A London-based journalism nonprofit is working with the WikiLeaks Web site and TV and print media in several countries on programs and stories based on what is described as massive cache of classified U.S. military field reports related to the Iraq War. Iain Overton, editor of The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, tells Declassified that his organization has teamed up with media organizations—including major television networks and one or more American media outlets—in an unspecified number of countries to produce a set of documentaries and stories based on the cache of Iraq War documents in the possession of WikiLeaks. As happened with a similar WikiLeaks collection of tens of thousands of U.S. military field reports on the Afghan war, the unidentified media organizations involved with the London group in the Iraq documents project will all be releasing their stories on the same day, which Overton says would be several weeks from now. He declined to identify any of the media organizations participating in the project.
Overton acknowledges that the volume of Iraq War reports that WikiLeaks has made available for the project is massive, and almost certainly more than the 92,000 Afghan field reports the organization made available for advance review to The New York Times, Britain's Guardian, and Germany's Der Spiegel. The material is the "biggest leak of military intelligence" that has ever occurred, Overton says. As we reported when stories on WikiLeaks' Afghan holdings first appeared, the site's stash of Iraq documents is believed to be about three times as large as its Afghanistan collection. After the Times, Guardian, and Der Spiegel published their stories based on the Afghan war documents, the site itself posted 76,000 of the papers. But after coming under criticism from both Pentagon spokesmen and human-rights activists for publishing information that could jeopardize the lives of Afghans cooperating with American and allied forces, WikiLeaks said it would not itself post the remaining 15,000 Afghan war documents until activists had taken some time to review, and, if necessary, edit sensitive information from the material.
WikiLeaks had signaled that the Afghan war documents might be posted on the site in the near future; its plans for the release of those documents are currently unclear. Overton says that in their work on the Iraq War documents, his organization and its media partners have "significantly learned from past experiences" regarding disclosure of material that could put lives in jeopardy. "We are hugely aware that this is an issue, and we're taking it very seriously," Overton says. He says that his organization itself would not be posting raw U.S. government reports on the Web, adding that he sees his group's job as digging stories out of the raw material, not simply publishing it in its original form. Overton says that his bureau's media partners are also "aware of the need to ensure that information is properly redacted."
Monday, 13 September 2010
Jon Savage compiles Black Hole: Californian Punk 1977-1980
Jon Savage has curated a new compilation for Domino, Black Hole: Californian Punk 1977-1980.
The esteemed journalist and broadcaster, best known for his formidable 1991 punk tome England’s Dreaming, aims here to pay tribute the first wave of Cali punk, pulling together routinely angry and anti-establishment – if often darkly humorous – tracks from the likes of The Dead Kennedys (pictured), The Germs and The Zeros. There’s a more in-depth explanation of the project’s motivation in Savage’s sleeve notes, which are reproduced below:
“This compilation celebrates the first wave of California Punk that briefly flourished between 1976 and 1980. Before then, there were a few glitter + cuspy street rock/ power pop bands – in Los Angeles, the Pop, Zolar X and the Nerves, in San Francisco, La Rue – while afterwards came the deluge: Hardcore, Rockabilly Revival, Industrial, and mainstream Power Pop.
So there were two to three years where – while admitting a generalised loud and fast punk template – almost anything went. Anyone who visited California in 1977 and 1978 could see that the major labels would never give the new generation of groups access to proper funding, television, radio and supported tours. They existed in a black hole. But in that vacuum they found freedom.
As the co-founder of key LA punk zine Slash Claude Bessy remembered, ‘the record companies and media were all hippies who had made it, and they were very hostile. But that’s when it got really good. We decided it was our party, nobody is interested, let’s go wild. It definitely seemed that we were going to be rejects forever’.
