Former U.S. ambassador to Malaysia John Malott has declined to be drawn into a verbal punch-up with Malay rights troublemaker Ibrahim Ali, who had called him and a prominent economist Zainal Aznam Yusof “sick” for their views. Both men had said the existing discriminatory practices in the country boded ill for its economic future.
"I do not want to dignify his remarks by saying anything in response. But I would like to assure my many friends in Malaysia that I am well, both physically and mentally!" Malott wrote in an email reply to Malaysia Chronicle.
This is not the first time Malott and Ibrahim Ali have crossed swords. Last year, Ibrahim staged a noisy demonstration outside the U.S. embassy in leafy Ampang suburb, handing over a memorandum to officially protest Malott for calling his Perkasa outfit a 'militant' group.
Malott (right) led the U.S. mission during the years 1995 to 1998 and still maintains an active interest in Malaysia and her Southeast Asian neighbours. Earlier this week, he wrote an article entitled The price of Malaysia’s racism that was published in the Wall Street Journal.
In it, he warned of the negative social and economic consequences if Prime Minister Najib Razak continued to practise racial favouritism and allowed his Umno party to foist Malay supremacy onto the other ethnic groups that make up 45 per cent of a 28 million population.
Deflecting blame from Najib
Ibrahim, a veteran parliamentary lawmaker from Kelantan with a chequered record, first burst into national prominence about a year ago seeking to defend Malay rights after a court ruled that the word ‘Allah’ could be used by non-Malays to describe God.
He founded Perkasa and staged protest after protest, making inflammatory remarks that deeply angered the non-Malays. Yet he escaped punishment for many of his comments that lawyers have said were clearly seditious.
That sparked suspicion that he was part of a good guy-bad guy drama staged by Najib and former premier Mahathir Mohamad to cling to power in Umno.
On Tuesday, the 57-year old Ibrahim lashed out at Malott and Zainal, who sits in the National Economic Advisory Council.
In an effort seen as orchestrated to deflect blame from an increasingly unpopular Najib, Ibrahim stoutly defended the political dominance held by the Malay community and also resisted any attempts to withdraw its special economic rights.
"I think there are Malaysians who have asked for his help. There must be people behind him, asking him to give negative views of our prime minister,” Malaysiakini reported him as saying.“I believe Malott is backed by a Malaysian who is facing a political death, but I will not name names.”
Coincidentally, Zainal had also blamed Ibrahim and Perkasa for “strangling” the New Economic Model at a separate event. When Najib took over the premiership in 2009, he claimed he wanted to launch the needs-based NEM to replace the race-based and affirmative-action New Economic Policy.
But Ibrahim disagreed the NEP made Malaysia uncompetitive.
“During the time of the NEP, there was so much FDI coming in. Now the dip in FDI is a global issue... even the US has been asking its businesses to invest in their own country. It is not because of affirmative action,” Ibrahim had said in rebuttal to Zainal’s claim that the NEP’s condition of a minimum 30 per cent Malay equity participation reeked of protectionism and deterred investments." said Ibrahim.
Political thuggery and fallacies
Experts and opposition politicians have minced no words, lambasting Najib and the Umno elite of using “political thugs” like Ibrahim Ali to stir racial emotionalism and to intimidate the other races for the end purpose of hiding the economic truth from the Malays.
Malaysia suffers from endemic corruption and its ranking on the Corruption Perception index has been slipping. In particular, the Umno elite has been accused of massive dishonesty and graft. A recent report from renowned watchdog body, Global Financial Integrity, has warned that between 2000 to 2009 some $291 billion or RM888 billion was siphoned out of the country in the form of illegal outflows. Yet Mahathir's son Mukhriz, who is also the Trade deputy minister, has insisted there is no need to investigate the report.
Opposition Leader Anwar Ibrahim has often questioned why 96.7 per cent of the poorest Malaysians were Malays if the NEP was so effective. Umno has controlled the country since 1957 and the NEP was first implemented in 1971.
“Malay supremacy is a slogan used by a small group of Malay elites who are cheating the Malays as a whole for their own interests. After 53 years in power, the Malays and bumiputera are still neglected. The 30 percent Malay-bumiputera equity has yet to be met. Of the RM54 billion equity and shares for bumiputera, only RM2 billion still belong to them,” PKR or People’s Justice Party president Wan Azizah Wan Ismail had said in November last year.
Like Malott and Zainal, she too had drawn a tidal wave of anger from Perkasa and other Umno-backed NGOs. A series of police reports were lodged against her, urging the authorities to probe and jail her for sedition and treachery towards her race.
