O Contraire

Now that Private Bradley Manning, source of WikiLeaks’ cascade of most treasured documents, has been charged with, among other things, “aiding the enemy,” and Julian Assange, the recipient of those documents, is likely to be charged under the Espionage Act, I think it’s time to consider the history of that act, and what it’s done to the United States and its citizens in the past. There are some eerie parallels with today.

In 1917, which is when World War I was in full swing and Woodrow Wilson, the Democratic president, thought it might be a fine idea to suppress dissent at home, a lot of Americans, most notably those in the press and Congress, rose up to object. So the final bill, when it was passed, never mentioned the press, which certainly made newspaper editors happy—for a time.

So I’m sort of wondering just how much uglier the United States can possibly make itself look. Right now the country seems to be playing a starring role in the Addams Family: a kind of global Vampira who seizes on her children and devours them.

The Parliament of Germany, a onetime yes-nation (until two weeks ago), declared to the White House that the treatment of Private Bradley Manning was “unnecessarily hard.” State Department spokesman P. J. Crowley resigned in March after telling an MIT audience that “what is being done to Bradley Manning is ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid.” A UN envoy, Juan Mendez, was not permitted to visit the prisoner. Amnesty International has weighed in suggesting the WikiLeaks source is likely a victim of human rights violations, as has the government of Australia.

It just so happens that—at least for now—bailouts of individual member countries are illegal under European Union law. You may not, especially given recent history, know this. Indeed, because of certain remarkable instances (cf: Greece, Ireland), it is quite clear that many members states of the EU would prefer not to know this.

But here it is in black and white, Article 125.1 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union: “The Union shall not be liable for or assume the commitments of central governments…. without prejudice to mutual financial guarantees for the joint execution of a specific project. A Member State shall not be liable for or assume the commitments of central governments… without prejudice to mutual financial guarantees…” etc. etc. Longwinded yes, but decipherable. Bailing out debtor nations is wrong. Illegal. Prohibited.

“The Mission investigated six incidents in which Judge Richard Goldstone beat his wife. The cases examined in this part of the report are, with one exception, all cases in which the facts indicate no justifiable spousal objective.”

— from The Bachrach Report

Oops. Sorry.

We know a lot more today about Judge Richard Goldstone than we ever did when I conjured up the Bachrach Report out of thin air, and now I’m going to have to backtrack just a bit because it looks a lot like Goldstone’s wife was never “intentionally targeted as a matter of policy” (as the judge himself would say), and also that she never was beaten by her husband. Or, for that matter, beaten by anyone at all.

Probably you’ve been concerned about family tensions within the Qaddafi family lately. Almost everyone has, even those who don’t know its members intimately, because (a) they all dislike each other, so it’s kind of interesting to watch family dynamics play out on the Libyan stage and (b) almost every one of them has what family counselors like to call “an unresolved issue.”

So here she is, bursting into the Tripoli hotel, sobbing openly in front of the reporters she has begged to see—and there she goes, pulled screaming from the cameras, her shrieks muzzled by handlers wielding knives, cloaks, anything to make her stop talking for good (watch the video here).

She’s just an anonymous woman in a burqa—no, she’s actually Eman al-Obeidy, a 26-year-old Libyan law student who looks far older. She tells the foreign journalists who are nothing more than a passel of jailbirds, incapable of roaming beyond that hotel without government permission, that she’s been raped by 15 men. They have bruised her, scratched her, urinated on her—very brave admissions on her part. And not only because the detailed playing and replaying of her impassioned pleas for help on foreign television will incite the Qaddafi regime (the same regime whose officials apparently raped her) to deal with her in ways we’d all prefer not to imagine. But because she’s a Muslim woman in a Muslim country, and Muslim women in Muslim countries by and large usually know better than to admit they’ve been raped.

I believe I have the answer to all our problems. Yes, the 22 nations of the Arab League begged and begged the US to intervene in Libya; yes, so did the Libyan rebels, who, still, keep yelling “One-two-three, Sar-ko-zee,” now that the French, the US, and the UK have acquiesced to their pleas.

And yes, you can bet that within five minutes or five days, take your pick, we’re all going to hear a lot about perfidious Western imperialism, and not just from Qaddafi. But from some of the very people (“folks,” as Obama would say, annoyingly) who once yearned to see allied fighter jets over Sirte airport and Tripoli bunkers—damn the consequences.

So here’s a little quiz:

Which nation possesses 70 F-15 S Eagle, 10 F5-E Tiger, 72 Eurofighter Typhoon, 15 Panavia Tornado ADV, 70 Panavia Tornado IDS for ground attack, and one Boeing RE-3A TASS plus a Boeing RE-3BITASS—among many other lethal instruments of war …

… but is unnaturally shy about hovering over Libya just now?