Californian punks were self-starters, creating an infrastructure out of nothing: venues like Brendan Mullen’s guerrilla club, the Masque; fanzines like Slash, Flipside, Search and Destroy out of San Francisco; and of course groups, ranging from sped-up rockers and pure punkers to synth experimenters and agit-prop consciousness raisers, leavened with the theatre of the absurd.
Having experienced a taste of this squalling subculture – I was very disappointed that it got almost no media attention in the UK. I’d get sent the records by Search & Destroy’s V.Vale and I couldn’t believe how good they were: easily as good as anything being produced in the UK, if not better in their black humour and earthy swing.
It was chauvinism of course, and nationalistic chauvinism at that – doubly nauseating. England had become ‘the world’s Punk Rock Centre’ – never mind that the idea, or a variant thereof, had also occurred to the alert and the alienated in New York, Cleveland, Paris, maybe even Chickasha, Oklahoma. And so its music press had to maintain the position. By slagging off the Yanks.
As if it was needed, this compilation should address that historical neglect. It has been gratifying to see Cali Punk given its due by recent oral histories like Brendan Mullen’s “We Got The Neutron Bomb: The Untold Story of L.A.Punk” (with Marc Spitz), and “Lexicon Devil – the Fast Time and Short Life of Darby Crash and the Germs” (with Don Bolles and Adam Parfrey 2002).
But the music contained herein needs no further justification than the fact that it rocks; that it contains ideas, tunes, anti-establishment rants, sharp comments about the world, attempts at transcendence and plenty of savage wit. Because it has remained an open secret, it hasn’t become a cliché, and so sounds as fresh as the day it was recorded.”
This is the second compilation that Savage has made for Domino, the first being 2008′s Dreams Come True: Classic Wave Electro 1982-87. It’s due to be released on November 15, on CD and digital download; more info and pre-orders here.
Tracklist:
1. The Germs – Forming
2. The Dils – I Hate The Rich
3. The Screamers – Peer Pressue
4. Crime – Murder By Guitar
5. The Zeros – WIMP
6. The Avengers – We Are The One
7. The Consumers – Anti Anti Anti
8. The Randoms – A-B-C-D
9. Black Randy And The Metro Squad – Trouble At The Cup
10. The Alleycats – Nothing Means Nothing Anymore
11. The Weirdos – Solitary Confinement
12. The Zeros – Beat Your Heart Out
13. X – We’re Desperate
14. The Offs – 624803
15. The Sleepers – Seventh World
16. The Middle Class – Situations
17. The Bags – Survive
18. The Germs – Media Blitz
19. The Middle Class – Love Is Just a Tool
20. The Flesheaters – Pony Dress
21. Urinals – Black Hole
22. The Aurora Pushups – Victims of Terrorism
23. The Avengers – The American In Me
24. The Dead Kennedys – California Uber Alles
25. The Dils – The Sound of the Rain
26. The Sleepers – Los Gatos
1. The Germs – Forming
2. The Dils – I Hate The Rich
3. The Screamers – Peer Pressue
4. Crime – Murder By Guitar
5. The Zeros – WIMP
6. The Avengers – We Are The One
7. The Consumers – Anti Anti Anti
8. The Randoms – A-B-C-D
9. Black Randy And The Metro Squad – Trouble At The Cup
10. The Alleycats – Nothing Means Nothing Anymore
11. The Weirdos – Solitary Confinement
12. The Zeros – Beat Your Heart Out
13. X – We’re Desperate
14. The Offs – 624803
15. The Sleepers – Seventh World
16. The Middle Class – Situations
17. The Bags – Survive
18. The Germs – Media Blitz
19. The Middle Class – Love Is Just a Tool
20. The Flesheaters – Pony Dress
21. Urinals – Black Hole
22. The Aurora Pushups – Victims of Terrorism
23. The Avengers – The American In Me
24. The Dead Kennedys – California Uber Alles
25. The Dils – The Sound of the Rain
26. The Sleepers – Los Gatos
What I found in my inbox today
An old friend sent me an email this morning. In it were pictures (e.g. the above picture is one) of Muslims praying on Madison Ave in New York city. Here are some snippets of the text:
- This is NYC on Madison Ave This is an accurate picture of every Friday afternoon in several locations throughout NYC where there are mosques with a large number of Muslims that cannot fit into the mosque
- This is in New York City on Madison Avenue, not in France or the Middle East or Yemen or Kenya.
