the U.S., assurances from the U.S. Government that the death penalty will not be applied.  Similarly, there are currently cases pending in EU courts contesting the extradition of War on Terror detainees to the U.S. on the ground that they will be treated inhumanely by virtue of the type of prolonged, intensive solitary confinement to which Bradley Manning -- and thousands of other actual convicts -- are subjected.  

And now we have the spectacle of Julian Assange's lawyers citing the Obama administration's policies of rendition and indefinite detention at Guantanamo as a reason why human rights treaties bar his extradition to any country (such as Sweden) which might transfer him to American custody.  Indeed, almost every person I've spoken who has or had anything to do with WikiLeaks expresses one fear above all others:  the possibility that they will end up in American custody and subjected to its lawless War on Terror "justice system."  Americans still like to think of themselves as "leaders of the free world," but in the eyes of many, it's exactly the "free world" to which American policies are so antithetical and threatening.

* * * * * 

Speaking of American justice, ondelette, over at FDL, raises an interesting point:  for those who believe that leading right-wing figures are inspiring violence (whether of the kind that just occurred in Arizona, things like this, or even calls for Assange's murder), shouldn't they be treated the same way American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki is:  i.e., targeted by the U.S. Government with due-process-free assassination for inciting violence?  Doesn't the mentality justifying Obama's assassination program necessarily extend to other Americans accused of "inciting" violence with their political speech?  While it's true that American officials -- once the assassination efforts were leaked -- began passing claims to journalists that Awlaki had an "operational role" in Terrorist plots, there has been no evidence presented of that, and the concern overwhelmingly with Awlaki is what he inspires violence with his political speech.  If presidentially-decreed assassination is justified against him, why not other American leaders accused of inciting violence?  Shouldn't the President order them taken out, too?

Government-created climate of fear

(updated below)

One of the more eye-opening events for me of 2010 occurred in March, when I first wrote about WikiLeaks and the war the Pentagon was waging on it (as evidenced by its classified 2008 report branding the website an enemy and planning how to destroy it). At the time, few had heard of the group -- it was before it had released the video of the Apache helicopter attack -- but I nonetheless believed it could perform vitally important functions and thus encouraged readers to donate to it and otherwise support it. In response, there were numerous people -- via email, comments, and other means -- who expressed a serious fear of doing so: they were worried that donating money to a group so disliked by the government would cause them to be placed on various lists or, worse, incur criminal liability for materially supporting a Terrorist organization.

At the time, I dismissed those concerns as both ill-founded and even slightly paranoid. From a strictly legal standpoint, those concerns were and are ill-founded: WikiLeaks has never even been charged with, let alone convicted of, any crime, nor does it do anything different than what major newspapers around the world routinely do, nor has it been formally designated a Terrorist organization, nor -- I believed at the time -- could it ever be so designated. There is not -- and cannot remotely be -- anything illegal about donating to it. Any efforts to retroactively criminalize such donations would be a classic case of an "ex post facto" law unquestionably barred by the Constitution. But from a political perspective, the crux of the fear was probably more prescient than paranoid: within a matter of months, leading right-wing figures were equating WikiLeaks to Al Qaeda, while the Vice President of the U.S. went on Meet the Press and disgustingly called Julian Assange a "terrorist."

But more significant than the legal soundness of this fear was what the fear itself signified. Most of those expressing these concerns were perfectly rational, smart, well-informed American citizens.  And yet they were petrified that merely donating money to a non-violent political and journalistic group whose goals they supported would subject them to invasive government scrutiny or, worse, turn them into criminals.  A government can guarantee all the political liberties in the world on paper (free speech, free assembly, freedom of association), but if it succeeds in frightening the citizenry out of exercising those rights, they become meaningless.

