Americans call for his incarceration, execution,assassination, rendition and torture. Freedom of information not so free as "Fortress America" has become Moonbat Capital of the world.
KUHNER: Assassinate Assange? Web provocateur undermines war on terror, threatens American Lives Washington Times Dec. 2, 2010
Wikileaks Cables at The Guardian.uk.co
Whisleblower Bradley Manning faces 52 years in prison for leaking documents to Wikileaks . Obama Clinton et al no better than the Bush/Cheney gang of thugs.
Julian Assange's Swiss bank account closed- just a bit of hypocrisy from the Swiss government and banks who kept billions in Nazi plunder including Gold fillings pried from the corpses of murdered Jews during Hitler's "Final Solution" . For decades these banks refused to release these funds .
According to the Swiss then this means Wikileaks is more dangerous than the Nazis???
Julian Assange's Swiss bank account closed Guardian.uk.co Dec. 6, 2010
WikiLeaks founder has account – used for donations – closed by PostFinance owing to 'false information' about residency
and the good news is : Wikileaks creates over 200 Mirror sites to combat the establishment's draconian attacks on Wikileaks.article below.
The Bad News is that much of the mainstream Media is taking sides with the establishment and the political elites and once again prove they are not on the side of the American people in general. They only love the rich and the powerful and treat the public at large as an annoyance. Something these superior individuals have to put up with and placate in order to keep their jobs. They see themselves as explaining to the ignorant and stupid public what they would claim is obvious that is that those in power need not answer to the great unwashed .
Glenn Greenwald appeared on MSNBC to discuss Julian Assange of Wikileaks and the most recent classified documents Wikileaks has made public. MSNBC attacks Julian Assange rather than critically examine what is in the leaks. They say he has put many people in danger but then claim what he revealed was already known or is not a big deal. they several times refer to the bogus rape charges and that he is a hypocrite because he at times keeps a low profile. They refuse to consider that these rape charges are just a way to discredit Assange.
They also mention that he went to 35 schools growing up . He says though that his parents were in the movie business and so they moved a lot.
They don't mention that because of death threats Assange is at times in hiding--
When Glenn Greenwald defends Julian Assange and criticizes the Congress and the media he is cut off.
The host has made her mind that Wikileaks and Julian Assange and people who support him such as Glenn Greenwald are all anti-American. Greenwald points out that these critics are falling back on the old McCartyism type accusations
did they cut him off on purpose, did homeland security interfere
Anyone watching this on tv who hasn't had the time to investigate these leaks on their own is left with the impression that Julian Assange and Wikileaks are dangerous and a threat to US security or that Wikileaks is making much ado about nothing.
Glenn Greenwald on MSNBC being treated as a radical anti-American for daring to defend Julian Assange & Wikileaks
(Note I reversed the order of the article beginning with the video and Joe Lieberman last)
Joe Lieberman emulates Chinese dictators by Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com Dec. 2, 2010
As Glenn Greenwald points out in his follow up article to this interview:
If there's Nothing New in these documents, can Jonathan Capehart (or any other "journalist" claiming this) please point to where The Washington Post previously reported on these facts, all revealed by the WikiLeaks disclosures:
(1) the U.S. military formally adopted a policy of turning a blind eye to systematic, pervasive torture and other abuses by Iraqi forces;
(2) the State Department threatened Germany not to criminally investigate the CIA's kidnapping of one of its citizens who turned out to be completely innocent;
(3) the State Department under Bush and Obama applied continuous pressure on the Spanish Government to suppress investigations of the CIA's torture of its citizens and the 2003 killing of a Spanish photojournalist when the U.S. military fired on the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad (see The Philadelphia Inquirer's Will Bunch today about this: "The day Barack Obama Lied to me");
(4) the British Government privately promised to shield Bush officials from embarrassment as part of its Iraq War "investigation";
(5) there were at least 15,000 people killed in Iraq that were previously uncounted;
(6) "American leaders lied, knowingly, to the American public, to American troops, and to the world" about the Iraq war as it was prosecuted, a conclusion the Post's own former Baghdad Bureau Chief wrote was proven by the WikiLeaks documents;
(7) the U.S.'s own Ambassador concluded that the July, 2009 removal of the Honduran President was illegal -- a coup -- but the State Department did not want to conclude that and thus ignored it until it was too late to matter;
(8) U.S. and British officials colluded to allow the U.S. to keep cluster bombs on British soil even though Britain had signed the treaty banning such weapons, and,
(9) Hillary Clinton's State Department ordered diplomats to collect passwords, emails, and biometric data on U.N. and other foreign officials, almost certainly in violation of the Vienna Treaty of 1961.
