WikiLeaks plugged

A bank blockade is about to staunch the flow of information from Julian Assange's notorious WikiLeaks website. According to reports in the Guardian and the New York Times, two of the newspapers that splashed the news from a torrent of secret documents uploaded to the website mostly by a low-level American soldier, Bradley Manning, publishing has stopped abruptly. What's lacking is, er, liquidity.

Julian Assange announced Monday that his pro-transparency hacker website will temporarily halt publication because of a cash shortage and will now concentrate on fundaising efforts. Bank of America, Visa, Mastercard, Western Union, and Paypal boycotted WikiLeaks last year after the release of thousands of classified U.S. State Department cables and a threat to leak a big stash of documents incriminating the Bank of America. Consequently, the organization has lost about 95 percent of its revenues, Assange said at a press conference in London. Mortgage frauds hinted at in B of A emails were published on the related site Anonymous in March, but had less impact than anticipated. Arizona and Nevada had already filed charges for

a host of deceptive practices by Bank of America, including falsely advising people that they must be in default before getting a modification, promising modifications would be made permanent after an initial trial period, and pursuing foreclosures even after assuring homeowners that the foreclosure process was stopped.

Already, the death knell is sounding and commentators are writing obituaries for the website, like this one in the Atlantic. While Manning remains in solitary confinement, the Australian whistleblower Assange is out on bail in Britain.

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Rebel Without A Clause? Review of 'Rimbaud in Java'

Writer Jamie James attempted to fictionalize his research for a novel,  after nine years of investigation, but ultimately he abandoned make-believe dialogue for the dogged truth.  That's a reporter. The book is released this week, and I got a chance to review it.

Long before Rambo, there was Rimbaud.
In fact, the poet Arthur Rimbaud can be seen as a kind of anti-Rambo: a literary child prodigy, army deserter, and blue-eyed French fop.
Consider "Bad Blood": A Season in Hell.

It sounds like an appropriate title for a Sly Stallone action movie sequel, but the punchy phrases are taken from an extraordinary prose poem, self-published by an openly gay teenager in 1873, which still is considered a milestone in French literature.

Jamie James's latest book, Rimbaud in Java-The Lost Voyage,  details the poet Arthur Rimbaud's inspiration and desperation to keep a low profile in a weird bygone Java replete with magic and carnal mysticism, then traces his travels back to Europe incognito as a deckhand aboard a steamer. Detours into sexual deviancy in the Victorian age and amorous French attitudes towards Orientalism and Islam are relevant and gripping.
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Arthur Rimbaud, decadent teen poet

 

(Hat tip to cartoonist Matt Bors.)

Hari-kari at the Independent?

The popular and rather egomaniacal columnist Johann Hari, who has admitted lifting quotes and bolstering his own profile on Wikipedia under a pseudonym while savaging his rivals, handed back his Orwell Prize for political reporting before it was officially rescinded. But it appears he kept the cheque! His apology in today's edition of the Independent may have satisfied his editors, though most of his journo colleagues are aghast. The Oxbridge chap, a wily wannabe Christopher Hitchens without Hitch's intellectual wattage , will go on leave from his newspaper for four months, apparently to take a little refresher course in journalism and ethics at his own expense. (Some say this will be at Columbia's prestigious J-school. But how did he get admitted so quickly?) And then , folks, he is expected back at the Independent. You have been warned. Same crass company as Stephen (Shattered) Glass and Jayson Blair , although The Independent has been remarkably soft on him.

For more reaction in the British press on this incident: click here, there, everywhere.

update:
The Orwell Prize and Political Quarterly has invited Hari to make a donation in the amount of the 2000 pound sterling prize to the press freedom charity, English PEN, of which George Orwell was a member, but no donation has yet been made.
 

Russ Baker bashes New Yorker piece on 'Getting Bin Laden' for sketchy sourcing

The spin cycle apparently ain't what it used to be. Is the New Yorker's exclusive article on the Bin Laden raid mainly based on whoppers circulated by the writer's dad, a top brass with military intel? [pictured above] A veteran reporter warns us not to be, er, schmidled:

When you look closely, nothing seems right about what will surely become the accepted account of the raid that nailed America’s enemy number one. And then things get even weirder…


•It is based on reporting by a man who fails to disclose that he never spoke to the people who conducted the raid, or that his father has a long background himself running such operations (this even suggests the possibility that Nicholas Schmidle's own father could have been one of those "unnamed sources.")

•It seems to have depended heavily on trusting second-hand accounts by people with a poor track record for accurate summations, and an incentive to spin.

•The alleged decisions on killing bin Laden and disposing of his body lack credibility.

•The DNA evidence that the SEALs actually got their man is questionable.

•Though certain members of Congress say they have seen photos of the body (or, to be precise, a body), the rest of us have not seen anything.

•Promised photos of the ceremonial dumping of the body at sea have not materialized.

•The eyewitnesses from the house -- including the surviving wives -- have disappeared without comment.

We weren't allowed to hear from the raid participants. And on August 6, seventeen Navy SEALs died when their helicopter was shot down in Afghanistan. We're told that fifteen of them came, amazingly, from the same SEAL Team 6 that carried out the Abbottabad raid -- but that none of the dead were present for the raid. We do get to hear the stories of those men, and their names.

Of course, if any of those men had been in the Abbottabad raid -- or knew anything about it of broad public interest, we'd be none the wiser -- because, the only "reliable sources" still available (and featured by the New Yorker) are military and intelligence professionals, coming out of a long tradition of cover-ups and fabrications.

Meanwhile, we have this president, this one who according to the magazine article didn't ask about the core issues -- why this man was killed, who killed him, under whose orders, what would be done with the body.

Well, he may not want answers. But we ought to want them. Otherwise, it's all just a game.

Hat tip to the new'Forensic Journalism' website, whowhatwhy.com


How's this for Bad assery??

(Russ Baker, the investigative reporter behind whowhatwhy -- a site that we hope will not overlook where, when, and how??-- points out that he is not the well-known Pulitzer Prize winning columnist

Elementary my dear Watson....run!

He may be synonymous with crafty detective work and putting criminals behind bars, but it seems that even Sherlock Holmes never saw this one coming. Mark Gatiss, the executive producer and co-writer of BBC show Sherlock, tweeted how the cast and crew had to abandon the set during the London riots. "This is a new one on me. Scene incomplete owing to approaching looters. Unbelievable times," he tweeted (http://twitter.com/#!/Markgatiss). "Unit evacuated. F*****g terrifying!". The i, P15

hat tip to Media Guardian

Breivik calls journalists 'Category B Traitors'

Killing the messenger in a massive hack attack?

Confessed Oslo attacker Anders Behring Breivik mentioned journalism conferences that attract droves of reporters and editors from around the globe as major targets for possible attacks to advance his xenophobic, right-wing agenda.

In his 1,500-page manifesto, Breivik called these gatherings “THE MOST attractive targets for large scale shock attacks" of what he deemed "category B traitors."

Hat tip to the Center for Public Integrity for this link