So much of what the U.S. Government has done over the last decade has been devoted to creating and strengthening this climate of fear.  Attacking Iraq under the terrorizing banner of "shock and awe"; disappearing people to secret prisons; abducting them and shipping them to what Newsweek's Jonathan Alter (when advocating this) euphemistically called "our less squeamish allies"; throwing them in cages for years without charges, dressed in orange jumpsuits and shackles; creating a worldwide torture regime; spying on Americans without warrants and asserting the power to arrest them on U.S. soil without charges:  all of this had one overarching objective.  It was designed to create a climate of repression and intimidation by signaling to the world -- and its own citizens -- that the U.S. was unconstrained by law, by conventions, by morality, or by anything else:  the government would do whatever it wanted to anyone it wanted, and those thinking about opposing the U.S. in any way, through means legitimate or illegitimate, should (and would) thus think twice, at least.  

That a large percentage of those brutalized by this system turned out to be innocent -- knowingly innocent --  is a feature, not a bug:  that one can end up being subjected to these lawless horrors despite doing nothing wrong only intensifies the fear and makes it more effective.  The power being asserted is not merely unlimited and tyrannical, but arbitrary.  And now, the Obama administration's citizen-aimed, due-process-free assassination program, its orgies of drone attacks, its defense of radically broad interpretations of "material support" criminal statutes, and its disturbing targeting of American anti-war activists with subpoenas and armed police raids are all part of the same tactic.  Those contemplating meaningful opposition to American action are meant to be frightened.  The anguished, helpless  cries of 18-year-old American Gulet Mohamed, after a week of being disappeared and brutalized by America's close ally, serves an important purpose.

* * * * *

Consider how this expresses itself with regard to WikiLekas.  Jacob Appelbaum was first identified as a WikiLeaks volunteer in the middle of 2010.  Almost immediately thereafter, he was subjected to serious harassment and intimidation when, while re-entering the U.S. from a foreign trip, he was detained and interrogated for hours by Homeland Security agents, and had his laptop and cellphones seized -- all without a warrant.  He was told he'd be subjected to the same treatment every time he tried to re-enter the country (and his belongings, months later, have still not been returned).  And he was one of the individuals singled out in the DOJ's court-issued subpoena to Twitter.

Since that airport incident, Appelbaum has been extremely (and understandably) cautious about speaking out publicly on anything having to do with WikiLeaks.  In other words, he passionately believes in the cause of transparency promoted by WikiLeaks, but is afraid to exercise his free speech rights to advocate for that cause.  Two weeks ago, he left the U.S. for the first time since that incident and has talked about the trepidation he feels when returning.  Last night, he posted this on Twitter:

That's an American citizen who has never been charged with any crime: afraid to return to his own country, and then deciding to do so only with ACLU lawyers meeting him at the airport.

Or consider Birgitta Jónsdóttir, the former WikiLeaks volunteer and current elected member of Iceland's Parliament whose Twitter account was also the target of the DOJ's snooping (prompting Iceland's government this morning to summon the U.S. Ambassador for an explanation).  She was scheduled to leave on a long-planned trip to Canada for a conference and last night wrote this about her travel plans:

That's an elected member of the Parliament of a NATO country who -- after having the DOJ use the federal courts to snoop through her private online information -- is now afraid to fly through the U.S.

And these fears are well-justified.  Anyone connected to WikiLeaks -- even American citizens -- are now routinely detained at the airport and have their property seized, their laptops and cellphones taken and searched and retained without a shred of judicial oversight or due process.   And this treatment extends to numerous critics of the government having nothing to do with WikiLeaks.  In the past month, I've spoken with American writers, photographers and filmmakers -- who are not ready yet to go public -- who have experienced similar and even worse harassment when entering the U.S.  Notably, like anyone remotely connected to WikiLeaks, all of them -- given the government's broad surveillance powers -- insist upon communicating only behind multiple, highly fortified walls of encryption.  The U.S. Government plainly wants any genuine critics to feel fear, and is willing to use any means -- no matter how lawless and extreme -- to induce it.