There is some interest on whether Ibrahim Ali will now lead another showy Perkasa protest to the U.S. embassy, and if police complaints will be lodged against Zainal.
With popular uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt spinning along, each with a certain amount of world-reshaping potential, there's been a lot of new attention focused on the role that WikiLeaks has played in these events. Ian Black, the Middle East editor of The Guardian, one of the key newspapers disseminating diplomatic cables from WikiLeaks' trove, told NPR last night that he didn't feel the leaked cables were the primary driver of these uprisings. Nevertheless, WikiLeaks seems to have helped to remove the people now demonstrating on the streets from their isolation by providing a "confirmation of what people in these countries know and feel intuitively," about the conditions under which they have lived.
If you spend any time at all reading about Bradley Manning, the young U.S. Army private who stands accused of providing WikiLeaks with massive amounts of intelligence pulled from the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network used by the Pentagon and the State Department, the picture that emerges is one of a young man who also felt isolated, one who saw WikiLeaks as a means of ameliorating that feeling. Manning remains in custody --a particularly brutal form of solitary confinement, actually -- at the Marine Corps brig in Quantico, Va.
Manning still faces charges of his own, but he's played a larger role in the tensions between U.S. government officials and WikiLeaks, in that he is seen as the key figure in building a larger criminal case against WikiLeaks founder and figurehead Julian Assange. That Manning willingly provided WikiLeaks with classified information does not appear to be in dispute. The issue, rather, is one of "did Manning jump or was he pushed?"
U.S. officials have been gamely attempting to make the case that Assange inducedManning to provide WikiLeaks with government documents. Now, according to the Wall Street Journal's Julian Barnes and Evan Perez, that case has cratered:
New findings suggest Pfc. Bradley Manning, the intelligence analyst accused of handing over the data to the WikiLeaks website, initiated the theft himself, officials said. That contrasts with the initial portrait provided by Defense Department officials of a young man taken advantage of by Mr. Assange.Further denting the push by some government officials to prosecute Mr. Assange, the probes have found little to link the two men, though others affiliated with WikiLeaks have been tied to Pfc. Manning, officials said.For the U.S. to bring its preferred case against Mr. Assange of inducing the leak, it would have to show that the WikiLeaks founder specifically encouraged Mr. Manning to hand over the documents, which included thousands of State Department cables, as well as low-level intelligence reports on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.Federal Bureau of Investigation agents and Justice Department lawyers continue to gather evidence for a possible conspiracy charge against Mr. Assange, but that's a harder case to make, government officials said.
This is not going to come as any surprise to Jane Hamsher and Marcy Wheeler of Firedoglake, or Glenn Greenwald of Salon, who have been arguing that such a case against Assange could not be made for weeks.
This case against Assange -- that he had pursued Manning, with the intention of inducing the soldier into proving WikiLeaks with thousands of classified diplomatic cables -- relied heavily on the word of Adrian Lamo, a high-profile hacker-turned-"threat analyst," to whom Manning reached out in May of 2010, revealing that he had taken classified material and leaked it to Assange. Lamo reported this to authorities, and provided the contents of his chat logs with Manning to Wired Magazine.
In a December 15, 2010 article in the New York Times, Lamo told Charlie Savage that the case against Assange could be made by studying his chat logs with Manning:
Adrian Lamo, an ex-hacker in whom Private Manning confided and who eventually turned him in, said Private Manning detailed those interactions in instant-message conversations with him.He said the special server's purpose was to allow Private Manning's submissions to "be bumped to the top of the queue for review." By Mr. Lamo's account, Private Manning bragged about this "as evidence of his status as the high-profile source for WikiLeaks."Wired magazine has published excerpts from logs of online chats between Mr. Lamo and Private Manning. Mr. Lamo described them from memory in an interview with The Times, but he said he could not provide the full chat transcript because the F.B.I. had taken his hard drive, on which it was saved.Since WikiLeaks began making public large caches of classified United States government documents this year, Justice Department officials have been struggling to come up with a way to charge Mr. Assange with a crime. Among other things, they have studied several statutes that criminalize the dissemination of restricted information under certain circumstances, including the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986.
But the chat logs that Wired made available to the public were heavily redacted and fell well short of the mark in terms of bolstering Lamo's claim. That's when Greenwald and Firedoglake opened up a two-front attack on this allegation. Greenwald waged a high-profile battle with Wired on journalistic grounds. Meanwhile, Hamsher and Wheeler dived into the available information in an attempt to ascertain what could be divined from it.
Wheeler -- whose preternatural gift for taking massive amounts of data and synthesizing a throughline helped to earn her a Hillman Award for investigative journalism -- immediately starting picking holes in the government's case. Through this work Hamsher and Wheeler were able to construct a definitive timeline of events concerning Lamo's dealings with and about Manning, and -- lo and behold -- what they found were a ton of inconsistencies.