- Is there a message here???? Yes, there is, and they are claiming America for allah. (sic)
- if we don't wake up soon, we are going to "politically correct" ourselves right out of our own country!
Can you spot the Obama reference?
This is actually an annual event that is planned and has a permit. Snopes details it here. Seeing my friends and countrymen embrace this fear and loathing is unsettling, but sadly I have to say it is also not surprising. It is campaign season again and the din of hate will only grow loader as we near November. Now, with large media outlets and talk radio fanning the flames we will all be awash in it. Joe Canason writes, "Paranoia and prejudice have long been instruments of right-wing politics in America, from the Red Scare and McCarthyism to the Nixonite Southern strategy. The current outbreak of Islamophobia represents the latest product of the same old manufacturing process." Indeed it does.
Joe Canason @'Salon'Second Soldier Alleges Former Tillman Commander Ordered "360 Rotational Fire" in Iraq
(Photo: Staff Sgt. Liesl Marelli / DVIDSHUB; Edited: Jared Rodriguez / t r u t h o u t)
Another former soldier of Bravo Company 2-16 (2nd Battalion, 16th Infantry Regiment) has said in a radio interview that a controversial battalion commander ordered soldiers to open fire on civilians in an indiscriminate pattern of "360 rotational fire," upon being hit by an improvised explosive device (IED). The interview took place last month with Scott Horton of AntiWar.com Radio. The commander in question is the same commander who led the first of many investigations into the death of NFL football star Pat Tillman in Afghanistan, in 2004, and was one of Tillman's commanding officers. A documentary on what the Pentagon has said was a "friendly fire" incident has just been released, "The Tillman Story." In the interview with Horton, Spc. Josh Stieber said that he witnessed the street massacres, which resulted when the order was carried out "maybe five to ten times."
The first soldier to reveal the order, Spc. Ethan McCord, told World Socialist Website News reporter Bill Van Auken last April that the commander, Lt. Col. Ralph Kauzlarich, told his men in different settings and at various times that they were to have a new "S.O.P." (standard operating procedure) whenever an IED went off. At that time, in early 2007, the Bush "surge" was just getting underway, and IED attacks and troop deaths had risen sharply. McCord told Van Auken: "He [Kauzlarich] goes, 'If someone in your line gets hit with an IED, 360 rotational fire. You kill every motherf*cker on the street.'" McCord said that he had also witnessed the order carried out, saying: "I've seen it many times, where people are just walking down the street and an IED goes off and the troops open fire and kill them."
Continue reading
Ralph Lopez @'truthout'
Houellebecq vs. Wikipedia
French writer Michel Houellebecq has always loved to pepper his novels with long encyclopedic descriptions of personalities, locations, and scientific concepts. In his new novel, the excellent La carte et le territoire (The Map and the Territory), which is the toast of the French literary scene, Houellebecq launches into tedious digressions about topics as varied as the housefly and the city of Beauvais. Some of the passages seemed so much like Wikipedia entries that Slate.fr, Slate's French sister site, decided to check, and—surprise!—discovered that at least three passages from the book are borrowed from the online encyclopedia.
On Sept. 2, I published an article in Slate.fr, under the headline "Houellebecq, the Possibility of a Plagiarism," in which I revealed the author's copy-and-pastes from Wikipedia and noted that the technique was a logical extension of his literary style. (For side-by-side comparisons of three passages from La carte et le territoire and the Wikipedia entries, see this page.)