Yesterday, computer security expert Chris Soghoian documented how little the DOJ can hope to learn from the court-ordered Subpoena issued to Twitter (given how limited is the information stored on Twitter).  But that's the point:  the goal of that Order isn't to learn anything; it's to signal to anyone who would support WikiLeaks that they will be subject to the most invasive surveillance imaginable.  I met two months ago with a former WikiLeaks volunteer who believes as fervently as ever in its cause, but ceased working with them because his country has a broad extradition treaty with the U.S. and he was petrified that his government, upon a mere request by the U.S., would turn him over to the Americans and he'd disappear into the world of the Patriot Act and "enemy combatants" and due-process-free indefinite detention still vigorously applied to foreigners.

This is the same reason for keeping Bradley Manning in such inhumane, brutal conditions despite there being no security justification for it:  they want to intimidate any future whistleblowers who discover secret American criminality and corruption from exposing it (you'll end up erased like Bradley Manning).  And that's also what motivates the other extra-legal actions taken by the Obama administration aimed at WikiLeaks -- from publicly labeling Assange a Terrorist to bullying private companies to cut off ties to chest-beating vows to prosecute them:  they know there's nothing illegal about reporting on classified American actions, so they want to thuggishly intimidate anyone from exercising those rights through this climate of repression.

Beyond the erosion of freedom, there's a serious cost to all of this.  Virtually the entire world uses Twitter now, and the efforts by the U.S. Government to invade people's accounts -- including an elected member of Iceland's Parliament -- made headlines around the world.  Many Americans may not perceive it, but much of the world, as a result of such actions, sees the U.S. not as "Leaders of the Free World" but one of the greatest threats to privacy and other core liberties.  Watching people afraid to fly through the U.S. -- including its own citizens -- is just remarkable.  And the spectacle of Homeland Security agents detaining whomever they want, and then unilaterally stealing their laptops and cellphones and keeping them and digging through them for as long as they want -- all without a warrant -- is a powerful sign of how far things have fallen.

* * * * *

As always, many people would respond to claims of this sort by believing they're hyperbolic.  The reason for that is obvious:  none of this happens to them.  And the reason it's doesn't is because they're not engaged in any actual dissent; they're not opposing the U.S. Government in any meaningful way.  They're Good Citizens, supportive of their government (or critical only in the most tepid and deferential ways), and thus not targeted by such measures.  So they don't perceive them, or if they do, don't believe they're a problem.  But that's how repression always works:  it's targeted only at the faction that is actually adversarial to political or other elite power. 

People who spout pieties are never targeted with censorship, since there's nothing to censor.  Only those whose views are threatening or marginalized are subjected to such measures.  Identically, media outlets that engage in government-subservient reporting are not the target of the government's wrath; only those whose reporting undermines government interests (such as WikiLeaks) are so targeted.   And most people are not being detained at the airport and having their laptops searched, seized and copied -- or having their Twitter and other communications invaded -- because they're not doing anything to bother the government; it's those who are who experience that intimidation.   But political liberties are meaningless if they're conditioned on obeisance to political power or if citizens are frightened out of exercising them in any way that matters.

There has been much talk over the last several days, in the wake of the Arizona shooting, about attempts by some citizens to instill physical fear in elected officials.  That's a worthwhile and necessary topic, but the fear that government officials are attempting to instill in law-abiding, dissenting citizens is far more substantial and sustained, and deserves much more attention than it has received.

 

UPDATE:  4 related items:  (1) The Los Angeles Times has a surprisingly strong editorial today condemning what it calls the "indefensible" conditions of Bradley Manning's detention; (2) McClatchy's Nancy Youssef has a very good article examining why American journalists -- in contrast to journalists from around the world -- refuse to defend WikiLeaks from government attacks; (3) Forbes notes that in the wake of speculation that the DOJ's pursuit of Twitter data may include the names of those who follow WikiLeaks on Twitter (I personally don't think it does include that), WikiLeaks quickly lost 3,000 followers on Twitter, presumably people now too afraid to continue to follow them; and  (4) The Miami Herald's Carol Rosenberg notes the latest glorious milestone of our National Security State:  "Guantanamo prison camps enter their 10th year tomorrow."