That's just a sampling.
This is what Joe Lieberman and his comrades are desperately trying to suppress -- literally prevent it from being accessible on the Internet. And "journalists" like Capehart play along by continuing to insist there's "nothing new" being revealed by WikiLeaks despite their never having reported any of this. And since the disclosures, does anyone believe that any of these revelations have received anything close to meaningful attention by the American establishment media? But remember -- as Capehart's newspaper taught us today -- "revelations by the organization WikiLeaks have received blanket coverage this week on television, in newspapers" in Free America -- showing what a Vibrant, Adversarial Press we are blessed with -- but "in many Arab countries, the mainstream media have largely avoided reporting on the sensitive contents of the cables."
Joe Lieberman emulates Chinese dictators by Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com Dec. 2, 2010
The comparison of these two passages is so telling in so many ways:
The Washington Post, today:
Revelations by the organization WikiLeaks have received blanket coverage this week on television, in newspapers and on Web sites around the globe. But in parts of the world where the leaks have some of the greatest potential to sow controversy, they have barely caused a ripple.
Authoritarian governments and tightly controlled media in China and across the Arab Middle East have suppressed virtually all mention of the documents, avoiding the public backlash that could result from such candid portrayals of their leaders' views.
In China, the WikiLeaks site has been blocked by the government's "Great Firewall," and access to other sources for the documents has been restricted. Most Chinese are unable to read the contents of the diplomatic cables. . . .
The Guardian, yesterday:
WikiLeaks website pulled by Amazon after US political pressure
The US struck its first blow against WikiLeaks after Amazon.com pulled the plug on hosting the whistleblowing website in reaction to heavy political pressure.
The company announced it was cutting WikiLeaks off yesterday only 24 hours after being contacted by the staff of Joe Lieberman, chairman of the Senate's committee on homeland security. . . .
While freedom of speech is a sensitive issue in the US, scope for a full-blown row is limited, given that Democrats and Republicans will largely applaud Amazon's move. . . .
The question is whether he was acting on his own or pressed to do so by the Obama administration, and how much pressure was applied to Amazon. . . .
Lieberman said: "[Amazon's] decision to cut off WikiLeaks now is the right decision and should set the standard for other companies WikiLeaks is using to distribute its illegally seized material. I call on any other company or organisation that is hosting WikiLeaks to immediately terminate its relationship with them."
The department of homeland security confirmed Amazon's move, referring journalists to Lieberman's statement.
Talking Points Memo -- in an article headlined: "How Lieberman Got Amazon To Drop Wikileaks" -- detailed that Lieberman's "staffers . . . called Amazon to ask about it, and left questions with a press secretary including, 'Are there plans to take the site down?'" Shortly thereafter, "Amazon called them back . . . to say they had kicked Wikileaks off." Lieberman's spokeswoman said: "Sen. Lieberman hopes that the Amazon case will send the message to other companies that might host Wikileaks that it would be irresponsible to host the site."
That Joe Lieberman is abusing his position as Homeland Security Chairman to thuggishly dictate to private companies which websites they should and should not host -- and, more important, what you can and cannot read on the Internet -- is one of the most pernicious acts by a U.S. Senator in quite some time. Josh Marshall wrote yesterday: "When I'd heard that Amazon had agreed to host Wikileaks I was frankly surprised given all the fish a big corporation like Amazon has to fry with the federal government." That's true of all large corporations that own media outlets -- every one -- and that is one big reason why they're so servile to U.S. Government interests and easily manipulated by those in political power. That's precisely the dynamic Lieberman was exploiting with his menacing little phone call to Amazon (in essence: Hi, this is the Senate's Homeland Security Committee calling; you're going to be taking down that WikiLeaks site right away, right?). Amazon, of course, did what they were told.
