Wikileaks and Human Rights: Scott Horton to Speak Here Tomorrow

Human rights litigator Scott Horton will be speaking here tomorrow evening. I will introduce him and moderate the Q and A.

Here is the info:

What: "Wikileaks: The Public's Right to Know and the Government's War on Whistleblowers"
Where: The Inn Wisconsin room, Memorial Union, U. of Wisconsin - Madison
When: Friday April 22, 2011, 7:00 pm

Mr. Horton is a lecturer at Columbia Law School, Senior Editor of Harper's Magazine, and prominent legal blogger. His clients have included Andrei Sakharov and other Soviet dissidents.

Here is a sample of his writings on the Wikileaks controversy:

WikiLeaks’ disclosure of the 91,000 U.S. government documents that it labels the “Afghan War Diary” raises a number of vital issues. Most of the discussion so far has focused on the significance of the documents themselves. They make the intelligence community look not so intelligent, and they make a number of political leaders look like dissemblers, spewing claims about the situation in Afghanistan that can’t really be squared with information in their briefing portfolios. But quite apart from their contents, the WikiLeaks documents are a test for America’s voracious national-security state. Its response to them gives us a sense of how it intends to fight perceived threats to secrecy.

... Field officers of the intelligence community urgently need to play a game of misdirection–relabeling the threat that is presented to them. They will argue that the WikiLeaks disclosures imperil the safety of American forces on the ground, America’s allies, and thus every American citizen sitting at home. They will find few facts to back this contention, but that won’t stop them.

Find the rest of his article here.