DOJ subpoenas Twitter records of several WikiLeaks volunteers

(updated below - Update II - Update III)

Last night, Birgitta Jónsdóttir -- a former WikiLeaks volunteer and current member of the Icelandic Parliament -- announced (on Twitter) that she had been notified by Twitter that the DOJ had served a Subpoena demanding information "about all my tweets and more since November 1st 2009."  Several news outlets, including The Guardian, wrote about Jónsdóttir's announcement.   

What hasn't been reported is that the Subpoena served on Twitter -- which is actually an Order from a federal court that the DOJ requested -- seeks the same information for numerous other individuals currently or formerly associated with WikiLeaks, including Jacob Appelbaum, Rop Gonggrijp, and Julian Assange.  It also seeks the same information for Bradley Manning and for WikiLeaks' Twitter account.

The information demanded by the DOJ is sweeping in scope.  It includes all mailing addresses and billing information known for the user, all connection records and session times, all IP addresses used to access Twitter, all known email accounts, as well as the "means and source of payment," including banking records and credit cards.  It seeks all of that information for the period beginning November 1, 2009, through the present.  A copy of the Order served on Twitter, obtained exclusively by Salon, is here.

The Order was signed by a federal Magistrate Judge in the Eastern District of Virginia, Theresa Buchanan, and served on Twitter by the DOJ division for that district.  It states that there is "reasonable ground to believe that the records or other information sought are relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation," the language required by the relevant statute.  It was issued on December 14 and ordered sealed -- i.e., kept secret from the targets of the Order.  It gave Twitter three days to respond and barred the company from notifying anyone, including the users, of the existence of the Order.  On January 5, the same judge directed that the Order be unsealed at Twitter's request in order to inform the users and give them 10 days to object; had Twitter not so requested, it would have been compelled to turn over this information without the knowledge of its users.  A copy of the unsealing order is here.

Jónsdóttir told me that as "a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee [of Iceland's Parliament] and the NATO parliamentary assembly," she intends to "call for a meeting at the Committee early next week and ask for the ambassador to meet" her to protest the DOJ's subpoena for her records.  The other individuals named in the subpoena were unwilling to publicly comment until speaking with their lawyer.  

I'll have much more on the implications of this tomorrow.  Suffice to say, this is a serious escalation of the DOJ's efforts to probe, harass and intimidate anyone having to do with WikiLeaks.  Previously, Appelbaum as well as Bradley Manning supporter David House -- both American citizens -- had their laptops and other electronic equipment seized at the border by Homeland Security agents when attempting to re-enter the U.S.

 

UPDATE:  Three other points:  first, the three named producers of the "Collateral Murder" video -- depicting and commenting on the U.S. Apache helicopter attack on journalists and civilians in Baghdad -- were Assange, Jónsdóttir, and Gonggrijp (whose name is misspelled in the DOJ's documents).  Since Gonggrijp has had no connection to WikiLeaks for several months and Jónsdóttir's association has diminished substantially over time, it seems clear that they were selected due to their involvement in the release of that film.  Second, the unsealing order does not name either Assange or Manning, which means either that Twitter did not request permission to notify them of the Subpoena or that they did request it but the court denied it (then again, neither "Julian Assange" nor "Bradley Manning" are names of Twitter accounts, and the company has no way of knowing with certainty which accounts are theirs, so perhaps Twitter only sought an unsealing order for actual Twitter accounts named in the Order).  Finally, WikiLeaks and Assange intend to contest this Order.  

 

UPDATE II:  It's worth recalling -- and I hope journalists writing about this story remind themselves -- that all of this extraordinary probing and "criminal" investigating is stemming from WikiLeaks' doing nothing more than publishing classified information showing what the U.S. Government is doing:  something investigative journalists, by definition, do all the time.

And the key question now is this:  did other Internet and social network companies (Google, Facebook, etc.) receive similar Orders and then quietly comply?  It's difficult to imagine why the DOJ would want information only from Twitter; if anything, given the limited information it has about users, Twitter would seem one of the least fruitful avenues to pursue.  But if other companies did receive and quietly comply with these orders, it will be a long time before we know, if we ever do, given the prohibition in these orders on disclosing even its existence to anyone.