Note that Lieberman here is desperate to prevent American citizens -- not The Terrorists -- from reading the WikiLeaks documents which shed light on what the U.S. Government is doing. His concern is domestic consumption. By his own account, he did this to "send a message to other companies that might host WikiLeaks" not to do so. No matter what you think of WikiLeaks, they have never been charged with, let alone convicted of, any crime; Lieberman literally wants to dictate -- unilaterally -- what you can and cannot read on the Internet, to prevent Americans from accessing documents that much of the rest of the world is freely reading.
Meanwhile Obama, Biden, Hilary Clinton label any American who reveals insider intel on the government even when the information shows that the government deceived the electorate and for instance instead of ending the ill-conceived War On Terror is just compounding the initial errors by the US governments and its elites.
What Hilary is saying is that she would have incarcerated and possibly executed Woodward and Bernstein over the Watergate affair or those who leaked The Pentagon Papers or Seymour Hirsch daring to write the truth about the Mi Li massacre or those who leaked intel on America's involvement in various military coups ie Iran, Guatemala , Honduras, Chile El Salvador and on and on or those who first revealed facts about the Iran-Contra affair .
So will Hillary Clinton and her wrecking crew go after those individuals and groups in the Gulf states who dare write about or show the true extent of the damage to the Gulf by BPs Oil rig catastrophe; will she go after environmentalist who write the truth about the disastrous effects caused by her friends in the coal industry who see nothing wrong with Mountain-Top Removal Mining.
Evading a shutdown, WikiLeaks mobilizes Twitter supporters By Blake Hounshell at Foreign Policy.com ,December 5, 2010
In a bid to stay one step ahead of the governments, companies, freelance hackers trying to shut down its operations, WikiLeaks mobilized its vast base of online support Saturday by asking its Twitter followers to create copies of its growing archive of hundreds of classified State Department cables.
By late afternoon Eastern time, more than 200 had answered the call, setting up "mirror" sites, many of them with the name "wikileaks" appended to their Web addresses. They organized themselves organically using the Twitter hashtag #imwikileaks, in a virtual show of solidarity reminiscent of the movie V is for Vendetta. In that 2005 film, a Guy-Fawkes masked vigilantee inspires thousands of Londoners to march on the Parliament similarly disguised -- while it blows up in front of their eyes. Presumably, many of these people believe they are facing the same sort of tyranny that V, the film's protagonist, fought against.
Critics of WikiLeaks have called on the Obama administration to shut down the site, but now it's clear that doing so would be a difficult task indeed. The New Yorker's recent profile of Julian Assange, the organization's mysterious founder and front man, said that "a government or company that wanted to remove content from WikiLeaks would have to practically dismantle the Internet itself." WikiLeaks has also posted a massive, heavily encrypted "insurance" file on The Pirate Bay, a sympathetic website, which presumably contains also 250,000-plus cables and would be released into the wild if anything happens to Assange.
As my FP colleague Evgeny Morozov warns, aggressive action like arresting or killing Assange could spawn the rise of a vast, permanent network of radicalized hackers "systematically challenging those in power – governments and companies alike – just for the sake of undermining 'the system'." That could prove an extremely dangerous threat to the global economy and diplomatic sphere.
Evgeny offers the sensible suggestion that governments try to steer WikiLeaks into a more productive direction. "It is a choice between WikiLeaks becoming a new Red Brigades, or a new Transparency International," he writes, arguing that a responsible version of the organization could pose more of a challenge to closed regimes than to the West. "Handled correctly, the state that will benefit most from a nerdy network of 21st-century Che Guevaras is America itself."
First my own comments followed by Truthout.orgs position on Wikileaks , censorship, and the hunting down not just of Julian Assange but all those in government who leak information to the public.
President Obama was supposed to be the agent of positive change instead he and his psuedo-liberals or pseudo-progressives are each day more and more like their predecessors in the Bush administration. "loose lips sink ships" this old chestnut was true if what was leaked to the enemy gave them usable intel such as when an attack was going to take place or revealing government and military's secret codes. From what I can gather there is little in the leaked cables that can be used in such a way that it would endanger US troops or the United States itself.
