Glenn Greenwald: Government-Created Climate Of Fear (Re: WikiLeaks)

[Hissyspit]

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/01/10/fear/index.html

MONDAY, JAN 10, 2011 07:11 ET

Government-created climate of fear
BY GLENN GREENWALD

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.

- snip -

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.

- snip -

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.

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[Ninga]

1. i have been afraid for a long long time that our culture has become so

fragmented, easily distracted, and so overloaded with stimulaton that critically important events never get the attention deserved.

In another time what happened to Jacob Appelbaum, would have not have gotten swept under the rug as it has now.

[BWCL]

3. yeah

couldn't agree more!

[BWCL]

4. is

there still ways to send money to them?

[Luminous Animal]

7. Yes.

http://wikileaks.ch/support.html

[suffragette]

2. K&R

[BridgeTheGap]

5. Bush & co were absolutely guilty of fostering such a climate. That it continues, though on a lesser

scale, is still disturbing. While there are legitimate concerns of national security that require certain information to be kept from the public eye, it should be fairly clear that people in government can use that legitimate concern to hide nefarious activity.

[Luminous Animal]

6. The continuation is not on a lesser scale. If anything, the harassment by the DOJ of

lawful activity has increased.

[Luminous Animal]

8. Kick.

[kgnu_fan]

9. kick