Writer Dominique Noguez once called Houellebecq "the supermarket Baudelaire." He has always described society using the clinical language of marketing- and advertising-speak. Wikipedia, where the cold, unemotional writing is based on the soft consensus of its contributors, is a perfect match for Houellebecq's prose.
Plagiarism also has a long literary history. In 1869, in Les Chants de Maldoror (The Songs of Maldoror), Comte de Lautréamont's description of his character Maldoror is partly based on an entry from L'Encyclopédie d'histoire naturelle (The Encyclopedia of Natural History), by Jean-Charles Chenu. Scholars didn't discover Lautréamont's borrowing until 1952. Thanks to Google, we needed five minutes rather than 83 years to track down Houellebecq's sources.
The use of the term plagiarism in the Slate.fr article set off a heated controversy in France. (The author was already a polarizing figure.) The anti-Houellebecq side found new proof of his work's vacuity, while the pro-Houellebecq camp complained of a witch hunt against him. Plagiarism has become the Godwin's law of literature, the word that shouldn't be said, that curtails all further discussion.
Houellebecq's response to the controversy was one of weary resignation. He rejects the use of the word plagiarism, but he doesn't deny copying and pasting from Wikipedia. In a video interview, he calls his style "[a] patchwork, weavings, interlacings" He went on:
Lots of people have done it. I was especially influenced by [Georges] Perec and [Jorge Luis] Borges. Perec could do it even better than me, because he doesn't rework the fragment at all, which always creates a very strong linguistic discrepancy. Me, I can't manage that kind of discrepancy, so I rework the text a bit to make it closer to my own style. … I'd like to be able to modify them a little less than I do.
In other words, Houellebecq is apologizing for not copying Wikipedia more directly. A spokesman for Flammarion, his publisher, told us, "If some passages appear to be verbatim from other work, they can only be very short quotes." But Houellebecq doesn't care if they're short or long; Wikipedia is a literary source like any other.
Indeed, Houellebecq praises the online encyclopedia in La carte et le territoire by creating a fictional version of a Wikipedia entry: He imagines the page of iconic French TV anchor Jean-Pierre Pernaut as it might appear in the near future. In his video interview, Houellebecq claimed, "I manage to write fake Wikipedia pages. I think the one about Jean-Pierre Pernaut is totally believable." In fact, though, the pastiche was not successful, completely failing to capture the essence of Wikipedia-speak by being too grandiloquent.
Beyond any literary consideration, Houellebecq and Flammarion are theoretically in breach of the law. Wikipedia may be published under a free software license, but quoting from the encyclopedia is controlled by the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA licence. By publishing entries under that license, Wikipedia allows commercial reproduction, but only with clear attribution: "To quote an excerpt from Wikipedia in a book, you would need to identify it as a quote (with quotation marks for example) and source it with a footnote or an endnote as 'Wikipedia, article X, version read on the XX/XX/XXX' with the URL to that precise version," Adrienne Alix, the president of Wikimedia France told me.
Houellebecq never cites Wikipedia when he copies from it, so could the encyclopedia sue him for plagiarism?
Probably not. Wikipedia is not the author. Each article is a collective work, with each contribution signed with the pseudonym or IP address of the contributor in the History tab. For Michel Houellebecq to get into legal trouble, one of the contributors would need to feel particularly wronged, which is unlikely to happen. Not to mention that Wikipedia sometimes borrows from other texts.
Ironically, a smart-ass contributor found it funny to rewrite Wikipedia's definition of the housefly with the slight alterations Houellebecq added in his book. Houellebecq is not (yet) a member of the French Academy, but he has earned a spot as a Wikipedia contributor. He must like that a lot.
Vincent Glad @'Slate'
British troops investigated for heroin smuggling
Military police are investigating claims that British soldiers may have trafficked heroin from Afghanistan.
The Ministry of Defence said they were aware of "unsubstantiated" claims that troops were using military aircraft to ship the drug out of the country.