 

UPDATE III:  Iceland's Interior Minister, Ögmundur Jónasson, described the DOJ's efforts to obtain the Twitter information of a member of that country's Parliament as "grave and odd."  While suggesting some criticisms of WikiLeaks, he added:  "if we manage to make government transparent and give all of us some insight into what is happening in countries involved in warfare it can only be for the good."  The DOJ's investigation of a member of Iceland's Parliament -- as part of an effort to intimidate anyone supporting WikiLeaks and to criminalize journalism that exposes what the U.S. Government does -- is one of the most extreme acts yet in the Obama administration's always-escalating war on whistleblowers, and shows how just excessive and paranoid the administration is when it comes to transparency:  all this from a President who ran on a vow to have the "most transparent administration in history" and to "Protect Whistleblowers."

Daley is a reflection, not a cause

Few things interest me less at this point than royal court personnel changes.  I actually agree with the pro-Obama/Democratic-Party-loyal commentators who insist it doesn't much matter who becomes White House Chief of Staff because it's Obama who drives administration policy.  Obama didn't do what he did in the first two years because Rahm Emanuel was his Chief of Staff.  That view has the causation reversed:  he chose Emanuel for that position because that's who Obama is.  Similarly, installing JP Morgan's Midwest Chairman, a Boeing director, and a long-time corporatist -- Bill Daley -- as a powerful underling replacing Emanuel isn't going to substantively change anything Obama does.  It's just another reflection of the Obama presidency, its priorities and concerns, and its overarching allegiances.  

There's a section of my forthcoming book about the rule of law which examines the direct causal line between the vast number of Wall Street officials in key administration positions and the full-scale exemption from accountability which financial elites enjoy even for the most egregious lawbreaking.  When you compile all of those appointments in one place, the absolute stranglehold large-scale corporate interests exert over virtually all realms of government policy is quite striking.  But it's nothing more than what the economist Nouriel Roubini meant when he told the makers of the 2010 documentary "Inside Job" that Wall Street has "captured the political system" on "the Democratic and the Republican side" alike, or what Simon Johnson describes as "The Quiet Coup":  "The government seems helpless, or unwilling, to act against" elite business interests. 

Shipping in a JP Morgan executive to be White House Chief of Staff isn't a cause of any of this; it's just a nice symbol for what our political culture is, more than ever in the Era of Change.  It's the other side of the revolving door that sent Peter Orszag to his multi-million-dollar a year reward at Citigroup for his 18 months in an administration which lavished that bank will all sorts of gifts.  Getting exercised about Bill Daley's empowerment is like going to the beach and being angry that it's full of sand:  this appointment is the inevitable by-product of the essence of Washington and of the Obama presidency.  It's what they do and who they are.  As Matt Stoller suggested, the most surprising thing about the Daley pick is that he has no Goldman Sachs experience.

But I do find the angry reaction from some progressives to be somewhat perplexing (even though I agree with the substance of their critique and am glad they're voicing it).  On one level -- the most superficial one -- the Daley appointment seems very strange.  Think about this: leading progressive voices -- including MoveOn and, in a very hard-hitting segment last night, Rachel Maddow (video below) -- have vociferously condemned the Daley choice.  By contrast, the most enthusiastic reactions came from JP Morgan Chairman Jamie Dimon (who first suggested Daley), the Chamber of Commerce, the Third Way, and Karl Rove.  Beyond that, Daley was an outspoken opponent -- in public -- of two of Obama's most prominent legislative items:  health care reform and the financial regulation bill's consumer protection agency.  Why, angry progressives seem to be asking, would Obama ignore the views of his so-called "progressive base" while seeking to please those who are his political adversaries?