In turn, that spurred Greenwald to demand that Wired release the remaining chat logs between Manning and Lamo. Wired responded in oozingly self-serving fashion, in a two-pronged attack on Greenwald that Greenwald subsequently took apart in meticulous fashion. The final upshot on all of this? Wired admitted to BoingBoing's Sean Bonner and Rob Beschizza that "the chat logs in fact contained no unpublished references to Assange or private servers" for Manning's use.
And in terms of making the case that Assange was actively trying to induce or assist Manning in leaking classified information, that was, as they say, the whole shooting match. As Bonner and Beschizza point out: that left "no new smoking guns in the unpublished portion or the logs, and little to suggest the degree of collaboration between Pvt. Manning and Wikileaks that prosecutors may need to pursue charges."
As for what evidence there was to be had in the previously published portions of the chat logs, Bonner very deftly takes it apart. (Forgive the lengthy blockquote coming, it's important for clarity.) Per Bonner:
Given that those logs have been public for months now, anything incriminating in them has already been seen and noted a bajillion times over-- that's my assumption, anyway. There is some confusion about the already-published reference to an FTP server, and some people suggest that this backs up Lamo's claim. But I read these logs very carefully before making any comment, and didn't come to that conclusion.The section in question is as follows:(02:48:52 PM) Lamo: How long between the leak and the publication?(02:49:18 PM) Manning: some time in february(02:49:25 PM) Manning: it was uploaded(02:50:04 PM) Lamo: uploaded where? how would i transmit something if i had similarly damning data(02:51:49 PM) Manning: uhm... preferably openssl the file with aes-256... then use sftp at prearranged drop ip addresses(02:52:08 PM) Manning: keeping the key separate... and uploading via a different means(02:52:31 PM) Lamo: so i myself would be SOL w/o a way to prearrange(02:54:33 PM) Manning: not necessarily... the HTTPS submission should suffice legally... though i'd use tor on top of it...(02:54:43 PM) Manning: but you're data is going to be watched(02:54:44 PM) Manning: *your(02:54:49 PM) Manning: by someone, more than likely(02:54:53 PM) Lamo: submission where?(02:55:07 PM) Manning: wl.org submission system(02:55:23 PM) Lamo: in the massive queue?(02:55:54 PM) Manning: lol, yeah, it IS pretty massive...(02:55:56 PM) Manning: buried(02:56:04 PM) Manning: i see what you mean(02:56:35 PM) Manning: long term sources do get preference... i can see where the "unfairness" factor comes in(02:56:53 PM) Lamo: how does that preference work?(02:57:47 PM) Manning: veracity... the material is easy to verify...(02:58:27 PM) Manning: because they know a little bit more about the source than a purely anonymous one(02:59:04 PM) Manning: and confirmation publicly from earlier material, would make them more likely to publish... i guess...(02:59:16 PM) Manning: im not saying they do... but i can see how that might develop(03:00:18 PM) Manning: if two of the largest public relations "coups" have come from a single source... for instance(03:02:03 PM) Manning: you yeah... purely *submitting* material is more likely to get overlooked without contacting them by other means and saying hey, check your submissions for x...I've bolded the two parts I believe are relevant. In the first part, people are citing Manning's answer to Lamo's question as evidence, but this ignores the fact that Lamo's question is hypothetical. The question is presented as hypothetical, so I read the answer as hypothetical, too. Taking the answer out of context makes it sound like Manning is saying he used that system, when in fact he's merely suggesting the the type of system Lamo might use if he was in this situation. That's how I read it, anyway.The second bit is worth noting because it suggests Manning was submitting files somewhere also used by other submitters‐ hence the queue they might get lost in-- and the reference to after submitting something, someone needs to take further steps to let Wikileaks know about it. To me, that doesn't sound like a preferential setup, or a private or secret FTP server setup for someone specific.That said, I didn't talk to Manning or Lamo, and I only have these logs to go on. Your interpretation may be different. But I don't see this conversation as evidence of anything special or preferential as Lamo has suggested, which is why I said the logs don't back up Lamo's claims.
The more you shine sunlight on this matter, the more the case that Assange induced Manning to provide WikiLeaks with classified information, or otherwise assisted in the procurement of same, falls apart. So last night's news that investigators have failed to "uncover evidence that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange induced an Army private to leak government documents to his website," is pretty unsurprising. But this definitively vindicates the arguments that have heretofore been made by Greenwald, Hamsher, and Wheeler.
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