The inquiry is focusing on service personnel at airports in Camp Bastion and Kandahar.
Security has been tightened, with additional sniffer dogs being used as part of the crackdown at the bases.
An MoD spokeswoman said: "We are aware of these allegations.
"Although they are unsubstantiated, we take any such reports very seriously and we have already tightened our existing procedures both in Afghanistan and in the UK, including through increasing the use of trained sniffer dogs.
"We regret any inconvenience this causes to our service personnel. Any of our people found to be engaged in trafficking of illegal narcotics will feel the full weight of the law."
Drugs and weapons
BBC Defence Correspondent Jonathan Beale said the Royal Military Police's Special Investigation Branch launched their investigation before the allegations were reported in the press.
Our correspondent added the increased security measures - such as the use of sniffer dogs at Afghan and British airbases - were introduced last month.
Afghanistan is the source of 90% of the world's opium.
The multimillion dollar trade in poppy production is used to fuel the insurgency.
It allow militants to purchase weapons with which they then attack the Afghan government and international forces, destabilising the region.
According to a 2008 UN report, 98% of the country's opium is grown in just seven provinces where there are permanent Taleban settlements and where organised crime profits from the instability.
WikiLeaks Collaborating With Media Outlets on Release of Iraq Documents
Joe Raedle / Getty Images
Hacker on Alleged Wikileaks Source Adrian Lamo explains why he told authorities that U.S. Pvt. First Class Bradley Manning was the alleged source of the Afghanistan Wikileaks docs
Overton says that media organizations participating in the project will be making financial contributions to "help meet production costs" and that each media organization will likely come up with its own, at least partly original, take on the material because "everyone wants their exclusive." He declined to discuss in any detail what specific revelations the Iraq documents might contain. Declassified has previously reported that the Iraq material portrays U.S. forces being involved in a "bloodbath," but some of the most disturbing material relates to the abusive treatment of detainees, not by Americans but by Iraqi security forces.
It is unclear what role WikiLeaks frontman and cofounder Julian Assange is playing in the current project. Assange is currently facing an investigation by Swedish authorities related to allegations of rape and sexual molestation. Pentagon officials have condemned WikiLeaks' handling of classified defense files and have demanded that the Web site hand back all its holdings to U.S. authorities and destroy all its copies of the material.
It is unclear what role WikiLeaks frontman and cofounder Julian Assange is playing in the current project. Assange is currently facing an investigation by Swedish authorities related to allegations of rape and sexual molestation. Pentagon officials have condemned WikiLeaks' handling of classified defense files and have demanded that the Web site hand back all its holdings to U.S. authorities and destroy all its copies of the material.
Mark Hosenball @'Newsweek'
*shucks*
From my inbox this morning:
Hi:
I'm writing to you, first of all to compliment you on your blog, and secondly to say that, primarily as a result of reading your great material, I've been inspired to begin one of my own.
I live in Los Angeles, although I am Scottish by birth, and I have always been staggered by the lack of concern and, indeed, ignorance that you find here in regard to politics and its impact on each individual life. It would seem even more apparent these days - at a time when the threat from the extreme right is growing ever larger.
Hence the blog. I'm not deluding myself that it will become a talking point for thousands but take the position that, if one young person is moved to vote by reading it, then it's a success. That's why I'm trying to use music posts as the tease and intersperse them with opinion pieces and interesting news excerpts.
I'd like to ask you to have a look at the blog when you have a chance and, if you think it worthwhile and in accord with your views, whether you would be willing to mutually link each other's blogs so, hopefully, more readers can be directed to both. I would also like to ask whether you have any objection to me using pieces from your blog on mine.
My blog is still in its infancy and the design is still evolving. However there's enough content up there, I believe, for you to get the idea of where I'm coming from.
The blog is
Thanks. Hope to hear from you soon.
Well Neil,
you seem to be doing a fine job so far...
will keep checking back
Regards/
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