But it's perfectly rational for Obama to do exactly that.  There's a fundamental distinction between progressives and groups that wield actual power in Washington:  namely, the latter are willing (by definition) to use their resources and energies to punish politicians who do not accommodate their views, while the former unconditionally support the Democratic Party and their leaders no matter what they do.  The groups which Obama cares about pleasing -- Wall Street, corporate interests, conservative Democrats, the establishment media, independent voters -- all have one thing in common:  they will support only those politicians who advance their agenda, but will vigorously oppose those who do not.  Similarly, the GOP began caring about the Tea Party only once that movement proved it will bring down GOP incumbents even if it means losing a few elections to Democrats.

That is exactly what progressives will never do.  They do the opposite; they proudly announce:  we'll probably be angry a lot, and we'll be over here doing a lot complaining, but don't worry:  no matter what, when you need us to stay in power (or to acquire it), we're going to be there to give you our full and cheering support.  That is the message conveyed over and over again by progressives, no more so than when much of the House Progressive Caucus vowed that they would never, ever support a health care bill that had no robust public option, only to turn around at the end and abandon that vow by dutifully voting for Obama's public-option-free health care bill.  That's just a microcosm of what happens in the more general sense:  progressives constantly object when their values and priorities are trampled upon, only to make clear that they will not only vote for, but work hard on behalf of and give their money to, the Democratic Party when election time comes around.

I'm not arguing here with that decision.  Progressives who do this will tell you that this unconditional Party support is necessary and justifiable because no matter how bad Democrats are, the GOP is worse.  That's a different debate.  The point here is that -- whether justified or not -- telling politicians that you will do everything possible to work for their re-election no matter how much they scorn you, ignore your political priorities, and trample on your political values is a guaranteed ticket to irrelevance and impotence.  Any self-interested, rational politician -- meaning one motivated by a desire to maintain power rather than by ideology or principle -- will ignore those who behave this way every time and instead care only about those whose support is conditional.  And they're well-advised to do exactly that. 

It is probably the case that a lack of enthusiasm on the part of the Democratic base contributed to the Democrats' defeat in the 2010 midterm election.  But what Obama cares about is getting re-elected in 2012, and he knows full well that come March or April of that year -- if not earlier -- most of the progressives who are now continuously complaining about him will be at the front of the line waving their Obama banners, pulling out their checkbooks and whipping into line anyone who is not similarly supportive.  By contrast, corporate institutions and Wall Street tycoons will pour their money into Obama's defeat if he does not show them the proper level of deference and accommodate their policy demands, but will support him (as they did in 2008) if he pleases them.  Resource disparities between those factions are significant, but it's also due in part to their own choices that Wall Street is empowered, and progressives are irrelevant.

If someone wants to lend unconditional support to Obama and the Democrats, there's a cogent (if not persuasive) rationale to justify it.  But what I find baffling is that those who make that choice -- and who make clear that this is their choice -- then express surprise, anger and scorn in situations like the Daley appointment when the White House so blatantly ignores what they want.  Given the posture of progressives, why would the White House possibly do anything other than ignore them (except when they're deliberately attacking them in order to appear more centrist)?  What motive does the White House have for doing anything other than that?  None that I can see.

U.S. teenager tortured in Kuwait and barred re-entry into the U.S.

Gulet Mohamed is an 18-year-old American citizen whose family is Somalian.  His parents moved with him to the U.S. when he was 2 or 3 years old, and he has lived in the U.S. ever since.  In March, 2009, he went to study Arabic and Islam in Yemen (in Sana'a, the nation's capital), and, after several weeks, left (at his mother's urging) and went to visit his mother's family in Somalia, staying with his uncle there for several months.  Roughly one year ago, he left Somalia and traveled to Kuwait to stay with other family members who live there.  Like many teenagers who reach early adulthood, he was motivated in his travels by a desire to see the world, to study, and to get to know his family's ancestral homeland and his faraway relatives.

At all times, Mohamed traveled on an American passport and had valid visas for all the countries he visited.  He has never been arrested nor -- until two weeks ago -- was he ever involved with law enforcement in any way, including the entire time he lived in the U.S.