What the establishment doesn't like is that the media and the public see the inner workings of their government including their lies and propaganda and their fear of facts and their own self-delusion.The invasion of Iraq was a bloody comedy of errors as the Neoconservatives misread the situation in Iraq and in the Middle East. Some of them were fooled by the quixotic picture presented to them by a drunken charlatan Iraqi exile Chalabi who lived outside of Iraq for so long he misread the attitudes of the Iraqi people. Rather than being greeted with flowers by the Iraqi people they found instead a growing resistance what Americans called an insurgency.
This labeling of a resistance as in the French Resistance in WWII or more aptly the Algerian resistance in the 1960s to the imposed rule by the French Colonial power.
The French in Algiers like the British in India somehow came to believe that their invasion and conquest over the indigenous people was justified and not for a moment questioned. Unfortunately these Western Colonial perceptions of the rest of the world has not quite been extinguished as it were.
If tomorrow some foreign power were to invade Europe, or Canada or the USA claiming they had come to free them from tyranny wouldn't most people in these countries be offended and would do whatever they could to resist such an occupation.
President Obama may want to tinker with the system but in the end he holds to the "Status Quo" and buys into the American myths and delusions that what is in America's interest is the same as what is in the interest of other nations and peoples.
Because of the Bush Regimes blunders and delusions of grandeur once the honeymoon period in Iraq was over and the Iraqis realized there was a new authoritarian corrupt brutal regime in power they began their resistance. Soon the American and British troops were greeted by IEDs and car bombs and suicide bombers. And the Americans in Iraq have still not learned from their mistakes For instance if you incarcerate thousands of innocent Iraqi citizens then abuse and torture them and treat them as if they were a lower form of life then you are not going to win hearts and minds, if you can't restore a semblance of order or rebuild the infrastructure such as power, water, sewage disposal and treatment or reconstitute an Iraqi police force, army and bureaucracy then don't expect expressions of gratitude.
Even now Obama , Clinton, Biden and the Mainstream Media and America's elite have joined the GOP and the rightwing media in condemning and demonizing Julian Assange and Wikileaks. He is just the messenger releasing documents given to him by insiders that is whistleblowers who believed that these documents should be released to the public because this information needed to be viewed by the public. Now instead of the Obama administration responding to these leaked documents in a serious substantive critical manner they spend their time hunting down the leakers and all those who dare to read and then comment on these documents.
TRUTHOUT'S BUZZFLASH DAILY HEADLINES
Salvador Dali was the master of surrealism, but the Obama administration gave him some competition this week.
The Obama/Clinton State Department warned staff members not to read the WikiLeaks cables that many of the same staff members wrote and had access to, prior to the leak, on a classified government site.
According to The Christian Science Monitor, "The US State Department has directed its staff around the world not to surf the WikiLeaks website, according to employees. The ban is in response to WikiLeaks' decision to publish classified material."
Even more bizarre and chilling: students at Columbia University were allegedly warned that if they surfed WikiLeaks and discussed the contents online, they risked future careers in government. The Tech Herald and other publications reported:
If you are thinking about working for the government, but have recently used social media platforms to link to or discuss WikiLeaks’ cablegate materials, you can likely kiss that potential career path goodbye.
An e-mail forwarded by a student enrolled at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia is making the rounds on the Internet this weekend. The e-mail, which is said to have originated from the Columbia University’s Office of Career Services, warns anyone aspiring for a government job that WikiLeaks is off limits.
Further news reports indicated that all federal workers have been essentially banned from viewing the WikiLeaks site, while the US government plays whack-a-mole by continuing to try to close the site down - as well as getting PayPal to stop processing funds for financing WikiLeaks and Amazon to stop hosting it.
But WikiLeaks has become the Internet version of the old Soviet samizdat movement, and keeps popping up in "mirrored" sites hosted by supporters of transparency around the world.
While certainly some government activity needs to be conducted in secret, these cables are more embarrassing to those in power than damaging to national security. They enlighten the public and foster transparency.
A BuzzFlash reader emailed me this quotation from John F. Kennedy: "We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people."
That's what Barack Obama promised the American people during his 2008 campaign, but apparently he changed his mind and decided to hang up an iron curtain between US citizens and the truth.
Mark Karlin
Editor, BuzzFlash at Truthout
and so it goes,
'Different Day ,Same shit'
GORD.
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