How Wikileaks Shone Light On Some of the World's Darkest Secrets

 

 

By Archie Bland

08 April, 2010
The Independent

How does a website run by just five full-time staff generate so many scoops? Archie Bland investigates

When the Ministry of Defence first came across Wikileaks, staffers were stunned. "There are thousands of things on here, I literally mean thousands," one of them wrote in an internal email in November 2008. "Everything I clicked on to do with MoD was restricted... it is huge." The website, an online clearing house for documents whose authors would generally prefer them to stay in the private domain, has since been banned from the MoD's internal computers, but it did no good: eventually, that email ended up on Wikileaks. And when a US Army counter-intelligence officer recommended that whistleblowers who leaked to the site be fired, that report ended up on Wikileaks too.

The authorities were right to be worried. If any further proof were needed of the website's extraordinary record in holding the authorities to account, it came this week, in the release of shocking video footage of a gung-ho US helicopter attack in Iraq that killed 12 people, including two unarmed employees of the Reuters news agency.

The US government had resisted Freedom of Information requests from Reuters for years. But when an anonymous whistleblower passed the video on to Wikileaks, all that quickly became futile. An edited version of the tape had received almost 4 million hits on YouTube by last night, and it led news bulletins around the world.

"This might be the story that makes Wikileaks blow up," said Sree Sreenivasan, a digital media professor at New York's Columbia Journalism School. "It's not some huge document with lots of fine print - you can just watch it and you get what it's about immediately. It's a whole new world of how stories get out."

And yet despite Wikileaks' commitment to the freedom of information, there is something curiously shadowy about the organisation itself. Founded, as the group's spokesman Daniel Schmitt (whose surname is a pseudonym) put it, with the intention of becoming "the intelligence agency of the people", the site's operators and volunteers - five full-timers, and another 1,000 on call - are almost all anonymous. Ironically, the only way the group's donors are publicly known is through a leak on Wikileaks itself. The organisation's most prominent figure is Julian Assange, an Australian hacker and journalist who co-founded the site back in 2006. While Assange and his cohorts' intentions are plainly laudable - to "allow whistleblowers and journalists who have been censored to get material out to the public", as he told the BBC earlier this year - some ask who watches the watchmen. "People have to be very careful dealing with this information," says Professor Sreenivasan. "It's part of the culture now, it's out there, but you still need context, you still need analysis, you still need background."

Against all of that criticism, Wikileaks can set a record that carries, as Abu Dhabi's The National put it, "more scoops in its short life than The Washington Post has in the past 30 years". By earning its place as the natural destination for anyone with sensitive information to leak who does not know and trust a particular journalist - so far, despite numerous court actions, not a single source has been outed - Wikileaks has built up a remarkable record.

Yes, it has published an early draft of the script for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and Wesley Snipes' tax returns; but it has also published the "Climategate" emails, an internal Trafigura report on toxic dumping in Ivory Coast, and the standard operating procedures for Guantanamo Bay.

Whatever the gaps in its procedures, there is little doubt that the website is at the forefront of a new information era in which the powerful, corrupt and murderous will have to feel a little more nervous about their behaviour. "There are reasons I do it that have to do with wanting to reform civilisation," Assange said in an interview with salon.com last month. "Of course, there's a personal psychology to it, that I enjoy crushing bastards. I like a good challenge."

Full disclosure: What we wouldn't know without Wikileaks

Trafigura's super-injunction

When commodities giant Trafigura used a super-injunction to suppress the release of an internal report on toxic dumping in the Ivory Coast in newspapers, it quickly appeared on Wikileaks instead. Accepting that the release made suppression futile, Trafigura lifted the injunction.

The CRU's 'Climategate' leak

Emails leaked on the site showed that scientists at the UK's Climate Research Unit, including director Phil Jones, withheld information from sceptics

The BNP membership list

After the site published the BNP's secret membership list in November 2008, newspapers found teachers, priests and police officers among them. Another list was leaked last year. The police has since barred officers from membership.

Sarah Palin's emails

Mrs Palin's Yahoo email account, which was used to bypass US public information laws, was hacked and leaked during the presidential campaign. The hacker left traces of his actions, and could face five years in prison.

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Beyond Law And Order

 

 

The political class cannot abdicate responsibility for leadership and make the Naxal problem into a mere security issue. The way Pakistan deals with its tribal-belt in FATA should not be a role-model to emulate in central India

 

B. Raman

 

There are two Indias.

The dazzling India which we see every day on our TV channels, in the spins of our political leaders and in the writings of our so-called strategic analysts. This is the India which, according to them, is moving rapidly forward to take up its position as a world power, which is courted by the other nations of the world.

But there is another India which we rarely see or write about. This is the India of grinding poverty-- a victim of social exploitation of the worst kind, where the inhabitants--mainly tribals-- are treated like chattels and domestic animals by the upper caste political leaders, landlords and forest contractors.

We rarely see India of negative images because it has been sought to be pushed under the carpet by the dazzling India, which feels embarrassed to admit to the world that such an India exists 63 years after independence.

It is this India kept pushed under the carpet, which has managed to struggle its way out from under the carpet and is hitting out with ferocity at all its perceived exploiters-- whether in the Government or in the society.

It is this India coming out from under the carpet, which is flocking to the banners of the Maoist ideologues and taking to arms against the Government and its social exploiters. For it, the Government is not of the people, by the people and for the people, but of the exploiters, by the exploiters and for the exploiters.

Unless we have the moral courage to admit this harsh reality we are going to see more and more incidents of utter savagery as we saw on April 6, 2010, in the Dantewada district of Chattisgarh where a group of Maoists --estimated at between 300 and 1000-- ambushed and butchered about 75 members of the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), who had gone into the jungles for counter-insurgency operations.

This is not the first incident of butchery of the security forces  in the history of our counter-insurgency operations. This will  not be the last unless and until we realize that counter-insurgency is not only about putting down violence against the State and Society, but also about making resort to violence unnecessary by addressing the problems and grievances of the tribals.

It would be very easy to dismiss the Maoist insurgency as the political manipulation of illiterate or semi-literate tribals by Maoist ideologues from cities to achieve political power through the barrel of the gun. Yes, there is an element of cynical political  manipulation of the tribals by many city-bred Maoist ideologues.

But the claim of political manipulation alone cannot explain how hundreds and hundreds of tribals are flocking to the banners of the Maoists. Intense anger over the failures of successive Governments to recognize and address their problems are driving them  to heed the calls of the ideologues to massacre their perceived class enemies.

Unless and until we have a two-pronged approach to the problem--better counter-insurgency to put down violence and better governance and administration to remove the expoitation of the tribals by the non-tribals and improve their quality of life, blood will continue to flow in the jungles and roads of the tribal homelands in Central India.

Tribal India had always posed law and order problems. The tribal homelands in the North-East did so when Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi were Prime Ministers. They put down the Chinese and Pakistani supported tribal insurgency in the North-East with a firm hand. At the same time, they interacted vigorously with the tribal people and addressed their problems in an attempt to wean them away from violence. Nehru started a special service called the Indian Frontier Administration Service (IFAS) and inducted the best officers from other services into it to improve governance in the tribal areas not only in the North-East, but also in the Andaman & Nicobar Islands. They were always ready for a dialogue with the tribal leaders--even with those who had taken to arms against the State.

They addressed poverty and social injustice not only in the tribal areas, but also in  the rest of the country. Indira Gandhi used to start her day every day by mingling with poor and exploited people outside her residence and listening to their tales of woe. Her shoulders were always available to the poor and exploited to rest their head on and cry.

After Rajiv Gandhi, we have had a succession of Prime Ministers without a human touch in governance and administration in the tribal areas. They tend to look upon the tribal revolt in Central India as purely a problem of law and order, but not also as a problem with human dimensions.

The Prime Minister Dr.Manmohan Singh is rarely seen or heard. He hardly ever mingles with the poor and downtrodden in the tribal belt of Central India. He deals with the tribal belt of Central India in the same way as the Pakistani leaders deal with the tribals of the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (FATA)-- as mainly a problem to be tackled by the security forces as if the political class has no responsibility for leadership.

There is hardly a medium and long-term strategy -- with a judicious mix of the law and order and hearts and minds dimensions. All new ideas on counter-insurgency coming up are about how to make the security forces more effective. It is important for them to be effective . But it is equally--if not more--important for the political leadership to be seen by the tribals as caring and sensitive to their anger and bitterness towards their exploiters.

The time has come for the Prime Minister to take up in his hands the responsibility for working out a comprehensive political, operational and human strategy for dealing with the problems of the tribal homelands in Central India

If we continue to dither  as we are doing now, Mao Zedong may have his last laugh in India. 

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"But none of the priests used condoms so at least they're all good Catholics."

Mark Steel in The Independent on 7 April 2010

Gordon Brown has one genuine chance left. He must employ the Vatican, as their public relations team operates at a level of utter genius. Somehow, while they're embroiled in an international paedophile scandal, they've fixed it so the person who's had to apologise is the Archbishop of an entirely different faith, for suggesting on Radio 4's Start the Week that the scandal has caused the Catholic church to lose credibility. Gary Glitter must have been straight on to 118 118 to gasp "Give me the number of the Pope".


The Pope's own preacher managed to make life even trickier for his boss, complaining that criticism of the Catholic Church on this issue was similar to anti-Semitism and "Collective punishment for Jews." Of course. I'm sure when a priest is told the children he abused want action to be taken against him, he thinks "I tell you what, now I know exactly how Anne Frank felt."

Still, I suppose we should be grateful he didn't add "But none of the priests used condoms so at least they're all good Catholics."

In a way this follows the history of the church, which has never been keen on owning up to its bad behaviour until the last minute. As a guide, having threatened to kill Galileo unless he withdrew his astronomical discoveries, they did manage to apologise, in 1996. So if the child abuse victims can be patient for three more centuries that should get everything cleared up.

You could argue there's something in the nature of the priesthood that makes this sort of activity more likely. A shrink for example might suggest that if you're seen as a conduit between your parishioners and the creator of the universe, and have to be celibate and even masturbation lands you with an eternity in unimaginable agonising torment, that could lead to behavioural issues in certain cases.

The Vatican has objected that the percentage of paedophiles in the priesthood is lower than in society as a whole. Who knows what polling company produced those figures but the problem isn't that some priests abuse children, it's that the ones who do it have been protected by their holy bosses.

It may be that a similar percentage of gas fitters are child abusers, but if they're caught they're sent to the police, and not told that as long as they quietly slip off to a different parish they can still advertise themselves as Corgi registered.

For example, one Father Lawrence Murphy is said to have abused around 200 boys at a deaf school over a period of 24 years in South Wisconsin, and when this was reported to the Vatican he was asked to move to North Wisconsin. And if they'd thought of it they'd probably have suggested he tried the blind school instead as at least they wouldn't be able to identify him in court.

Or there's the government commission in Ireland that concluded in one institution: "For six years priests and nuns terrorised boys and girls with physical, sexual and mental abuse."

If that was any other body, the press would plaster photos of all the abusers on their front pages under headlines saying "Boil this scum." And with your normal paedophile case, if someone suggests the institution that protected them will lose credibility as a result, the media reaction isn't "Hmm, well that seems a little strong."

But there's an assumption that if someone's a religious leader they are by definition wholesome and a bit saintly, so even a paedophile priest must mean well. And the person in charge of the branch of the Vatican that dealt with these misdemeanours was Cardinal Ratzinger, the current Pope, so it must all be a result of a bureaucratic mix-up or something.

So the Pope will just have to offer a semi-regret, send a couple of the worst offenders to a clinic, maybe suggest in future if a priest can't help himself with a bit of child abuse, he should use patches to wean himself off it, and then complain how upsetting it is if in spite of all this someone suggests his church is losing credibility.

Or maybe we've all been fooled and the Archbishop's comments were part of a publicity stunt for the show he made them on, in which case it was a huge success and similar tactics will be used for other shows. So the first question on next week's Gardeners' Question Time will be: "Can the panel tell me why my hydrangeas have been riddled with greenfly since the Church of England has been effectively finished as a religion? And that comes from the Dalai Lama?"

‘Essay factory’ offers 2:1 degree or your cash back

 

Liz Lightfoot

 
IT is the academic equivalent of "phone a friend". Students are being sold foolproof dissertations written for them with a cashback guarantee if they fail to get at least a 2:1 degree.
 
Instead of burning the midnight oil, all the students have to do is put the cost on their credit card. The company selling the service also says its contributors can ghost-write a first-class version of the essay for £1,440. An MA dissertation will cost up to £15,000.
 
The offers by the website UKEssays.com are the latest evidence of the growth of "essay mills", widely condemned as cheating aids. The firms claim they do not encourage dishonesty and say they tell students to use the essays as a "resource" and not hand them in.
 
The tailor-made work is becoming increasingly popular as universities become better at detecting direct plagiarism from the internet.
Most universities now use anti-plagiarism software to scan work that students submit, but they have done little to combat the essay mills.
 
UKEssays.com promises to put the completed essay through its own anti-plagiarism scanner to make sure it cannot be detected.
The firm is among the most successful of the essay mills. Its parent company, Academic Answers Ltd, recently reported profits of £241,598 for the year ending November 30, 2008. Its founder, Barclay Littlewood, 31, a qualified solicitor, has an estimated fortune of some £7m, according to The Sunday Times Young Rich List.
 
The company claims to have 4,000 contributors, ranging from serving lecturers to solicitors, retired doctors and recent graduates, who write the essays on behalf of students.
 
It says it has regular customers from universities including Durham and York. It claims none of the essays it recently provided for 240 students at Nottingham and Nottingham Trent universities to pilot its new guarantee was detected.
 
Many university degrees now award all marks — or nearly all — through coursework and dissertations rather than final exams, making them vulnerable to students plagiarising work or buying essays online.
 
Last week a Sunday Times researcher posing as an Edinburgh University undergraduate asked the company about providing a final-year dissertation and essays for a course in English literature and classics.
 
A member of staff at UKEssays.com told her that a 6,000-word dissertation, which would count towards her final degree, would cost £1,440 at first-class standard and £720 for a 2:1. She advised that students should not try buying essays that were of an improbably high standard.
 
Tony Eynon, managing director of UKEssays.com, based in Nottingham, said the new guarantee was a "real breakthrough in contemporary academia".
 
Bahram Bekhradnia, director of the Higher Education Policy Institute, a think tank, said: "It is potentially very serious and undermines the whole fabric of higher education."

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The secrets in some English surnames

Terence Blacker

They reveal family origins, as well as insights into one's life and character

There are moments in one's life when a powerful curiosity about family origins begins to niggle. An urge to talk to older relations about interestingly eccentric great aunts is one symptom of this malaise; researching one's family tree on the internet is another.
Ancestors rarely live up to expectations. When Michael Parkinson was dropped from the genealogical celebrity show Who Do You Think You Are? because the Parkinsons were simply too dull, his experience reflected a wider reality. I am said to be descended from a ninth-century king of Denmark, belong to the family of one of Napoleon's mistresses, and be a distant cousin of Stephen Fry - but then it turns out so is virtually everyone else.
 
Surnames are different. They not only reveal family origins but quite possibly contain insights into one's own life and character. Recognising how helpful names are as a key to self-knowledge, Professor Richard Coates of the University of the West of England launched a project researching the surnames of Britain this week.
 
Can the origin of a family surname inform the way we behave today? Perhaps some familiar names can provide a few clues.
Cowell. In Anglo-Saxon times, a cowell was a tool for picking up animal droppings, particularly those of cattle. Because cowpats were then highly valued in dried form, being used as insulation, cushions and an early form of Frisbee, those who collected them and sold them, cowellers or cowells, gained great respect for making money out of muck and were often revered local figures.
 
Darling. It is wrongly assumed that the family name darling was earned by court favourites who were easy with their sexual favours. In fact, the name originates from the old Wiltshire verb "to darl", meaning to render a person unconscious by means of speaking in a tedious, dull manner for a long time. Darlings were much in demand among residents of Salisbury and other major towns who had difficulty in sleeping.
 
Windsor. During the reign of Henry II, a pejorative term "wind sir" was used to describe particularly useless, vacillating members of the aristocracy. (By contrast, the name Winslet derives from the Viking "vintslett" or "wind-slayer", denoting a powerful and attractive warrior).
 
Rooney. Surprisingly, the name Rooney, or Ru Ni to give it the correct spelling, originates in Mongolia where it denoted a strong but less than talkative stone-carver. The name is thought to have transferred to English during the 19th century.
Widdecombe. As indicated in the old folk song Widdecombe Fair ("The maid with eyes so fair and fay/ Took me twa to Widdecome Fair, wehay!"), the word "widdecombe" was a euphemism for physical delight. The highest compliment that could be paid to a woman of mature years was that she was "wise, wide and widdecombe".
 
Clarkson. In 15th-century Basildon, the town clerk employed his son to make public pronouncements on his behalf at every possible opportunity. Thereafter a self-important loudmouth who liked to claim rather more attention than he deserved became known as a clerkson, or clarkson.
 
Osborne (or Osbourne). Literally "dog-skinner" in the local Worcestershire dialect, an Osborne was someone who did unpleasant things on behalf of the community. As a result, he became something of an oddity, a social outsider. Despite their apparent and superficial differences, recent osbornes - George, Ozzy and John - share this common heritage.

 

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EIGHT CLUES TO HAPPINESS

KHUSHWANT SINGH

Having lived a reasonably contented life, I was musing over what a person should strive for to achieve happiness. I drew up a list of a few essentials which I put forward for the readers' appraisal.

1. First and foremost is GOOD HEALTH. If you do not enjoy good health you can never be happy. Any ailment, however trivial, will deduct from your happiness.

2. Second, a HEALTHY BANK BALANCE. It need not run into crores but should be enough to provide for creature comforts and something to spare for recreation, like eating out, going to the pictures, travelling or going on holidays on the hills or by the sea. Shortage of money can be only demoralizing. Living on credit or borrowing is demeaning and lowers one in one's own eyes.

3. Third, a HOME OF YOUR OWN. Rented premises can never give you the snug feeling of a nest which is yours for keeps that a home provides: if it has a garden space, all the better. Plant your own trees and flowers, see them grow and blossom, cultivate a sense of kinship with them.

4. Fourth, an UNDERSTANDING COMPANION, be it your spouse or a friend. If there are too many misunderstandings, they will rob you of your peace of mind. It is better to be divorced than to bicker all the time.

5. Fifth, LACK OF ENVY towards those who have done better than you in life; risen higher, made more money, or earned more fame. Envy can be very corroding; avoid comparing yourself with others.

6. Sixth, DO NOT ALLOW OTHER PEOPLE to descend on you for gup-shup (gossip). By the time you get rid of them, you will feel exhausted and poisoned by their gossip-mongering.

7. Seventh, CULTIVATE SOME HOBBIES which can bring you a sense of fulfilment, such as gardening, reading, writing, painting, playing or listening to music. Going to clubs or parties to get free drinks or to meet celebrities is criminal waste of time.

8. Eighth, every morning and evening, devote 15 minutes to INTROSPECTION. In the morning, 10 minutes should be spent on stilling the mind and then five in listing things you have to do that day. In the evening, five minutes to still the mind again, and ten to go over what you had undertaken to do.

Higher callings, base desires

 

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown: 

The custodians of impossible morality turn into monstrous predators

The idea for this column comes today from a young man called Taher. He emails me often, asking for advice, commenting on what I have written and sometimes just to kick around thoughts. He is an American whose father hails from Pakistan and whose mum is Afghani, "one of those beautiful, green-eyed mountain people", he says. They divorced soon after moving to Ohio. His father told Taher it was his mother's fault, because too many people stared at her irresistible face, a face that aroused evil desires.
Taher, who is 24, wants to be a writer and is starting that long journey. His first novel is going to be about just such a woman, born too lovely and seen as witchy by conservative Afghani émigrés living in small-town America. And her son, abused by the local imam. It happened to Taher when he was 10.
 
Taher and I have been discussing the child sexual abuse within the Catholic church worldwide and complicit priests and popes. What paedophile priests have done to children - especially young boys, most of all vulnerable young boys - is horrifying. Far worse though is the cover-up, which appears to have been organised at the Vatican, at the HQ. The top brass ensured their reputation was kept clean. Suffocating silence was thrown over the dirty quilt.
 