Approximately two weeks ago (on December 20), Mohamed went to the airport in Kuwait to have his visa renewed, as he had done every three months without incident for the last year.  This time, however, he was told by the visa officer that his name had been marked in the computer, and after waiting five hours, he was taken into a room and interrogated by officials who refused to identify themselves.  They then handcuffed and blindfolded him and drove him to some other locale.  That was the start of a two-week-long, still ongoing nightmare during which he was imprisoned for a week in an unknown location by unknown captors, relentlessly interrogated, and severely beaten and threatened with even worse forms of torture.

Mohamed's story was first reported this morning by Mark Mazzetti in The New York Times, who spoke with Mohamed by telephone, where he is currently being held in a deportation center in Kuwait.  I also spoke with Mohamed this morning, and my 50-minute conversation with him was recorded and can be heard on the recorder below.  Mazzetti did a good job of describing Mohamed's version of events.  He writes that during his 90-minute conversation, "Mr. Mohamed was agitated as he recounted his captivity, tripping over his words and breaking into tears."

That was very much my experience as well.  It may be difficult at times to understand all of what Mohamed recounts because he is emotionally distraught in the extreme, but it's nonetheless very worth listening to what he has to say, at the very least to portions of it.  Mohamed was repeatedly beaten with a stick on the bottom of his feet and his palms, hit in the face, and hung from the ceiling.  They threatened him with both the arrest of his mother and electric shock, and told him that he should forget his family.

He still does not know why he was detained and beaten, nor does he know what is happening to him now.  Indeed, although Mazzetti writes that he was detained and beaten by Kuwait captors, Mohamed actually has no idea who was responsible, and told me that at least some of the people interrogating him spoke English.  He has been told that he will be deported back to the U.S., but is now on a no-fly list and has no idea when he will be released.  American officials told Mazzetti that "Mr. Mohamed is on a no-fly list and, for now at least, cannot return to the United States."  He's been charged with no crime and presented with no evidence of any wrongdoing.

This event is significant for multiple reasons, many of them obvious.  The questions Mohamed was repeatedly asked -- including two days ago by American embassy officials and FBI agents who visited him in the detention facility -- focused on whether he knew Anwar al-Awlaki, the American cleric in Yemen who has become an obsession of the Obama administration, as well as why he went to Yemen and Somalia.  Kuwait is little more than a subservient American protectorate, and the idea that they would do this to an American citizen without the American government's knowledge, if not its assent and participation, is implausible in the extreme.  That much of the information they sought from Mohamed is of particular interest to the U.S. Government only bolsters that likelihood.

Independent of all that, the U.S. Government has an obligation to protect its own citizens.  Mohamed described to me how both embassy officials and the FBI expressed zero interest in the torture to which he had been subjected during his detention.  The U.S. Government has said nothing about this matter, and refused to comment about Mohamed's treatment to The New York Times. 

All of this underscores the rapidly expanding powers the U.S. Government and law enforcement agents within the country are seizing without a shred of due process.  For the government to put an American citizen on the no-fly list while he's traveling outside the U.S. is tantamount to barring him from entering his own country -- a draconian punishment, involuntary exile, meted out with any due process.  In June, the ACLU filed a lawsuit on behalf of several citizens and legal residents who -- like Gulet Mohammed -- have been literally stranded abroad and barred from returning with no hearing, simply by being placed secretly on the no-fly list.  Add to that the growing seizures of the laptops and other electronic equipment of American citizens re-entering the country without any warrants -- or even yesterday's ruling from the California Supreme Court that police officers can search and seize someone's cell phone without a warrant when arresting them -- and (even leaving aside the administration's ongoing due-process-free prison camps and assassination programs) these are pure police state tactics.

The Bush-era torture scandal was as much about its use of torture-administering allies as it was the torture regime which the U.S. itself created.  In the face of these credible allegations -- just listen to this American teenager talk and assess how credible he is -- the Obama administration, at the very least, has the obligation to inform the public about whether this is true, what its role was, if any, and what it's doing to investigate and protest this abuse of its own citizen.

My discussion with Mohamed can be heard by clicking PLAY on the recorder below.  I'm posting it in its entirety without edits, except for the last minute or so where we discussed how we came to speak, information I'm withholding at his request: