WikiLeaks v. State Department

There’s been another major WikiLeaks data dump. The previous ones which made the news here in America focused on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But this one shifts focus from the Pentagon to the State Department, releasing around 250,000 lightly classified documents which reveal the inner workings of US diplomatic relations.

The usual cast of clowns are up in arms about this, calling for a quasi-Stalinist government stranglehold of information and war on the press for reporting  embarrassing facts about them. Republican Congressman Pete King of Long Island, NY, is calling for WikiLeaks to be classified as a terrorist organization, and the reality television star / internet troll Sarah Palin compared WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to the Taliban.  She also suggested that the government use “cyber tools” in order to track him down. Perhaps the cyber police could use their cyber tools in order to backtrace it. And when that happens, consequences will never be the same.

But the American right wing isn’t the only political faction angry with WikiLeaks. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claims that WikiLeaks is part of an American plot against his country with the goal of stopping Iranian nuclear capabilities because some of the leaked cables contain pleas from other countries in the region calling on the American political leadership to attack Iran’s nuclear sites.

To be fair, Ahmadinejad is not exactly the Taliban. For one thing, Iran is mostly Shia while the Taliban is Sunni. But when you’ve got two opposing sides, like the political leaderships of America and Iran, and they both accuse a journalistic organization of being on the side of their enemy, then that’s a pretty strong indication that the journalistic organization in question is not a part of either camp. They’re just doing their job. And that job happens to involve publishing information which will make powerful people in all camps extremely angry.

I normally stay away from sports metaphors, but if you’ve got two opposing teams both of which accuse the referee of favoring their opponents, then similarly that would be a pretty strong indication that the ref is actually being fair and that it’s the players who are biased in their own favor. WikiLeaks is like that kind of referee, but obviously on a much more significant scale.

So the whining of world political leaders over WikiLeaks have basically here been reduced to the level of discourse normally reserved for Buffalo sports fans. Or even, now, the players themselves, but that’s a different story altogether. It’s pathetic.

Joe Lieberman has also weighed in on the subject. He, like many others, is of the opinion that WL puts American lives at risk, but stops short of calling them a terrorist organization. White House Spokesman Robert Gibbs also reiterated the claim that WL puts American lives at risk. But this seems to be largely just chest-pounding, since neither statements contain any specific information in the now-public cables which connect the data to any risk at all. Lieberman and Gibbs are simply asserting that claim without any data to support their assertions. And it can’t reasonably be said that drawing a specific connection between the cables and supposed danger to American diplomats must remained classified because thanks to WikiLeaks and the newspapers involved, those cables are now available to the public.

The only way that the position of “WL endangers Americans” can be maintained would be if a much more general connection were to be made. For example, since the release of these documents makes the DoS look bad, then other countries might be less willing to cooperate with them. But that would be the case for any reporting which reflected poorly on the State Department. Taken to its logical conclusion, that line of thinking would mean a necessary prior restraint on any reporting on the State Department, which would be a problem in a country with something like a First Amendment and a Supreme Court which rules against prior restraint.

If that weren’t bad enough for this “OMG Julian Assange endangers Americans” argument, there’s one final nail in the coffin here. Prior to the release of these documents, WL offered to review the information by proxy with the State Department, just as they had with the Pentagon in the previous cases involving military issues. Here is a link to the relevant correspondences from the UK’s Index on Censorship, but this is the important quote which gives lie to this claim about how the State Department would do anything to prevent these alleged risks to American lives, from State Department legal adviser Harold Hongju Koh:

We will not engage in a negotiation regarding the further release or dissemination of illegally obtained U.S. Government classified materials

So even if you were to believe the ‘putting lives at risk’ claim at face value, the underlying and unspoken claim that the State Department cares very much about these risks is completely ridiculous. They clearly don’t care enough about these imaginary risks to bother talking to a few icky computer nerd hackers. Gross!

Everybody must get stoned

This is just a very depressing story and I really don’t even know how to find a joke in it. Apparently that power belongs only to Monty Python.

In Iran, they of course have capital punishment. And there are still some pretty brutal practices used, even within the context of capital punishment. Unlike in Utah, the convict doesn’t get to choose to use an older means. Even in that case, the convict chose to die by firing squad, which only goes back at most as long as we’ve had guns.

But in Iran, they occasionally use methods of capital punishment which go back literally to the Stone Age. In Islamic criminal jurisprudence, stoning or lapidation is called Rajm. Typically, the victim (when female, such as is the case here) is buried up to their chest and then people throw rocks at them until they’re dead. The rocks are supposed to be smaller than one’s fist, which reduces the chances that the victim will receive a mercifully quick fatal blow. The punishment as it’s applied for adultery is prescribed in Islam in the Hadith, Book 17, Number 4192:

[W]henever Allah’s Apostle received revelation, he felt its rigour and the complexion of his face changed. One day revelation descended upon him, he felt the same rigour. When it was over and he felt relief, he said: Take from me. Verily Allah has ordained a way for them (the women who commit fornication),: (When) a married man (commits adultery) with a married woman, and an unmarried male with an unmarried woman, then in case of married (persons) there is (a punishment) of one hundred lashes and then stoning (to death). And in case of unmarried persons, (the punishment) is one hundred lashes and exile for one year.

Now fast forward to the present day and we have the case of Sakineh Mohammadie Ashtiani, a Turkish-speaking mother of two from the northern Iranian city of Tabriz who was convicted of adultery in 2006. Human rights attorney Mohammed Mostafaei claims that Ashtiani’s confession to adultery may have been due to language barriers, since she does not speak Farsi. If that’s true, then it would echo the case of Fawza Falih, an illiterate women who was coerced to sign a confession to being guilty of “witchcraft” by the Saudi Arabian Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, a.k.a. the “religious police” – a confession which, of course, she could not even read. The religious police refused to even read the accusations to her in that case.