The ally in most grievous need of a couch, the hyper-emotional Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, has just called on NATO and the US to pack up and leave.

(Or did he? No one ever really knows what the president of Afghanistan means, least of all the president of Afghanistan, himself.)

First, according to the New York Times, he said over the weekend, “Our demand is that this war should be stopped. This is the voice of Afghanistan.” Then a few hours later a Karzai spokesman explained that no, that voice the world just heard wasn’t Afghanistan’s at all, and it wasn’t Karzai’s either. That, it would appear, was actually the voice of some random Afghan ventriloquist with a dummy in a soda jerk cap perched on his lap.

On the night Hosni Mubarak was toppled from power, the crowd in Cairo’s Tahrir Square found itself liberated from all sorts of constraints: dictatorship, brutal rule, censorship, casual imprisonment, torture. And civilization. Mariam Nekiwi, a young video editor, found this out first-hand when, as her boyfriend recalled for the Los Angeles Times, “A group of men surrounded her from four directions and closed her off.”

First someone grabbed her groin, then others grabbed the rest of her body, pulling at her clothes. She couldn’t see, but she did manage to scream.

The reaction of those around her?

“People started yelling at me to be quiet,” Nekiwi told the newspaper. “They said: ‘Don’t tarnish the revolution. Don’t make a scene.’”

Quick: Which nation’s largest bank is partly owned by Libya? Which nation’s stock exchange is partly owned by Libya? Which nation, as the Australian recently emphasized, is building bombs with Libya, courtesy of a European munitions firm in which Colonel Qaddafi has heavily invested?

And which nation handed over $5 billion to Libya during a jubilant ceremony, after which the generous European leader famously bowed low and kissed Qaddafi’s hand?

There are few spectacles bleaker than watching an organization devoted to transparency and courage threaten a lawsuit against someone who writes a book critical of that organization’s founder. Yes, Julian Assange — of WikiLeaks — is angry. Very, very angry.

Here’s why. Last fall, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, a valued former WikiLeaks staff member and computer scientist, broke up with Assange, feeling (as he informs the reader many times) that Assange had become “paranoid,” “a megalomaniac,” and extremely dicey about money. Naturally, the moment I learned from the New York Times that Assange was planning to take what his lawyers described as “legal action” against the book, I immediately called it up on my Kindle and started reading. Nothing like the prospect of a bully taking to the courts, I always think, to make me open up my wallet to the defendant.

Two years back, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi explained, in the wake of a string of rapes, that what the country really needed to thwart that kind of crime was at least 300,000 soldiers deployed in the streets. Lesser measures, he pointed out, simply wouldn’t work because “our women are so beautiful.”

Every time some commentator points out that Mohamed ElBaradei, who apparently hopes to become President Hosni Mubarak’s successor in Egypt, is basically a moderate and as such, worthy of US support, I think back to last June 3rd. That was the day Egypt’s biggest opposition group to Mubarak — a.k.a., the Muslim Brotherhood — announced it would back ElBaraidei and his so-called political change campaign.

The smart word around Rome is that Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi will be on the next plane out of the country, perhaps a few days later than Hosni Mubarak. One piece of evidence: the underage Moroccan pole dancer Karima El Mahrough (a.k.a. Ruby Heart-Stealer) caught on tape just days ago, telling a friend: “It’s going to cost him dearly.”

The teenager meant that very literally, it now appears. The prosecutors in Milan have been helping the local print media (much of the electronic variety being owned by Berlusconi) to generous helpings of dirt: 5 million euros (about $7 million), Ruby informed her friends over the phone, is the going price of her silence. And Berlusconi, a multi-billionaire after all, was evidently more than willing to pay up to keep his throne. In Italy, it’s okay (even important) for a politician to fool around, but there are limits: apparently one of those limits is underage girls. Even in Italy, this is against the law.

What exactly is national sovereignty these days? What does it amount to? Does a nation, in other words, still have the unilateral power to choose its own destiny and the destiny of its citizens? Or are citizenship and the idea of nationality so smudged that any power, either political or mercantile, can alter the laws of another?

These are the questions that arise as the result of the actions of a single pharmaceutical company — Hospira in this instance — which may well result in making unfeasible, at least in some American states and at least for a time, the possibility of putting certain prisoners to death in the United States. Something, in other words, that battalions of lawyers, Amnesty International representatives, and previous Supreme Court rulings were unable to accomplish.