The Catholic hierarchy seeks to monitor and completely control the sexual behaviour of their flocks - banning condoms, abortion, pleasure, damning those who refuse to obey. Millions of believers ignore the injunctions, but millions do not. That power is then abused, as we have seen. More is sure to tumble out in the weeks to come.
 
But Taher is interested in bigger questions: "Do you not think there are some similarities between 'true' Catholics and 'true' Muslims? Both have leaders who are obsessed with how dangerous sex is and both have really sick attitudes. If they could go easy and just accept sex is part of human life it would be better for them and the rest of us."
 
A number of Muslim bloggers have started up similar debates since the recent Catholic scandals broke. One asks: "Could it be that Muslims are more sexually repressed than members of other faiths? I guess it is a close call between us and Catholics." Several young Muslim women and men have also contacted me alleging sexual abuse by imams and mullahs.
 
These two world faiths have more rules, regulations, thought and behaviour police when it comes to carnal relations than any other. Catholicism casts human sensuality as Satanic, injects an overdose of guilt to kill pleasure and within its clergy imposes celibacy, a restriction that is clearly impossible for many men of that God. The custodians of impossible morality so turn into monstrous predators.
 
Strict Sunni and Shia Muslims also fear sexuality and try to contain it with ever increasing fervour. Young women must cover up completely; girls too are temptresses and so are made to wear scarves, cloaks and gloves. Young men must wait until marriage with a good Muslim woman before they can have sex. All else is haram - wicked, a sin. So consumed are some Muslims with this mission to tame the sexual drive that they live in a distorted universe, a swamp of imagined wickedness and some, like the Catholic priests, end up doing terrible things.
 
I have interviewed too many such Muslim men who find modern relationships between the sexes only corrupt and filthy. Abdullah, a prisoner who is doing time for raping his niece, tells me that veils cannot hide a woman's breasts and buttocks. He can see right through them which is why, in his view, women should not be in the public space, ever. He can't pray, he says, because provocative females have rotted his brain and heart.
 
The Catholic priests who raped children from their congregations would understand Abdullah's behaviour and excuses perfectly. Those who see sex as gross and immoral, perhaps more easily use sex as an instrument of violation. Other, less dramatic effects of sexual paranoia are just as worrying. Since the spread of Saudi religious fundamentalism, devout Muslims have been brainwashed into thinking Islam is mainly concerned about the avoidance of lust and the struggle to find high decorum. Their faith has got distorted and become fearful.
 
From west to east, millions have sex on their minds day and night and they cannot find the tranquillity for prayer and connection with God and spirituality. Theirs is one long torturous battle against the natural self. So too, I imagine, for the vast numbers of Catholic priests whose celibacy was a sham. Did they punish their victims for their own failures to connect with the divine?
Child abusers are found among people of all religions and none. Religious and cultural communities and ordinary neighbourhoods collectively hide abuse and abusers because that is preferable to the stench of a scandal. When the Sikh British playwright Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti wrote a play about sexual violence in a temple, Sikh protesters stopped the performances. They didn't want to be reminded of what goes on in holy places. In my recent memoir, The Settler's Cookbook, I described how a widower in the 1960s touched up women when they bent over to find their shoes after prayers. They said the "dirty cockroach" had deflowered his own daughters. Nobody did anything. Instead, when he died they cleaned up his story and prayed for his soul. No bridegrooms were found for the "used" girls. In mosques and Islamic organisations, this still goes on and is veiled in utmost secrecy.
 
The abuse of young people in any religious setting is an intolerable betrayal of trust and divinity. But some religions seem more susceptible than others. Substantial numbers of Catholics and Wahabi Muslims are excessively fervent, seriously sanctimonious and phobic about the human body. Is it possible this lethal combination encourages illicit, forced sex with children? Should we be looking to save these souls before they wreck more bodies? I am only posing questions not casting aspersions. Not allowed. Blasphemy, they will cry. These enquiries will be buried under a pile of righteous outrage. Until the next time and the next.

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