Amnesty International is pushing hard against this miscarriage of justice, but as far as the Iranian courts are concerned it’s a done deal. Sakineh Mohammadie Ashtiani could be stoned to death at any minute. The only thing that could prevent it is a ginormous international campaign on her behalf, which even in the case of Iran is not unprecedented. Maybe it’s not plausible to expect the Iranian government to have a deconversion experience and suddenly realize that their legal system is bullshit and based on ridiculous mythology, but at least we can maybe help out the most egregious victims one at a time.

UPDATE: Sakineh Mohammadie Ashtiani will not be stoned to death, but she still faces the death penalty for adultery.

UPDATE II: The Iranian government has banned the media from covering this case.

UPDATE III: The Guardian reports Ashtiani’s cellmate’s account of the initial verdict.

UPDATE IV: The President of Brazil has made a call to grant asylum to Ashtiani. I have not yet heard of a similar call made by our President, unfortunately.

UPDATE V: Iran’s government rejected President da Silva’s offer.

UPDATE VI: The International Committee Against Stoning is reporting that Ashtiani’s attorney was arrested in Turkey yesterday

UPDATE VII: Ashtiani is now facing 99 lashes for indecency because a newspaper published a picture of her without her headscarf.

UPDATE VIII: The secretary general of Iran’s High Council for Human Rights said that there is a “good chance” that Ashtiani will not be executed.

UPDATE IX: A German group is reporting that Ashtiani is free, but the Iranian government has not yet confirmed.

UPDATE X: The Iranian government released a video of Ashtiani confessing to her husband’s murder, which they claim is “contrary to a vast publicity campaign by Western media that confessed murderer Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani has been released.”

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Earthquakes, Iran, & Boobs

This should kind of make some sort of sense by the end of this post

The first funny thing about earthquakes and Iran comes from that country’s always hilariously unhinged figurehead, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. You see, he is worried about earthquakes in Iran’s capitol city. This is a reasonable concern since Tehran in on a major fault line. But his response to it, well, it’s not so reasonable because lol Ahmadinejad. From the Telegraph:

“We cannot order people to evacuate the city… but provisions have to be made. At least five million should leave Tehran so it is less crowded and more manageable in case of an incident,” Mehr news agency quoted him as saying.

No big deal, right? Just 5 million or so. It’s kind of like moving half of New York City to Albany. Those other 7 million people are probably all assholes anyway, I guess.

In most modern countries, cities on a fault line compensate for the risk by improving building codes, monitoring problematic areas, educating the public on how best to respond, that sort of thing. But Iran’s President seems to want to move toward a more drastic route. To find out why he sees the matter as so incredibly urgent right at this point in time, we might do well to see how his religious leaders may have influenced him.

And as it turns out, this very well could be the case. An imam called Ayatollah Kazem Sedighi had a few insights based on his up-to-date study of geology which is apparently contained completely within the Koran. Let’s see what he has to say about all this. From the Telegraph:

“Many women who dress inappropriately … cause youths to go astray, taint their chastity and incite extramarital sex in society, which increases earthquakes,” [Sedighi] told worshippers at a Tehran prayer service late last week.

Ahmadinejad’s position as president of Iran is more of a secular one than his official clerics. So as a ‘practical’ politician, he’s going to hedge his bets on whether or not Allah will be merciful (6:54, among other places, in the Koran) and try to get 5,000,000 people to just up and move to the sticks… Just as a Plan B in case of the extremely unlikely scenario where Sedighi’s plan to dress women as beekeepers actually doesn’t reduce the amount of earthquakes.

Anyway, Jennifer McCreight, a grad student at Perdue (for full disclosure, I should probably mention that she’s also on the same atheist blogroll as me, which is linked to in the sidebar to the right), decided to carry out an experiment since the good Imam’s claim seemed testable. She calls it Boobquake, but I prefer the National Day of Cleavage. She’s inviting women to dress immodestly this Monday (April 26) and then will analyze seismic readings from around the world in order to see if there are any statistically significant deviations which could confirm or falsify Sedighi’s hypothesis inre: boobs/earthquakes.

There’s also a Facebook page, and as Jennifer’s been getting tons of press for this it’s gotten pretty popular. NY Magazine, the NY Post, the Times of India, and CNN have covered this, and that’s only after a minute of searching.

Back to school Iranian-style

A scary article appeared in the NY Times earlier this week. The Iranian government’s reaction to the protests against the alleged election fraud are carrying over into the realm of academia, with its “Supreme Leader” making statements which seem to indicate a purge of the education system. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said last weekend:

“Many of the humanities and liberal arts are based on philosophies whose foundations are materialism and disbelief in godly and Islamic teachings.”

He’s right about those studies being secular. If done properly they do not automatically presume the existence of the Abrahamic deity, and they don’t presuppose Koranic infallibility. What he’s wrong about is that that is a horrible thing which “ardent defenders of Islam” must stop or co-opt.

And when he says that teaching these subjects “leads to the loss of belief in godly and Islamic knowledge,” he’s right in the sense that learning more makes one less inclined to accept religious doctrine – especially ones invented by some power-hungry sociopath 1400 years ago. But it’s not exactly clear that there is such a thing as “Islamic knowledge” in the first place. When someone who claims to be inspired by their religion makes a discovery, it’s not acknowledged and respected simply because they make that claim. It has to be tested using the same evil secular methods Khamenei is decrying here. If a purge like the one described is implemented in Iran, respectable Muslim scholars will be left with no way to demonstrate their findings to a larger audience because they will have to go out of their way to make sure certain mullahs are convinced that such findings are based on “Islamic knowledge” – whatever that means – and not the secular methodology which we know actually works.